Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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The state of the
American newspaper
Backed by Pew money, a platoon of noted writers is
giving scrutiny to what media companies are actually doing for, and to,
America’s newspapers
The editor was confronted by dwindling circulation. He faced a clear
need to tweak the product, but without betraying his vision for it. He
had to appease advertisers without seeming craven. He had to persuade a
skeptical staff that he knew what he was doing, even when he didn’t. He
had to work with business-side executives he really didn’t like, even as
he shielded his writers from their clutches.
Chances are you can empathize with this editor. He was Harold Ross,
founder of The New Yorker, and these are just a few of the pressures he
faced more than 70 years ago when his great invention nearly expired in
its infancy.
Over the years many funny stories have been told about this rumpled
iconoclast, and since I wrote a book about him I’ve told some myself. There
was the time in 1940, for instance, when Walter Winchell was on the warpath
after The New Yorker published a withering profile of him, based in part
on a rigorous checking of over 200 of the columnist’s published items.
("In other words," summed up St. Clair McKelway, "Winchell was not quite
half right in the month of April.") So one day, apropos of nothing else,
Winchell informed his legions of readers that Ross didn’t wear undershorts.
Shown the item, Ross walked into the bathroom, took off the pair he was
wearing and mailed them to Winchell.
But it would be a mistake to let such stories obscure the fact that
Harold Ross was a great editor, among the greatest the profession has ever
produced. He had all the tools: a passion for excellence, the curiosity
of a polymath, a keen sense of humor, and of course an unparalleled nose
for talent. But mostly he was great, I think, because he was true to his
principles, all those external pressures — and they never really went away
— be damned.
My point? That top editors — be they at magazines, daily newspapers,
country weeklies or church bulletins — have never been divorced from the
business realities. Nor have most wanted to be. They’ve always had to edit
their publications with an eye on circulation, on advertising linage, on
profit margins. Who knows better than an editor that an unread newspaper
is just a waste of wood pulp? When editors are portrayed in those great
old Hollywood newspaper movies (personal favorite: William Conrad in "-30-’’),
are they making high-minded decisions about an upcoming three-parter on
tort reform? Certainly not. They’re making down-and-dirty calls about the
story gripping enough to put on the street that day.
What’s changed
What is new, it seems to me, is the scope and intensity of the pressures
confronting today’s editor. And where once those pressures would have been
segregated from the newsroom at large, confined to the top one or two editors
at a paper, they now cascade through ranks. The emphasis in the phrase
"newspaper business" clearly has shifted from the first word to the second.
The resulting tensions have squeezed a lot of joy out of your lives. I
know editors who are having fun, sure, but I know more who aren’t, and
I know quite a few who aren’t even editors anymore. They staggered out
of the sandbox, deciding life was too short.
This uncomfortable state is but one symptom of an industry struggling
to regain its bearings. Transitory good times and low newsprint prices
cannot mask the fact that this is a crucial moment for newspaper journalists
and executives. Competition confronts you on every side. Readers desert
you, and the ones who remain question your credibility and rate you right
up there with lawyers and loan sharks. Huge media companies centralize
authority as never before. Stories have become "information." Fights rage
about what is and isn’t news, and who gets to decide. Some observers even
doubt the relevance of newspapers in this high-tech, jump-cut, jigglevision
world.
Many of these problems have arisen beyond your control, of course. To
a print enthusiast, the growth of the Internet looks like an exploding,
ever-encroaching galaxy, and Joseph Pulitzer never had to worry about Bill
Gates. And who’s to blame for a culture that has systematically ground
our attention spans into 15- and 30-second grooves? All the same, it’s
undeniable that many of the newspaper industry’s wounds are self-inflicted.
The project
So how did we get to this pass?
Something called the Project on the State of the American Newspaper
is trying to answer that question. I am the project’s director and editor.
But its guiding spirit, my boss, is Gene Roberts, the recently retired
managing editor of The New York Times and the altogether Rossian (equal
parts charismatic and enigmatic) figure who built The Philadelphia Inquirer
into a world-class newspaper.
Gene’s concerns about the newspaper industry are not exactly a secret.
His 1996 Riverside Lecture on the dangers of corporate ownership was one
of the decade’s most widely reprinted and discussed commentaries on journalism.
Less well known is the fact that, for some years now, he has wanted to
undertake an in-depth examination of the industry. Not surprisingly, given
Gene’s record, what he had in mind was to hire some of the best reporters
in the nation to go forth and spend several months examining the companies
and the trends that, for better or worse, are shaping the newspaper business.
Then they would write what they saw, letting the facts do the talking.
All Gene needed was money. The project became a reality when, a year
ago, he hooked up with Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence
in Journalism. Chances are you’re already familiar with some of PEJ’s endeavors,
such as the Committee of Concerned Journalists, which already has attracted
more than 800 signatories; its reports on news sources; and its continuing
series of regional forums on such issues as media credibility, the celebrity
culture and online journalism. PEJ is underwritten by the Pew Charitable
Trusts, as part of that foundation’s commitment to helping the public and
the press understand one another. In that spirit, Pew last summer agreed
to fund the Project on the State of the American Newspaper as an initiative
of PEJ.
We launched the project in the May issue of the American Journalism
Review with a thought-provoking profile of Tribune Co. by Ken Auletta,
media writer for The New Yorker. The second piece, James V. Risser’s take
on journalism’s endangered species, the independent newspaper, was in the
June issue. Our series will appear uninterrupted in AJR for at least a
year, and we hope longer. After the pieces run serially we intend to publish
them as a book.
Who is involved?
Gene is the project’s (unpaid) editor in chief. The associate editor
is Carolyn White. All three of us have deep roots in newspapers. I’ve been
an editor at The Cincinnati Post, The Miami Herald, The New York Times
and the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, and for two years was executive
editor of Knight Ridder’s paper in Columbus, Ga., the Ledger-Enquirer.
Carolyn worked at The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, The Philadelphia Inquirer,
Rolling Stone magazine and, most recently, Mirabella magazine, where she
was books editor. But she is better remembered in newspaper circles for
her four-year stint as managing editor of the Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune,
during which time many considered it the best small newspaper in America.
Other accomplished people are aiding and abetting. The project’s board
of advisers comprises Norm Pearlstine, head of Time Inc. publications;
Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author Anna Quindlen; Charles Eisendrath,
head of the Knight Fellows program at the University of Michigan; and Beverly
Kees, editor and program director of The Freedom Forum’s Pacific Coast
Center in San Francisco. My friend Rem Rieder, the fine editor of AJR,
seems to have worked at all the other papers I somehow missed. And his
boss is Reese Cleghorn, dean of the University of Maryland College of Journalism
(which publishes AJR) and one of the most respected people in the profession.
It hardly needs to be said — but it’s important, I think, to say it
— that we love newspapers. That’s why we’re worried about them. That’s
why we’re on board.
The plans
Over the next year, then, what can you expect from the Project on the
State of the American Newspaper? I’m not exactly sure yet myself, except
to guarantee that this will be the most thorough, and I hope thoroughly
engaging, examination of newspapers ever undertaken, something that will
at least approach the seriousness and scope Gene Roberts intends it to
have.
The hallmark of the series will be basic reporting. In an inherently
subjective exercise, we will try to be as objective, and as clinical in
our approach, as is possible. For instance, in an upcoming piece on what
is happening to coverage of state government, we’re literally counting
reporter noses in all 50 states. We’ll do something similar in discussing
foreign coverage. In other reports we’ll measure content. We’ve also adopted
standard methodologies that are clearly imparted to our writers. Thus,
someone profiling a large newspaper group — and incidentally, a contributor
cannot now be in a paper’s employ — will spend a week each in five or six
cities where the company publishes, not only to see how those papers are
faring but those readers too. In the process we want to establish some
benchmarks we trust will prove useful to critics and researchers for years
to come.
In short, we’ll be applying the same scrutiny to you that you apply
to the big stories in your own communities. In such circumstances you don’t
pull punches, and neither will we. Some of these stories will sting, because
where the newspaper industry has hurt itself with inattention, self-satisfaction
or shortsightedness, it’s important to say so. But other stories will be
more upbeat, since many fine newspapers continue to do much right. The
development of thorough and authoritative business sections — another story
we will pursue — is a case in point. Indeed, in today’s information welter,
the newspaper industry’s track record and fundamental credibility, tattered
as it is, may yet be its salvation.
And all these reports will be complex, because that is the nature of
the industry and its problems. Countless variables come into play, and
a lot of thought goes into your decision-making. That’s why we’re asking
our reporters to spend three months or more on these assignments, and letting
them write to such an extraordinary length — upward of 15,000 words in
many cases.
The kickoff piece by Ken Auletta, one of the nation’s most respected
voices on media matters, is a prime example of this textured approach.
He pointed out how the fast-growing Tribune is, in many ways, a model for
21st century media companies — "the next NBC," in the words of one of its
executives. Unlike some other companies, Tribune enters the future bold
and unafraid, and Wall Street has applauded. But there are downsides to
using newspapers essentially as hubs for multimedia enterprises, as Tribune
does. The demands can round a paper’s edges, compromise its resources,
dull its reflexes. In the Windy City, Auletta says, the Chicago Tribune
simply is not the muscular and nationally influential paper it once was,
a view shared by most big-city editors I know.
Similarly, Jim Risser’s piece, while lamenting the fate of the independents,
squeezes a little of the romance out of our perceptions of them. Not all
independents do themselves proud, some achieving profit margins that would
make public companies blush. Still, the independents’ vanishing act should
give us all pause.
There will be articles like Roy Reed’s profile of A.H. Belo, an upbeat
story about a company that firmly believes editorial quality is good business.
Other pieces will be about specific trends and issues. The state government
installment, for example, will have newsrooms buzzing coast to coast. Charles
Layton and Mary Walton document how, at a time when unprecedented power
is being shifted from Washington back to the states, newspapers are in
an alarming retreat from statehouse coverage. The numbers are sobering
and discouraging.
What are the goals?
So what do we hope to accomplish with this series? What will people
learn?
Well, like you, we want to shine a light on a compelling situation.
Our readers — media managers and opinion shapers — will decide whether
they like what they see. If not, perhaps the series will help prompt some
changes.
But speaking for myself, I hope editors at least can derive a measure
of support and conviction from these pieces. The profession is in a rather
bruised condition lately, and why not? Editing as a contact sport is rough.
Certainly it always was for Harold Ross, who fought constantly with his
business counterparts (he typically referred to them as "ciphers" and "plugs")
and was in a perpetual state of exhaustion and exasperation.
Yet Ross refused to let business realities budge him from what he knew
to be his true mission. If he had to sell women’s lingerie in The New Yorker’s
glossy ads, well, he did it because it let him turn Joseph Mitchell loose
on the grittier precincts of New York, or publish 30,000 words from John
Hersey on what happens when you drop an atomic bomb on a city of unsuspecting
people.
Nor did Ross yield to fads. He listened to his readers but never abdicated
to them. If they had wanted to be editors, he figured, they’d have gone
into that line of work in the first place.
When Ross died of lung cancer in 1951, having kept his awful condition
a secret even from his family, it came as a body blow to his New Yorker
colleagues. None of them had ever imagined an existence without him. For
all his failings and crotchets, Ross the editor was integrity personified,
as reliable and immutable as Gibraltar. "In retrospect," said E.B. White,
"I am beginning to think of him as an Atlas who lacked muscle tone but
who God damn well decided he was going to hold the world up anyway."
These days you too may feel a little wobbly beneath the burden. But
we’re rooting for you to stay firm. After all, it’s a precious load you
bear.
We’d like to hear your ideas and suggestions. The Project on the
State of the American Newspaper is at 8701C Adelphi Road, Adelphi MD 20783.
Call 301/434-0954, e-mail tkunkel@ajr.umd.edu.
Information about the newspaper series and the Project for Excellence in
Journalism can be found at PEJ’s Web site, http://www.journalism.org.
Kunkel is editor and director of the Project on the State of the
American Newspaper.
