Good Journalism and Business: An Industry Perspective

Newspaper Research Journal, Winter 2004 by Overholser, Geneva

This review of recent industry concerns about how profit pressures on media companies have affected journalism discusses how lamentations have turned recently to suggested solutions.

"Oh, you've just been working for Gannett too long," a jovially confident Gregory Favre, Then editor of The Sacramento Bee, told a couple of editors anguishing over profit pressures at a conference outside Chicago in 1997. Four years later, Favre would be leading an initiative at the Poynter Institute focused in large part on the impact of those very pressures on journalism quality throughout America. And, in quick proximity, a respected Knight Ridder publisher would quit over cost pressures,1 the president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors would make the issue the centerpiece of his convention speech,2 and Favre's former boss, the CEO of family-dominated McClatchy, would mull the virtues of remaining public versus taking the company private3 as a protection against Wall Street's unstinting imperatives. No one was thinking any longer that only Gannett editors knew profit pressures. Thus has the erosion of American journalism's public service role due to increasing business pressures changed from rarely discussed hot-potato notion to conventional wisdom. It would be pondered at think tanks and industry conventions, within individual newsrooms and in trade publications, books and online discussions.

Against the background of a dozen years ago, this change looks dramatic indeed. As Gannett's "editor of the year" in 1990, I was invited to speak at the company's year-end meetings. Commending Gannett's pioneering move in launching LiSA Today, I made this suggestion:

Here's my dream for the next risk-taking, history-making endeavor: Let Gannett show how corporate journalism can serve all its constituencies in hard times. As we sweat ou t the end of the ever-increasing quarterly earnings, as we necessarily attend to the needs and wishes of our shareholders and our advertisers, are we worrying enough about the other three? About our employees, our readers, and our communities?4

It was, after all, Gannett's indomitable CEO, Al Neuharth - retired by the time of that speech - who had made quarter-by-quarter profit "improvements" the goal for media companies across the nation. Certainly Gannett knew how to make it happen. When the company bought The Des Moines Register in 1985, the paper's profit before taxes was just under $6 million. Within a year, it was $11 million, then $17 million the next year. By the time I returned to the paper as editor in 1988, it was $20.5 million. Yet, dramatic as these rapid gains were, their effects were clearly not to be discussed. After that 1990 speech, incredulous executives indignantly asked my publisher if he had approved my remarks in advance. And he, in turn, felt compelled to ask me (if somewhat sheepishly) to write a note to his corporate boss assuring him of my fundamental loyalties to the company.

Nonetheless, by the time of that speech, profit pressures were fast becoming a widespread challenge for editors. That very year, Gene Roberts left his job as executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, a paper he had built into one of America's best. That marked the beginning of the wider journalism world's understanding that the once eminently admired Knight Ridder was doing its best to emulate Gannett's business successes. By 1993, former Chicago Tribune editor Jim Squires had published Read all About It! The Corporate Takeover of America's Newspapers, an early entrant in what would become a spate of books on the subjects. Wrote Squires:

During the last decade, the culture of the press has changed from that of an institution dedicated to the education of the public to that of its rival, television, which is dedicated to entertaining consumer?, far ? profit. At the same time, the new corporate owners of the press have taken the responsibility for 'news' content out of the hands of trained, experienced professional journalists whose goal was peer recognition for quality journalism, and put it into the hands of trained, experienced professional business managers whose goal is peer recognition for successful business management.5

Still, the conversation at that early moment remained muted. Roberts didn't talk openly about the pressures when he left The Inquirer. He didn't want to poison the well for the editors who would follow him, he told me in a phone call at the time. And Squires' book, though eagerly noted by many, was rejected by others as the product of infighting at the Tribune. There was such powerful aversion to this conversation that even in 1997, at that Chicago conference where Favre was so confident that the problem was limited in scope, the topic came out only with great difficulty. The convener of that meeting, Oregonian editor Sandra Mims Rowe, wrote afterwards:

The editors dissected the difficult, s ticky and often-avoided question of financial investment in newsrooms at some length, awkwardly at first, but ultimately with a passion and coherence that would surprise many in our newsrooms.6