RADICAL CHANGE DEBATE: HALF-OXFORD, HALF-CIRCUS

Although participants weren't certain of the definition of 'radical change,' the Kovach-Gartner team defeated the Campbell-Weaver team on substance, but lost on style

The featured debate at ASNE's 1996 convention seemed a lot like an editor's job these days - frequently entertaining, but largely perplexing.

In "Radical Change in the Newsroom," a collegiate-style debate, four prominent journalists argued the topic, "Resolved: That radical change in newspapers is necessary and can be accomplished without compromising the values that have sustained the industry."

On the affirmative were Cole Campbell, editor of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, and Janet Weaver, managing editor of the Wichita (Kan.) Eagle. Michael Gartner, editor of the Ames (Iowa) Daily Tribune, and Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation, took the negative position. Carl Sessions Stepp, associate professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, moderated the debate, which he characterized as "Wrestlemania, ASNE-style."

Forget the figure fours and sleeper holds, however; these debaters had a hard time pinning each other down. One difficulty was the phrase "radical change," which Kovach defined as "walking away from your roots" - radix in Latin. Campbell countered that radical change can be a turning back to the roots.

Another difficulty was that the Gartner-Kovach team seemed to be directing their criticisms against the concept of public journalism, which was not specifically mentioned in the Weaver-Campbell case.

Weaver introduced that case by arguing that radical change was necessary to get newsrooms back to fundamental values. She proposed change in three areas - in dealings with readers, with colleagues and "with change itself." Newspapers must engage readers "not as an audience to be entertained," but as citizens, by focusing on essential news, by emphasizing "the present over the moment" and by engaging readers as partners in civic discourse.

Similarly, to engage newsroom staffers as collaborators in change, editors must educate them about the economics of our business, and promote reinvestment in newsrooms. And in changing our relationship to change, Weaver proposed that editors set goals for changes in the newspaper based on an examination of their communities.

"I've got an enormous problem here," Gartner responded as first negative, "in that I don't disagree with anything that has been said." The industry preoccupation with change is based on "situations at a few regional newspapers" and not on a widespread crisis in the industry, he said: "Group-think solutions to industry problems won't work, because we all have different problems."

Problems in regional papers result when publishers and editors are transferred too often to learn what makes a community tick, Gartner said. And in a reference to public journalism, he added that "I am greatly troubled not by what has been said but by what has been done" at papers in Wichita, Charlotte, Dayton and Norfolk. His prescription: Quit setting up community meetings and teams in newsrooms. Stop holding focus groups - "one of the worst things that's ever happened to American journalism" - and simply "cover the bejesus out of the community."

In a wry gambit, Campbell urged the audience to judge the debate "not by the stature of the claimants" but by the worth of their ideas: "Mr. Gartner has made that easier by not having any of his own." Campbell argued that change is inevitable and transformational, and that the only question is how newspapers can change without harming fundamental journalistic values. "If journalists don't take care of business, businesspeople will take care of journalism," he warned. To support the affirmative case, he frequently quoted from speeches by Kovach.

Which set up Kovach's opening quip: "I guess my job is to repudiate everything I've said, which is pretty easy to do; I've done it a number of times." Kovach characterized the industry's woes not as a journalistic problem but as a business problem. He criticized papers that drop afternoon editions or lop off areas of circulation, then register circulation losses which they in turn blame on lack of reader interest: "It's a phony claim," he said, and an example of the way in which contemporary business practices and profit expectations hurt newspapers.

After a rebuttal round, some 150 audience members responded to 11 questions about the debate by using electronic devices much like TV remote controls. In the substance of the debate, Gartner and Kovach were voted the winners by 36 percent, with 28 percent voting for Weaver-Campbell and 34 percent undecided. Weaver and Campbell won for style and rhetoric, with 49 percent of the vote to 34 percent for Gartner-Kovach.

Stepp then invited the four debaters to respond, and all agreed the debate had been inconclusive. Weaver described it as "a war of semantics." Kovach, who confessed that he must have been "learning to smoke in the bathroom when they taught debate in high school," lamented the lack of detail in the discussion: "I wish we could be more specific and direct with each other about what we're doing."

Campbell offered perhaps the most telling lesson as he asked whether debate is "the kind of discourse we favor in our newsrooms." When issue-driven articles are based on one side's case and the views of those directly opposing it, "you don't see the people in the middle," he observed. "The debate format is ineffective for anything - except formal debate."

Zomparelli is editor of the Roanoke (Va.) Times.