Journalism Educators and the Journey to Pluto:

Who Will Go and How?*

By Edmund B. Lambeth

In 1966 Georgia Congressman Charles Weltner, one of only two southerners to vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, faced a momentous decision. A 39-year-old Democrat with a promising political future, Weltner had routinely signed a loyalty oath binding members to back all the party�s candidates at the polls.

Yet, the state�s Democrats had nominated segregationist Lester Maddox for governor. Vowing not to "compromise with hate," Weltner resigned his congressional seat rather than vote for Maddox. It was a decision that stunned many, forcing colleagues and voters to ponder an unusual act of moral courage. Weltner�s friends, however, found his choice decidedly in character.¹

The widely publicized resignation of publisher Jay T. Harris to protest the pressure of high profit margins on journalistic quality at the San Jose Mercury News gave our craft/profession a Weltner-like decision to remember, ponder, and � if we wish � to act upon. Unexpectedly to many, but not to those who know him best, Harris slapped the waters of corporate culture hard and straight enough for many of us to glimpse the bottom. "I resigned because I was concerned about the future of the whole of the paper, the business side and the news side," Harris said, adding: "I resigned because I could no longer live with the widening gap between creed and greed."²

"History will record," said outgoing ASNE president Rich Oppel, editor of the Austin American-Statement, "that this was the most powerful speech ever given at ASNE."³ Rem Reider, editor of the American Journalism Review, wrote that it was "clear (Harris) hopes his high profile exit will be a catalyst in reversing the direction in which the newspaper business seems to be careening."⁴

Knight-Ridder corporate leaders regretted Harris� departure, lauded his role at the Mercury News, but questioned his conclusion that the newspaper was "trending in the wrong direction."⁵ In a trade magazine column Knight Ridder chairman and CEO Tony Ridder argued that "quality journalism has endured" despite continuing recent declines in advertising and increases in the price of newsprint at the newspaper.⁶

Harris� statement of his case to the American Society of Newspaper Editors (which is available on the Poynter Institute website) made waves across the country. No reading of his full remarks can reasonably question that his was an act of conscience, closely reasoned and carefully executed. One response � natural enough, but insufficient � is to put the Harris episode under the rubric of an excellent micro case study for next semester�s media ethics course and move on.

However, Harris� action invites us as media ethicists to think about our obligations at the level where corporate decisions to cut newsroom resources can potentially affect not only the news media�s role in democracy, but their viability as a business with a public trust. How can we respond in our teaching, research, and service to these larger and troubling conditions in the news business? How can we help to preserve journalism as a vocation with a public trust? Harris described himself as "at the symbolic center of a debate that extends in substance and consequence well beyond circumstances surrounding my resignation as publisher of the Mercury News." He goes on to ask:

"When the interests of readers and shareholders are at odds, which takes priority? When the interests of the community and shareholders are at odds, which take priority? When the interests of the nation in an informed citizenry and the demands of shareholders for ever-increasing profits are at odds, which take priority?"

He said daily journalism has been subjected to a "tyranny of the markets." He cites an exchange between NewsHour correspondent Terrence Smith and Lauren Rich Fine, a media analyst for Merrill Lynch.

Smith: "Well...what profit margin does Wall Street expect from a newspaper, a publicly held newspaper company? If they average in the 20s, is that enough? What does it have to be?"

Fine: "Well, it�s never enough, of course. This is Wall Street we�re talking about."

As much as that exchange between Smith and Fine appears to have moved and shaken Harris, so did the following early passage in his ASNE speech affect me. Here�s part of how Harris described the critically important meeting that prompted his resignation:

"What troubled me � something that had never happened before in all my years in the company � was that little or no attention was paid to the consequences of achieving �the number.� There was virtually no discussion of the damage that would be done to the quality and aspirations of the Mercury News as a journalistic endeavor or to its ability to fulfill its responsibilities to the community. As important, scant attention was paid to the damage that would be done to our ability to compete and grow the business."

Figuratively, this distinguished publisher, journalist, and former professor (at Northwestern University) comes and politely sticks a finger in our eye, and we educators find ourselves asking, "How can I respond to what seems to be an intractable economic, media leadership and management problem?"

One thing is for sure. Working journalists and those allied closely with them are taking the Harris episode very seriously.

The Poynter Institute for Media Studies and the Committee of Concerned Journalists created sections on their websites to receive feedback from reporters and editors across the country on the permanent effects of cutbacks in their newsrooms. Jim Naughton, the Poynter President and formerly an editor with the Philadelphia Inquirer, said practitioners have been "too easily dismissed when they protest that journalism is suffering because of a concentration on satisfying shareholders." Naughton said he hopes that "facts about the real effects" will reach the public and give substance to the dialogue triggered by Harris� public resignation.⁷ Comments are being received at noblesound@poynter.org.

Geneva Overholser, a national columnist, former editor of the Des Moines Register and now occupant of the Hurley Chair for the Missouri School of Journalism, emphasizes the importance of helping the public hear and understand Harris� message. "For it�s their right-to-know that is abridged when shareholder interests dominate." She said it is important to determine whether cutbacks in newsrooms are linked in verifiable ways with a decline of journalistic excellence, adding: "And � especially in terms of reaching publishers � connections between the cuts and the criticisms readers have." ⁸

David Laventhol, former publisher of the Los Angeles Times and now publisher and editorial director of the Columbia Journalism Review, suggested, among other things, that "if newspapers report on themselves warts and all," benefits could ensue. "If readers understood newspaper economics, they could become powerful allies in offering support for new philosophies of profitability" that are more friendly to the idea of journalism as a wise and essential investment rather than a drain on the bottom line.⁹

In the midst of the debate triggered by Harris� resignation, Editor & Publisher polled 77 publishers and 62 editors across the nation. By a ratio of 4-to-3, they said "margin management" is bad for newspapers. Although not all news media would disclose their profit margins, almost four of 10 said they fall in the 30% to 39% range, with about as many saying their margins range from 20% to 29%. In other industries the profit margin norm is only 15% to 20%, according to E&P.¹⁰

To Frank A. Blethen, majority owner, publisher, and CEO of the Seattle Times, "our nation�s newspaper and journalistic voices are less diverse, independent, and bold than ever before." He called for "radical action," such as limits on concentration in ownership of news media and changes in tax laws "that drive privately held newspapers into public-chain hands."¹¹

There is a sense in which the sharp introspection caused by the Harris resignation was prefigured by three important developments. First, in broadest terms, is the attention to ethics, credibility, and values in journalism, which began in the 1970s and 1980s and shows no sign of abating. As it grew within academe and the profession, it helped prepare us to examine the practices of journalism as they affect the health of democratic public life. Others might prefer to say we actually are discussing whether enlightened capitalism will reawaken soon enough to save a democratic press from death by commercialism.

The second development was the Project on the State of the American Newspaper. The idea was originated by Gene Roberts as he returned to the University of Maryland after a stint as managing editor of the New York Times, and was funded by a $2 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. It gave birth to 18 stories in the American Journalism Review, between May 1998 and January 2000. As an outgrowth of the project the University of Arkansas Press published the first of two books, "Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering."

(www.uapress.com). Roberts is Editor-in-Chief. Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Communications at Maryland, and freelance writer Charles Layton are general editors.¹²

Third, the organization in the late 1990s of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, brought together reporters, editors, photojournalists, and journalism educators to discuss contemporary journalism with citizens. The ultimate goal was to critique journalism�s contemporary practices so as to refresh its ideals and energize its commitment to the public good. The hope was to inform and inspire the public to claim ownership of its own vital stake in a healthy and energetic free press.

The leaders of the CCJ-funded research project (also supported by Pew Charitable Trusts) are Bill Kovach, veteran editor and former director of the Nieman Foundation, and Tom Rosenstiel, former media critic for the Los Angeles Times, and currently director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Crown Publishers of New York this year issued the first edition of The Elements of Journalism, in which the authors congealed the reflections stimulated by the project�s public forums, citizen surveys, and in-depth dialogue with citizens and fellow journalists.¹³

In his review of the book, Professor Carl Sessions Stepp of the University of Maryland, described it as "heartfelt, convincing, eloquent, and accessible, but also frustrating." He concluded: "It is almost as if the authors have won us over their concept of journalistic excellence and then told us it is located on the planet Pluto. All we need to do is figure out how to go there and retrieve it."¹⁴

I agree with Stepp, yet I believe that The Elements of Journalism can be an effective invitation to those whom we want to join in the task of journalistic renewal. I have in mind not only our journalism students, but other students enrolled on our campuses, and, most critically, the reachable public. Moreover, if goals for space travel and journalism can be compared, it will take as much energy, imagination, and persistence to renew and sustain excellent journalism as to actually reach Pluto. That�s especially so given the current sacredness of the bottom line.

That leads to "Go to Pluto" RecommendationNo. 1: Create Journalism & Democracy courses available to students on American campuses. These courses can be configured in at least two ways. One can serve as a capstone course to encourage journalism students to think deeply about the democratic role of the news media. Another configuration would be an extension or service-learning approach to the course. It would need to include media literacy and demonstrate how citizens can not only recognize good journalism, but interact with news media to encourage excellence.

The goal would be to help citizens assess local news media performance, define their own stake in good journalism, and expand their use of news media to better monitor government and social institutions.

Journalism professors, especially tenured ones with cyberspace skills and experience in community journalism, can create civic websites and community fora that could fit like a nesting block into both of the courses alluded to above.

Thus, Recommendation No. 2: Establish local websites to help democratic citizens relate effectively to, learn from, and evaluate fairly, the performance of local news media.

In fact, John McManus is directing a special media watchdog project by KTEH public television in San Jose known as "Grade the News." It's a Bay Area website enterprise (www.gradethenews.org) that elicits reactions, criticism, and suggestions from citizens to local news media as well as relevant perspectives from academe and elsewhere.

For a variety of reasons, news stories often fail to recognize or address, in-depth, the moral dimension of major public issues � local, national, and global. Yet, I am not aware that the current cadre of media critics and their supporters and counterparts in academe have begun to explicitly discuss the challenges of such coverage. Thus, for Recommendation No. 3: Journalism educators and can usefully conduct research and write clearly for their students, journalists, and citizens on how best to cover ethical issues in the news. These include, among others, genetic medicine, environmental pollution, human rights, and humanitarian intervention in ethnic conflicts at home and abroad. Journalism educators, however, can learn much from major journalism reviews that needs to be incorporated into their own teaching, research and service. Too many of us have failed to read the menu of media criticism in North America, let alone sup at a common table with thoughtful critics.

However, on the economics front, individual workers in the academic vineyard are beginning to create new knowledge about the relationship between newsroom investments, circulation, market penetration, and the management of profit margins by publicly-owned media companies. Stephen Lacey, director of the School of Journalism at Michigan State University, and Hugh J. Martin published a study three years ago of the economic performance of Thomson newspapers with other newspapers in comparable communities. "The results," they wrote, "indicate that high short-run profit margins are associated with declining circulation and circulation revenue." They estimated that Thomson�s high profit requirements between 1980 and 1990 cost the company $1.33 million in subscription revenue, "a figure that does not count possible losses in advertising lineage because of declining penetration." They concluded that Thomson�s high profit requirements eroded circulation and circulation revenues. Their findings supported the warnings of Leo Bogart and others that "cutting costs to obtain high profits will have negative long-run effects on newspapers." Lacey and Professor Mary Alice Shaver are continuing and expanding this line of research to discover more about the relationship between higher profit margins and the loss of circulation by many newspapers in the 1990s.¹⁵

Recommendation No. 4: What if empirical and case study research establishes persuasively the negative effects on circulation of higher and higher profit margins? We would still need careful analysis and discussion of how best such knowledge can be communicated effectively to the public, corporate officers, individual shareholders, large institutional investors, plus reporters and shirt-sleeve editors themselves.

One could argue that such a task is naive, daunting, difficult, risky, and premature. Yet, we know much more about the practice, process, effects, and public benefits of journalism than we have yet communicated to citizens now grown skeptical of our credibility. It would require a special alignment of the knowledge, experience, and insights of media researchers, journalists, and citizens themselves for such an alignment to materialize. Is this a tossed salad too exotic for anyone�s appetite for change? Certainly, it would require virtuoso leadership. But were we able to persuade ourselves of its merit, wouldn�t the work involved beat watching the continued erosion of belief in journalism as a business with a public trust? The point is that some such an alignment needs at least to be explored. It could meld nicely with Recommendation 5 below.

It�s because of the moral dimensions of the news business that we need those who teach media ethics to be involved deeply in saving the idea within our culture of journalism as a business with a public trust. And we can do that only if enough Americans begin to demand that the idea be more widely practiced in the 21^st century than it has been in the late years of the 20^th.

Those who teach media ethics on campus have not spent anywhere near enough time listening to and discussing mutual concerns with writers, photographers, editors, publishers, and citizens. There is more to teaching ethics than even the best advice on pedagogy from the most experienced teachers. To talk about the common good, we need to hear first hand from others outside academe, especially journalists and citizens. Wisely, Phil Meyer frequently also reminds journalists they need to understand the language and logic of the marketplace. Recommendation No. 5 is that the Media Ethics Division find ways to demonstrate the usefulness of working relationships between journalism educators and practitioners on all sides of the profit margin debate. Citizens from diverse socio-economic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds are vital to such a demonstration. The intent of this recommendation is for division members to weave these relationships into their teaching, research, creative activity, and public service.

It occurs to me that one way to do this would be to revisit Meyer�s suggestion more than a decade ago for an ethical audit conducted voluntarily and cooperatively by daily newspapers.¹⁶ At the time, I was skeptical of the idea. But the past 14 years convince me that pilot experiments with daily newspapers of various sizes could be very worthwhile. His approach included state-of-the-art accuracy questionnaires, content analyses, and surveys of readers to provide feedback on various dimensions of news media performance.

In his book, Ethical Journalism, Meyer used empirical social science research to, among other things, develop a typology of publishers. One type was the "statesman publisher," defined as a person "who is an active participant in the news side for the sole purpose of making it better."

I would like to think that it�s at least a few years too early to conclude that such publishers are a vanished or vanishing species. However, if an ethical audit could be devised that is appropriate to our circumstances circa 2001, perhaps its execution would allow us to re-envision the species. Carefully conceived, it also might explore the extra responsibility that journalism as a public trust places � or should place � on the boards of news media corporations and those in a strategic position to influence their deliberations.

To find a constructive way forward, we need to dream large dreams. We also need to reason and act wisely together in times that challenge free and democratic journalism more seriously than many of us have been either able or willing to recognize.

Lambeth is a professor emeritus of the Missouri School of Journalism and a former president of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication. He has chaired an ethics teaching workshop for journalism educators since 1984. During the 2001-2002 academic year, he is serving as the Laszlo Orszagh Chair in American Studies at the University of Szeged and at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest. This essay was the basis of a presentation to the August 2001 National Workshop on the Teaching of Ethics in Journalism at the convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. It was published in slightly different form in the autumn 2001 issue of Media Ethics, published at Emerson College. Lambeth can be reached at lambethe@missouri.eduand at lambeth@lit.u-szeged.hu.

Notes