Joint Reporting Agreement   

In an unusual move, Virginia's four leading dailies put competition aside and joined forces to examine the state's higher education system.

Somehow, the managing editors chatting over crab soup at the Willow Oaks Country Club in Richmond last April made it seem elegantly simple:

Virginia's four major dailies – the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Roanoke Times & World-News, Newport News Daily Press and Norfolk's Virginian-Pilot – would suspend decades of competition to launch a joint project on higher-education financing, offer it to local radio stations and other state newspapers, and finish it in time to have an impact on the fall gubernatorial campaign.

The editors decided to entrust the project to Dorothy Abernathy, the Associated Press' Richmond bureau chief, and me, the education editor for the Virginian-Pilot and a former Unipresser with an abiding dislike of "the other" wire service. That seemed appropriate.

It was as if, Abernathy would say later, engineers from Chrysler, Ford and General Motors had been directed to design a car together that would please the presidents of their companies, and then persuade all their dealerships to sell it.

Despite a tornado, a hurricane, a pregnancy, a mysterious illness, recurrent nightmares and near fist-fights, our five-part, 17-story series ran in mid-September in papers serving about 1.1 million readers and on radio stations statewide.

We found that state-supported colleges have failed to cut waste in the face of an economic downturn, even while raising tuition faster than most other colleges across the country; that faculty spend little time in classrooms; that colleges don't track faculty productivity; and that Virginia spends far less than its citizens can afford to support higher education, forcing colleges that used to worry exclusively about academics to become mega-fundraisers.

"Good Lord!" Gov. L. Douglas Wilder blurted when asked about the findings. Dealing with an anticipated $500 million state budget shortfall, he didn't wait for us to publish before directing college presidents to prepare for cuts of as much as 15 percent.

Local college presidents, for the first time, vowed publicly to make their institutions more efficient, and academics flooded editorial offices with letters about the series, most of them attesting to how hard they work and calling journalists the anti-intellectual stooges of penny-pinching politicians.

Yes, the mission was accomplished, but there was nothing simple about the undertaking, including that happy journalistic ending.

One of the outraged academics was my husband, an associate professor of neuroanatomy at Eastern Virginia Medical School, who only recently has begun talking to me again.

Each paper assigned a reporter, an editor and a "specialist" – an artist, a photographer, a page designer, an expert in computer-assisted reporting – to the project. Abernathy and I decided we'd better quickly round up everyone for a meeting.

That led to our first complication: Where?

Because we had project members based in Blacksburg, Charlottesville, Newport News, Norfolk, Richmond, Roanoke, Virginia Beach and Williamsburg, we chose Charlottesville, in the middle of the state. Fourteen of us sat around a horseshoe-shaped table, polished off a lunch of chicken salad and scoped out the, well..the ex-competition.

Speaking one by one, we compiled a list of concerns about the undertaking. It was long.

Reporters worried about turf and about being edited by editors from another newspaper; editors worried about the tight deadline and the jeers from newsroom colleagues; some worried that we wouldn't come up with enough new and striking material to justify the cost and hoopla of the project; and everyone worried about sharing sources, coordinating, trust and whether our managing editors were really committed to this.

We also were worried about abiding by what we called the managing editors' non-compete clause. "What if somebody is doing an interview but it's for an assignment that isn't part of the project and they find out something good? Do they have to tell everyone else?" "What if somebody on the paper who's not involved in the project, such as a reporter in the state capital bureau, finds out something about higher-ed financing? Does he have to share, too?" One would think we were accustomed to being swamped with scoops and scandals in education every summer.

Madelyn Rosenberg, a Roanoke reporter who has since become an assistant bureau editor, wondered if the papers would take a unified stance on their editorial pages.

And how could we enter the project in the Virginia Press Association's annual contest, since all the big newspaper competitors would be working together?

Jane Zemel, an assistant city editor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, said later that the project "initially scared just about everyone who heard about it."

But it also excited us. We compiled a second list, not quite as long as the first, of the positive points: the impact the series would have, the novelty, the challenge, the chance to work with different people, and the opportunity to thoroughly investigate an important topic.

?e decided we needed a working title for the project, something more pithy than what we'd been using, "the multi-paper project on college costs." We settled on "Operation Diploma," or "OD" for short, coined by Pilot Art Director Jeff Glick, who obviously had spent too much time doing graphics geared for his paper's large military readership. To avoid confusion, we decided to mail out a form letter explaining Operation Diploma to college officials.

As soon as the word went out, college public affairs directors began to complain that the state's newspapers had ganged up on them. Since then I've wondered whether our letter fueled the repeated charges from academics after publication that the series was biased and criticized the colleges unfairly.

We started with no preconceived notions about what the series would entail. Two weeks after our first session we again lunched in Charlottesville and began looking for ways to narrow the topic.

Or, at least some participants wanted to narrow it. Others argued for great scope and breadth befitting a joint newspaper undertaking. We debated. My head throbbed.

Nothing seemed to be coming together as different people jumped up to scribble ideas on an easel pad:

• "Why are tuition costs rising and so what? Who's being left out?"

• "Why isn't college year-round?"

• "What's the value of going to a prestigious college that is more expensive?"

And on and on.

Coming up with a story list was further complicated because we knew we needed schools and people from every part of the state, and schools at every level, from community colleges to research universities. It was overwhelming.

Philip Walzer of the Pilot proposed doing a story he'd already begun reporting on the productivity of faculty members. The idea stemmed from a growing effort by state legislators to lower higher-ed costs by requiring teachers at public colleges to teach more students. Abernathy wanted to know how it would fit in. Ruth S. Intress of the Richmond paper, who had covered higher ed longer than any of us, doubted that we'd ever get useful statistics showing how professors spend their time. Walzer didn't respond.

The session was tense. Intress, the lone smoker on the team, kept retreating to a corner for relief. She and I were the most vocal; Rosenberg seemed content to listen, and Jim Stratton of the Daily Press threw up his hands in frustration and at times gave up trying to be heard.

Still, we shared an unspoken fear. If we didn't come up with something, we all were going to look bad. That was enough to bond us together, and somehow out of the chaos a preliminary story budget emerged. Though it was to grow and change frequently, at least we had a framework.

Any notion that we'd risen above competition vanished at our third meeting at the end of May. The Washington Post was investigating the split between research and teaching at schools in Maryland and Virginia.

As a member of the Virginia AP, the Post had been informed about Operation Diploma through mailings and the wire service newsletter. Abernathy suggested that we consider inviting the Post to participate.

Silence.

"I heard they thought it was cute that the little papers in Virginia were doing something together," one reporter said.

We began debating whether we could spring the series earlier than mid-September. We couldn't. Ultimately, we decided to proceed on schedule, ignore the Post and hope it didn't beat us.It didn't. On July 19, a story on the front of the Post's Metro section did little more than run through the standard pros and cons of research and classroom instruction and report that state officials were calling for professors to teach more. We had dodged a bullet.

Telephones were just the start of our complicated communications web. My terminal in Virginia Beach was rigged so I could bypass the usual electronic copy procedure and file directly to AP-Richmond, and Abernathy learned to send E-mail through her work station directly to my fax machine, and those of the other team members – at least some of the time. In this way, we passed memos, updated budgets, clips and occasionally, sarcastic cartoons about the relative worth of reporters and editors.

We also attempted, less successfully, two telephone conference calls. Both were expensive and the second consisted of little more than Abernathy's secretary, Joyce DeWitt, cursing as she tried to keep everyone connected and the rest of us either laughing helplessly or wailing, "Are you still there?" We needed the communications to deal with dozens of details, some of them bizarre complications arising from our cooperation.

Even the most routine of changes carried landmine potential. For example, it became clear that Intress' piece on the colleges' failure to economize and Walzer's on the small amount of classroom instruction going on belonged together and early in the series, days two and three. We'd originally put Stratton's piece on fundraising on day three. Abernathy and I agonized about whether the Daily Press would see this as demoting its reporter, and about whether other team members would read favoritism into my pushing up a piece by a Pilot reporter.

As it worked out, Stratton said fine, no problem.

I also had to confront the problem of having to tell a reporter a story doesn't work. Even though he suspects that himself, trusts your judgment and depends on you to tell him the truth, this is not my favorite part of editing. Multiply that feeling a hundredfold when the reporter has never worked with you, has no reason to trust you, and fears losing face in what amounts to a writing contest with his peers across the state.

Things got much more tense at the end of July when team reporters submitted their first drafts.

Rosenberg was trying to finish up early to go on a long-scheduled trip to Europe. Stratton was struggling with his draft while attending to his girlfriend, who was diagnosed with viral meningitis. It became obvious that Abernathy was pregnant. While that didn't slow her up, I knew now why she hadn't fought harder with me to get the deadlines pushed back.

And the fate of Intress' piece came to epitomize a clash of styles that was far deeper than our disagreement about the use of courtesy titles. Virginia newspapers, like others nationwide, are struggling to become more reader friendly, trying out shorter stories, informational graphics and bolder writing that curtails attribution and dispenses with the traditional format of: "He says this, but on the other hand, she says that." Some dailies have experimented more than others, and some of the team members were more comfortable with the experiments than others.

Initially Intress was game to write a short, snappy story – even though she is so familiar with Virginia's higher-ed system that she could fill volumes. But then I mauled her third rewrite of the final-day piece.

After much back and forth, she finally said she wanted me to sit down with her at a computer and show her what I meant. I drove 110 miles to her newsroom and we commandeered a spare terminal in the sports department for a long night. We must have been a spectacle, me pecking in frustration at an unfamiliar keyboard, she walking out repeatedly for smoking breaks, and both of us gesticulating and talking non-stop.

When we were done, a story that had once begun, "Forces of change are battering the ivory tower but Virginia's colleges and universities are stumbling amidst crises of growth, economics and identity," now read, "It comes down to tuition or taxes. Either way you pay."

Intress, author of both, said she would call the next morning after some sleep and a cup of coffee to tell me if she still liked the second version. Luckily, she did.

Rosenberg's personal deadline arrived and she flew off to Europe. Walzer picked up where she left off, continuing the search for financial hardship cases. He interviewed several students and did more rewriting than we intended. Abernathy and I added a contributing line to the bottom of Rosenberg's restored story. Walzer wanted a double byline. Here was a landmine.

We couldn't contact Rosenberg, but we knew we couldn't leave her as the only reporter without at least one single byline. Walzer declined in a coldly polite way to do a last interview. I did it, upset that our team seemed to be crumbling.

Gary Burns, the team's laid-back photo editor from the Times-Dispatch, also went into a meltdown around this time. When an AP photo editor remarked casually that wire service staffers in Washington were going to have a fit when they saw they had to move 40 photos for the project on the network, he exploded. "I don't want to hear that," he said. "The photos have all been shot and the cutlines written. You don't have to do a thing. I want you to just say 'Thank you.' "

Abernathy and I said, "Whew."

Amazingly, Abernathy and I remained calm and friendly under the worst of circumstances. The managing editors never made clear who was supposed to be in charge. We kept it that way and worked as a team. We're very different, too. She is soft-spoken and extremely efficient; I'm loud and impulsive. Still, we had absorbing talks about child-rearing, religion and men.

Technology continued to be a barrier, though. As the final editing marathon began, technicians carried Abernathy's Nokia work station from Richmond to an Atex-equipped office at the Pilot's Virginia Beach bureau. We wanted to edit side by side on familiar software.

The arrangement, however, proved to be too cumbersome. On the first weekend in September I drove to Richmond, moved into Abernathy's house, and with the help of a guide to her system, worked on AP bureau equipment.

Nature also conspired against us.

On August 6, I sent three days worth of edited first drafts to Richmond for Abernathy to start condensing. The AP was planning to run tighter versions of most of the 17 stories in the series for smaller newspapers that could not run the stories in their full 45 to 80 inch lengths. Broadcast versions had to be cut even more drastically. This was an arduous task, and Abernathy pressed to get started as soon as possible. So I was annoyed when I didn't hear back from her.

When I called, she explained that she and about every other journalist in the Richmond area had to cover the tornadoes ripping through a nearby town.

"Oh yeah," I said lamely. I'd stopped caring about news unrelated to colleges. "I can see how you might be busy."

Three-and-a-half weeks later, Hurricane Emily was barreling down on Virginia, and work on the project ceased. Jeff Glick, pressured to finish up the 12 graphics running with the series, was pulled off for storm duty. And I, with my neighbors taping up windows and my scared seven-year-old threatening to move to Kentucky, canceled a trip to Richmond to edit.

Emily hit North Carolina on August 31 and bounced off into the Atlantic. Thank God. Storm follow-ups might have bumped Operation Diploma off display pages.

By September 5, a week before publication, we were exchanging faxes that promised, "The end is in sight!"

Abernathy and I had reached a compromise on what I hoped would be the final landmine, two stories she declared the AP could not move. One was a list of recommendations for students, colleges and government agencies to help make college affordable. The other was a sidebar on the narrow scope of some research being pursued by Virginia professors while big, important problems went untended. The first piece was advocacy, she said, the second too judgmental, and AP members don't want such wire copy. I didn't want to drop the stories.

We agreed that she would offer rewritten versions of those stories over the wire, while the originals would be shared with the four cooperating newspapers.

Then we got bad news from the Daily Press. They were going to use a different series name than the rest of the state. Instead of "A College Education: At What Cost?" it would use "Virginia's College Cost Crunch."

On September 9, Michael Toole, the team designer, called to tell me the Daily Press managing editor had some questions about the series. I asked him what they were. "I'll fax them to you," he replied, and my stomach clutched.

I hovered over the fax machine until his cover sheet inched out. It stated, "Number of pages in transmission (including this page): 14."

I howled and fell onto a couch in the conference room. The fax amounted to 30 questions, which seemed much more manageable than 13 pages of questions, so my heart started beating again. I faxed back five pages of answers. That seemed to satisfy him.

Since the series ran, the governor and state college officials have been waging a war over how much the state should contribute to the schools' budgets.

College presidents committed themselves to cut waste and earmarked 1.5 percent of their annual budgets to devise ways to accommodate more students. They also pledged to study how professors spend their time and how to improve retention and graduation rates.

The State Council of Higher Education has publicly begun talking about the T-word – more taxes to properly support colleges and other underfunded state services – and about finding measures for how well colleges perform.

Much of the debate is still caustic. Letters to the editor from academics and their supporters called the series "misleading," "distorted," "inaccurate" and "the most biased, one-sided piece of journalism I have ever seen." The dean of the University of Virginia's School of Engineering and Applied Science said we picked on an easy mark. "I suspect the series was done," he wrote, "because there's just enough truth to stretch into a series, and any large state university system is just the kind of slow duck that makes an easy and inviting target for investigative reporting." But some correspondents acknowledged that we addressed important questions about faculty workloads and the value of research. And we did get our share of bravos.

The project, including the non-compete clause, terminated on September 12, though the partners – excluding the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which bowed out – briefly teamed up again with the AP for some reaction and follow-up pieces.

Cooperation will apparently continue. The Pilot and the Daily Press have agreed to jointly sponsor and pay for some staff development projects, including speakers, workshops and seminars. The Pilot and the Times-Dispatch are considering sharing projects that are currently being investigated by their education reporters, both recent winners of Education Writers Association fellowships. Readers of both newspapers will get two top-notch projects instead of one.

And happily, Randy Jessee, awards committee chairman for the Virginia Press Association, says he's figured out how we can enter the series in its annual competition. l