In January 2006 Gannett Company, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, closed its Hazard bureau in eastern Kentucky. For decades the small outpost had produced news about the region’s coal-mining industry for the Louisville Courier-Journal, which won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1967 and an inestimable level of public appreciation for its tough reporting on issues such as occupational health and safety, mining deaths and disasters, pollution, and labor disputes. “Did the Courier-Journal play a watchdog role?” asked Bill Caylor, president of the Kentucky Coal Association, in an interview with the New York Times. “Yes, newspapers do. They force us to not become lax.”1
Between 1918 and 1986 the Courier-Journal was locally owned and operated by three generations of the Bingham family, under whose direction it became the first paper in the United States to appoint an independent ombudsman. The Courier-Journal provided generous employee benefits and flexible working conditions, won eight Pulitzers, and became nationally renowned for its tough, probing journalism. “My grandfather said he saw the paper as a public trust, and we ran it that way,” said the late Barry Bingham Jr., the daily’s last family publisher. “We made a marginal profit, maybe 5 or 6 percent.” But in 1986, the Binghams, mired in family disputes, sold their paper to Gannett. The Virginia-based conglomerate, which launched USA Today just four years before acquiring the Courier-Journal while already on its way to accumulating nearly one hundred dailies nationwide, “has profit-margin demands that the Binghams never dreamed of,” Barry Bingham explained. By 2005, for example, Gannett’s margins were around 30 percent. To reach these levels, the chain downsized reporting staffs across its fleet of papers and shifted resources to the suburbs, where there are more affluent readers and, with them, large advertisers seeking their business. According to Tony Oppegard, an attorney with experience prosecuting mining companies for safety violations, in the early years of the twenty-first century a surge of new mining companies trying to “make a quick buck” with “little dog holes” meant that citizens “need a watchdog like the Courier-Journal all the more.”2
The daily paper used to be considered a necessary tool for American democracy. As Oliver Wendell Holmes famously put it, “Only bread and the newspaper we must have, whatever else we do without.” If, historically, broadcast media have been especially well suited for emergency communications, print journalism has been uniquely capable of providing sustained and enterprising reporting on key social institutions—government agencies, businesses, hospitals, neighborhoods, schools, and the like—that shape our everyday lives. The demise of Gannett’s Hazard bureau is merely one small act in a drama that American communities everywhere are beginning to observe in their own hometowns: in the age of consolidation, newspaper journalism is becoming a luxury good.3
TODAY GANNETT AND THE OTHER MAJOR NEWSPAPER COMPANIES ARE simultaneously contracting and expanding: On the one hand, newspaper chains are laying off journalists, closing bureaus, and abandoning countless small towns, neighborhoods, and city beats from Hazard to Honolulu at breakneck speed, racing to cut costs and raise profit margins. On the other hand, they are converging operations—merging production and distribution of news and information with television stations, Internet properties, and cable outlets—wherever possible, and searching for new ways to saturate local markets with products marked by their corporate brand. These opposing tendencies help explain one of the great paradoxes in today’s media business: while citizens are bombarded with an apparently endless supply of media products, the shrinking supply of primary producers at the local level renders media content strikingly similar, regardless of its form.
Big Media conglomerates insist that they are pulling out of less lucrative markets because of an industry-wide financial crisis. Overall circulation levels for traditional, printed papers are stuck in a steady free-fall, and young people are turning elsewhere for news and entertainment. Alternative weeklies and Internet sites such as Craigslist are formidable competitors for classifieds. The loss of large local retailers, such as department stores and car dealers, has slowed a traditional stream of revenue. Since 2000 a spate of high-profile scandals heightened public distrust of newspaper reporters, and comparable scandals involving newspaper business managers who reported inflated circulation levels elevated the distrust among advertisers. In 2005 major shareholders at Knight Ridder, then the nation’s second-largest newspaper chain, forced managers to sell the company because its profit margins were deemed insufficient. Newspaper stocks are sluggish. “At this point,” wrote the financial columnist James Surowiecki, “everyone knows that newspapers are doomed.”4
But the state of newspapers is more complicated than it appears, and even skeptics like Surowiecki acknowledge that the newspaper business generates remarkable cash revenues and is, however surprisingly, well positioned to become even more necessary in the digital age.
Newspaper journalism has never been as ubiquitous or influential as it is today, and, by the profitability standards of even the most lucrative industries, it remains robust. In 2005, for example, newspapers generated $47 billion in advertising revenues and enjoyed daily circulation around 78 million, not including the Internet. In October 2005 the Newspaper Association of America released audience surveys showing that the Web sites maintained by newspaper companies gave them greater media presence than previously believed, with 7 million people reading the USA Today on a weekly basis (about three times the reported Audit Bureau of Circulations figure released in September 2005, 2.3 million), along with 5 million at the New York Times (compared with 1.1 million), 2.65 million at the New York Daily News (690,000), 2.4 million at the Los Angeles Times (840,000), 1.8 million at the Washington Post (680,000), and 1.65 million at the Chicago Tribune (590,000).5 Moreover, newspapers provide the core editorial content for radio, television, and Internet news sites, from those produced by major media companies to those made by solitary bloggers. Without newspaper reporting, most other news media would have little basis for their journalism.
Despite constant cries from observers who say that the newspaper is doomed, daily papers routinely generate profit levels that dwarf those in other businesses, including Fortune 500 companies, whose average margins in 2004 were around 6 percent, and even Big Oil companies, such as Exxon Mobil, whose record-setting profits in 2005 came from a margin of roughly 16 percent. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, in the first six months of 2003 the top thirteen publicly traded newspaper companies had average profit margins of 19 percent. Morton Research reported that the weighted average of profit margins for newspaper divisions of the largest media companies jumped from 13 to almost 21 percent between 1991 and 2004. In 2004 three of the most economically successful chains, Gannett, McClatchy, and E. W. Scripps, earned nearly 30 percent margins, compared to roughly 18 percent at the Tribune Company.6
Profits were lower at the publicly traded New York Times Company (16 percent), Washington Post Company (14 percent), and Dow Jones & Company (9 percent), where two-tiered stock systems allow controlling family owners to sustain large investments in journalism at the expense of revenues. Yet even these levels are far above the Fortune 500 norm. The industry is indeed changing. But newspaper reports on the death of newspapers are greatly exaggerated—particularly by the media conglomerates that have something to gain from regulatory changes that allow them to own more local outlets. What is really hurting newspaper companies is not competition but greed.
DURING THE PAST TWO DECADES THE CHICAGO-BASED TRIBUNE COMPANY, a midlevel media conglomerate with outsize aspirations to climb to the top of the nation’s leading urban markets, helped lead the industry’s aggressive lobbying campaign to eliminate long-standing FCC “cross-ownership” regulations that prohibit one corporation from controlling a newspaper and broadcast station in the same market—unless the arrangement is “grandfathered” into law because of arrangements that predate the restriction, or permitted through a special federal waiver. More than any other media company, Tribune has wagered its future on repealing the cross-ownership ban. As its president and CEO Dennis FitzSimons recently boasted: “Tribune anticipated deregulation. We acquired Renaissance Communications [which owned six television stations, including WBZL in Miami] in 1997 [for $1.1 billion], giving us a cross-ownership situation in South Florida. We acquired Times Mirror [whose properties included the Los Angeles Times] in 2000, giving us cross-ownership situations in Los Angeles, New York and Hartford, Connecticut. We now have five markets where we own both a newspaper and television station.”7 In other words, rather than accept the standard federal cross-ownership laws, FitzSimons used the same strategy that the executives at Sinclair Broadcast Group and Capstar Broadcasting employed on a smaller scale: seeking waivers and lobbying to bring the laws into compliance with his own plans.
With a head start on other media conglomerates, Tribune became the only corporation to own and operate a major newspaper and broadcast television station in each of the top three markets, New York (Newsday and WPIX), Los Angeles (Los Angeles Times and KTLA), and Chicago (Tribune and WGN). It’s a strong business model, as FitzSimons attested. “Those three markets have 16 percent of total U.S. population and 25 percent of households with income of more than $150,000,” he boasted to shareholders. “Advertisers have to be there.” “We’re confident in the future of local mass media,” added Pat Mullen, the president of Tribune Broadcasting.
For Tribune, no city is as important as Chicago, where it operates its flagship local newspaper; WGN-TV, which broadcasts local sports, news, and entertainment; WGN Radio-720, the region’s top-rated AM radio station (which in many ratings periods beats the most popular FM station, Clear Channel’s WGCI, as the top station overall); Chicago, the city’s leading local magazine; Chicagoland’s Television (CLTV), the only local cable news and talk station; Metromix.com, the city’s top online entertainment and listings guide; ChicagoSports.com, a leading sports Web site; Hoy, the city’s most popular Spanish-language daily newspaper; and RedEye, a weekday tabloid designed to lure young professional readers between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four.
Tribune’s corporate leaders are deeply connected to the region’s power elite, and the company has made major investments in Chicago’s civic life. After the death of longtime editor and publisher Colonel Robert R. McCormick in 1955., Tribune helped establish the McCormick Tribune Foundation, which makes substantial contributions to universities, schools, and other civic institutions. The Tribune and McCormick names saturate the Chicago metropolitan area, from the monumental McCormick Place convention center on the city’s lakefront to the ultramodern McCormick Tribune Center on the Northwestern University campus, where many of the city’s future journalists train. To top it off, Tribune also owns the city’s beloved sports franchise, the Chicago Cubs.
According to Bruce DuMont, a veteran local broadcaster who once worked at WGN and is the founder and current president of the Museum of Broadcast Communications, Chicago is “a Tribune Company town” because Tribune’s diverse media holdings give it “many platforms to influence what people see, hear, and read,” and its “well-known and well-endowed institutions give [it] tentacles that reach far and deep in the city.” Sitting in the new museum building office space, the garrulous media executive told me that being the headquarters for a giant media company benefits the city, because it gets journalistic and philanthropic attention that most cities—including those where Tribune owns other newspapers—have lost. As in nearly all U.S. metropolitan areas, DuMont said, “our banks are no longer Chicago owned. Our insurance companies are no longer Chicago owned. Our utility companies are no longer Chicago owned, whether it’s electric, gas, or the phone company. Our cable system is not locally owned. The only major thing that is still owned is the newspaper and the media company.”
Locally owned and operated newspapers are all but obsolete in the contemporary media market—even in major cities such as Los Angeles, Houston, and Miami, whose wealth and sophistication suggest that they could support one. “Today,” said Frank Blethen, the outspoken publisher whose family has run the Seattle Times for five generations and is currently battling the Hearst Corporation, a conglomerate on a par with Tribune, for control of the Seattle market, “only about 250 of the nation’s 1500 newspapers are independently owned and operated,” and only a portion of these are locally managed. Speaking at the University of Washington’s Democracy Fest just before the 2004 election, Blethen declared that “frighteningly, our nation’s newspapers and media are now mostly controlled by a small group of corporations whose only value is more wealth and unbridled control.”8
In Chicago a growing number of residents and community organizations worry that Tribune’s omnipresence gives the conglomerate undue influence in local affairs, and that its multiple platforms for delivering news and entertainment result in Chicagoans seeing, hearing, and reading the same stories, in various forms, over and over during the course of a day. Chicago Tribune readers who turn on CLTV or WGN are likely to find print reporters or columnists repeating their accounts from the television news studio now located in the heart of the newspaper office or the radio studio on the ground floor, and are certain to get “cross-promotional” plugs for Tribune’s other media products. Jack Fuller, the former president of Tribune Publishing, believes that the company should be entitled to own even more local outlets than it already has. He told the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that it is impossible for any media company to dominate a market in a digital age. “In addition to newspapers, magazines, broadcast television and radio,” he argued, “now Americans can get news from a proliferation of national all-news cable operations such as CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, as well as from local cable operations … On the Internet they can get news from a wide variety of sites from all over the country and all over the world.”9 Fuller glossed over the problems that most concern Chicagoans: that national cable stations and Internet sites provide virtually no additional local content, and that much of their “news” is actually commentary and entertainment, not the local reporting that newspapers once provided with zeal.
When it comes to local journalism in Chicago and most other U.S. cities, finding primary reporting is increasingly difficult, whether for conventional beats (such as city hall and the neighborhoods) or special investigative projects. Consolidation and the rise of chains have reduced the number of professional news sources, and nowhere has this reduction been more dramatic than in the newspaper industry. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, newspaper employment dropped from 455,700 in 1990 to 381,300 in 2003, and although local newsrooms in small and midsize cities were hit especially hard, papers in major markets were not left unscathed.10
Such rampant downsizing only began after major newspaper companies had established monopolies in most U.S. markets, buying up or forcing out independent local owners throughout the nation. The media scholar Phyllis Kaniss wrote that “between 1940 and 1989, New York City went from having eight to three major metropolitan papers, Los Angeles from eight to one, Boston from nine to two, Philadelphia from five to two … and Detroit, Kansas City, Dallas, Cleveland, and St. Louis from three to two.”11 Whereas in 1923 about 40 percent of American cities had more than two daily newspapers and nearly all were locally owned and operated, by 2000 only about 2 percent of cities had more than one paper and roughly 80 percent of all dailies were owned by chains. The legendary press critic A. J. Liebling would have been particularly disturbed by this condition. In 1960 he wrote that “a city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.”12
ALTHOUGH CHICAGO IS ONE OF THE FEW AMERICAN CITIES TO RETAIN two major newspapers, Tribune has used its many media outlets to establish a dominant voice. When a story piques the interest of Tribune editors, it echoes through every medium, giving the company extraordinary influence in setting the local agenda. For the Justice Derailed series, an ongoing investigation of abuses in the criminal justice system including corruption in capital punishment cases, Tribune has generously backed a team of star journalists and published nine separate multipart series since 1999. “They offered us everything we needed,” said Maurice Possley, one of the lead reporters when we spoke. “Time, space, and resources to pursue the investigation. They got us a Lexis-Nexis subscription for the legal research. They didn’t demand the story right away. They let us do the reporting, develop it. They gave us full support.”
Tribune promoted the series by placing the authors on its radio, television, and Internet outlets. Steve Mills, another lead reporter, explained to me: “I couldn’t ask for any more support from the Tribune. We did a ton of local media after the report came out. We did CLTV and WGN, and that helped it pop to the national level.” Steve Edwards, from the public radio station WBEZ, said that “if the Tribune decides something was a major story and runs front-page coverage and repeated editorials on it, you would hear that story topping many local newscasts, you would hear other reporters doing more coverage of that issue. You would hear more roundtable discussions of that most likely on WBEZ and WTTW [the public television station]. You would hear more coverage of it on WGN radio and WGN-TV and on CLTV. There’s no question there would be a ripple effect. They have put the death penalty front and center on the agenda, and on that issue they’ve been huge.”
Not only has the Justice Derailed project served the city’s public interest; it has also helped save the lives of innocent people that the state of Illinois had sentenced to death. The Republican George Ryan, an advocate of capital punishment who was the governor when the Tribune initiated its series, publicly acknowledged that the paper’s reporting established a compelling case for exonerating wrongfully convicted inmates, pardoning others, and commuting the death sentences of all 156 people that Illinois had condemned to die—an act Ryan committed in his last days in office. “The Tribune series left me reeling,” Ryan explained. “Half of the nearly three hundred capital cases in Illinois had been reversed for a new trial or re-sentencing. Over half! … After seeing, again and again, how close we came to the ultimate nightmare, I did the only thing I could do. Thirteen times we almost strapped innocent men to a gurney, wheeled them to the state’s death chamber and injected fatal doses of poison in their veins. I knew I had to act … until I can be sure that everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty, until I can be sure with moral certainty that no innocent man or woman is facing a lethal injection, no one will meet that fate.”13
Ryan’s decision helped trigger a national political movement that compelled other governors and state legislatures to begin debating their own moratoria on capital punishment. The Tribune’s investigations sparked a small journalistic movement, too. “Newspapers in other states tried reproducing what we had done,” Possley said. “Our series provided a template.” Barry Scheck, a cofounder of the Innocence Project, considers the newspaper’s service invaluable. “The Tribune reporters played a major role in the death penalty debate,” he told me. “Their work made a difference immediately, and it will have a long-term impact, too.”
THE DOWNSIDE OF TRIBUNE’S POWER TO SET CHICAGO’S NEWS AGENDA and shape local political debates, however, is that both stories that it ignores and stories that its rivals uncover first are significantly less likely to seize the public’s attention. Steve Rhodes, who wrote a local media column for Chicago magazine before Tribune took over, said, “Tribune is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla, and that’s where most news derives from. The first thing that TV news directors do in the morning is read the Tribune. The radio is rip and read. The Sun-Times[Chicago’s second-largest daily newspaper] is always responding and reacting to the Tribune.” Bruce DuMont told me that Tribune uses its media holdings to advance its corporate goals and political projects, and to silence its opponents. “They have clout at the local political level, the state level, and the federal political level, because of the coverage that the Tribune Company and its various media entities include. It’s not only reporting, but also the editorial coverage. If you’re engaged in a project that is not favorable to the Tribune Company, you could end up by not having any media coverage, or bad media coverage. It makes it very difficult to compete.” Even Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, who has enjoyed nearly unchecked personal power in the city for almost two decades, acknowledges the influence of Tribune—particularly when his favorite local sports team, the Chicago White Sox, wins the World Series but gets little attention. “How can you compete with Tribune?” he asked in the fall of 2005. “I mean, give me a break. They own the Cubs, they own WGN Radio [and] TV and CLTV Come on. You think you are going to get any publicity for the White Sox? You can’t. Let’s be realistic.”14
What Daley observed in sports and culture coverage is even more true for hard news. Take the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation, a $1.5-billion, ten-year project announced in 2000 that involved demolishing roughly eighteen thousand units of public housing around the city, developing or rehabilitating thousands of others, and moving thousands of families into the private market. According to the city, “Under the CHA Plan for Transformation, all 25,000 leaseholders and their families are asked to relocate at least once—either to a temporary home or to a new or rehabbed permanent home.”15 This was a massive and controversial project, the largest urban-planning initiative for Chicago since the Urban Renewal programs of the 1950s, and it was led by an agency so inept that the federal government put it in receivership during the 1990s. The plan would affect a broad swath of the city, from the places that would gain or lose public housing complexes to the areas that would take in or refuse former CHA residents. In the process, the CHA plan would stir up the most sensitive and difficult urban issues: race, class, crime, discrimination, segregation, government power, and the rights of the poor. Yet local and federal agencies developed and implemented the plan without significant public input, not even from public housing residents.
Immediately, concerned citizens and civic groups began asking important questions. Why had there been so little public participation in the planning stages? Would the city government ensure that there were enough temporary and permanent units to house the relocated people? Would displaced residents have the right to return to their old neighborhoods, several of which were already gentrifying? What would happen to residents’ long-standing communities and social networks? What kinds of special services would be available to them? How would the city of Chicago track the relocated people and measure the program’s success? These questions were ripe for investigation, yet the Tribune made little effort to answer them. The newspaper lists almost fifty journalistic projects on its “special reports” Web site, yet not one concerns public housing.
Jamie Kalven, a local author and community organizer who spent years working in and writing about one of the largest CHA complexes, began our conversation about public housing by calling attention to the glaring inconsistencies between the Tribune’s intensive coverage of death penalty cases and its routine neglect of the city’s African American neighborhoods, where chronically unemployed men are likely to be unfairly caught up in the dragnet and wrongfully accused. “The Tribune’s big series is great,” Kalven told me. “But it can hardly compensate for its failure to do daily coverage of the ways that the city and local police are unfairly criminalizing black people and the poor. This is Chicago—the city where Amnesty International filed a report about human rights abuses by local authorities. Where is the regular beat on police violence, the devastating drug war, or corruption in the courts? What about coverage of segregation? Or poverty? You can’t make up for that with a special report.”
The CHA plan, Kalven argued, is far more important than the Tribune has acknowledged. “Chicago is indeed being transformed,” he insisted. “Entire communities have been obliterated. Places have been erased. This restructuring of the city can only be compared to the period after the Great Fire of 1871. It represents a failure of various institutions. But above all it’s a failure of journalism. The city’s dominant journalistic institution, the Chicago Tribune, has provided at best intermittent coverage, nothing sustained. This has, in turn, tended to shape coverage by others. I have little doubt that had the Tribune inquired deeply and on a sustained basis into the dismantling of public housing, it would have created the occasion and the space for other media to follow its lead.”
IN 1975 THE FCC PASSED THE NEWSPAPER-BROADCAST CROSS-OWNERSHIP ban to help ensure that citizens have access to a wide range of sources and perspectives, and that a leading local media company cannot decide which issues or positions get a public hearing and which do not. If one media company (or “voice”) dominates the production and distribution of local information in a market, regulators reasoned, that organization could have an unhealthy influence on its political, cultural, and economic life. “The reasons for these rules are simple,” explained former U.S. senator Ernest Hollings, a Democrat from South Carolina who said he owed his political career to laws that prevented a local media giant that opposed his candidacy from monopolizing the market and using the position to crush his first campaign. “Diversity in ownership promotes competition. Diversity in ownership creates opportunities for smaller companies, and local businessmen and women. Diversity in ownership allows creative programming and controversial points of view to find an outlet. Diversity in ownership promotes choices for advertisers. And diversity in ownership preserves localism—so individuals in towns across America are afforded access to at least several sources for their local news and information.”16 If there is a public benefit to cross-ownership, Hollings argued, neither media companies nor the FCC have identified it.
In the 1970s broadcast television stations and newspapers were the most popular sources of local news. They still are. Despite the many new sources of information available online or on cable, consumer studies, including those done for the FCC, consistently show that local TV and newspapers are where most people get their news.17 According to Gene Kimmelman, director of the nonpartisan public-interest group the Consumers Union (which publishes Consumer Reports), audience research by his organization showed that “80 percent of consumers say their major source is local broadcast networks and their newspaper.”
It’s the journalism, not the newsprint, that makes newspapers necessary for self-governance. While our democratic culture could survive the loss of the physical newspaper, it would be endangered without the kinds of reporting that newspapers provide. Newspapers publish exponentially more news and information than TV or radio newscasts, providing greater quantity, diversity, and depth of coverage, with more human resources for proactive investigative reporting (such as the Tribune’s death penalty project) and a broad range of local beats. A large metropolitan daily will often run between 80,000 and 100,000 words per issue, whereas a typical thirty-minute local television news broadcast contains between 3,000 and 3,600 words.
If, however, a newspaper company also owns television and radio stations, it can easily use its stronghold on local journalism to promote its own vested corporate interests rather than acting like a news organization, particularly the kind that covers the dangerous consequences of vested interests dictating the news. Consider Milwaukee, where Journal Communications controls the Milwaukee journal Sentinel, WTMJ-TV, WTMJ-AM, and WKTI-FM, all leading outlets. In 1994 and 1995 the city debated whether to support public funding for a new stadium to prevent the Brewers, the local baseball team whose games were broadcast by WTMJ-AM, from leaving town. “In late 1994,” reported the Consumers Union, “the CEO of the Journal Group, Robert Kahlor, became head of the Milwaukee committee championing public financing for the stadium, and even registered as chief lobbyist.” Did the company’s interests affect its coverage? According to Dave Beckman, a media scholar and columnist for a local alternative weekly, “The Journal Company’s newspaper, TV news shows and news talk radio station all marched lock-step supporting the public financing position,” with the journal Sentinel rallying support for the stadium through its sports pages, news sections, and editorials. The proposal, which after two setbacks in the Wisconsin State Senate ultimately passed by one vote, divided the region. But “the citizens of Milwaukee, despite the contentious nature of the issue, did not have antagonistic voices in the media to rely on.”18
To prevent such situations, the FCC recommended against eliminating the restriction on cross-ownership in its 2000 biennial review of ownership rules, stating that “the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule should, as a general matter, be retained because it continues to serve the public interest by furthering the important public policy goal of viewpoint diversity.” The commission recognized the business efficiencies achieved by cross-ownership but explained that “this result did not necessarily advance the Commission’s goal of viewpoint diversity because, without a diversity of ownership or editors, there would be no real diversity of viewpoints.”19 The commission’s recommendation was a blow to the Tribune Company, but it hardly took the FCC’s decision as final. Instead, Tribune doubled its spending for lobbyists between 2000 and 2003, gambling that it could use other means to persuade regulators to terminate the ban.20
The stakes were high for Tribune, which in 2004 owned fourteen newspapers and had an overall daily circulation of 3.6 million, placing it behind only the better-known chains, Gannett and what was then Knight Ridder, in market penetration. (In 2006 Tribune became the nation’s second-largest newspaper chain.) Tribune has more outlets in major cities than its competitors, though, and its 2004 revenues, $6.6 billion, were second in the industry to Gannett, which then owned ninety-nine dailies in forty-one states, twenty-one television stations, one hundred Web sites, and dozens of media outlets overseas. Tribune is also the nation’s fourth-largest owner of local television outlets, with twenty-six TV stations, including nine in the top ten and eighteen in the top thirty markets. It has extensive investments in emerging TV networks, including one-quarter of the WB and about one-third of the Food Network, and it develops and distributes first-run TV programming through Tribune Entertainment. Tribune was an early investor in AOL and other Internet ventures, and it has ownership stakes in a fleet of Web sites, including BlackVoices.com, and major classified services such as CareerBuilder.com, Topix.net, Cars.com, and Apartments.com. Combining local television, newspapers, and Internet properties is the key to its business model.
TRIBUNE AIMS TO MAKE EACH OF ITS MEDIA HOLDINGS A NODE IN ITS “synergistic” network of news, information, and entertainment makers, and it has developed a “convergence” production and distribution process that achieves an economy of scale by breaking down distinctions between print, broadcast, and Internet platforms. The conglomerate has built sophisticated technological systems for centralizing its journalistic, entertainment, and marketing resources, gaining efficiencies that allow it to keep staff levels lower and profit margins high despite falling newspaper circulation. In the course of one assignment, for example, Tribune reporters will often write a newspaper article, develop special Web content, and appear on a Tribune television or radio station, projecting the story to multiple audiences while promoting the brand. By the early 1990s the former Tribune editor James Squires realized that “journalism, particularly newspaper journalism, has no real place in the company’s future. No one ever uses the word. The company bills itself as an ‘information and entertainment’ conglomerate and hopes that newspapers will become a smaller factor in its total business.” Most tellingly, Tribune managers redefined their product by abandoning their rhetorical commitment to newspaper journalism and the values it represents. In 1998, when Howard Tyner was editor of the Tribune, he told the American Journalism Review, “I am not the editor of a newspaper. I am the manager of a content company.”21
I learned about the transformation from journalism to content—a term that carries none of the professional status or craft standards associated with journalism—in the late 1990s, when I visited the Tribune’s remodeled newsroom and interviewed staff reporters, and again in 2001, when I spent a week at the Tampa News Center in Florida run by another corporation, Media General, a southeastern media company that owns and operates the city’s leading television station, newspaper, and Internet sites from an integrated Superdesk.22 The Tampa Tribune, with a weekday circulation above two hundred thousand, and WFLA-TV, the local NBC affiliate, are considerably smaller than the Tribune Company’s outlets in Chicago. But Media General’s News Center is one of the most technologically advanced and managerially innovative convergence complexes in the world, and media executives regularly visit the site to observe what might happen to local journalism if the cross-ownership ban is repealed.
Both Media General and Tribune have separate editorial staffs responsible for the different platforms they operate, as well as multimedia managers responsible for coordinating work and building relationships between the news teams. Although not all stories produced at the News Center are made to cross platforms, editors and reporters try to maximize newsroom productivity by remaining vigilant for convergence possibilities. Every day the editors from the print, Internet, and broadcast divisions have a fifteen-minute “convergence meeting” to discuss shared projects and evaluate the previous day’s work; the company developed the digital News Bank system so that the staff for different media can easily access the news budget (the list of stories slated for the paper) and completed stories before they are published; and every month the multimedia manager compiles a report that lists successful convergence projects and praises staff for participating. “We produced nearly 200 overt acts of convergence in February at the News Center,” one internal report reads. For example, “In addition to writing daily stories for the Tribune, Winter Olympics reporter Bill Ward appeared nightly on WFLA and wrote regularly and compiled video reports for TBO.com [Tampa Bay Online]. Tribune pushes readers to TBO to view postcards from Ward. His Tribune notebook ran daily during the Olympics.”
These kinds of projects demand new skills, more time, and additional work for everyone involved. According to the managing editor, who oversees the daily editorial meetings and is most responsible for daily production of the paper, “my own job used to be a lot easier, just get out the paper. Now the matrix is a lot more complicated.” A sports editor explained that convergence affects the way he makes story assignments and the techniques reporters use to produce stories. “When you cover something now, the first thing you do is write a small TBO.com piece, then you do a TV spot, and then, finally you do a [Tampa] Tribune story. You have to do something for each medium—but also, by the time you get to the paper, you have to do something different—figure out what you can add with a newspaper story. So you have to come up with something that works with print. We [also] have to think about multimedia when we make our assignments. Before we used to just send the best writer, but now we have to think about who can do multimedia. If we have one guy going to the Olympics, we need someone who can do it all,” by which he meant doing TV. As print reporters in convergence companies are learning, being telegenic is becoming a necessary journalistic skill.
“Journalists’ jobs have definitely changed,” Media General’s Tampa human resource director told me. “These are not regular newsroom jobs. Reporters are writing differently if they’re asked to broadcast. Photographers are also doing more. Not only are they going on more assignments, but they’re also bringing multiple cameras. Broadcast guys, some with no still background, are now stretching their skills. They now have multiple jobs rather than one, so time management and multitasking are the biggest challenges for them. Our main convergence people are really maxed. I can’t imagine asking them to do more.”23
No one questions that convergence reduces the amount of time newspaper reporters have to conduct interviews, go out in the field, research, and write. While I was in the Media General newsroom I shadowed print-based reporters who were pulled away from their desks to do short television spots or longer stories for television. The Tampa Tribune has a much larger business reporting staff than the sister TV station, WFLA, so business reporters regularly write one- or two-minute updates for television while sitting at their desks, then go downstairs to put on makeup and shoot several takes before a mobile television camera unit. On one day I observed that
after writing her report, Mary comes down to the second-floor studio around 3:45. She has to wait for Graham, the convergence manager, to get ready, and she spends a lot of time standing around chatting. By 4:10 they are ready to shoot. Graham runs the teleprompter while Mary does her one-minute report. Afterward they go to the control room and watch the tape. Graham calls Mary the “one-take wonder” because usually she can get the take right on the first try. But this time there is a problem with the background noise in the newsroom, and they have to shoot it again. Mary returns, waits a few minutes for everyone to get set, and then goes again. This time it works, but she still has to wait for everyone to listen to the tape and watch the video. At 4:20 she returns upstairs to take off her makeup and resume her reporting.
While she was waiting for Graham to prepare the shoot, I asked Mary how she felt about the television work. “Well,” she began, “the good part is that it’s fun, it’s different, it’s difficult, and it’s interesting for me. It’s a break from my regular routine. But a few weeks ago I did TV every day for two weeks. And every day—when you spend forty minutes writing the script, twenty minutes putting on makeup, twenty to thirty minutes taping, and then taking the makeup off—it takes like two hours to do the job. That’s two hours—a quarter of my day—and that doesn’t help my reporting. At the end of two weeks I was going crazy.” Lisa, a Tribune religion reporter and a convergence veteran who does more extensive television work, was most disturbed by the non-journalistic, body labor that television demands. “The main thing you spend time on with TV is putting together the way you look. I have to do my hair, and then redo it throughout the day because you know it’s not going to hold when you’re running around reporting the way we do for print. And I have to bring the right outfits, the right jewelry. And dealing with all this superficial TV stuff just takes a lot of time, and it gets you thinking about other things.”
Managers and editors recognize that convergence journalism inevitably leaves journalists less time to report, reflect, and produce stories.24 According to a top editor in Tampa, with the new arrangements “there’s definitely think time lost, and reporting time.” This is precisely what Lisa, in Tampa, and several Chicago Tribune reporters told me. Newspaper journalists are specifically concerned about new constraints on their work, and they fear that the norms of television news production will take over print as the media production process converges. Lisa explained: “In print I have thirty-five inches—not a huge amount of space, but not short either. When I put on my TV hat I think about what works here—the emotion, the visuals, the sound. But thank God I can then do my print job, because I can’t say what I want to say in a one-minute, thirty-second TV segment.” The most ardent critics in the newsroom worry not only about lost reporting time but also about how the partnership allows the forms of television news—such as the short report, soft features, and heightened attention to brand-name, celebrity journalists—to penetrate the print medium and facilitate what they disparagingly call “USA Today-style papers.”25
At the Chicago Tribune, journalists learned about the company’s emerging interest in television when managers decided to build a television news studio in the heart of the newspaper editorial space, directly outside the main editor’s door. The studio, designed for the convenience of print reporters contributing TV spots, and also so that viewers would see that the station delivered up-to-the-minute news from Tribune journalists, both literally and symbolically centralized the role of television production in the newspaper. The Tampa News Center, which was specially designed to facilitate convergence, is organized around an open “Superdesk” staffed by print, Internet, and television editors. Television producers, along with a bank of fifteen television sets in a semicircle around the desk, dominate the space. Moving print reporters into the TV studio may well improve the overall quality of local newscasts, and in fact Big Media companies make considerable use of one study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism reporting that “stations with cross-ownership—in which the parent company also owns a newspaper in the same market—tended to produce higher quality newscasts.”26 Yet the study did not examine what happens to the quality of newspaper articles under the same conditions, and it’s hard to observe either Tribune or Media General without concluding that, where cross-ownership is permitted, the future of newspapers is not only on the Internet but also in television.
IN RECENT YEARS A NUMBER OF WELL-KNOWN NEWSPAPER PUBLISHERS have begun to warn the public about these trends. By the 1990s prominent editors and reporters who had so far refrained from addressing how bottom-line pressures had undermined journalistic values began publishing tell-all commercial nonfiction books describing how accountants, marketers, and investment bankers had stormed the newsroom and hijacked its mission. The result was a veritable genre of its own: the news media disaster story. Ironically, though, the damning reports about the downfall of local journalism did not appear in the newspapers that their authors edited, leaving the millions of readers they reached on a daily basis without “news about the news”—except in their bookstores and libraries.
After retiring from an eight-year stint as editor of the Chicago Tribune, James Squires published Read All About It! The Corporate Takeover of America’s Newspapers, in which he complains that “what the news media do for a living today is no longer journalism at all,” and that “there no longer is even the illusion that public service is the first goal of the institution.” In The News about the News: American Journalism in Peril, the Washington Post editors Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert Kaiser single out Tribune, which “wants a 30 percent margin,” as a company whose commitment to “protecting such high profits can easily undermine the notion that journalism is a public service.” But they are equally critical of other chain newspapers that “now belong to giant, publicly owned corporations far removed from the communities they serve. They face unrelenting quarterly profit pressures from Wall Street now typical of American capitalism” and are managed by owners who “see newsrooms as money-eating cost items.”27
Richard McCord, whose book The Chain Gang: One Newspaper Versus the Gannett Empire recounts the story of how Gannett, which owns USA Today and nearly one hundred daily newspapers, crippled competitors and shored up monopolies in small and midsize cities across the nation, begins with a publisher complaining that “They [Gannett’s managers] are the devil incarnate!”—and proceeds to show why.28Under the direction of Al Neuharth, who was CEO from 1973 to 1986, and John Curley, who replaced him, Gannett developed a reputation for ruthless business practices designed to establish local monopolies: jack up advertising rates; downsize the editorial staff (and, where possible, break up the union); shrink the newsroom; then watch the profit margins soar. Gannett’s business strategy generated extraordinary profit margins, but its ruthless cost cutting at the expense of local journalism earned it the contempt of reporters and editors everywhere, including at other chains.
In 1974, for example, Gannett bought both daily papers in Oregon’s capital, Salem, the Oregon Statesman and Capital Journal, and merged them into one financial unit. Salem residents worried that Gannett would soon merge the newspapers altogether (it did, in 1980), leaving the city with only one voice. But advertisers did not have to wait this long for monopoly pricing. By 1975 Gannett had raised the rates 43 percent, and local retailers clamored for a new outlet. Encouraged by the opportunity, a Portland company called Community Publications created a new free weekly, the Community Press, in March 1976, and it did well enough to add a weekend edition by year’s end. Marketplace competition was not part of Gannett’s original plan, however, so the chain arranged with a regional company to print its papers for 10 percent below the market rate and transferred N. S. “Buddy” Hayden to serve as publisher and implement “Operation Demolition,” which he described as a major initiative “to fatally cripple the Community Press.” How did Gannett do it? According to legal files released to McCord, it gave its local staff a list of advertisers to lure away from the Community Press, providing cash rewards for each client successfully won over. One memo, from Gannett’s advertising executive Wayne Vann, explains: “When an advertiser is demolished from the Community Press, you receive a code C for credit of $10.00 per account for each week the account stays demolished. (But the $10 credit is lost for each week the ad goes back into the CP—that is, it is taken away.) The whole idea of the program is to reduce or eliminate each of the advertisers on your base list, while at the same time you keep additional advertisers from advertising in the Community Press” McCord found that Gannett “was providing free advertising to keep business out of the weekly”—including more than six thousand dollars’ worth to a supermarket on condition that it end its relationship with Community Press.29
There is nothing unusual about competing for clients, but Community Publications considered Gannett’s behavior predatory and anticompetitive, in the legal sense, and after closing the Community Press in 1978 it sued the chain for $12 to $18 million in antitrust violations. The two companies settled the case privately just one week before it was scheduled to go to trial. “To avoid exposure, Gannett bought its way out,” McCord complains in his book. Gannett announced that the settlement payout “would have ‘no material financial impact’ on the company,” and so “the nation’s richest newspaper company could simply weasel out of trouble by writing a check.”30 Emboldened by the experience, Gannett steamrolled over competitors in other American cities in similar fashion. McCord highlights cases in New Mexico and Wisconsin where he had helped private owners win hard-fought legal and journalistic victories to prevent Gannett from taking over their markets and replacing quality local newspapers with cookie-cutter dailies. But these are exceptional stories in recent urban history, and the proof of Gannett’s domination may well be visible on a newspaper box near you.
Gannett’s business practices are infamous in the newspaper industry, but the chain’s public reputation comes from its generic formula for mass-producing “reader-friendly” local papers: pare down news space on the page (the news hole) and cram with ads; replace hard news with wire copy and superficial local reports, how-to stories, quality-of-life and entertainment features, question-and-answer columns, and lots of “happy news.” According to the company, local information is the key to market success. But the newspaper scholar Aurora Wallace argues that the industry Gannett leads “champions the local in the abstract as it commits fewer and fewer resources to its service.” For example, rather than build up the editorial staff for professional local reporting, Gannett pushes populist, “civic journalism” projects, encouraging residents to write folksy tales about their community’s positive features. “We’re all reporters, because each of us tells stories,” says the introductory film at its Newseum complex in Virginia. So who, after all, needs to pay trained journalists to do any deep digging?31
It’s indisputable that Neuharth invented a recipe for increasing newspaper profit margins, which soared from below 10 percent when the papers were owned by families and small business to nearly 40 percent during prosperous periods of Gannett management. But the business model has degraded reporting at some of the best local dailies in America, including the Des Moines Register, the Asbury Park Press, and the Louisville Courier-Journal These publications had earned their professional reputations through decades of aggressive, hard-hitting journalism focused on their hometowns. Once Gannett took over, managers from the McLean, Virginia, headquarters descended to hollow them out, stuffing the pages with gimmicky projects designed to create the impression of local engagement. “The results,” wrote the columnist and former Des Moines Register editor Geneva Overholser, “are brittle and lifeless … Our newspapers do not read as if they are written and edited by people who feel the city’s pulse, who’ve long walked its streets, who love its quirks, know its history, and care deeply about its future—because, by and large, they are not”32
GANNETT HAS BEEN SPEARHEADING BIG MEDIA’S TAKEOVER OF LOCAL newspapers for decades, but in the late 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century it was Hollinger International, directed by the media mogul and British Lord Conrad Black and President and Chief Operating Officer David Radler, that escalated corporate aggression against dailies and their readers into an outright war on journalism—especially at its main U.S. publication, the Chicago Sun-Times.
Black, who was born into a wealthy family and became enamored of William Randolph Hearst during childhood, began his career in publishing by purchasing the Sherbrooke Record, an English-language daily in Quebec, in the late 1960s. “We like to joke that Sherbrooke is where Conrad Black learned to rape and kill,” said one of the paper’s veteran employees in the documentary Citizen Black. “This is the place he learned his operating methods.” In 1971 he and Radler, his business partner, started to acquire additional papers in their native Canada through a holding company called Sterling Newspapers, and in the late 1970s they acquired Hollinger International. Soon Hollinger had become the nation’s leading owner of daily papers, and it reached overseas to purchase major international publications such as London’s Daily Telegraph, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Jerusalem Post. 33 When speaking before a Canadian government panel assembled to address mounting fears of media consolidation in the 1980s, Radler famously quipped that his greatest contribution to journalism was “the three-man newsroom—and two of them sell ads.”
In 1994 Hollinger made its most significant U.S. acquisition, purchasing the Sun-Times from an investment group led by Adler &c Shaykin. The second paper in the Second City—and a tabloid at that—the Sun-Times was still one of the top ten U.S. dailies, though its reputation for gritty city news reporting and aggressive investigations that it had earned under its original owners, Chicago’s Marshall Field family, had been fading since they sold the paper to Rupert Murdoch in 1984. (Murdoch flipped it two years later after buying a local TV station and coming up against the cross-ownership ban.) Black and Radler made Chicago Hollinger’s corporate headquarters, acquiring a fleet of small community publishers in the metropolitan area, including Pioneer Press Newspapers, Star Newspapers, Suburban Chicago Newspapers, and the Daily Southtown, so that they could consolidate operations and offer special advertising packages to clients.
Once their mini-empire was in place, the duo got down to business, flushing out nonunionized journalists, refusing to replace departing staff even when top reporters on key beats left, and eventually instituting a hiring freeze that slowly bled the paper dry. One veteran told me that when he first came to the Sun-Times there were no empty desks in the newsroom, so he had to type out his stories when other reporters were out of the office. After a few years under Hollinger management there were empty desks everywhere. The editors and reporters worked fanatically to put out a serious daily; yet without an adequate supply of journalists it was hard to regularly produce in-depth reports on Chicago’s key institutions. Morale plummeted, as did the quality of the paper.
An overworked staff of city reporters, sports writers, and sharp columnists kept the Sun-Times afloat, while the paper continued to receive attention for its celebrity writers, including Robert Novak, Roger Ebert, Rick Telander, and Richard Roeper. Despite the pressures that made labor-intensive reporting difficult, the Sun-Times managed to publish an occasional investigative piece, most notably a three-part series in 2004 called “Clout on Wheels: The Scandal of Chicago’s Hired Truck Program,” in which Tim Novak and Steve Warmbir revealed that Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration “spen[t] $40 million a year hiring private trucks that perform [ed] little or no work in a program corrupted by mob influence and patronage.” The series, which provided the names and locations of the firms and owners in on the scheme, sent shock waves through Chicago and embarrassed Daley, who prided himself on reinventing city government so that it ran like an efficient business. In fact, the report uncovered the kinds of corruption that Chicagoans expected from the first Mayor Daley, not his son.34
Hard-hitting investigations such as “Clout on Wheels” were once a standard feature of the Sun-Times, and veterans there speak proudly about their history of digging up important local stories that the Tribune missed. When I did fieldwork in the newsroom during 2002, however, the journalists universally complained that all but two or three of them were too busy with daily assignments to conduct long-term projects.
Everyone at the Sun-Times knew that Black and Radler considered the paper a cash cow, but the extent to which they milked it did not become clear until August 31,2004, when a special committee of Hollinger’s own board of directors released a 513-page report accusing the duo of looting some $400 million from the company—about 95 percent of its profits from 1997 to 2003. The committee, which was led by the special counsel and former SEC chairman Richard Breeden but did not include the celebrity conservatives Black had handpicked for his informal advisory board (including Richard Perle, Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher, and George Will), found evidence of “an overwhelming record of abuse, overreaching, and violations of fiduciary duties by Black and Radler, the two controlling shareholders,” and accused them of establishing a “corporate kleptocracy … in which ethical corruption was a defining characteristic of the leadership team.” The report alleged that in addition to “nearly $200 million in excessive and unjustifiable management fees,” Black and Radler took some $15 million in corporate cash without notifying the board; paid roughly $90 million to themselves and their cronies for fraudulent noncompete agreements; spent $61.3 million on private jets that were often used “for their own prestige, comfort, and convenience”; offered Black’s wife $1.1 million annually for a “no-show job”; and made major charitable contributions with Hollinger funds that resulted in named honors—the “Black Family Foundation Wing” at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and the “Radler Business Wing” at Queens University—for the executives.35
The report in Kingston, Ontario, served as the basis for shareholder suits, such as a $540-million case against Black, Radler, and other members of their leadership team, and another against board members that was settled out of court for $50 million in May 2005. It also helped spur a grand jury to pursue criminal investigations of Black and Radler, with Radler ultimately entering a plea-bargain agreement to pay a $250,000 fine and serve a twenty-nine-month prison sentence for mail fraud in exchange for cooperation in the ongoing probes of Black by federal prosecutors and the SEC. When the investigation began, Black issued a public statement complaining that, “like all fads, corporate governance has its zealots, and its tendency to excess.” He was equally defiant when it ended and criminal charges were looming, initially refusing to relinquish control of his media properties, then plotting to pin responsibility for corporate malfeasance on Radler, and finally threatening that the government would ultimately have to compensate him for its own wrongdoings. As his attorney, Greg Craig, told the Wall Street Journal, “There was no fraud, and the federal government will soon be paying it all back, with interest.”36
Craig’s remark made little impact on Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. Attorney prosecuting Black’s case. On November 17, 2005, the grand jury indicted Black on eight counts of mail and wire fraud, among other charges, the maximum penalty for which is forty years in prison and a $2-million fine. “What has gone on here is the grossest abuse by directors and insiders,” Fitzgerald announced. “The indictment charges that insiders at Hollinger—all the way to the top of the corporate ladder—whose job it was to safeguard the shareholders, made it their job to steal and conceal.” The SEC also brought civil charges against Black for the same acts, and prosecutors sought additional penalties for Hollinger executives.
Black may go to prison if he is convicted of the criminal charges, but that is unlikely. Hollinger investors may recoup some of the losses they suffered at his hands, but not all. There may be more lawsuits, criminal investigations, and special inquiries. And the Sun-Times, which remains a Hollinger paper (though perhaps not for much longer), may find its way into better hands. But the citizens of Chicago cannot demand compensation for the damage Hollinger did to one of their leading news organizations, and they have no way to measure the costs Hollinger inflicted on their democratic culture. Like residents of so many other American cities, they can only imagine how many stories—about corporate fraud, government corruption, or any number of social and economic trends that affect their everyday lives—went unreported while media moguls looted their hometown.
HOLLINGER IS A SPECTACULAR AND EXTREME EXAMPLE OF WHY TREATING the news primarily as a source of revenue—and secondarily, at best, as a source of reporting—can have disastrous consequences; and there’s nothing to suggest that Black’s peers in the newspaper business have been similarly corrupt. Yet even when management acts ethically, the standard economic pressures that push newspapers to cut back on journalism routinely hurt cities, depriving residents of the chance to learn vital information about the institutions that help determine their fate.
Consider just a few of the issues that local papers with downsized editorial staffs missed in recent years. Today we know about Enron, but not because of the Houston Chronicle’s investigative journalism or even its regular business coverage. Until national publications exposed the crooked company’s extraordinary malfeasance, the Chronicle never scrutinized the source of its wealth. Although the Fortune magazine writer Bethany McLean, working off a tip from a skeptical hedge fund manager named James Chanos, raised questions about Enron’s financial reporting and stock valuation in a March 2001 feature story, “Is Enron Overpriced?” the Chronicle did not immediately follow up. In the Columbia Journalism Review, Scott Sherman reported that “on August 19, 2001, in response to [CEO Jeffrey] Skilling’s resignation and a concurrent fall in the stock price, the Houston Chronicle business columnist Jim Barlow announced: ‘It’s still a company with innovative people who have shown they can turn ideas into profitable businesses. That’s why the current problems will blow over.’”37 Not until October 31,2001, the day after federal regulators upgraded their inquiry into Enron’s financial transactions, did the Chronicle begin to change its tune.
In San Francisco the independent weekly Bay Guardian used to run an annual feature on the top stories that the city’s major papers—the Chronicle (which is owned by the Hearst Corporation) and Examiner (which used to be controlled by Hearst but is now a free tabloid owned by the Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz)—failed to cover. Inspired by Project Censored, the media research group at Sonoma State University that publishes yearly lists of twenty-five domestic and international stories that didn’t make the mainstream news, the Bay Guardian asked journalists and community leaders to identify unreported local issues. In 1999, for example, one of the weekly’s panel of experts complained that the big papers had inadequately covered the sweeping deregulation of the energy industry, failing to explain a bill that helped utilities and large users but harmed residential consumers and small businesses. Two years later this issue would return with a vengeance, when an unprecedented series of rolling blackouts made residents of the Golden State wonder why they hadn’t been warned that this might happen. The Bay Guardian also criticized the dailies for doing little reporting on the labor practices of local companies, pointing out that the San Francisco-based Gap, which leading international organizations had condemned for using child workers, deserved more serious scrutiny at home. Like Enron in Houston or WorldCom in Clinton, Mississippi, the story on San Francisco’s corporate behemoth made national headlines before it was featured in the local news.
Corporate malfeasance usually begins at home, and in the 1990s American dailies had a heaping grab bag of stories waiting for them just outside the newsroom. In how many towns did Wal-Mart force employees to work overtime without pay or lock in the night staff? And how many years did it take for these practices to make the news before they were uncovered by writers for national magazines? The rise of national chain news production also helped redefine the measures that journalists use to assess the economy. Business reporters who lacked time, resources, and editorial directives to cover local companies, workers, and labor market conditions ramped up their quick and easy coverage of stock values while neglecting to examine why the average American was working more hours, taking home comparable pay, and bearing the burden of more personal debt than he or she did in 1970. When the boom cycle of the 1990s came to an end and economists warned that the bubble was bursting, most reporters failed to look at corporate chicanery in their own backyards.
Local news organizations have not adequately explained who pays the price when large corporations threaten to leave their hometowns, taking hundreds or thousands of jobs with them unless the government doles out generous subsidies and tax breaks. Nor have they reported the public risks when state agencies outsource important services, including educating children and providing health care to the elderly and poor, to private firms who offer to do it for less. These kinds of stories should be the journalistic core of local newspapers. But when the editorial staff is small, or estranged from hometown institutions, or too busy to investigate, complicated issues and hidden corporate or political practices don’t make it into print until the damage has been done.
ACCORDING TO THE AMERICAN JOURNALISM REVIEW, WHICH IN THE late 1990s initiated an investigative series on the state of American newspapers, consolidation and editorial downsizing in the industry have resulted in a dramatic loss of state-level political reporting at the very moment when it is most necessary. Since the Reagan presidency, a series of New Federalist social policies have delegated more power from Washington to the states, while the declining political power of city governments—whose base of affluent residents fled to the suburbs and formed a new suburban power bloc—has made statehouses the key sites of local decision making, even in states such as New York, California, and Illinois. The kinds of crucial decisions that are in the hands of state government include whether and how to use capital punishment, mandatory minimum sentencing, and juvenile justice systems; how to regulate the energy and utility sectors; how to allocate public education spending; and how and where to use funds from the Department of Homeland Security. With rare exceptions, stories about state-level politics are the exclusive province of local news organizations—or, as is increasingly the case, they are not covered at all. As Charles Layton and Mary Walton reported, “A survey of capital press rooms shows that most have fewer reporters today than in the recent past … In capital press rooms around the country, there are more and more empty desks and silent phones. Bureaus are shrinking, reporters are younger and less experienced, stories get less space and poorer play, and all too frequently editors just don’t care.”38
The absence of political reporters is even more striking in small towns, where lesser-known chains such as Liberty Group Publishing and Community Newspaper Holdings acquired scores of community papers across the country, pared down the editorial staff, pumped up the pages with news from wire services, consolidated printing operations, even merged editions with other publications nearby. According to Aurora Wallace, “Community weeklies were once indispensable sources for coverage of local events which no other news outlets would cover: town council meetings, school board decisions, youth sports … and all the assorted activities of local citizens … The owners of such newspapers have historically been residents of the places where the newspapers were printed and had vested interests in the health of the communities where they operated.”39 Consolidation at this level of the market usually happens silently, however, because in small towns there is rarely anyone outside of the community paper who reports on local news.
Big-city political reporting has not been spared, either. In the late 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century, for example, San Francisco’s daily papers failed to report on an issue that directly affects much of the city’s population: a financial crisis generated by the clumsy, corrupt, and incompetent commercial development of the Presidio, a former army base that is now San Francisco’s “crown jewel” and was recently declared part of the National Park Service. The Presidio is home to many threatened plant species and is an ecological treasure on coastal land adjacent to the Golden Gate Bridge. In 1996 the U.S. Congress established the Presidio Trust, charging it with the novel task of making the park financially self-sufficient by 2013. Originally, the trust hoped to raise funds by refurbishing and renting out the eight hundred army buildings remaining on the premises as residential units, but it soon expanded its scope. In 1999 its board began negotiations to lease the park’s decrepit Letterman Hospital to the filmmaker George Lucas for $5.8 million annually (about 14 percent of the park’s yearly operating costs); Lucas has since built the Letterman Digital Arts Center on the grounds. Initially, local activists raised fears that a full-scale sell-off would soon turn the precious parkland into the city’s next Fisherman’s Wharf, complete with tourist hotels, cheesy amusement parks, and chain restaurants. A few city reporters pursued the story of preservationists and environmentalists battling the trust’s plans for growth. But none of the major local news organizations dug deeply into the issue.
A freelance journalist named Kerry Tremain began to uncover the story that they missed: In 1998 the trust hired the former air force pilot James Meadows as its executive director, but if the board asked for references, it must not have read them carefully. The highlights of Meadows’s job history include wildly overspeculating on real estate projects around Phoenix, Arizona, eventually bankrupting his corporation, Cardon Meadows, and leaving taxpayers the bill. While the company was failing, Meadows cut off payments to his suppliers, threatening never to pay them unless they continued working without immediate compensation. According to one local attorney representing a plumbing firm, “many small companies here lost everything” because of Cardon Meadows’s shady practices, and Meadows was named in thirty-five lawsuits against his organization. After another failed partnership, this one with Gordon Hall (who would later be convicted of illegally paying stock promoters associated with the mob to increase his company’s share values), Meadows himself filed personal bankruptcy. And in 1990 Meadows tried to start a home-building division at Castle & Cooke in Bakersfield, California, yet he left in 1994 when the company’s weak performance resulted in significant layoffs and neighborhood groups filed suit against the firm. One can only imagine how many realtors dreamed of spearheading development on the Presidio project. But, with no one looking closely and no watchdogs in the newsroom, Meadows’s record earned him the job.
It didn’t take long for Meadows to repeat his business history. Tremain, who began investigating the trust at his own expense after reading local news coverage and feeling dissatisfied with its reporting, wrote that in only a few years “Meadows has wreaked havoc with the trust’s finances and reputation. The agency’s building program is stalled, and its plans to achieve self-sufficiency are leaking badly … He is widely distrusted and has created an organization saddled with egregious cost-overruns, cover-ups, a disgruntled real estate community, and staff turmoil … The park’s future is already in financial peril.” How did he do it this time? Meadows hired an old friend, Bruce Anderson, who had worked with him in Denver, to run the trust’s facilities department, which employed over 300 of the trust’s 460 workers; Anderson’s wife ran the procurement department, which handled bids from the private contractors who competed for park projects. The work crews that the Andersons hired for renovations consistently billed twice as much as they initially estimated, with cost overruns reaching the millions. The trust failed to demolish the extant structures that it had to clear for Lucas to begin his project, so the expected revenues from the lucrative lease arrangement didn’t materialize. Meadows did make sure that the Officers’ Club was ready for a Russian art exhibition, even though the fast-paced project required so much overtime that the final bill, for $2 million, was almost four times the estimate. Tremain reported that the invitation-only opening party featured “Russian caviar, giant ice sculptures, champagne, and fine California wines, paid for with trust funds.” Indeed, Meadows indulged in the perks of his post, driving a BMW convertible, flying first-class, and living rent-free in a six-thousand-square-foot mansion overlooking the park—but only after the trust spent eighty thousand dollars to renovate it.
None of this was public knowledge before tiny San Francisco magazine published the results of Tremain’s six-month investigation, for which they paid him six thousand dollars. (“About the same amount I would have gotten if I had interviewed a celebrity chef instead of doing investigative work,” he told me.) Tremain’s reporting, which earned him a nomination for the National Magazine Award in the Public Interest category, made a major impact, ultimately prompting follow-up coverage from San Francisco’s large news organizations and pressuring the trust’s board to urge Meadows to resign and to replace him with a more qualified developer. We can only speculate how much damage to the trust’s finances could have been prevented if the local newspapers had looked more closely at the issue that was hidden before them in plain sight. For now, though, the park’s future remains uncertain, with Congress threatening to increase the scale of commercial development in the Presidio if the trust does not make progress toward its goal of self-sufficiency by 2013.
In the heyday of city newspapers one of San Francisco’s dailies might have hired Tremain to conduct investigations similar to the Presidio report full-time. But there is little support for an investigative reporting staff in contemporary papers, especially in cities where there is no serious local competition. Despite the success of his story, Tremain could not continue the Presidio project and regretted, he said, that [he] wasn’t able to adequately explore perhaps the bigger issue in any depth—the very uncomfortable trade-offs involved at the nexus of private and public interests that the park’s development raises.” San Francisco, Tremain admitted, actually gets significantly more journalistic attention than its neighbors in the region. “I’ll tell you a giant black hole of reporting,” he offered. “Oakland. Nobody is interested in Oakland. You have a local newspaper, the Tribune, that used to be the center of power in the city. The fact that it had the largest tower in Oakland meant something. Now they demand quick turnover and quick stories but don’t cover the city well. At the magazine level, Diablo and San Francisco are two big regional magazines. But I’ve never seen a story on Oakland in San Francisco, and you couldn’t sell an Oakland story to Diablo to save your life.”
With no market in Oakland, and the local issues involving San Francisco’s park system fading away, Tremain looked beyond the region and wrote about President Bush’s drive to privatize national parks. That wasn’t professionally viable, either. As Tremain put it, cities may pay a price for losing investigative reporters, but for journalists “doing investigative reporting freelance is an almost guaranteed way to go broke.”
THE TRIBUNE COMPANY INSISTS THAT LOCAL JOURNALISTS WILL CONtinue to disappear from the media landscape unless the FCC allows cross-ownership, helping newspaper companies convert to convergence and thereby make its business even more profitable. During the media policy debates of the past decade, Tribune lobbyists and executives threatened that the company could not afford strong editorial staffs if it was prohibited from combining a newspaper and television broadcast station to achieve an economy of scale in a single market. Yet residents of Los Angeles, New York, and Hartford, cities where Tribune had already established cross-ownership of a television station and newspaper, had cause to doubt the company’s commitment to maintaining robust journalism staffs under any conditions. They had experienced firsthand the reality that, contrary to its rhetoric, after acquiring new newspapers Tribune makes deep cuts to the editorial division, eliminates foreign and domestic bureaus, and replaces them with content from its hubs, the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.
Editors and reporters worry that the kind of investigative reporting and intensive local coverage that the company now supports in its top markets is threatened by the expansion of its business, and that, for instance, the Tribune and Times bureaus will not provide local perspectives on national and international issues that affect their readers. In Los Angeles, the Times’s highly regarded editor John Carroll resigned because Tribune—reeling from a judicial ruling that it was liable for paying the federal government roughly $1 billion in back taxes and interest owed by Times Mirror—imposed a series of sweeping layoffs, reducing the editorial staff from more than 1,140 to 940. Local civic leaders in Los Angeles are particularly anxious about the absence of a locally owned and operated newspaper whose management has a special commitment to the community. The Times continued winning Pulitzers once Tribune took over, but newsroom morale deflated when managers in Chicago hardly acknowledged its success.40
After the transition critics complained that the Times lost its connection to Los Angeles, where issues such as immigration and the international entertainment business could make the city an ideal laboratory for journalism that explores global issues in a local context, circulation at the Times plummeted at a rate more than twice the industry average, falling from over one million to 851,500 by March 2006, partly as a result of its editorial estrangement. The former Times book review editor Steve Wasserman wrote that “there is a strong feeling within the newsroom … that its Chicago masters regard Los Angeles as an alien planet whose denizens are made of different DNA.” Moreover, he argued, “There is no consensus within the paper as to who it represents or what, if anything, it should stand for. It has no voice; it lacks gravitas.” The editors did make one major decision, however. In October 2005, the Times announced it would attempt to regain readers by running shorter articles and more celebrity stories.41
In Baltimore editors and reporters complain that the Sun has lost much of its staff because, as its Newspaper Guild representative Michael Hill said, Tribune “has decided that this city can’t afford the kind of paper that the Sun has been for a century and more.”42 Tribune’s response: in fall 2005 it offered a voluntary employee buyout plan, with the goal of reducing the staff by another 75 people. Weeks later Tribune announced similar plans for its papers in Hartford, Connecticut; Orlando, Florida; Newport News, Virginia; and Allentown, Pennsylvania. Ultimately, Tribune added its big-city papers to the chopping block, too, paring 45 newsroom staffers from New York’s Newsday, 85 journalists from the Los Angeles Times, and about 220 employees from the Chicago Tribune.43
Tribune’s cutbacks to its local newsrooms continued through 2006. But that fall Los Angeles civic leaders began to fight back. On September 12, a group of twenty prominent citizens, including former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, wrote a public letter to Tribune management, calling on the corporation “to keep the Los Angeles Times a vibrant paper.” The authors, responding to rumors that additional layoffs to the reporting staff were imminent, declared that “we have watched with concern as our newspaper has repeatedly reduced the size of its staff, cut the space given to news and declined in circulation … All newspapers serve an important civic role, but as a community voice in the metropolitan region, the Los Angeles Times is irreplaceable. We are not quite sure this is fully understood by those outside our community.” If Tribune was unwilling to make “an even larger investment in the Times,” they concluded, “perhaps a different mode of ownership would better serve Los Angeles.”44
The growing campaign to defend journalism at the Times got an unexpected boost the next week, when Dean Baquet, the Times editor, and Jeffrey Johnson, the publisher, openly defied Tribune’s orders to impose another round of newsroom layoffs while keeping operating expenses flat. Baquet and Johnson were immediately summoned to Chicago, and before they left neither man knew if he would remain a Tribune employee for long. In October, Tribune ousted Johnson but said it would retain Baquet, at least for the time. Dennis FitzSimons, the CEO, announced that Tribune would begin to consider selling off some of its properties and unwinding its troublesome partnership with the Chandler family. Investors reacted enthusiastically, yet the citizens’ response—like so many other unreported stories in the age of media consolidation—is news we’ll never know.