Last Updated: March 23, 1999
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On journalism
Without a healthy bottom line, newspapers cannot carry
out their mission; people who fail to embrace this economic imperative
should leave the business
This is excerpted from the Ralph McGill Lecture that Smith gave in
October to the University of Georgia in Athens.
It was the spring of 1968. The weight of Vietnam caused LBJ to quit
his race for the White House. Assassins murdered both Martin Luther King
and Bobby Kennedy. And Ralph McGill had but a short time to live.
That year, a young man, caught up in it all, dreamed of the day he would
become a newspaperman. A college freshman with a summer of obits, police
briefs and press release rewrites behind him, he could only dream of becoming
the journalist that McGill already was.
He was 18 and he boarded his first airplane to fly to Washington. Poor
people by the thousands had come there, setting up tents on the Mall. Their
actions spoke of the war, their heroes’ pointless murders, as well as their
poverty. Yet, their actions also spoke of their hope.
These were the people for whom McGill often wrote. And it’s only just
occurred to me that my own idealism and journalistic passion drew me to
them.
That 18-year-old boy stands before you today. But can he say, especially
when measured against McGill, that his idealism remains firm and his journalistic
passion still burns? For now that boy’s focus is as much on bottom-line
performance as headline significance.
I have been invited to answer the following: “Some journalists doubt
Big Business and courageous journalism can coexist in the same house. So,
what is the formula ... required between the marketing of newspapers and
the journalism that goes in them?”
First, a disclosure is in order. That same idealistic kid has also been
hung in effigy by some of the high lords of journalism. My decision to
accept the resignation of a certain Atlanta Journal Constitution editor
a decade ago prompted a New Orleans-style funeral parade in the editor’s
honor.
As the 100-or-so marchers made their way down Atlanta’s Marietta Street,
past the newspaper building where I served as publisher, there, swinging
from a high pole was the most amazing likeness of me that I’ve ever seen.
A picture appeared in the next issue of a news weekly.
All of this, of course, prompted a call from my always-supportive mother.
“I just knew you’d make it into a national magazine,” her voice chirped
with pride.
That episode shaped and sharpened my commitment to the newspaper calling
I hold so dear.
Our strengths
Newspapers have never been more alive, vital to the lives of readers
and crucial to society. Quality journalism supported by sophisticated business
practices have made it so. The two go together.
In an era of flat circulation, softening readership and embarrassing
journalistic missteps, such a claim of excellence may sound preposterous,
but it’s not. The declining threshold of what passes for truth compels
us to perform to higher standards than before.
Fundamental to the past, present and future of newspapers is this pursuit
of truth on behalf of readers. Without this foundation, I am convinced,
newspapers have no reason for being. They would have no audience, and without
an audience, advertisers, who provide 80 percent of a newspaper’s revenue,
would find other places to spend their dollars.
Newspapers are still the place for thoughtful, thorough reporting, which
distinguishes them from the breathless 24-hour chatter of all-news radio
and television. Their coverage, especially enterprise work, sets the agenda
for their media kin.
There is more of this enterprise reporting than we realize. Sometimes
traveling under the banner of “civic journalism,” other times called public
affairs or investigative reporting, it’s just old-fashioned reporting that
reflects the idealism that drew so many of us to this profession.
Since McGill’s time, the financial side of newspapering has grown more
complex. If his publisher felt he had to “steady the soapbox” for his star,
today’s publishers must do the same while battling competitors fiercer
than have ever existed. For the steadiness of the soapbox, as anyone knows
who has ever bought paper by the railroad car or ink by the barrel, has
never been more rickety. In McGill’s day, The Atlanta Constitution faced
competition from a few television outlets and a handful of AM radio stations.
Time does not permit a recitation of all the competitors, in a variety
of media, that face today’s publisher.
The critics
Still here, of course, are the critics of newspapers who existed then
and now. Toppling the soapbox is their life’s dream.
Sadly, they are joined by some who would undermine its stability by
gnawing from within. They’re blind to the vital ties between financial
and journalistic strength.
I learned this lesson as a publisher in Dayton, Ohio, when I faced one
of my hardest professional decisions. To extend resources amid declining
profits, I decided to merge the news staffs of our commonly owned, but
competitive, morning and afternoon newspapers. We also laid off some employees.
I had grown up as a reporter on one of those newspapers and lived for the
daily news battle we fought, so the decision was especially painful.
But nothing hurt as much as when I read what a reporter said — anonymously
— in our newspaper the next day: “Now I know how the folks in Xenia felt.”
He was referring to a nearby town that had lost nearly 40 people to a tornado
some years earlier. We were working to guarantee the newspaper’s survival
and a reporter compared it to a deadly tragedy. It’s a pity he could see
no difference.
Financial health returned to the Dayton Daily News. Its journalistic
well-being survived, as evidenced by the 1998 Pulitzer it earned for coverage
of abuses in the military medical system.
There ought to be special shame on those who once occupied top editorships
and now snipe from safe academic nests. They’re always available with a
quote that preserves their place in history by disparaging those who have
followed them.
Typical is this quote, from Gene Roberts, a University of Maryland professor,
in a 1998 Columbia Journalism Review article called “Money Lust: How Pressure
for Profit is Perverting Journalism.”
News coverage is being shaped by corporate executives at headquarters
far from the local scene. (The shaping) is seldom done by corporate directive
or fiat. It rarely involves killing or slanting stories. Usually it is
by the appointment of a pliable editor here, a corporate graphics conference
there, that results in a more uniform look, a more cookie-cutter approach
among the chain’s newspapers, or the corporate research director’s interpretation
of reader surveys that see common denominator solutions to complex coverage
problems. ... As papers become increasingly shallow and niggardly they
lose their essentiality to their readers and their communities. And this
is ultimately suicidal.
An editor once told me readers give us far more credit than we deserve
for being Machiavellian. The same, I fear, could be said for Roberts’ overblown
view of newspapers. His friends and followers have spent years mocking
his former employer. To believe them is to believe that Knight Ridder has
bartered its journalistic soul for financial fortune. That, of course,
is nonsense.
I’m not here to make a case for Knight Ridder nor pick on Gene Roberts,
whose views, if nothing else, will keep us focused. They can take care
of themselves.
What I am here to do is to make a case for the end to the divisive nonsense
that says high-quality journalism and financial success can’t coexist.
It’s something that shouldn’t have to be done. But I’ve had a gut full
of these so-called lions of journalism who roar and preen while the rest
of us lead the herd in the hunt for better newspapering.
Some words to live by
Here, then, is the “formula”:
First, believe in newspapers and quit writing their obituaries.
While the percentage of adults reading newspapers has slipped, it is the
one common place, in most communities, from which citizens get local information
daily.
No channel has come close to matching a single newspaper’s audience.
A bad day in the newspaper business is better than the best day in any
other medium.
It is time that those of us who believe in newspapers speak up. To the
whiners, criers and bellyachers, I politely suggest you go elsewhere. Get
out of the way. You’re consuming valuable oxygen the rest of us need.
Second, recognize that, with rare exception, newspapers are no longer
each other’s main competitor. Television, radio, cable, direct mail,
and the Internet have usurped that role. Yet, newspapers look first to
what they know best — other newspapers — as their target.
That’s silly. At a time when nearby newspapers ought to find ways to
cooperate, they persist in fighting.
Third, identify, reward and celebrate our successes as aggressively
and appropriately as we flog our failures. Shelve the modesty, which
I think is mostly phony, and tell readers what we’ve done on their behalf.
Fourth, be open to new ideas, new ways of thinking. I admire
the courage shown by Mark Willes of Times Mirror. He’s made his share of
missteps, yet forged ahead. Some of what he says I disagree with. Much
of what he says is worth pondering.
Fifth, recruit, retain and advance our best people. Supply and
demand tells us we’re in an extended period of more work, especially more
skilled work, than we have employees to do the jobs. We cannot afford to
lose good people. We must recruit better people. And those we have deserve
every opportunity to get better in the jobs they’re doing.
Sixth, and last, lead.
My best lessons in leadership have come from colleagues. Here’s one:
I had just been named publisher of the Dayton Daily News when I was
31. I was scared, and I guess it showed. One day, as I walked to my car,
our editorial cartoonist, Mike Peters, asked me how I was doing. I looked
at the tops of my shoes and mumbled something about hoping to survive.
In an instant, Mike’s face tightened and his tone became very grown-up.
“If you talk like that, we’re all in trouble,” he said. With that, he turned
and walked away. Lesson learned.
McGill’s lessons
One lesson to learn from Ralph McGill is that he refused to be beaten.
McGill understood that to make the world a better place you damned well
better survive to write tomorrow’s front-page column. And he wrote with
a fervor borne out of his idealism.
And therein lies the message I hope I have learned some 30 years after
my idealistic visit to Washington. More than ever, I want to see a brighter
tomorrow, but I’ve come to recognize the complex blend of vision, determination
and, yes, compromise it takes to get there.
Because I believe newspapers and newspapering afford one of the best
ways to help reach that tomorrow, I will do everything I can to ensure
that the next generation after the generation that followed McGill has
an ever-strong platform from which to work.
Smith is president of Cox Newspapers.
