“Is
Media Performance Democracy’s Critical Issue?”
A
luncheon speech by
Tom Stites, editor/publisher
To the
first Media Giraffe Project summit conference at the
University
of Massachusetts Amherst
June 30,
2006
The
author is a veteran editor at major U.S. daily newspapers. In January, he will
move to the Center for Public Integrity to edit its “Buying of the President:
2008” book project.
Ever since I arrived here at the University of
Massachusetts on Wednesday evening for the Media Giraffe summit, I’ve not been
able to shake an irony: The first time
I ever gave a speech to a journalism audience was almost exactly 25 years ago,
right here at UMass, and despite the passage of a quarter century what I’m here
to talk about today isn’t all that different from my topic way back then.
I wasn’t yet 40, and was the national trends editor of The New York Times. A UMass student who’d been a productive
stringer invited me to speak, and she and her classmates gave me the topic: the
future of print journalism in an electronic age. So here we are at UMass again, with the electronic age much more
advanced and journalism’s quandaries much more vexing, especially when we think
about them in the context of our faltering democracy. And still we’re trying to solve the puzzle that is the future of
journalism.
Now just because I have a white beard and a long resume
doesn’t mean that I’m going to stand up here and regale you with stories about
the good old days of newspapers. The most
fundamental reason for this is that except for a few places – newspapers owned
by civic-minded families in St. Louis, Louisville, Des Moines, Nashville, and
Hartford come to mind – the good old days weren’t so good.
The
Philadelphia Inquirer has been the subject of attention at this
conference because the paper’s new owners took control while we’ve been meeting
here, so let’s use it as a case in point.
The Inquirer’s history
disproves the myth that family ownership is inherently good. Until 1970 it had been owned for two
generations by the Annenberg family. In
that year the publisher, Walter Annenberg, sold it to Knight Newspapers – this
was before Knight and Ridder joined to become the company that has just been
dismantled again. I was the first editor
the Knight management hired. At that point, the newspaper that in only a few
years would all but corner the market on Pulitzer Prizes was arguably the worst
major daily in America. And let me tell
you that this is saying a lot, because there were some truly wretched
dailies. Some of them were second and
third papers in rusting industrial cities; some were doomed afternoon papers
full of fluff and police stories with quotes that strained credulity, and for
very good reason; some were aging Hearst and Scripps-Howard properties that
would make you yearn to read the quality of journalism found today in the least
of Dean Singleton’s papers; some were owned by politically corrupt local
families.
So what made The
Inquirer so terrible? The weirdest
thing was that it was full of book serializations. Sometimes they even started on Page One. I am told that at one point The Inquirer was serializing six books
at the same time. So how much space
could there be for news? But this is
merely weird, and relatively benign.
Try this:
Annenberg had a society columnist who was paid a breathtaking salary and
reported directly to him. Who she wrote
about was often determined by who Annenberg was trying to butter up
socially. When he really wanted to
trowel it on, he’d have his columnist write something flattering about his
social target and order that the column run on Page One.
And then there were Annenberg’s political shenanigans – he
shamelessly used his news columns to embarrass candidates who dared to run
against his favorites. One day in 1966
a Democrat named Milton Shapp held a press conference while running for
governor and Annenberg’s hand-picked political reporter asked him only one
question. The question was, “Mr. Shapp,
have you ever been admitted to a mental institution?” “Why no,” Shapp responded, and went away scratching his head
about this odd question. The next
morning he didn’t need to scratch his head any more. A five-column front page Inquirer
headline read, “Shapp Denies Mental Institution Stay.” I’m not making this up. I’ve seen the clipping – a friend used to
have a framed copy above his desk. Those were not the good old days. Too bad there were no bloggers back then –
what a field day!
These days we wring our hands about ethical transgressions
that pale in comparison to Annenberg’s and those of many other shameless
publishers who once ran newspapers across the land. Whatever becomes of The
Inquirer in the hands of its newest new owners, it will be a shadow of the
newspaper it was in the golden era when Gene Roberts led it to 17 Pulitzers in
18 years starting in the 1970s. But it
likely will be a much better paper than The
Inquirer of the Annenberg era. Or,
at least, much less bad.
One thing the old Inquirer
did better was to sell newspapers. In
1968 its circulation was 473,000; now it is 350,000. But in 1968, The Inquirer
was the No. 2 paper in town, trailing the family-owned Bulletin, an afternoon paper that folded in 1982 after more than a
decade of brutal competition with The
Inquirer. The combined daily
circulation of two downtown broadsheets in 1968 was – get this –
1,121,000. That’s more than triple what
The Inquirer sells today. And since The Inquirer’s peak two decades ago, it has lost more than a third
of its circulation, joining in the circulation decline that causes so much
hand-wringing and helps inspire people like us to come together and try to
solve the puzzle that is the future of journalism.
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Before I plunge into the meat of what I have to say today,
let me pause to acknowledge that very few people in this room have ever heard
of me or of the magazine that I’ve edited for the last decade – and to thank
Bill Densmore for sticking his Giraffe neck out and inviting me to speak
anyway. And to thank you for having the
guts to come listen to someone you don’t know much about. Or maybe it’s the free lunch. Whatever.
So let me lay out what sociologists might call my social
position within journalism. I’ve come
to love the label Bill Densmore hung on me in his early literature about this
conference: veteran journalist. It just happens to be quite accurate, and
it’s a handy replacement for an identity that I’ve long savored, but one that
has been overtaken by technology: ink-stained wretch.
I first went to work in a newsroom in 1962. I’ve worked for an embarrassingly long list
of newspapers, mostly in Chicago and New York.
I’ve held every kind of reporting job from obit writer to columnist to
national correspondent, and every kind of editing job from the copy desk rim to
managing editor. I’ve been the editor
of two print magazines and the publisher of three; I started an electronic
publishing venture more than a decade ago and today am the publisher not only
of a print magazine but also its partner magazine on the World Wide Web. Despite my focus so far on the ancient
technology of newspapers, I’m not a total troglodyte. I read some blogs and get RSS feeds. I contributed some thoughts that my friend Dan Gillmor quoted in We the Media, his seminal book on citizen
journalism.
With a resume as long as mine, it’s obvious that I have a
weakness for greener grass. My wife’s
diagnosis is that I’m unstable. My own
take is that my weakness for greener grass is partly due to an entrepreneurial
streak but mostly it’s because I’m never satisfied with the way news is done
and I’m always looking for opportunities to make it better.
The last decade has been a fascinating one for me, in that
I’ve stepped away from the news culture and have found that a detached
perspective can be fascinating. I may
not be in step with many of you who have been immersed in the news culture in
the decade I’ve been on the sidelines, but I suspect that my vantage point may
allow me to see some patterns that may be harder to discern from close up.
During my decade of detachment it’s been easy for all of
us to see that our democracy has eroded to the point that Sandra Day O’Connor
gave a speech shortly after retiring from the Supreme Court in which she warned
that the United States could become a dictatorship. Let me remind you that this comes from a Reagan appointee, not
exactly a Troops Home Now/Impeach Bush advocate. Given the growing power of antidemocratic institutions in our
political system that are fueling an imperialistic administration – especially
huge corporations, plutocratic wealth, and a strain of Christians with strong
theocratic impulses – I tremble when I think about democracy’s future in the
United States of America. And given
journalism’s challenges, I’m sure that all of us are trembling.
I’m fixated on democracy because
its foundation is the conscience, and conscience, along with the ability to
reason, is what distinguishes us from other animals and makes us human. True democracy – not the false definition so
popular in Washington that democracy is “a form of government where capital has
free reign and elections are held now and then” – true democracy is the
collective expression of the citizens’ consciences. However wide of the mark this expression may be, it is way preferable
to authoritarian forms of government that can force us to act in ways that
offend our consciences. To the extent
that external authorities can do this, our humanity is diminished – and we are
subjects rather than citizens.
I care about journalism down to
the marrow of my bones – it’s in my DNA – but without democracy meaningful
journalism is impossible. And vice
versa. That’s why I’m here today,
answering the call to address the question, “Is media performance democracy’s critical
issue?”
Well, my answer is yes. And from my detached perspective I think
that all the attention this conference is paying to print, blogs, citizen
journalism, and ownership forms, while much needed, is also obscuring a bigger
and more serious problem.
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Let me start with some definitions. I too am taken by the clever Jay Rosen
phrase that’s the buzz of the conference – “the people formerly known as the
audience.” I understand that many of
these people are now participants, not just receivers of news but content
choosers and content creators, and I understand how valuable this is to the
adhesion of our communities and thus to democracy. This positive phenomenon is advancing rapidly in our culture, and
I’m cheering lustily as it does.
That said, for purposes of this talk, I’m going to use two
old-fashioned terms: “citizen” and
“reader.” Yeah, I know, I know,
“reader” is a passé concept, a word for a passive recipient of stuff that
editors choose. But there is reason to
use the word anyway.
In late1980s the late Neil Postman wrote an enduringly
important book called Amusing Ourselves
to Death. In it he says that
Marshall McLuhan only came close to getting it right in his famous adage, that
the medium is the message. Postman
corrects McLuhan by saying that the medium is the metaphor – a metaphor for the
way we think.
Written narrative that people can read, Postman goes on,
is a metaphor for thinking logically.
And he says that image media bypass reason and go straight to the
emotions. The image media are a
metaphor for not thinking logically.
Images disable thinking, so unless people read and use their reason
democracy is disabled as well.
So I don’t care whether people read written narrative from
newsprint or from a screen, and while participation in the news process is
important it’s OK with me if people are passive receivers of written narrative
that’s selected by editors. What
matters is that they read news, that their reason is engaged, that they are
equipped as well as they can be to be effective citizens.
I’m talking democracy here. Thus readers. Thus citizens. I’m here to advocate for the citizens – all
citizens – and for broad and robust democracy enabled by robust quality
journalism.
Also because I’m talking democracy, I’ve been focusing my
remarks on mass market newspapers. That’s because they are still the most
natural and thus the best medium for conveying serious reporting to large
numbers of people – about 55 million Americans a day pick one up. Both radio and television can produce
serious reporting and distribute it widely – NPR and PBS and some network
magazine shows prove this as a matter of routine – but both broadcast media do
other things more naturally and thus better.
And the Web’s interactivity ensures that it can do some things far
better than print can. But while the
Web is highly democratic within the slice of the population that uses it
intensively, so far this slice is small and elite.
With this as a backdrop, let’s finally turn to the huge
problem whose contours I see lurking behind the high-profile problems that
concern all of us.
--0--
What really makes me twitch is that the amount and
distribution of serious reporting that people can read are both dwindling, and
they’re dwindling in a way that all but cuts off citizens who are less than
affluent – the hourly wage earners, the marginally self-employed, the Wal-Mart
shoppers, the regular folks of America.
This is to say most folks.
Shortly I’m going to provide you with some fresh and surprising
statistics that show how negative this trend is. But let me start by saying that cutting these citizens off from
serious reporting is profoundly antidemocratic in and of itself. It distorts the political process by
ensuring that a lot of people don’t have the solid information they need to
make sound life and citizenship judgments.
Keep in mind that we’re talking about a huge population of
people quite unlike the information elite who populate this room – people whose
average wages have been declining for years after inflation is taken into
account, who may be dealing with predatory lenders and have a negative net
worth, whose job security tends to be eroding, who may be working more than one
job, who include almost all the 45 million Americans without health
insurance. Journalism doesn’t serve
this huge population if it is written and presented only in ways that appeal to
people with disposable income to spend on nice furnishings for their suburban
houses and who worry about how best to get a second opinion on a medical
diagnosis. In fact, to people whose
challenge is how best to see just one doctor without ending up in the
poorhouse, that kind of reporting is an affront. So is all the lavish coverage of personal finance. And this is the state of our daily
newspapers today.
Citizens who have no access to serious journalism about
the issues that are relevant to their lives end up awash in the propagandistic
opinion media and in the sound bite vapidity of standard broadcast news. Without serious journalism that they can
read to equip them with facts and engage their reason, some respond to this
sorry state by disenfranchising themselves in hopelessness; others vote the
opinions drilled into them by the manipulative cable news diatribes.
What’s
the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank famously asked in his book title. I
submit that a big part of what’s wrong is that lots of Kansans – especially
less affluent Kansans who voted their conservative values and thus elected
people to Congress who were sure to legislate against their economic interests
– these citizens were bereft of serious reporting they could read and thus saw
and heard only endless propagandistic opinions from the only media left in
their lives.
Let’s unpack this.
I’ll save the most troubling part for last, and start with what I mean
by the term serious reporting.
Serious reporting is based in verified fact passed through
mature professional judgment. It has
integrity. It engages readers – there’s
that word again, readers – with
compelling stories and it appeals to their capacity for reason. This is the information that people need so
they can make good life decisions and good citizenship decisions. Serious reporting is far from grim and
solemn and off-putting. It is
accessible and relevant to its readers.
And the best serious reporting is a joy to read.
Serious reporting emanates largely from responsible local
dailies and national and foreign reporting by big news organizations, print and
broadcast. But the reporting all these
institutions do is diminishing. With fewer reporters chasing the news, there is
less and less variety in the stories citizens see and hear. The media that are booming, especially cable
news and blogs, do precious little serious reporting. Or they do it for specialized audiences. And this brings me to the most troubling
part of my message today.
--0--
Why is it that less-than-affluent Americans are being
zoned out of serious reporting? Elite
audiences like this one often jump to the conclusion that “those people” are
undereducated and don’t read much. But
less affluent people do read. Wal-Mart
is one of the Big Four booksellers, the others being Borders, Barnes &
Noble, and Amazon. Harris poll data
show that year after year about 30 per cent of citizens report reading as a
favored leisure pursuit.
Less-than-affluent people still read, it’s just that a great many have
stopped reading news.
Now here are my promised surprising statistics. They come from the Pew Center for the People
and the Press. Every two years Pew does
a survey that asks people whether they’d read a newspaper the day before. When Pew presents its findings, it breaks
down the responses by age, and also by educational attainment. But it doesn’t break the numbers down by
income. Suspecting that the decline in
newspaper readership has been disproportionately among the less affluent, I
asked them to dig out that data for me.
To my astonishment, for people with annual household
income from $50 to $75,000, Pew found that people answering that they’d read a
newspaper the day before had actually increased by a percentage point between
1998 and 2004, to 58 per cent from 57.
And people with household incomes of $75,000 and up declined by five
points, to 55 per cent from 60. But the
study did not ask about reading newspapers on line, and the higher one’s income
the likelier one is to be what another Pew effort, the Internet & American
Life Project, calls “high-powered broadband users” – 46 per cent have household
incomes of more than $75,000 annually.
And Harris Poll data show that 26 per cent of people who read newspapers
on line report reducing their use of other media, including newspapers. I would be one of these people – I get print
papers delivered only on the weekend and read them on line during the
week. If you ask me whether I read a
newspaper yesterday, five days out of seven I’d answer no.
The data I’ve gathered don’t create a complete picture,
and thus force us to extrapolate a bit, but I think it’s safe to conclude that
that affluent, educated citizens are still reading quality journalism.
This is good news.
Now for the bad: For citizens
with household incomes of less than $50,000, readership has plummeted. For people in households earning $30,000 to
$50,000, readership is down by 13 points, to 35 per cent from 48; for people in
$20,000-to-$30,000 households, it’s down by 9 points, to 34 per cent from 43
per cent, and for people in households with less than $20,000 income, it’s down
11 points, to 27 per cent from 38 per cent.
In terms of percentage of decline, the falloff exceeds 20 per cent for
all three of these groups – in only six years.
Part of this can be explained by young people entering
their earning years with modest salaries and advanced technology habits, and
surveys show that today’s young people spend less time on news that their
counterparts of earlier years. But even taking this into account, what we’re
talking about here is a class divide – two classes of citizens, one that’s well
served with quality reporting and one that’s left to the vagaries of the
manipulators. Given our country’s
cherished values, this is a disgrace.
And it is a terrible threat to democracy, which we all know can’t
function without a well-informed citizenry.
--0--
So what’s causing this?
There are many variables. The
number of media competing for our attention just keeps expanding. Younger people are far more adept with
technology than their elders – although the Harris Poll finds significantly more
GenXers reading national newspapers than the overall population. But here’s a variable that gets almost no
attention: How editors choose what
stories to cover and how to frame them.
In this era of discount retailers like Wal-Mark that
advertise very little, newspaper advertising tends to come from upscale
retailers. Responding to the wishes of
these advertisers, publishers no longer want nonaffluent readers. Over the last three decades, newspapers have
increasingly reflected that.
Now I’m going to revert to a couple of contrasting stories
about the old days. When I was breaking
in as a reporter, I ran the police beat for The
Kansas City Times. The managing
editor, a crusty old guy named John Chandley, explained that he wanted me to
provide at least a short item about every siren heard each night in all parts
of the city, so our readers would know what had happened. And he meant all parts of the city, rich and
poor. This kept me hustling, and to
this day I remember the lesson: The
newspaper I worked for wanted to sell papers to every household in the
area. They wanted 100 per cent market
penetration, or as close as they could come to 100 per cent. In 1962 and 63, when I was a police
reporter, dailies everywhere wanted 100 percent market penetration. Newsday,
where I worked in the 1970s, approached 85 per cent penetration at its peak,
the record for American newspapers. Now
it’s about 40 per cent. David
Laventhol, Newsday’s editor when I
worked there, wanted to make sure his staff valued all the paper’s
readers. “Never forget that you’re
writing for the man in the bowling alley,” he told us over and over, back in
the days before gender-neutral language became the norm.
Now fast-forward to the late 1980s. By this time I was associate managing editor
of The Chicago Tribune, and all the
talk among the news management was about editing the paper for the top two
quintiles of the income distribution.
That means that 40 percent market penetration is the goal, not 100
percent, and that The Trib cares
little about 60 percent of the people who might be its readers. And these people are the men and women in
the bowling alley. Why doesn’t The Trib care? Because these days nonaffluent people shop at Wal-Mart, and
advertisers like Lord and Taylor and stores that sell fancy wines don’t want to
pay for circulation among people who can’t afford their wares. It’s as simple as that.
Now almost all metro dailies want only the affluent
readers. Everybody else is what
advertisers call “waste.” So publishers
simply ignore the interests of the bowling alley set, or write about “them”
only as statistics or as the objects of debates among economists and policy
analysts. I am absolutely confident
that it takes these “waste” readers – more than half of all Americans – very
little time perusing the local daily to see that reading further is a waste of
their time.
There are no villains here; this change has been gradual
and inexorable as old department stores went out of business and discounters
became dominant. It was 30 years ago when The
New York Times set the path that all big dailies have followed by
abandoning its historic two-section format to became a four-section daily. It did this by adding a daily business
section as well as a variety of special feature sections. Abe Rosenthal, who died this year, is
lionized for leading the way with these sections, which attracted waves of new
advertising and revenue that protected The
Times’s vast news-gathering budget.
Papers all over the country aped The
Times, and now every metro daily has a daily business section that covers
employment reports by assessing their impact on the stock market and feature
sections that extol buying fancy new furnishings for your suburban house and
health sections that offer advice on how best to get a second opinion on a
diagnosis.
In the same period, newspaper staffs have become more and
more educated and thus inclined to quote experts who talk in abstractions and
jargon and discuss less-than-affluent citizens as statistics. So: Is there any wonder that less affluent Americans have abandoned
newspapers and are angry at the press?
They’ve abandoned newspapers – the primary source of serious reporting –
because the newspapers have abandoned them.
--0--
Let’s see if we can bring this less abstract. Twenty
percent of American adults shop at Wal-Mart weekly. How many of you shop at Wal-Mart weekly? Raise your hands. How many of have shopped at Wal-Mart at least once in the last
six months? Hands up. Now, how many of you are among the 45
million Americans who don’t have medical insurance? Hands up.
The group in this room is largely composed of the people
who the upscale advertisers want, and thus who newspapers want as readers. And we’re the journalists, the gatekeepers
making judgments about how to present the news in ways that’s relevant to
readers. One of the primary rules of
marketing is that if you believe your customers are like you, you’re headed to
failure. Do we have a clear idea of who
our readers are, or who they might be, how they differ from us?
Here’s a challenge:
Imagine with me that you’re a 39-year-old single mother of three
daughters. You live in East Boston and
ride the Blue Line to work long and unpredictable hours in a retail job near
Downtown Crossing. One daughter is
grown and married, one is living at home and working part time while attending
a community college, and the third is still in high school. Your family has no health insurance. You shop, sparingly and carefully, at
Wal-Mart. Now and then, when you can
afford it, you go bowling.
I’m serious about this.
I want you to imagine really being this person. Close your eyes, and conjure up your three
daughters. These are nice young
woman. First picture the married one,
next the one living at home, and now, finally, the teenager still in high
school. Imagine not having medical
insurance, imagine the worry and stress.
Imagine skimping at Wal-Mart.
Settle into this role.
Now I’m going to put up some clips of stories that The Boston Globe published in just one
issue this week, Tuesday to be exact.
Stay in your role as you look at these slides, and reflect with me on
whether The Globe is a newspaper that
understands you and presents news in a way that’s relevant to your life.
I’m going to channel for our mom now, and while I do, stay
in your role. Here we go, starting with
the
front page.
Down in the lower left corner is the only human interest
story on the page. Who’s this about? The
music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I wonder what a music director does. And how much does a ticket to the symphony cost, anyway?
So much for Page A1.
Let’s take a look at B1. Ah, here’s a story
about a tugboat. Lots of people who go down to Cape Cod for vacations love
this old tugboat, because they get to drive by it real slowly in the terrible
traffic, at the Bourne Rotary. Let’s
see, how often do my daughters and I get a chance to vacation at the Cape?
I guess I might as well move on to the next section. Right here on page C1, I see a story about a
radio station: It’s WCRB, and it
plays classical music. People who like
that kind of music were concerned that it might have to go off the air, but now
it looks like it won’t. People who like
that kind of music must be relieved.
Myself, I’ve never had a chance to go to hear the symphony in person –
the tickets cost so much – so here’s a free way to listen to some classical
music. Too bad it’s gospel music I like.
Wait a minute!
Inside this section, on Page C4, here’s a review for gospel night at the
Boston Pops. Geez, I wonder how much
those tickets cost?
Moving on to E1, the business section, here’s a big
headline at the top of the page – houses
in Massachusetts are getting cheaper.
The median price is down by 4 per cent, to only $331,000. Let’s see, at $11.50 an hour, can I afford
that?
And inside the section, here’s a columnist
who wants to help me save money. I
sure could use some help. Now this is a
big room, so I can’t imagine that you can read the text, so let me read
Humberto Cruz’s helpful words about 401(k) matching plans for you:
Even
free money can’t get millions of Americans to save.
Instead,
the best way to get them to do it is to force them, unless they specifically
say they don’t want to.
I’ve
come to this conclusion after years of reviewing studies and research papers.
I’m impressed that you’re an expert, Mr. Cruz, but I sure
wish you had the expertise to get my employer to offer a 401(k) matching plan.
Mr. Cruz goes on in his column to explain why is it that
even free money can’t get millions of Americans to save. One reason he cites is the burden of
everyday expenses, and I can certainly understand that. But he also quotes an expert named Utkus as
saying that another reason people don’t save is “plain inertia . . . a ‘psychological inability’ to do so.” Mr.
Cruz then quotes Mr. Utkus some more:
“I call it the ‘savings-averse’ population,” he says. “They put up a lot
of reasons why they can’t save.” Cruz
then adds that the problem “is often one of behavior, not finances.” My. I
don’t have any savings. Is there
something wrong with my behavior?
OK, let’s turn to this cute little section called Sidekick.
This sounds real friendly. “Your Guide
to a Better Day,” it says. Gee! Right
here on the front is something that sure would make my day better. The photo makes my mouth water. A restaurant
that has a special on an order of two
lobsters whose combined weight is five pounds. And how much does that cost?
I guess I better turn the page.
Ah: Here’s another
suggestion for making my life better. Shades
of Green, the headline says. The
story tells about an art exhibit at Dunia, which the paper says is “a
self-described ‘eco-store’ with an art gallery” that’s “good for the
environment.” An artist is showing her
paintings and the story says that if I buy one, 20 per cent of my money will be
donated to the Earthwatch Institute.
I’m sure that’s a good cause.
I’ll have to see if I have enough money left after I eat a couple of
lobsters and go to hear the Boston Pops doing gospel music.
Did I neglect to mention that our imaginary mom has a
sarcastic streak?
About the time I gave my 1981 speech here at UMass, a
friend of mine named Larry Durocher published a parody called Not The New York Times. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies
because it was so relentlessly funny. Instead of a Living Section, it had a Having Section, whose lead
headline was, How to Insulate Your House with Pate. The Globe and The Chicago Tribune and The Philadelphia Inquirer and other
regional dailies haven’t gone quite that far, but the trend is heading that
way.
There are 130 million Americans over 18 outside whose
incomes are down the scale from the publishers’ favored top two quintiles. Their lives have many particularities, and
our fictional mom is only one of them.
This is to say that I did not invent her as a stereotype. I invented her
because my mother was a single parent who worked retail and I know how we
struggled financially. Nonetheless, my
mother subscribed to The Kansas City Star
and read it every day. But that was
back in the old days, the way-long-ago days when I was a kid, when newspapers
still wanted everybody to read them. The Star was a two-section paper
then. It didn’t have fancy feature
sections. And it wanted everybody in
every neighborhood in the city to know about every siren.
My purpose here has not been to pick on the Globe. Given changes in retailing and
thus advertising, the changes in newspapers have been inevitable.
I don’t think my mother, or our fictional mom from East
Boston, would mind a newspaper with these stories in it if the paper also had
stories that addressed their interests.
But the Globe I just picked
apart has no stories offering people with no heath coverage strategies for
getting care without going bankrupt. Or
pieces about how the state gigs low-income people with the lottery. Or analyses of the job market for weekly
wage earners. Or a myriad of other things that are crucial to the lives of
people the newspapers no longer case about.
--0--
Abe Rosenthal wasn’t the only major editor who died this
year. My dear friend Bill Woo, William
F. Woo, also left us. Bill was the
first person to be named anything other than Joseph Pulitzer to be the editor
of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and
after he was run off by a change of management, he taught journalism at
Stanford. I went to Bill’s memorial
service a few weeks ago, and it got me back in touch with the Pulitzer legacy –
not just the prizes, but the philosophy that gave rise to them. When the original Joseph Pulitzer retired in
99 years ago, he wrote The Post-Dispatch Platform, which the paper has
published daily ever since. Let me read
it to you:
I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.
When the original Pulitzer’s grandson was publisher and
Bill Woo was his editor, they’d go to lunch once a week to go over the previous
week’s papers and review how well they’d done in living out the planks of the
Platform. They wanted to make sure that
the paper never lacked sympathy with the poor and was never afraid to attack
wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.
Now, instead of having sympathy for the poor our
newspapers discard them. But so do many
of us in this room. Many of us think
about citizen journalism and blogs as the saviors of democracy, and while they
certainly have impact and show lots of promise, so far they reach a much
smaller and much more rarefied audience than daily newspapers. We talk of readers as the audience, as the
users, and as the people formerly known as the audience, believing that they
are participants in the news process now.
It’s much more accurate to say that some are participants now, and to
acknowledge that the majority do not participate, and no small number never
will. Many of us are committing the
marketing sin of thinking the customers are like us. Some are like us, but most citizens are less educated than us,
and make less money than us, and have far more uncertainty in their lives.
So my plea to all of us, myself included, is that we keep
America’s discarded readers in mind as we work to strengthen journalism and
shore up our withering democracy. We
need to remember that they’re citizens, too, and to take care to make sure they
have easy access to quality journalism that squarely addresses the issues that
affect their lives. Unless we do,
there’s a good chance that our democracy is doomed. Or, at the very best, our
democracy will be disfigured by a class divide that’s the 21st
century equivalent of our nation’s earliest days, when voting was restricted to
white male property owners.
So let’s adopt Pulitzer’s Platform as a creed for
journalism, and heed the call of democracy to get quality news to everybody – everybody. Media performance really is
democracy’s critical issue. Much
responsibility rests on us. If we can’t
do better – lots better – I fear for our nation’s future.
Thank you very much.
_____________________________________
Tom Stites
Newburyport, Mass.
978-499-1807
