EDITOR LEADS TIMES WITH OWN TIME LIMIT

Roberts, with mandatory retirement looming, says serious journalism doesn't have to be a barrier to making money

Some editors equate Gene Roberts' name with the Philadelphia Inquirer, which he left in 1990 after eighteen years as executive editor during which his staff won 17 Pulitzer Prizes. Others identify with his freely-expressed distaste for the corporatization and bottom-line emphasis that now characterize U.S. newspapers. After three years on the faculty of the University of Maryland as a journalism instructor, Roberts, now 63, returned to the New York Times in April 1994, at the behest of Executive Editor Joe Lelyveld, to serve as managing editor under a unique three-year agreement that will end when he reaches the Times' mandatory retirement age of 65.

Q. Describe the experience of returning to the Times after an absence of 22 years, including three as a journalism professor.

A. So much of my whole life had been involved in journalism, it wasn't like I was entering an alien place. [At the University of Maryland,] in many ways it was sort of like being in the newsroom; you were getting involved in the students' careers, trying to help them get jobs, and trying to get the best possible story you could get out of them, and kicking it back when it had to be kicked back, and lovin' it when it clicked. I had discovered an emancipating thing as a college professor, that for the first time I was in control of my life, in a way you never can be in the newspaper business, and I didn't totally want to give that up.

Q. So why did you return, and did you have any second thoughts?

A. One of the attractions was that I was 62, and the Times had a mandatory 65 retirement age, and we started talking right from the start about me coming in for three years ... the fact that it was a fixed limit was to me a very definite appeal. Joe Lelyveld's pitch was that the Times in the next three years was going through an amazing amount of change, in which we were going to start new editions, we were putting in new presses, we were going into color; we had a plan to make the paper later for updating, upgrading some of the sections. I always had been an editor who delegated most of the daily paper and worried more about next week, next month, next year, where we were going to be in two, three years from now. And Joe wanted me very much involved in the planning process and I cared and still care a great deal about the direction the Times goes in ... but if it had been an open-ended assignment, I'm not sure I was ready. It would have been more of a wrench.

Q. What do you remember about your first weeks as managing editor at the Times?

A. I thought of myself as knowing lots and lots of people on the Times, but the first shock was every time I saw a list of people in which I knew everybody on it, it was a retirement list, of people who were retiring or getting buyouts.

Q. In your Riverside Press-Enterprise lecture earlier this year, you warned about the negative ramifications of corporate ownership of newspapers that is driven by a bottom-line mentality. You said, "To talk of increasing coverage or newshole or staff on most newspapers now would be tantamount to confessing to lunacy." And that corporatization issue seemed to be the reason that caused you to leave the Philadelphia Inquirer. In hindsight, should you have stayed on and fought the good fight to maintain your vision of the paper?

A. I decided to leave four years before I did. I could see the forces at work and see that change was inevitable. I was the last of the editors [in Knight-Ridder] who had not been put under a publisher; one of the great appeals had been that I did not have to check with anyone locally about anything I chose to do as an editor.

[Roberts reported to a Knight-Ridder executive at corporate headquarters in Miami.]

Q. Sort of the ideal editor's job, wasn't it? Get my publisher away from me and let me do my job?

A. It was wonderful. I had that virtually for 14 years, and suddenly I was the only editor who had had it, and it was proposed that I could become a publisher or work in Philadelphia under a publisher. I would have a dotted line to Miami. Essentially it worked, but it wasn't the same.

Q. Is that what triggered your decision to leave?

A. I decided at that point to leave. The paper and the freedom I had known was going to be curbed a bit. They came back with a proposal that in a sense nothing would change and they would make it worth my while, and the publisher assured me he wouldn't interfere. [Roberts said he then agreed to stay on for a few years, and then left in 1990.]

It was becoming more and more financial ... budgets were becoming more and more constant in my life. I played every chit I knew how to play, and had gone as far as I could go. I couldn't bring myself to participate in any major dismantling of what I had spent building up.

Q. Don't you have the same financial pressures at the Times which is, after all, a publicly-held company?

A. We don't have nine budget revisions in one year.

Q. In that same Riverside lecture, you noted that very few of the top-level editors you know "want to be editors any more" and are thinking instead of alternatives. In fact, many editors have taken buyouts or retired early to start new careers rather than deal with newsroom downsizing and doing more with less. What would you advise your colleagues who are trying to cope with these stresses every day?

A. They should fight as long as they think there's a sporting chance they can win. There may be a time when it's time to go. Don't have blinders on and don't deceive yourself that you're making the paper better [when the opposite is happening]. Newspapers can succeed by reaching out to a complex audience, not by raping the newsroom and deceiving themselves that they are making their papers more reader friendly. Making them too common-denominatorish only serves the people with stock options and bonus incentives.

Q. The big newspaper chains still are focusing on margins and improving their profits, and they dominate the industry. Where will the Times be in 10 years?

A. The corporate chains are hell-bent on helping us become the dominant paper in the country because they are opting out of substance. What they're doing is making it possible for papers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to exist on a national level. Other newspapers are shrinking what they're giving the reader, when there are readers out there hungry for information. We're losing the tradition of the strong regional paper that gave you the full stock listings and a good national, foreign and regional report. That phenomenon has disappeared in Des Moines and in Louisville, it's disappearing in Chicago and it's left a mighty void out there. People who fill voids succeed in business. I believe there are still some serious newspaper people who are going to survive. There are some committed to serious journalism, like the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times and the Anniston (Ala.) Star.

Q. Isn't the New York Times Co., which owns a number of regional dailies, a corporate chain that has bottom-line requirements? What makes it different from the others?

A. It has a strong commitment to excellence. It made its reputation and made itself indispensable by being a sound, solid newspaper. Good newspapers work economically; its almost as if the thought is abroad in the land that if you have a good newspaper you can't make money; that's bull. Look at John Morton's column. [From the November American Journalism Review in which Morton, a newspaper analyst, said that newspaper companies now in a frenzy of cost-cutting were "eating their seed corn," much like some starving farm families during the Great Depression who "were forced to eat their seed corn ... but smart enough to realize they were eating their futures."]

If you take every kind of cyclical excuse to rein in the newsroom, you just aren't going to have anything left out there. You just can't jerk readers down with any short time economic problem without driving readers away.

Q. You're an anomaly then?

A. We're an anomaly because we're still giving information to readers who have become conditioned to want information, and when newspapers stop being informative, they're making themselves obsolete. It seems to me that sooner or later more than just the New York Times has got to figure this out and will figure this out. Other businesses decided to save themselves. I see signs that some people are listening. Letters I've gotten from editors and publishers indicate that publishers, even more so than editors, are quite concerned about what's happening in the business and don't see how we can go on and on and on shrinking what we give the readers. I think that's become more and more apparent.

Q. What impact do you see the so-called new media having on journalism as we know it, with people getting information through their computers?

A. I don't think it will change the course of journalism. There will be more journalists and even more specialized audiences.

Brief, former editor of the Stamford (Conn.) Advocate and Greenwich Time, is now an adjunct faculty member of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and New York University.