Remarks delivered at the ASNE convention in Washington, D.C. on April 10, 2002:
On April 27th, 1923, Casper Yost, editor of the editorial page at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, called to order the first meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors at 11 a.m. at the Willard hotel.
Yost, the society’s first president said, “If we can put our whole force, our whole thought, into the development of this society it will be a great thing, I am quite sure, for the advancement of our profession and for our individual interests, and the efficiency of our newspapers. Now we will proceed onto business.”
The American Society of Newspaper Editors has proceeded on to outstanding business in the 79 years since Yost spoke those words. I am proud to stand here in the shadow of Yost and the line of great presidents who put their whole force and their whole thought into making ASNE a premier journalism organization.
While there is some historical confusion about how ASNE began, it seems clear Yost and other founding members created the society because press critics were hammering newspapers for a lack of ethics.
The ethics concerns dominated the early years of the society. But so did one other fear. That was the fear of newspaper publishers and the way they controlled their newspapers. The Chicago Tribune‘s E.S. Beck wrote in a personal letter to the New York World‘s’ Arthur Krock, “In a basic sense, it seems to me, the trouble is that we are employees and are, to a degree, under inhibitions and cannot speak freely for our papers.”
Imagine that. In a time of crisis, editors were not sure if they could speak out, for fear of their publishers and owners.
Our crisis in 2002 is an ethics crisis of a different sort. As ASNE gathers here at the emergency encampment at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, we ponder how the values of great journalism can exist side by side with the profit demands of the marketplace. Layoffs, newshole cuts, and short-term financial imperatives cast a long shadow over our work. Editors today worry, as E.S. Beck did, whether they can truly affect the direction of their newspapers because the balance of power has shifted away from editors.
Despite our industry’s challenges I am convinced Casper Yost would be proud of what you and our society have accomplished for the profession, for newspapers, and for editors in the past year. From our diversity work to our high school journalism initiative and more, you will see that work come alive during this convention.
ASNE does important work, and I’m proud of that work. I’m personally proud of my service to this organization this year. Leading this society is a high honor, and I will always treasure it.
But, as many of you know, I’m Catholic and I’m afraid my deep sense of Catholic guilt outweighs my sense of accomplishment. I am deeply saddened that I have failed this year to rally editors around the cause of fighting for the highest standards of independent journalism in times of economic difficulty and national crisis.
You can easily spot editors this year by their stooped shoulders. When our generation’s most horrific event, now commonly called 9/11, ripped at our nation’s soul, many editors dug deeper into their bunkers. They did their jobs well, even brilliantly, but the larger issues facing our profession have been shoved aside.
Those issues can be shoved aside no longer.
We convene this meeting in 2002 in the depths of a dramatic recession in newspaper ad spending. It is a recession that has forced every newspaper I know to lock down expenses on everything from newsprint to employees to felt tip pens.
We convene this meeting in 2002 seven months after the Sept. 11 tragedies tore a hole in our hearts, but elevated our journalism to new heights.
Yesterday Elie Wiesel, David Handschuh, and others helped us reflect on those horrible events. With the grace of God, they gave us hope and they taught us how to move forward.
There are hundreds of dramatic tales of heroic journalism from Sept. 11. Many of you lived them in your own newsrooms as your staffs rose to the greatest news event of our generation. We all learned again that day just how important journalism is to us, but more importantly, to the readers of American newspapers. Our readers needed our newspapers. They clung to them as we haven’t seen them cling in years.
The declining economy, the phenomenal profit pressure editors have faced, and the psyche-scarring events of Sept. 11 have forced me to rethink this speech. Months ago I promised my wonderful program chair, Dave Zeeck, that today’s speech would be about creating our future.
I had contemplated a speech about the future of our business and how journalism will need to function. I had a long list of concrete ideas about targeted delivery, serving special segments of our audience, partnerships with magazines, convergence, and other issues that will surely consume editors in coming years.
But as one of my favorite country songs says, “Give me a break, it’s whaddya feel not whaddya think.” Editors and staff feel scared. Editors and staff feel powerless. Editors and staff feel isolated.
That’s why I want to talk today about what it’s going to take to create a values-based future for newspapers. I want to talk about how editors can take charge of the future of journalism in a world obsessed with money, stock options and quarterly reports.
My ASNE presidency was born on April 6 of last year when the former publisher of the San Jose Mercury News, Jay Harris, stirred this society in a way it has seldom been stirred. Jay spoke to us just a few short weeks after he resigned in protest of the short-term emphasis on profits at his newspaper.
Jay said many memorable things during that provocative speech but this comment haunted me. “There was virtually no discussion of the damage that would be done to the quality and aspirations of the Mercury News as a journalistic endeavor or to its ability to fulfill its responsibilities to the community.”
Jay Harris sounded the alarm on that April day. And then we all watched sadly as hundreds of journalists were laid off. Yesterday we learned that newspapers lost 2,000 jobs last year.
Many profound thinkers have pontificated and wrung their hands since Jay so eloquently warned us the obsession with short-term profits is causing newspaper companies to lose sight of their long-term obligations and opportunities.
I do not want this speech to be another “woe is us” screed against some mysterious Wall Street devil. I do not want it to be idealistic or impractical. I believe in capitalism as much as the next person. It’s no secret that the equity aspects of the newspaper business have been very good to this son of a mid-Michigan car salesman and hospital admitting clerk. Profit is good.
But the basic values of news have also shaped my life. There was the day 27 years ago in Ypsilanti when a distraught young father wanted to choke me because we had written a story about his child’s crib death. There was the week in Ypsilanti in which our “little newspaper that could” told the nation that patients in an Ann Arbor veterans hospital were dying at an alarming rate. Those events and others taught me early some great lessons about a newspaper’s power to destroy and to save.
Each one of you has a score of stories about how your newspaper work made a fundamental difference in your community, in your nation, or even in one individual’s life.
Len Downie and Bob Kaiser in their new book The News About the News eloquently describe how great storytelling, fueled by great reporting, can make “a palpable difference in the community, sometimes in the entire country or even the world.” Then Downie and Kaiser deliver the clincher. “The best such journalism is often produced by reporters and editors who have the luxury of pursuing topics they think are important without having to worry excessively about how much it may cost to report a story or whom the story may offend.”
Juxtapose that quote with one from Polk Laffoon, a spokesman for Knight Ridder. He said this about newsroom staff cuts to Rick Edmonds from Poynter: “How deep is too deep? I suppose it’s when you can’t get the paper out. An awful lot of papers that get very thin still sell just fine.”
So, there’s the collision, and in recent months it’s been a violent one.
On one side are CEOs and publishers of newspapers. They cite the “efficiency of the markets” and tell us the “market” demands profit margins in the 20 to 35 percent range They say they need to grow those profits consistently.
On the other side, journalists, academics, and pundits say journalism is not a business like any other. They say it’s a sacred trust fueled by the First Amendment, and to fulfill that public mission, news resources matter — a lot.
Hovering above the debate is the Wall Street devil. Call it the market, the shareholder, the street, or the analysts. All the terms imply that someone else insists we produce ever-larger short-term profits. If we don’t, that devil will come take our business away from us. That has always been the horrible threat — someone even more evil will snatch your business. Then you’ll really be sorry.
I do not believe in the Wall Street devil. I think the devil is us. Scott Cooley, a senior analyst at Morningstar, was correct when he said in the March issue of American Journalism Review that “pressure for strong financial performance comes ultimately from individual investors who are looking for the best returns on their pension plans or other financial holdings.”
The devil made me do it argument must die. Here. Today. Every publisher, editor, and newspaper CEO in America is an independent human being with free will, values, morals, and ethics.
It is high time we show some courage.
It is time we dig deep and tap into those values and morals and allow them to guide us in our leadership of American journalism.
We must stop wringing our hands and ruing our fate. No more ruing!!
I said this was not going to be an idealistic speec, so I propose five practical prescriptions to create a future in which news values and profits can co-exist in the same sentence.
1. Establish our own personal value base and live it courageously.
2. Buy into, promote, and live the values of the First Amendment.
3. Tell our story better to investors.
4. Publishers and editors must make a personal contract to create a sound business AND serve the public interest.
5. We need an industry-wide leader to galvanize the national discussion on news values and profits.
Let me talk about those five prescriptions.
When I assumed the presidency of this society I said this: “Our opportunities to do good, to stimulate debate and discussion and to supply the glue of our communities make what we do far more than a job, it’s a calling. That calling demands every ounce of our integrity and commitment.”
I’ve talked a lot about calling this year and how it relates to what we do. The author of Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah, says calling exists in work when there is a moral core to what you do, there is meaning and purpose, and your work contributes positively to the common good.
We find a moral core in journalism when we act ethically. We find a moral core when our insistence on fairness and balance gets sharper edged. We find a moral core when we insist that people always look at every side of a story. We find a moral core when we consider how our actions affect people — staff and readers. We find a moral core when we follow the sage advice of my dearest friend, Gregory Favre, who wrote a brilliant piece in a Poynter publication recently about managing with your heart. We find a moral core in journalism when we think about how our mistakes damage people.
By exposing wrongdoing, shining the public light on society’s failings, and holding officials and individuals accountable for illegal and improper behavior we make our work purposeful and meaningful.
Serving as the community glue or the community general store, where everybody in the community can come for knowledge, stimulation, and provocation allows each of us to serve the common good. When we push for diversity in the community, we serve the common good.
I’ve been thrilled recently to see the word “stewardship” used next to the word “journalism.” At a Poynter conference in January, Howell Raines talked about the Methodist stewardship he learned as a child. He says it reminded him that the most important thing is to be a good steward of The New York Times.
When Jerry Roberts resigned as managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle he said, “I want to offer two words of unsolicited advice that I believe shapes all great newspaper people — practice stewardship. The Chronicle is a living, breathing thing. It was here long before any of us arrived and it’ll be here long after all of us have gone. We’re all stewards of a great and historic institution that defines our community. Being on the paper is a privilege and a public trust, and we should go about our work with reverence, caring, and passion that honors the paper’s past, builds its future, and above all else, serves its readers.”
This talk of stewardship is uplifting and essential. Stewardship needs to be at the heart of our values. Stewardship instills and personalizes the sense of obligation we should all feel if we are to find the right blend of profit and public service.
This discussion of our own personal value base is all about looking in the mirror and looking into your soul at the same time. Do you like what you see? Do you see courage? Do you see fear? Do you see resignation? Are you proud of that person you see, and what you do for a living and how you do it? To paraphrase an old cliché, when you die are you going to be proudest of the margins your newspaper produced or do you want to be known for the way your values permeated your newspaper?
We must engage in this discussion about values and profits with a courageous and deep sense of commitment to our own personal set of values and ethics.
My second prescription is that we must buy into, understand, and live according to the values of the First Amendment. We do not make Wheaties and we do not make car bumpers. We make newspapers for a free society.
Our forefathers protected the press, and the courts have expanded that protection because news is essential to our society. Free and open discussion of ideas and of the behavior of the powerful is essential to our democracy. That’s why Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach, in their book The Elements of Journalism, conclude that journalists really work for citizens and not for the corporate behemoths.
It becomes the responsibility of all of us to make sure that the Rosenstiel/Kovach concept does not become a quaint and idealistic expression. We have to make our obligation to the citizens and the First Amendment genuine and palpable. Our information and journalism has to add ever-greater value to the reader and the community. Now is not the time to be stinting on resources to gather news or on adding value to the news and information we gather. We must be responsible, relevant, important, useful, and interesting. Above all, we must have the courage to fulfill the dreams of the framers of the First Amendment.
A TV anchor in the Twin Cities named Don Shelby is a little different from many anchors. He knows news and he has values. He spoke for me, and I bet for a lot of you, when he told the Minnesota Newspaper Association this a few weeks ago.
“You think I have the courage, this kid from Muncie, Indiana, to walk in and sit down across from presidents and all kinds of criminals and ask tough questions? I don’t have that kind of courage in me. I don’t have the kind of courage to stand up and get in somebody’s face and demand accountability.
“But all I have to do is turn around and look and I see them all lined up behind me. I see Madison and Jefferson and Washington and Lincoln. I see every person that ever fought in a war. You know what they’re saying to me?
“Go ahead Don, go ahead. We’ve appointed you.”
That delightful image of our forefathers lined up behind us should give us all courage no matter how difficult the economic picture gets.
One of my favorite songs is an alternative country song called “The Cape” by Guy and Suzanna Clark.
Some of the lyrics go like this.
Eight years old with a flour sack cape tied all around his neck
He climbed up on the garage, figuring “What the heck.”
He screwed his courage up so tight the whole thing came unwound
He got a runnin’ start and bless his heart, he headed for the ground.
He’s one of those who knows that life is just a leap of faith
Spread your arms and hold your breath, always trust your cape.
Those First Amendment values are our cape. Let’s trust them.
My third prescription is that we must tell our story better to investors.
One of my ASNE mentors, Bob Giles, the curator of the Neiman Foundation, said in a March American Journalism Review article, “My argument with newspapers in terms of the way that they relate to Wall Street is that they present themselves as not different from other companies. They talk very little about the quality of the news and the emphasis is far too much on profits. The result is an underrating of the value of the standards of journalism.”
And, I would suggest, an underrating of the true long-term value of our franchise.
This is a subject that is getting a lot of much-needed attention. An incredibly bright and engaging Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri named Eleanor Farnen has developed a fascinating hypothesis. It is this. “Media companies tend to focus on the financial goals of their organizations. Non-media companies will take a more balanced approach by focusing not only on financial issues but also on the value of their products, the importance of their customers and suppliers and the future of their brands.”
When she’s finished, Farnen thinks she may find that media executives are setting the financial bar far higher than it needs to be set.
My good friend, Dan Sullivan, the Cowles Professor of Media Management and Economics at the University of Minnesota, finds it incredibly telling that not a single newspaper company appears in the portfolio of prominent public interest mutual funds. These are funds set up to invest in companies with admirable social behavior or companies with great social responsibility.
We need to start asking why companies dedicated to enhancing the public debate are not on such investment lists.
We need to develop performance measures that reflect our investment in the communities we serve.
We need to sell our public service mission, the long-term prospects of our business, and the social value of our product to investors rather than obsessing on profit margins.
My fourth prescription is that publishers and editors make a personal contract to create a sound business AND serve the public interest.
This opposing side stuff is not going to work. Our news franchises are not going to survive if publishers and editors are squabbling, or worse, not talking at all.
In too many places we have moved to a Mars/Venus kind of relationship between publishers and editors. Editors are not being accorded the same status they once were in many organizations. Some of that is the fault of arrogant editors and some is the fault of the single-minded attitudes of publishers. Too often, the resources of editors are treated like the resources of other departments. That’s not right. Content-providers must be treated differently.
Editors must be key players in making our news franchises strong. Certainly they need to do it by being creative about new products and new methods. But, the most important contribution of editors must be as leaders of great news products. That requires time, focus, and commitment.
We’re not going to create cooperation and partnership by wiggling our noses and wishing it so, but a genuine contract between publishers and editors could help. I’d say the contract should have these essential elements.
1. The reader/citizen is the primary customer. Not advertisers. Not corporations. Not an elite few. If the publisher and editor can agree on that simple target, and behave as if it is unequivocally true, many arguments will be eliminated.
2. Business and profits are not automatically bad, and the editor will not assume they are. In return, the publisher will not view the editor as disloyal if the editor questions the levels of those profits or the rate of profit growth.
3. “Grow or die” must be the motto of both the editor and the publisher. The franchise must grow, not just the bottom-line. If operating earnings are growing on the back of cost cuts the franchise is dying and you’re milking it. If the editor and publisher are committed to growing readership, circulation and the entire franchise, the debate would be reshaped in countless companies.
4. Newsrooms are going to have to grow and grow significantly. This is a hard one and I am well aware it is the one business people may well use to scoff at this entire speech. If newsrooms are going to become more multi-media and they must; if newsrooms are going to better serve more target markets and they must; if newsrooms are going to develop better experts on complex topics and they must; if newsrooms are going to fulfill the mandates of the Readership Institute study and they must; if newsrooms are going to do more great journalism which makes newspapers vital to citizens and they must — then newsrooms are going to need more people. Efficiency is a noble goal and we should be smarter about how we use our resources, but newsrooms are going to have to grow.
5. The editor and publisher must always assume the best about each other. They must agree to never denigrate the other’s position in front of other people. They must never lie to each other. They must talk out every issue in a respectful way. As parents we all know that telling our kids they can’t do something “just because I said so” is not very fruitful. The same applies to the editor/publisher relationship.
I think this is the kind of contract that could lead to publishers and editors jointly finding a solution to our problems.
My fifth prescription is that we need an industry-wide leader to bring CEOs, publishers and editors together to lead the national discussion on news values and profits.
There has been some important discussion on this matter, but it is too diffused.
Jim Naughton told the Poynter Board of Advisors in January that, “It no longer is appropriate to assume that someone — ASNE or RTNDA or SPJ or the Committee of Concerned Journalists-will speak for the journalism. Bless them if they do. Poynter must.”
I agree with Jim that Poynter and all the other journalism organizations, including ASNE, must speak for news values.
But I think we need something more. We need a national convenor. We need a person and an organization to bring real firepower to the effort to find the right balance between corporate profits, news values and personal values.
There are lots of disparate efforts right now at universities, foundations, and think tanks to find effective ways to center this problem-solving conversation. What we need now is a galvanizing force to take charge. We need dynamic leadership to mobilize editors and publishers to work this problem to solution.
We’re going to need money. We’re going to need vision. We’re going to need dynamism. Most of all we’re going to need unity. All the groups who want to figure out how newspapers can be profitable and remain true to core news values are going to have to be effectively harnessed, focused and energized.
Len Downie suggested to the ASNE board of directors Monday night that ASNE should lead this effort. Len’s thoughts were provocative, and ASNE needs to be a major player in the effort. But I don’t believe ASNE’s governance allows ASNE to lead this effort. A one-year president with full-time work obligations simply could not produce the creativity, the energy, or the leadership required.
Poynter, Knight Foundation, Pew, a major university, or API would also be hard-pressed to lead this process alone.
I think perhaps the best solution is a coalition of all of these organizations along with NAA, the McCormick Foundation, APME, SPJ, the Committee for Concerned Journalists, Unity, the Council of Presidents and many others, led by a powerful individual with the skills I’ve talked about. I can easily think of five or six outstanding people who might be willing to get their hands dirty to make such an effort a success.
On Friday afternoon I will be an ASNE past president. I would happily join with other past presidents, the new ASNE president, and the leaders of other organizations to help create this sort of dynamic problem-solving powerhouse.
My prescriptions today have been specific.
I have called for a reinvestment in our commitment to living and spreading our personal values; for a rededication of editors to the principles of the First Amendment; for this industry to tell its story to Wall Street in a public service context and not in a context of ever-higher profit margins; for a specific type of contract to allow publishers and editors to jointly serve the demands of profits and our public service mission. And, I have called on the industry to come together around a powerful organization to facilitate the discussion on finding the right balance between profits and the public interest.
I believe we are at a crucial juncture in our profession and in our industry. We must decide today whether we’re going to take newspapers forward with a genuine sense of values and commitment or if we are going to choose the path of milking our companies of every last dime. If we do that, we will die.
I recently read the excellent Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. I was struck by Ellis’ contention that the voices of the revolutionary heroes speak to us so eloquently “because they knew we would be looking and listening.” Ellis says, “All the vanguard members of the revolutionary generation developed a keen sense of their historical significance even while they were still making history on which their reputations would rest.”
Every editor, every publisher, and every newspaper company CEO in America is living at a special, critical moment for American journalism. We need to find the personal courage to overcome our feelings of isolation, fear and powerlessness so we can live that moment in a way that would make Casper Yost and all of his ASNE founding brothers proud. We must act as if history is watching.
To use Casper’s words, we must put our whole force, our whole thought into making newspapers and the news business, responsible, responsive and respected.
We must put our whole force and our whole thought into finding ways that profits and news values can live happily together.
We must put our whole force and our whole thought into living our personal values in a way that makes a critical difference to journalism, to readers and to all citizens.
That, as Casper Yost said at the birth of ASNE, will be a great thing.
Tim J. McGuire is editor of the Star Tribune and president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors for 2001-02.
