Acquisition by Gannett Changes Paper's Editorials

Newspaper Research Journal, Spring 2004 by Hallock, Steve

Analysis of the editorials in The Lousiville Courier-Journal before and after its 1986 sale to Gannett reveals little change in editorial ideology or frequency, but it shows a reduced emphasis on local issues.

Ask longtime residents of Louisville, Ky., what they remember about july 1986 and you're likely to evoke a memory of a muggy Sunday afternoon birthday picnic in the park or a Friday evening cruise down Broadway downtown. Those with political or historical interests might recall the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that governments may limit First Amendment protection for speech in advertisements. Former President Ronald Reagan signaled to Congress a willingness to compromise on key issues of his proposal to revamp the nation's tax system. South African police tear-gassed churchgoers and arrested at least three worshippers in a black township near Johannesburg. The king of Morocco announced he would resign as Arab League Conference chairman after being criticized by some Arab countries for meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

In Louisville, july 1986 marked a change in how that city's daily newspaper operations chronicled these and other current events and offered opinion on them. This change, as manifested in the newspaper's editorials for the purpose of this study, was not one found so much in the editorials' and newspaper's political ideology (i.e. Republican vs. Democrat) as it was in editorial emphasis and process and in a loss of a local and regional editorial voice because of the closure of one of the city's two daily newspapers.

This was the summer that the Bingham family sold The Louisville Courier-Journal and Louisville Times to the Gannett newspaper group after one daughter sold her minority stock to Gannett for $84 million.1 The Courier-Journal had been independently owned since it began publication in 1868 and by the Bingham family since 1918. The deal signaled the largest U.S. newspaper chain company's move into the prestige ranks of American journalism with Gannett taking over an eight-time Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper in The Courier-Journal that enjoyed a strong national reputation.2

The sale of The Courier-Journal to Gannett was part of a national trend that between 1960 and 1996 saw chain ownership of newspapers in the United States more than double. In 1960, nearly 70 percent of U.S. dailies were independently owned; by the early 1990s, that number had declined to 25 percent following a three-decade buying spree by chains,3 defined as ownership of two or more dailies in different cities by one firm or individual.4 This shift in daily newspapers from single, usually family, ownership to the group sector sparked some academic and industry studies of the effects of chain ownership on newspaper operations.

A common criticism of group ownership is that its interests lie more in profits than in newspaper quality and integrity. Groups take money out of the community by sending profits to the home headquarters, and corporate executives with no roots in the community dictate news policy and editorial decisions from faraway headquarters.5

Local autonomy, however, is a trait the Gannett group announces with each takeover of a newspaper and one that Gannett editors in charge of the local operation frequently claim.6 Local autonomy and structural and organizational changes accompanying the takeover of an independent newspaper by a group, specifically as evidenced in the editorials of The Louisville Courier-Journal and Times before and after their purchase by Gannett, is the focus of this study.

Newspaper editorials, more than any other section of the daily paper, stake out a newspaper's political, social and economic territory. Editorials historically have revealed how the newspaper's heart beats and how its brain functions. A newspaper's daily stories reveal a community's business and political functions; a newspaper's sports and arts and entertainment pages discover a community's games, leisures and artistic culture; a newspaper's editorial pages help shape a community's conscience.

Waldrop argued in Editor and Editorial Writer, a 1967 textbook on the writing of editorials, the editorial page lends meaning to the complexity of the day's events, takes on the battles of the citizenry, helps free the reader from myths and demagoguery, offers a daily forum for community dialogue, cultivates public opinion and in the process nurtures democracy and "enable(s) him to be on guard against the editor's human weakness in presenting and playing the news."7

For the newspaper, the editorial page is

* A source of personality, of "conscience, courage, and convictions"

* A means of demonstrating that "A newspaper is a citizen of its community," a statement which appears in the editorial masthead of the Eugene Register-Guard;

* "A leaven and a guide to the whole newspaper operation."8

So the editorial page offers some insight into an absentee corporate owner's commitment not only to editorial autonomy but to such journalistic principles as serving as watchdog over a community's political and business structure, as champion of the community's needy and as a caring member of that community.