All INI
associates,
The
following essay is a powerful message of our industry and what newspapers are
all about. The references to the very good watchdog journalism being
done within many communities, regardless of size, was especially
inspirational and stimulating. I hope it has the same effect on our
editors and reporters.
I
suggest all employees, not just those in the newsroom, take the time to read
it.
Thanks,
Ed
Dulin
President/CEO
Perspective: Keep
the faith and believe in newspapers
This
essay is adapted from a speech by Tampa Bay Times Chairman and CEO Paul Tash to
the Metro Production Conference, a consortium representing 76 newspapers and
their suppliers from five countries. The essay originally appeared in the Tampa Bay Times and is being republished with
permission.
Today being a Sunday, I offer my own confession of faith.
I believe in newspapers.
And by newspapers, I mean particularly those physical objects
produced in huge quantity through some nearly magical process in the middle of
the night and delivered before daybreak to millions of American homes and
businesses where they are eagerly received.
I take nothing away from our websites, or our new apps for
smartphones, or our electronic newsletters, or the videos we produce, or from
the social media that connects people far and wide with the good work we are
doing.
They have expanded our reach and capacities far beyond what
anyone could have imagined and represent a vital part of our business and a
steadily greater share of our future.
But we should also be clear-eyed about our electronic endeavors.
At most American newspapers, they draw heavily upon the resources — financial,
human and journalistic — of the business that our smug critics like to deride
as “mature,” or “legacy,” or “dying.”
“Nobody reads newspapers anymore.” You hear that line so often
that even some of our most loyal fans start to feel a little sheepish that they
still want the ink-on-paper version of what we do. “I know I’m in the
minority,” they sometimes tell me.
Except they are not in the minority, not by a long shot.
According to the Pew Research Center and its annual report on the news media,
more than half of all newspaper readers rely entirely on the printed version.
And more than 80 percent of newspaper consumers have print as part of their
mix.
Anybody who says “nobody reads newspapers anymore” has never
spent a Sunday morning in a circulation phone room after a bad storm, or a
breakdown in the pressroom, or a big college football game that went into
overtime.
I believe in newspapers for their power to connect merchants
with customers. Here in the Tampa Bay area, the No. 1 Ford dealer sells as many
vehicles as the next three Ford dealers put together. His secret? I am sure he
has several. Here’s one: He buys full pages of advertising in the local
newspapers every day.
One of our best advertising customers is Publix Super Markets,
but a few years ago, Publix decided to stop putting $5-off coupons on sticky
notes plastered on the front page of the newspaper. The problem? Not that the
ads weren’t working, but that they were working too well — with much higher
redemption rates than Publix had bargained for.
So, I believe in newspapers.
Most of all, I believe in newspapers as a force for social good.
For all the economic strain upon us, newspapers still break more ground, reveal
more scandals and right more wrongs than any other branch of the news media.
If not for us, the world would be a different, darker place.
How do I know? For nine years, I had the high privilege of
serving on the board of the Pulitzer Prizes. For two days every April, about 18
of us would gather at Columbia University in New York, reviewing some of
America’s best journalism and deciding what deserved its highest prize. The
debates were exquisite, and the decisions were often excruciating because so
much work was worthy.
And every year, I would leave that room with two reactions.
First, it is really, really hard to win a Pulitzer Prize. I
joined the board in 2006, the high water mark in American newspaper
advertising, and in the next nine years, newspaper revenues fell steadily and sometimes
steeply. In the year I became chairman of the Pulitzers, four of the prizes
went to journalists at companies that had been through bankruptcy. And yet, the
quality of the finalists never declined.
Here’s the second reaction I would always carry from that
meeting: Thank God for newspapers. Frankly, it is hard to imagine any other
branch of the news media taking up the kind of difficult, expensive and
painstaking work that newspapers are still willing to do.
There’s no such thing as a bad Pulitzer Prize, but the best one
is the gold medal for Public Service. As usual, there were three finalists this
year.
One
was the Boston Globe, for an expose showing how landlords with
good political connections were packing college students into substandard and
unsafe housing, and how both college and city officials in Boston were turning
a blind eye to the danger. One student at Boston University died in a fire just
weeks before she was to graduate.
Another
Pulitzer finalist was the Wall Street Journal,
for an extraordinary series about how a medical device commonly used during
hysterectomies could actually increase the risk of cancer and death for women,
by sending malignant cells to other places in the abdomen, like spreading the
seeds of a deadly crop.
Neither of those finalists won the Pulitzer Prize.
Instead,
the gold medal for public service went to the Post and Courier in
Charleston, for revealing — and explaining why — South Carolina has the highest
rate in the country of women killed by their husbands and boyfriends. In South
Carolina, it turns out, you can go to jail longer for beating your dog than for
beating your wife.
When
it comes to covering a community, there typically is no more important voice
than the local newspaper. This year, the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting
went to the Daily Breeze in Torrance,
Calif., circulation 70,000.
Reporters
at the Breeze uncovered a scandal in a small local school
district, which was paying its superintendent more than $600,000 a year — more
than the superintendent of the Los Angeles public schools. The school district
also loaned the superintendent $910,000 at 2 percent interest so he could buy a
house, while he was going through his second bankruptcy.
If
not for the Daily Breeze, who would tell that
story?
The Pulitzers are open primarily to newspapers, but at Harvard
University, the Goldsmith Prizes for investigative reporting are open to all
comers. This year, there were more than 100 entries from television, radio,
magazines — and newspapers.
The
winner was the Miami Herald, for showing how state
child welfare officials were leaving children with parents that the state knew
— knew — were unfit, rather than remove the children to state custody. That
policy was wrapped in the warm and fuzzy language of keeping families together,
but the Heraldshowed
that it was cheaper for the state to leave the kids with their parents.
The Herald found 477 children who died after child
welfare officials had at least one encounter with their families. Seventy
percent of the children were just 2 or younger, as the Herald said, “too young to walk, talk, cry out for
help, run away or defend themselves.” One little girl was killed by her
mother’s pet python.
If
not for the Miami Herald, who tells her story?
Make no mistake, our newspaper business is harder than it used
to be. Much harder.
Over the last decade, our economics have been upended by the
worst financial crisis in our lifetimes, plus the relentless competition for
advertising, especially on the Internet. Retail merchants that have been
mainstays of newspaper ad columns now find their own businesses tremendously
disrupted, first by Walmart and then by Amazon.
How much have things changed? Consider this:
In
1981, the owner of the Chicago Tribune newspaper
bought the Chicago Cubs baseball team. In 2013, the owner of the Boston Red Sox
baseball team bought the Boston Globe newspaper.
Inside the newspaper business, we know the pain of this last
decade all too well. The casualties include some careers, and some of our
confidence about the future.
Remember
that Pulitzer Prize for the Daily Breeze in
California, for revealing how the local school superintendent was enriching
himself at the expense of the taxpayers? The lead reporter on those stories
left the newspaper for a job in public relations, with better pay and better
hours.
From beyond the newspaper business, some of our critics and
rivals chortle at our discomfort. They claim our business struggles show that
our day has passed, that we are old news.
Those people are confused. Difficulty is one question. Value is
a different matter entirely.
Just because something is difficult, does not make it
irrelevant. To the contrary, nothing that is really important is ever really
easy.
I believe in newspapers.
Without them, another little girl dies. Another wife gets a
beating. Another greedy public official gorges at the public trough. Another
woman gets a hysterectomy that could kill her. More college kids — maybe some
of your kids — are crammed into flophouses and firetraps.
I believe in newspapers because I see nothing on the horizon
that could begin to fill the void that we would leave.
The stakes are high. The challenges are steep.
Our customers are counting on us. Our communities are counting
on us. Our country is counting on us — to persevere and to prevail.
