The Broken Wall - newspaper coverage of its advertisers

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1999 by Blake Fleetwood

Recent evidence indicates that readers have noticed changes and that editors themselves are troubled. Last year the National Association of Newspaper Editors commissioned a massive three-year, million-dollar poll and research project entitled: "Why Has Newspaper Credibility Been Dropping?" The results are grim. Seventy-eight percent of the 3,000 readers polled "believe that powerful people or organizations can get stories they want into the paper, or keep stories out of the paper if they don't want them covered" Sixty percent of those polled believe newspapers allow advertisers' interests to influence news decisions.

How do reporters feel about it? "It's not that somebody comes up to you in the newsroom and says `knock it off,'" says Mike Meyers, a veteran reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "It doesn't happen that way. The influences are more subtle. Editors have traditionally been insulated from the counting house. The difference in the '90s is that all editors have a double incentive system. Today they get paid handsomely to think of, and anticipate, what advertisers want."

Last March Meyers wrote a story explaining how Northwest Airlines' domination of its Minneapolis hub cost local consumers $75 million per year in higher prices on airline tickets. A great story, but a dangerous one in Minnesota. Knowing that the airline was the largest employer in the state, and one of the biggest advertisers in the paper, Meyers did not have to be told to be unusually careful. He faxed his data to airline executives and asked for a comment. Before they got back to him, or the article was even published, airline executives were on local radio releasing the figures and putting their own spin on them. "We were being so careful that we let them scoop us on our own exclusive," says Meyers. When the article appeared it was old news.

Since the middle '80s most newspapers in the country, including the best and the brightest, have been racing to reposition themselves as products to be made more palatable to readers and advertisers, based on audience testing and other well-established Harvard Business School techniques. This concept is known as Total Newsroom, in which editorial, advertising, circulation and promotion are all coordinated around the goal of marketing a product. Instead of worrying about whether this is a good story, editors ask whether the proposed story will connect with the reader's life style. Like politicians, many major papers run nightly tracking polls so they can give readers what they say they want. But for many reporters, such techniques violate the ethic of honesty that has made Americans trust their newspapers. "We should act like professionals," says Meyers. "You would be an idiot if you went to a doctor who only told you what you wanted to hear. Reporters have to tell readers what they need to hear."

The battle is being fought out most visibly in southern California, where news is often literally treated as a product to be marketed like any other. Twenty-two months ago Mark Willes, a former General Mills (Wheaties, Cheerios, Lucky Charms) marketing executive, caused an industry firestorm when he took over the publisher's seat at the Los Angeles Times. He declared that he would "use a bazooka, if necessary, to blow up the wall" between business and editorial.