Nothing Succeeds Like Substance   

One of America's leading journalists implores newspaper companies to emphasize solid news coverage rather than flashy gimmicks – before it's too late.

My first newspaper job was with the Goldsboro News-Argus, which is, for the ill-informed, the leading newspaper in Wayne County, North Carolina. It then had a circulation of 9,000. I wrote its farm column, "Rambling in Rural Wayne." Farmers summoned me to the scene whenever there was a significant farming event.

I wrote, for example, about the first farmer of the season to transplant tobacco plants from the seed bed to the field, and about the season's first cotton blossom. I clucked over farmers' wives who made the county's best strawberry preserves and pickled watermelon rind; and they, in turn, clucked over me. I wrote of volatile tobacco prices, of hailstorms and drought. I once wrote about a sweet potato that looked like Gen. Charles de Gaulle.

Because I was linked closely to events that were important to farm families, I--and what I wrote--became memorable to readers in a way that I never was, before or since.

I was reminded vividly of this more than a decade after I left the News-Argus and the "Rambling in Rural Wayne" column. It was in 1968 during the Tet offensive, when I was a war correspondent for the New York Times in Vietnam.

I heard vague reports of trouble in Hue. I made my way there by truck and helicopter and found that the Marines were surrounded and held only two blocks of the city. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese forces held on to the rest. Each day after the Marines were reinforced by fresh units, they retook two or three blocks of the city, only to lose most of it again during the night to enemy troops.

It took about 10 days for the Marines to get 10 blocks or so from their headquarters compound. When they did, they found several American advisers who had been hiding under a house since the night the enemy overran the city. They had little water, even less food, and were hanging on by their nerve ends when the Marines broke through.

The Marines took the survivors to the headquarters compound and, to give them a sense of security, put them in the safest place they could find--a bunker dug deep into the center of the compound. I heard about the survivors and went to interview them.

"My name is Gene Roberts," I said. "I'm with the New York Times. I've come to get your story."

Out of the darkness came a voice, and it said: "Hey, did you ever write the 'Rambling in Rural Wayne' column for the Goldsboro News-
Argus?"

I learned valuable lessons from the News-Argus and my tobacco farmer readers. I learned never to underestimate readers. They can laugh with you at the Charles de Gaulle sweet potato stories, but they expect depth when stories arise that are important to them. I learned that if tobacco prices were going up or down there was no limit to their demand for detail. And when the government banned, as it once did, a very productive variety of tobacco seed, no amount of coverage was too great. I could have written the journalistic equivalent of "War and Peace" and the farmers would have read it.

I wish some of today's publishing executives had been out in the tobacco rows with me. They would have learned that formula and slickness cannot substitute for substantive news coverage.

It's interesting to note that when my old boss, John S. Knight, received the National Press Club's Fourth Estate Award 17 years ago, he reflected on the importance of giving readers a plenitude of solid news coverage. He reminisced, for example, about how he won the newspaper war in Akron, Ohio, and with the Beacon-Journal laid the cornerstone of what would become first Knight Newspapers and then Knight-Ridder, Inc. His strategy was simple: print more news than the opposition. "Too many publishers have forgotten that injunction today," Jack Knight told the club in 1976.

He was right then. And 17 years later, far more publishers have forgotten that it was the most substantive newspaper that became dominant in one competitive town after another: in New York, for example, and Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Dallas and Miami.

Today, as competition diminishes and disappears, many newspapers seem to be in a race to see which can be the most shortsighted and superficial. We are relying too much--far too much--on weather maps, charts, graphs, briefs and color.

If we had looked upon these devices as nothing more, or less, than desirable improvements, then our papers would have been all the richer for the additions. But in far too many newspapers, we introduced these devices while slashing newsroom budgets and newsholes. The result, all too often, has been that instead of becoming additions to news coverage, the devices have become substitutes for news coverage. And this, in a word, is folly.

We, of course, introduced many of the devices in order to reach out to marginal readers and non-readers. This was good. But when we started cutting back on substance, we put serious, devoted readers at risk by becoming less essential to them. And this was, and is, a very bad tradeoff. I think, quite simply, that we are imperiling newspapers in the name of saving them.

Not only is this trend weakening our hold on the most loyal readers, it is causing long-term confusion and instability on our staffs, which further threaten our readership. Evidence of this abounds.

Recently, I talked to a newspaper consultant who estimated that he had given advice to more than 100 newsrooms in the past two years. The consultant found a common problem at almost every paper. The mid-level tier of editors seemed traumatized. (See "Editor Meltdown," page 26.)

The problem? Lack of resources. The mid-level editors didn't think it was possible to perform at an acceptable standard given the resources at their disposal.

You could go to any editors' meeting in the past three or four years and encounter widespread angst. And not meetings of mid-level editors. Top editors.

Reporters are also reeling. Let me tell you just one story. Eighteen months ago, Susumu Shimoyama came here from Japan to study investigative reporting. His plan was to seek out some of the country's best investigative reporters and do a paper on how they practiced their craft. But except at a bare handful of papers, he found it difficult to find reporters who were spending time on projects. Some investigative reporters had been reassigned. Some were leaving journalism. Still others were retiring. All gave the same reason. Their newspapers had lost interest in in-depth reporting.

"I interviewed quite a number of investigative reporters in this country for this project," Susumu later wrote. "There was one common word with which some of them described themselves in spite of themselves. That was 'dinosaur.' "

Susumu abandoned his original plan. Instead, he did a paper titled, "The Demise of Investigative Journalism in American Newspapers."

Hopefully, the gap between what Susumu expected to find and what he actually found led him to overstate the problem. I hope and believe that. But I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

But whether or not investigative reporting is threatened with extinction, it is, without question, seriously battered. So are many other forms of substantive reporting, including steady and persistent coverage of news beats and subject areas.

Much of the newsroom cutting was done in the name of recession-related downsizing, although some companies say that the downsizing is permanent. But the recession is only part of the problem. The real problem is that we're further along in concentration of newspaper ownership and corporatization.

We're now in the second and third generation of professional corporate managers who are judged and compensated on the profits they generate during their tenure, not on what they do to guarantee the survival of newspapers. It should be noted that even in the worst of the recession, average operating profits, as a percentage of revenue, were in the 14 percent to 15 percent range for publicly held newspapers. Many basic American industries never reach that level of profit even in the best of times. And some newspaper companies reached those levels in recessionary times by mortgaging the future, by stripping away the glue that binds our most loyal readers to our papers.

Just how bleak is the situation? Scary to be sure, but not hopeless if corporations become aware that there is no security in superficiality and fadism. Here and there, thankfully, are newspapers--a distinct minority--that understand this and are riding out the recession without shortchanging their readers. And there are executives on still other newspapers who are beginning to worry about what they are doing to the future of their papers by focusing on short-term, rather than long-term, profit goals.

It will be interesting and telling to see, as the economy improves, how much newshole and staff will be restored, and whether management has learned that newspapers are not accordions, that their content cannot be pushed up and down at will without long-term damage.

Let us hope there is enough understanding to produce a strong countermovement for substance and continuity. Let us hope that more executives learn what some of us were taught in the streets and fields where the readers are--that you might get a large audience by being a quick, superficial read, but not an intense, dedicated audience.

And journalistic history is, of course, littered with the corpses of large-circulation newspapers that failed to make long-term and lasting reader relationships and, thus, were viewed as dispensable by their readers and, consequently, by their advertisers.