Green days

How corporate greed -- fueled by stock-market fever -- is destroying newspapers. Plus, more fallout from the Patricia Smith affair.

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

Chain journalism has entered its decadent phase. Not too long ago, executives at giant newspaper companies such as Gannett, Times Mirror, and Knight-Ridder felt obliged to find at least some publicly palatable rationalization -- rising paper costs, declining ad revenues, whatever -- for shutting down papers and laying off employees.

Now, though, it appears that the rules have changed. The '80s are back (did they ever really go away?), and greed is not only good, it is to be celebrated. Only about 300 of the 1504 dailies in the US remain independent. The rest are owned by chains, most of which are downsizing their way to ever-higher profit margins, making their shareholders fat and happy but shortchanging the communities they purport to serve.

At a time when the public is focused on such high-profile media scandals as the CNN-Time nerve-gas fiasco, the Cincinnati Enquirer's $10 million apology to Chiquita Bananas, and the fictionalizations of Stephen Glass and Patricia Smith, the profit-driven deterioration of chain-owned newspapers is perhaps the biggest scandal of all. Consider, for instance, these recent developments:

Media giant Dow Jones's Ottaway Newspapers, which publishes five dailies in Massachusetts, announced at the end of June that it would eliminate 220 jobs -- 8.4 percent of the total -- at its 36 newspapers nationwide. Earlier, the company said it would close its Washington bureau. Are such drastic steps being taken to stem a flood of red ink? Please. Ottaway, which in 1997 reported a pretax profit margin of $67 million, or 22 percent, on revenues of more than $300 million, seeks to drive that margin up to 27 percent -- widely described as the industry average for community newspapers. The goal, says Dow Jones chairman Peter Kann, is "to create more value for Dow Jones shareholders." And, you can be sure, considerably less value for Ottaway readers.

The front of the New York Times business section of June 29 proclaimed that "the newspaper industry . . . is as healthy as it has been in a decade," with burgeoning revenues and, for the first time since 1986, rising circulation. But that same day, in a news brief on page D8, the Times reported the results of a study showing that newspapers around the country have cut back drastically on the number of reporters they assign to state houses. Leading the way: Knight-Ridder, the country's second-largest newspaper group, with a 16 percent reduction, and Gannett, the largest, with 14 percent. (The full results of the study appear in the July/August American Journalism Review.)

When Quincy Patriot Ledger publisher Scott Low announced a little more than a year ago that he would sell his family heirloom, he claimed he would put a premium on finding an owner who would preserve the paper's sterling reputation for local-news coverage. Instead, he sold to a group headed by Brockton Enterprise publisher James Plugh, who is dismantling the Ledger's crown jewel: its "town reporter" system, in which at least one full-time staffer was assigned to each of the paper's 26 South Shore communities. Veteran editor Bill Ketter quit and is now filling in for Boston Globe op-ed-page editor Marjorie Pritchard, who's on maternity leave.

These developments have created barely a ripple in the mainstream press, but they are the talk of the industry. MONEY LUST: HOW PRESSURE FOR PROFIT IS PERVERTING JOURNALISM, blares the July/August cover of the newly redesigned Columbia Journalism Review. "A new era has dawned in American journalism," warns CJR editor-at-large Neil Hickey, who writes that the result of runaway budget-cutting and the news business's obsession with profits will be "a diminished and deracinated journalism of a sort that hasn't been seen in this country until now and which, if it persists, will be a fatal erosion of the ancient bond between journalists and the public."

Ironically, Hickey points out, one of the biggest culprits in this sordid state of affairs is -- us. The greedy, profit-obsessed owners who are destroying journalism are not just those who occupy corporate boardrooms. They're also the millions of stockholders who demand ever-increasing profits and ever-rising share prices. Many of these new investors only entered the market during the bull run of the past few years, and they assume (incorrectly, as they will one day learn) that 25 percent returns are part of their birthright.

A personal example of this new financial environment: my wife is a photographer for Ottaway's Salem Evening News, and we own some shares of Dow Jones stock. Thus, Ottaway's downsizing will make it more difficult for my wife and her colleagues to serve their readers, yet it will also enhance our portfolio. (Indeed, Dow Jones stock jumped to a record high earlier this week.)

There's a strong argument to be made that publicly traded companies are peculiarly ill suited to the news business. Of necessity, news organizations are labor intensive, and employees can't be eliminated without having an immediate, and negative, effect on the product. Newspapers are slow-growth companies with respectable but not spectacular profit margins, characteristics that are anathema to the go-go mentality of 1990s-vintage investors.

Andrew Barnes, editor and chairman of the St. Petersburg Times, generally regarded as one of the best of the independents, recently told the AJR that his goal was a profit margin of 15 percent -- no less, but also no more: "If it was going to be under 10 we'd damn well want to know why, and if it was over 20 we'd be doing something wrong."

Unfortunately, at today's chain-owned newspapers, a profit margin of at least 20 percent, far from being considered excessive, is looked at as a sign of good management -- and as an invitation to slash even more next year.

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Editors and staffers at the Boston Globe -- not to mention the public -- may be getting tired of the Patricia Smith saga. But the story of Smith's rise and fall isn't going away just yet.

Smith's literary agent, John Taylor "Ike" Williams, has made public two angry letters that he's written -- one to Globe ombudsman Jack Thomas, the other to managing editor for news operations Al Larkin. Williams, a lawyer who heads the Palmer & Dodge law firm's literary agency, is a major player in book circles (he represents a number of Harvard's academic superstars and did the deal for O.J. Simpson's bestseller, I Want to Tell You), and attention, as they say, must be paid.

In his letter to Thomas, Williams objects to the tone of his June 22 ombudsman column, and in particular to his use of a quote from Smith's June 19 farewell. Wrote Thomas: "Although Smith's column of apology was written with her customary flair, she continued to compromise the truth. Making up an entire column of fictitious people and quotations is not, as she would have us believe, slamming home a point. It's lying." In Smith's actual column, Williams points out, Smith spoke of her desire to "slam home a salient point," but she also straightforwardly confessed to "one of the cardinal sins of journalism: Thou shalt not fabricate. No exceptions. No excuses." Thomas, Williams charges, used Smith's words to make it appear that she was avoiding responsibility, when in fact she was accepting it fully.

In the Larkin letter, Williams complains about "a damaging campaign of manipulation" in the form of Thomas's column and an extremely tough June 27 piece by metro columnist Eileen McNamara. Williams charges that Smith is being singled out for vilification even though metro columnists Mike Barnicle and McNamara "have violated the universal rules of journalistic integrity." (Barnicle's columns have sparked ethical questions in years past. McNamara's one-time sloppy use of a dateline has resulted in lingering, though inaccurate, charges that she falsely claimed to have covered a conference in Salem.)

Also, a group of 20 prominent black women (including Urban League director Joan Wallace Benjamin, former judge Margaret Burnham, and community activist Juanita Wade) has sent a letter to the Globe "object[ing] most strenuously to the ugly, vindictive campaign the paper is now waging to obliterate [Smith's] otherwise stellar record of achievement as a journalist." The letter cites the Thomas and McNamara columns, as well as a June 28 piece by business-page columnist David Warsh, and includes this incendiary accusation: "As the Globe well knows, Mike Barnicle has been guilty of journalistic crimes far worse than those Smith admitted to." Editorial-page editor David Greenway says the letter will be published soon, but that the reference to Barnicle will be edited. "We don't print letters that we know to be factually wrong," he says.

A few observations.

As Williams notes, Thomas took Smith out of context -- but not in a particularly ugly or mean-spirited way, especially given that the Globe's ongoing investigation of Smith indicates she may have faked as many as 52 columns. "I understand [Williams's] feelings," says editor Matt Storin. "I wasn't exactly treated too kindly in those columns either, and I'm the editor."

The Globe's tough coverage of the Smith affair, by media reporter Mark Jurkowitz and ombudsman Thomas, was commendable. More to the point, it's their job. But the institutional self-absorption displayed by the fact that McNamara, Warsh, and Barnicle all felt the need to weigh in is getting to be a bit much. McNamara made some valuable observations about the role of race in Smith's rise from obscure music critic to Pulitzer-finalist columnist, but her strident tone offended many African-Americans both inside and outside 135 Morrissey Boulevard. "This isn't about race, it's about making up sources," says one of McNamara's black colleagues. "It's about somebody who did not fulfill her responsibilities, and fucked up and had to go."

Ongoing efforts to make Barnicle and Smith moral equivalents are entirely unsupportable. Barnicle's enemies point to incidents that occurred 8, 12, even 25 years ago. Yes, charges that Barnicle invented characters, faked quotes, and plagiarized are serious, and no, it doesn't appear that those charges were adequately investigated at the time -- although they were thoroughly aired and, unlike the Smith affair, ended inconclusively. There is no evidence that Barnicle has broken his trust with his readers since Storin became editor in 1993 -- never mind since the now-famous Globe fact-checking system went into effect in 1996. And even if some of the accusations against Barnicle are true, he's long since beaten the statute of limitations.

A final note. Some of Storin's critics insist that he should have fired Smith in 1995, when accusations that she sometimes faked it were first presented to him. The events of the past few weeks demonstrate clearly why he didn't. The Globe is a vast, powerful institution distrusted by many communities -- by Irish-Americans, by Catholics, by social conservatives, and, of course, by African-Americans.

Patricia Smith was more than just a metro columnist -- she was a symbol of the Globe's effort to connect with different communities. Who can blame Storin for putting her on notice and believing -- wanting to believe -- that this talented, eloquent writer had gotten the message?

The anger expressed in the black women's letter may be misdirected on the specifics, but its underlying message is right on the mark. The loss of Smith's voice is deeply felt, even though everyone now understands that she was not what she appeared to be.

Storin says he still hasn't given much thought to naming a replacement. He should do it soon, and he should do it with an independent, outspoken black writer.

Actually, no. This time, make it a black journalist.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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