A Total Makeover   

A new management team stresses local coverage and sharper graphics in its effort to revitalize the 25,000-circulation Centre Daily Times, Penn State's hometown paper. But is there too much happy talk in Happy Valley?

In 1989, Miami Herald business executive Jim Moss made a mid-career move full of risks and opportunities that very few fortysomethings get a shot at. Leaving one of America's hottest news towns, he went to Centre County, Pennsylvania, a half-rural, half-academic Appalachian enclave where news value is often keyed to Penn State football, corn-planting weather and the opening day of buck season.

The new publisher of the Centre Daily Times came to revitalize what was a bland, error-riddled paper that barely acknowledged local government and politics beyond its home base in State College. As the only daily serving the county's 120,000 residents, the Knight-Ridder property had grown complacent in coverage and, at times, downright unreliable, earning such epithets as the "Centre Daily Trash." What Moss set out to do was publish a paper that would be more open in both its visual impact and its link to readers, many of whom were fed up with the CDT's meager reach.

So mediocre was the paper that Moss, a business-side veteran fresh from a position as assistant to the president of Knight-Ridder's Miami Herald, eventually felt he had to reach into the newsroom and make a painful change. His friend, Executive Editor Robert Ashley, who had arrived two years before Moss, resigned late in 1993, but word spread quickly that Ashley was asked to leave. In March 1994, Moss brought in Deep South native Cecil Bentley as editor. Then the two outsiders went about introducing a controversial new approach that Knight-Ridder and other chains have been pushing across the country. Known as "community journalism" or "public journalism," the movement seeks to reconnect readers with their papers through surveys, reader pages and other vehicles, with newspapers playing a more active role in community affairs.

Reactions so far have ranged from cautious acceptance to a peculiarly durable sort of skepticism among readers who have watched outside editors and publishers run the CDT since Knight-Ridder bought it in 1979. Indeed, reader surveys helped send Ashley packing. Now readers are withholding final judgment – and in some cases being quite picky – while two people who look and sound like anything but central Pennsylvanians try to fix their paper.

Moss, 52, is an African American. Bentley is a white Georgian with a soft drawl who came from newspaper markets where the readerships were about 40 percent black. So Bentley's introduction to Happy Valley, as the area around State College is known, made quite an impression: "Man, when I woke up here my first day, I thought I was in Norway – nothing but white faces and lots of snow."

Their task was nothing less than a complete makeover: Shake up the newsroom, redesign the graphics and, most important, cover local news more closely. Says Moss of a community that gets its only television coverage – sporadic and shallow at best – from distant Altoona and Johnstown: "The unique value that I can provide in my market is local news."

Moss' mission became apüarent the year he arrived, when Knight-Ridder began a series of reader surveys. The CDT was making enough money to keep corporate bean counters happy, but year after year Centre County subscribers found the paper dull and boring, says Moss. "In my 25 years in the business, I've learned that people take their relationship with the paper very seriously and personally, whether they love it or love to hate it."

State College's Mayor Bill Welch, executive editor and general manager of the paper when he left in 1985, says, "The problem was that local reporting had just evaporated. Ashley was a hard news guy who came here from the Charlotte Observer. But we just don't have that many barges running into bridges and that kind of thing. Recognition, in journalism as in fiction, is an important element. People have to recognize their community in their paper.

"In fact, it often seemed..that the Daily Collegian [Penn State's student paper] paid more attention to the community. If the Collegian published obits, the CDT would [have been] in real trouble."

What often characterized the paper was passive stenographic reporting that seldom went beyond the university and the town of State College. "We as a newspaper had alienated so many of our people over the years," says Terry Hess, a former CDT sports reporter now with the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. He heard repeatedly from residents of Bellefonte, the county seat, and elsewhere in outlying regions that the paper cared little for them.

And there was reason to wonder whether the newsroom cared about itself. "Everyone was into putting in an eight-hour day and getting out of Dodge," recalls Hess. It showed: Rep. Gephardt in the lede and Sen. Gephardt in the headline, a photo of a man mowing hay with a cutline that says he's pruning his orchard, and countless errors of omission and spelling that made the paper a laughingstock.

Getting the bleak picture, Moss decided "we needed a sort of a 'come to Jesus' meeting" between Moss and Ashley. As Ashley recalls, the CDT already had more local news than most Knight-Ridder papers its size. "Jim and I did differ on the extent to which we had to pay attention to national news because of the highly educated, cosmopolitan nature of much of our readership, and on the extent and nature of our coverage of Penn State, which I saw as a significant part of our local news mission," says Ashley, now editor of the Messenger-Inquirer in Owensboro, Kentucky.

Moss eventually plucked Bentley, then 45, away from Milledgeville, Georgia, in March 1994, where he was publisher and editor of the 8,500-circulation Union-Recorder, Knight-Ridder's smallest daily paper.

Just three months after arriving, Bentley was sipping coffee one morning and discussing the potential of his new charge, which has a circulation of about 25,000 and a newsroom staff of 36. "I know that size is irrelevant to quality," he said. "In Milledgeville, where we had three to four reporters, a Small Claims Court judge went to jail as the result of an investigation that followed a series by us. He hadn't been audited in ten years."

When a reader called in, Bentley listened for about 20 seconds, thanked the caller and hung up. Grinning, he said it was a reader objecting to an anti-Ollie North editorial. "One thing I think I do better than most editors is learn not to be upset about such calls, and not to argue with them," he said. In Georgia, his paper was one of the first to endorse the hotly debated proposal to remove the Confederate stars and bars from the state flag and, along with the Atlanta Constitution, one of the few papers to back Andrew Young, the former black mayor of Atlanta, in a failed gubernatorial bid. "We got phone calls and letters in both cases," he recalls.

Now he's in Happy Valley, where he found a CDT "that didn't show the energy of a community fueled by a major university." What Bentley brought was what he calls "community journalism, a community talking to itself." It started with listening as Bentley and Moss held several town meetings at which readers asked for more coverage across the county. It meant cosponsoring public forums with the school district on juvenile crime and hidden poverty in a valley that isn't always happy.

Also getting into the act are nine contributing "community columnists" from a wide range of backgrounds. "I told the folks I wouldn't let them libel anybody and, if they're not skilled writers, [I would] do my best to keep them from looking bad in the paper," says Paul Carty, editorial page editor. What he got was everything from a fundamentalist minister sermonizing against adult cable channels to a dairy farmer who said the only way to speed up bathroom lines at Penn State football games would be to remove the toilet seats. So far, the editors are pleased with the results, and expect to bring in more new columnists.

Bentley is also intrigued by what he calls the "rites and rituals" of a community, and insists that the front page carry local features with color art as well as news. "We have to find a way to celebrate what folks do every day," says Bentley. For instance, he says, births are one of our rites, but announcements are nothing but names and weights – clones of each other. "Maybe we could say: 'You've got 50 words to announce your kid's birth, so go to it.' "

But it hasn't all been cutesy and neighborly. In a little over a year, the CDT has done long articles or series on controversial local quarrying that tears up the landscape; young athletes and eating disorders; winners and losers in countywide tax reassessment; judicial caseloads; the effects of a drunken driving death on a small town; a rural area's struggle with plant closings; local gay-bashing; and the lack of low-income housing.

This year, Bentley ordered exhaustive coverage of the most sensitive local issue – consolidating two nearby townships into a regional government centered in State College. The CDT editorialized for consolidation, but voters overwhelmingly rejected it.

In the meantime, Penn State has been clamoring for more coverage of its huge research programs, and Bentley approved a closer look at the university's secretive presidential search. So the day before classes started in January, a box on the op-ed page asked readers to help identify candidates for president. The response was negligible, but the CDT probably helped its own image by challenging the giant institution.

Despite their reservations about the "happy news" associated with community journalism, the more ambitious reporting Bentley has encouraged has pleased the paper's reporters. Business reporter Jim Mackinnon calls his plant closing story "damned exciting.* Reporter Ben Feller, who recently moved to the Greensboro, North Carolina, News & Record, says, "Before Cecil got there, I was just covering sewage rate hikes and planning commissions."

To be sure, dry subjects such as sewage rates and planning commissions are still covered by the paper's nine reporters, stretched thin over a wide geographical area. Mackinnon, for instance, also has transportation and the county government to cover as well as general assignment duties on Mondays. Until recently, he was one of four writers with a regional beat, giving him primary responsibility for 14 municipalities, a school district and the authorities that run sewage, water and public transportation in addition to the airport – plus day and night police on Friday.

But he's not complaining, especially since it wouldn't do much good. "Every paper has a staffing problem," says Bentley, who accepts the CDT's role as a training ground, hopefully for Knight-Ridder. "It's irrelevant to spend much time wishing for more reporters."

And what do readers think of local coverage? Some say it's diminished and are disturbed that Bentley went to three sections from four, killing the local section. He insists that the local news hole hasn't shrunk, with local coverage now starting on A1 and continuing inside along with expanded national and international pages. Bentley also ordered more local stories in a features section that used to be almost entirely wire-driven.

One local official has mixed feelings. "I'm seeing more news about the surrounding townships, which is productive for me because I don't have to call people all the time and ask what's going on," says Ruth Lavin, a State College Borough Council member. "But since they put local and national together, it's difficult for a couple at the breakfast table to manage the mess. It's a real push-and- shove as to who gets the front section of the paper."

R. Thomas Berner, head of journalism at Penn State and a CDT city editor during the '70s, says the paper has improved, but is bothered by some of the content. "It's what I call 'journalism lite,' " he says. "Most of the local [features] that get on the front page have no business being there."

Some of Bentley's staffers are quick to agree. "There is too much soft news on the front," says Mackinnon, 36, who coined the popular newsroom phrase, "happy talk for Happy Valley." "We often work at making a package news instead of making news a package." And Feller, 24, got annoyed because reporters occasionally were pulled off substantive stories to do fillers. "We had to do a story on turkey availability to go with a photo of turkey[s]...in a store," he says. "I question that."

So does Bentley, who bristles at the notion of happy news. "What we're doing is redefining news," he says. "And I don't want to have reporters writing [a story] to go with a photo on the front. If we define local news that way, we're not doing a good job."

Bentley has also reorgaÌized the newsroom to parallel the shift in coverage. An early attempt at a universal desk didn't work because of differences between daytime feature production and nighttime news and sports production.

And every local story is read by two or three pairs of eyes, including a final proof on the page itself. Errors may have fallen off slightly, although it is annoying to see the Penn State soccer coach welcome "parody" in the Big 10 tournament, and "flood plane" in a headline above a story about flood plains. And names misspelled or dropped into a story without either a first name or an ID tag still appear with irritating frequency. "Since I got here, we haven't made as much improvement in errors as I'd like to see," says Bentley. "In a university town, people are quick to circle errors and send them in. We're developing a checklist to catch them."

The almost negligible improvement in reliability stands in sharp contrast to the latest and most noticeable stage of remaking the CDT – its design. Assisted by Deborah Withey, a Knight-Ridder graphics expert from Detroit, Bentley led a seven-month effort that culminated in early May with new daily features sections on rites and rituals, food, trends in technology and fashions, the weekend, home and health, and a "values" section on religion and family life. The look includes more white space and larger text type, and was done without shrinking the news hole and in spite of today's higher newsprint costs. And headlines went from a heavy Helvetica to a lighter Berkeley font, prompting one reader to tell Bentley, "I feel like I'm now getting a gigantic invitation to some sort of ladies' function."

Mayor Welch agrees. "It seems to be standing up and screaming: 'Look at me, I'm well-designed,' " he says. "It doesn't look very newsy. It looks like a weekly, like a style section, like a shopper." But Bentley and Moss say positive reactions outweigh complaints.

What do readers think of this change? It's way too early to gather anything but anecdotal evidence on the redesign, but the emphasis on local coverage and deeper analytical pieces seems to have borne fruit. The last readership survey in the fall of 1994 showed a two-year jump of 10 percentage points in those pronouncing themselves "extremely satisfied" or "satisfied" with the paper. "The numbers are still low," says Bentley, who declined to provide further details from the survey. "But they are within the range now of other small Knight-Ridder papers."

Wherever the numbers go, Moss and Bentley will get the credit or blame. Both insist that Knight-Ridder lets them read their own market and act without interference. Looking back, Bentley recalls, "We've done a lot fast. There's been a sense of urgency about change."

Meanwhile, there are those demanding customers. "For the typical community paper, they're doing an outstanding job," says Welch. "Whether they're doing an outstanding job by this outstanding community is another question."

Moss has learned patience in the face of such skepticism. He knows you can shake up an almost century-old institution, and you can do it quickly, in a matter of a year or two. But bringing the community along at the same pace is another matter. "I am gaining a whole new appreciation," he says, "for the difficulty of deep and fundamental change."