Taking Care of Business   

As the economy tightens, interaction between the editorial and business sides of newspapers is becoming more widespread. In its effort to make money, is the industry rumbling unawares down a slippery slope?

Few aspects of journalism are as groundlessly romanticized.

The apocryphal "wall" between newsrooms and advertising departments is often referred to without a hint of self-consciousness as the separation between church and state. Indeed, despite ample evidence to the contrary, it's an undeniable part of the journalism culture to view the newsroom as an oasis separate from the messy details of money and business.

Yet the truth is very different--especially in these tough financial times. While interaction between the two sides of the industry isn't brand-new (see "After the Wall," March 2000), it is becoming more widespread and more nuanced. As an economy in the doldrums results in tightened newsholes and smaller staffs, what was once verboten now looks to some like good business practice.

"There's definitely a great deal more [interaction] as newspapers have come under more financial pressure," says Steve Proctor, deputy managing editor for sports and features at the Baltimore Sun, where buyouts of 140 staffers were announced in December. "It used to be if you had a newspaper in town, you were able to make a steady profit. Now, like so many other things in the world, newspapers are more at the whim of the opinions of Wall Street analysts. There's a lot more pressure to increase the profit margin of the paper, and so that has led to a lot more interplay between the newsroom and the business side of the newspaper."

Proctor is one of many editors at papers across the country who regularly meet with their counterparts in advertising, sharing story schedules for sports and travel and sometimes content. Some even get story ideas from their business departments.

It could just be another part of the business' evolution, a simple push forward into a different way of doing a job. In fact, many editors say despite the financial motivation to work more effectively with ad reps, the important thing--the paper's content--hasn't been affected. But critics and those editors who are resisting the urge to merge aren't so sure this is a good thing. (Sample fear: Realizing that the glass offices won't spend staff resources on a meaty but ad-poor politics section when the reps can really sell weddings.)

Here's the real question--in its race to make money, is the industry rumbling unawares down a slippery slope?

The philosophy is simple: You keep the news and the ads separate because otherwise readers can't trust you. Theoretically, readers look at a page and see clearly which parts of it are produced by (theoretically) objective journalists and which parts are trying to sell them something.

"I'm not naïve. It's not like you learn in journalism school: 'Never the twain shall meet,' " says Holly Mullen, deputy editor for sports at the Salt Lake Tribune. "But I feel very fortunate that we don't have those regular meetings, and we don't have that interaction. I've always completely believed if you do good journalism, isn't that enough?"

Well, maybe. Mullen headed the Tribune's coverage of the 2002 Winter Olympics. There were plenty of plans for special preview sections and stories covering everything from the sporting events to the investigation of the bidding bribery scandal to the social whirl surrounding the Games. What wasn't even on the table was a meeting with advertising folks about all those plans.

"I can honestly say right off the top of my head that I have never sat down with the people in advertising and discussed the editorial calendar," Mullen says. In fact, the only meeting in which ads came up at all was a discussion of page configurations and ad stacks.

But a situation like Mullen's was the exception rather than the rule at the newspapers I talked to, which were a cross section of large and small papers across the country. (Interestingly, both the Tribune and the Denver Post, where Editor Glenn Guzzo cites a travel calendar as the only area where any significant interdepartmental sharing takes place, are owned by MediaNews Group magnate William Dean Singleton. "We are very clear in this operation between what's editorial and what's not," Guzzo notes. "We have a publisher [Singleton] who views news and advertising as very separate things.") At many papers, it's common to have formal and informal meetings to share editorial calendars for primarily feature content--topics such as travel, fashion, entertainment or food--and sports. Events in coverage areas like these are easily anticipated, and there's little harm, many editors say, in simply telling sales reps when the Vegas section is going to run so they can better sell the section. More ads frequently translate into more space for the newsroom to do its job, and on a basic level, they translate into more money for the paper. The latter is crucial these days.

"We supply the advertising department with a schedule of what's running in the travel section, so that they are aware that September 7 is going to be cruises and they can sell this as they choose," says the Baltimore Sun's Proctor, who was part of a now-defunct multidepartment board that met each week to discuss overall marketing and strategy for the paper. "There are broad agreements to cover certain [travel] topics over the course of the year, but nobody tells us which stories to do. It's an effort to make them aware of what's going on."

Proctor says there's much interaction in sports and cites legendary Baltimore Oriole Cal Ripken's retirement as a good example of when the news and advertising sides talked. "The sports marketing committee, of which I'm a member, looks at opportunities for advertising and circulation to take advantage of things that are going to be going on in the paper," he says. "With Cal Ripken, there's going to be a number of special sections that are opportunities that advertising would be able to sell into and circulation would have a chance to put more papers on the street."

Similarly, a key part of Amy Glennon's job at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as "director of innovations" is to help encourage discussions between the newsroom and other parts of the paper.

"You forever hear it in our building, and I think it's symptomatic of a lot of businesses, that communication is never quite what people would like it to be," says Glennon, who assumed her post in July after several editing stints in the newsroom. "We're still very serious about maintaining an editorial wall, so we wouldn't go into content." Nor would Glennon pass along specifics about which businesses might be quoted in a story. "But, for example, the NCAA is coming to Atlanta [this] spring," she says. "If advertising understands that we're going to be doing four preview sections and a fan guide and understands exactly what kind of product we'll be selling, they'll be able to do their jobs better."

While funneling that kind of information wasn't unheard of in the past, more emphasis is being placed on it now as the Journal-Constitution, like other papers, struggles with the bottom line. Late last year, for example, corporate parent Cox Newspapers shuttered the 118-year-old afternoon Atlanta Journal, melding its more conservative editorial-page columnists into the morning Constitution.

"I think there's probably added urgency," Glennon says. "My job evolved before [the economic situation] got too dire; it wasn't completely linked to it. But the sense of urgency, of increasing the efficiency of what we do is heightened by it.... You get more bang for the buck by promoting better, and you get better ads by letting the advertising department know what we're doing. We may not have gone to the lengths before that we're now going to [to] communicate."

Tim Harmon, managing editor of Indiana's South Bend Tribune, says his paper is struggling with the economic downturn just as every paper is. "And I know the ad department is under increased pressure to come up with new sources for advertising, new sources for revenue," he says. "The area where we can cooperate most fully is in trying to create more space for editorial content that they in turn can sell or vice versa. It's kind of the chicken-and-the-egg argument. I use the idea of a senior [citizens] page. Yes, they're trying harder to do those things because they're under more economic pressure, but we want to do them because we think it will serve and bring in more readers."

At the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Assistant Managing Editor/Features and Entertainment Diane Bacha e-mails her contacts in advertising once or twice a month to keep them updated on plans for the section. "It's things like, 'We're writing about fireplaces this week; don't forget that on such and such a day, there's the big Thanksgiving food section,' " she explains. "We want to remind them of that, and I think that's pretty safe territory." Bacha, a 17-year editing veteran who worked at Gannett papers before joining the Journal Sentinel, says she's been teaming up with her advertising counterparts for years. Such communication, she says, pays off in better news space supported by the additional ads that get sold.

At the beginning of this year, Bacha says, newsroom editors were feeling more economic pressure than they had in the fall, and as a result were discussing scaling back editions and printing their television guide in-house. Though nothing was formal as of January, the discussions were bringing about more opportunities to talk about advertising--with the same parameters that had always been in place. "We still try to communicate with advertising on appropriate topics and in appropriate ways," she says.

Editorial calendars are just part of the sharing at the Tampa Tribune, says Cheryl Schmidt, the Tribune's features editor, who until 2001 served as one of the newsroom representatives on a building-wide strategic committee. It's not uncommon for proofs or prototypes to be shared, particularly of new sections or features that are about to be launched. This additional level of information helps the sales reps sell that section more effectively and still doesn't compromise the newsroom's coverage, Schmidt says. Such teamwork with the business side has increased in recent months, Schmidt says: "We have been doing it more in the last few months of 2001 and start of 2002, partly because of the economy. But also we have a new publisher and some new leadership in advertising, and those are factors, too."

Aside from the extra money that such communication is supposed to be generating, building these relationships has other benefits, some editors say. One of the oft-cited arguments against working too closely with the business side is that story ideas get thrown over the transom from ad reps. It's worth noting that a study released in November by the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism found that more than half of television news directors who responded to the survey had been pressured at some point by advertisers to kill or change the slant of a negative story. Pressure to do "puff pieces" on advertisers occurred "constantly" or "routinely," according to the survey of 118 news directors across the country, and one news manager quoted in the study said the biggest change in the newsroom in 2001 was pressure from the sales department on stories because of the shaky economy.

But the Tribune's Schmidt and others point out that not all story suggestions from outside the newsroom are inappropriate. "Just because it's an ad rep who comes to you with a story idea doesn't mean it's a bad story idea," Schmidt says. "We listen and we take it into consideration.... We get some fairly interesting community journalism-type tips."

Such tips are particularly helpful in the wake of high-profile studies that show readers are hungering for more stories about, well, them.

"One of the ways to do that is to really listen to the other employees the Tribune has," Schmidt says.

When it comes right down to it, though, there's nothing wrong with recognizing that you need to work with all parts of the newspaper to keep the budget in the black, says Gregory Favre, a distinguished fellow at the Poynter Institute who capped his 45-year newspaper career with a 14-year stint as executive editor of the Sacramento Bee. That's just the kind of commonsense teamwork that's crucial to running a business--yes, a business--that happens to be a newspaper, he says.

"You've got to make money in order to produce good journalism," he says. "It's just pretty axiomatic in my mind.... These are tough economic times. There's a lot of layoffs and buyouts and downsizing, a lot of anxiety in newsrooms.... Anytime I was going to start a new section, I always wanted to know what circulation, advertising and production thought of it. If you can't sell it, it's not going to last very long. You need to know if they can sell ads for it, if production can run it without putting other sections of the newspaper in jeopardy. You can't find all that out in a vacuum."

Bacha, at the Journal Sentinel, found that teaming with the ad folks helped her get the financial support she needed to launch a new section. "I suggested a seasonal arts and entertainment preview section that would signal the start of the new performing arts season, something that would have a calendar of events and tell the readers what's coming up," she recalls. "I said to the ad department: 'Could you sell this?' They were really enthusiastic about it. And their extra sales gave me extra space. It gave me more 'permission' to use extra space."

It all sounds good. After all, if content isn't really being affected and communication is helping to boost the faltering bottom line, is there really any cause for concern?

Oh yes, say some media critics, who are crying foul on using shrinking profits as a justification for tearing down what remains of the wall between departments. Certainly there have been cutbacks: Knight Ridder, for example, announced a 10 percent cut in staff in 2001 in response to shrinking ad revenues. The New York Times Co. laid off about 1,200 staffers, and the Tribune Co. let go 1,400.

But even though advertising is down and so are the numbers of employees, newspaper companies are still making plenty of money, analysts say. Not as much as before, of course, but profit margins in many cases are still squarely there. The average operating profit margin for publicly held newspaper companies for the first nine months of 2001 was 16.1 percent, according to Morton Research Inc. The typical profit margin for industry at large is 8 percent to 9 percent.

Numbers like those rankle John McManus.

McManus is a former newspaper reporter who directs "Grade the News," a media criticism project run by KTEH public television and Stanford University. The project, centered on Bay Area media, is a staunch defender of traditional journalism values, and so is McManus, who has also written a book about the effects of the market on journalism.

"We're not talking if the news media were to give up [pursuing profits] that they would go dark or cease publishing," McManus says. "We're talking about whether they'd be able to return two or three times as much as the average profit [margin]."

While he's quick to point out that he sees nothing wrong with editorial material that serves both advertisers and readers, he also sees several areas where newspapers hungry to maintain profits are getting into increasing trouble by teaming up with their advertising counterparts.

McManus raps journalists for fluff articles that fill out a section borne mainly of a desire to sell ads; self-censorship in such sections instead of tell-it-like-it-is consumer reporting; and resources spent on writing stories about real estate, food and cars instead of tougher sells like education and politics. He's also worried about what he calls the "subtle surrender" of editorial independence.

"If your newspaper has solicited ads for a magazine section on remodeling your backyard or brides, there's almost an implicit agreement that you're not going to include in that section any articles that would puncture the buying mood," McManus says. "You're not going to have an article in there that a backyard spa might not be a good idea, that it would be something you would use a lot in the first year and then have buyer regret about."

While it may be hard to get riled up over the content of a gardening section, McManus argues that these seemingly innocuous developments are a harbinger of something worse to come. "I think that there is sort of a desperate gamble going on in newsrooms: [the thought that] as long as these kinds of tactics are more or less confined to a special section or a special product--say, the magazine – that readers either won't notice or they won't generalize their skepticism about the motives of the press to other sections of the paper," he says. "And I think that's risky."

With newspapers, he continues, "It's easy to fracture trust and hard to establish it." And it's getting worse, McManus says: "It strikes me that they're gambling more than in the past."

McManus' argument that there are too many soft-sell sections rings true with Steve Geimann, a member and former chair of the Society of Professional Journalists' ethics committee. "I travel a lot, and I usually grab a local paper wherever I am on Sunday. I'll look at the business section, the travel section. I am usually hard-pressed to find anything critical or anything that would suggest a warning to consumers," Geimann says.

"I think that a lot of us who are concerned about the credibility of journalism are fearful that tough times might lead some people to closer cooperation with the advertising department that will be detrimental to journalism," he says. "The Staples Center [flap at the Los Angeles Times in 1999] is the example that I think everybody's afraid of a repeat of. Here's a highly regarded and honored newspaper that in the quest for advertising revenue creates this cooperative venue for a special section where the revenue is shared between paper and advertiser. You could argue that the decision cost the independence of the Los Angeles Times."

Others aren't so sure. Jan Schaffer, executive director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, says while tight finances may be leading more newsrooms and ad departments to work more closely together, that doesn't mean the end of good journalism. "I don't think there's always an overlay of dark clouds and ethical conundrums," Schaffer says. "That's not to say: 'Enter into a Staples deal.' But if these economic times bring those turfdoms closer together, I'm not one of those who think that's always a bad thing."

Echoing Tampa's Cheryl Schmidt, Schaffer says that tapping the resources of the ad reps is one benefit of a closer relationship. "You can find out [by talking to employees across the company] who's here in the community, who's a catalyst, who's a connector, who's the person who gets things done. This can be the kind of stuff the journalists don't have ready access to."

Michael Kilgore has heard the pro-and-con arguments before. He was an editor at the Tampa Tribune for years before switching to the business side, where he served as marketing communications director.

"I would say as long as the editors run the newsroom and decide what's covered, there's no slope, slippery or otherwise," says Kilgore, now the vice president of marketing at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. "I understand all those analogies, the elephant getting its nose under the net and all those kinds of statements, but the reality of it is we have to talk together. It's worse than idealistic to think that any other kind of company could succeed in a business and not have the parts of the business talk to each other. The basic principle still stands: Advertising should not affect coverage."

Agreed, says Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Sales Manager Cathy Ethington. "I always tell the reps, 'It's not, buy an ad, get an article.' "

That said, Ethington thinks there are plenty of revenue-generating areas that aren't being tapped that could help the paper's bottom line. She'd like to build the kind of relationship she has with Bacha in features with other editors in the newsroom. There's health coverage, for example, or business.

"That's a perfect one," she says. "We know when the quarterly reports are coming out; there's always retirement planning. Of course, the other part of that is once we ran a [newsroom-produced] health section tied to open enrollment period, and there were some negative stories about local managed care partners" in the section, as well as advertisers. The result was a new medical advertorial section under the control of the ad department--and without such negative stories. Still, the push for newsroom-generated copy that would sell ads is there, Ethington says. "A whole advertorial is not as powerful as one editorial story."

On the other side of that wall, Bacha is also grappling with content questions. "The travel sections--are they truly there to promote travel, or are they there to raise different questions about value, costs, services? Should we be running a story that raises questions about safety or those kind of issues?" Bacha asks. "To be really honest, we probably would not choose" to do that in a special section.

"It's a gray area," she continues. "I wouldn't say categorically 'No' to any stories that were perceived as critical. I would look closely at the tone--where is this story being played, how fair the story is. But what is the reader wanting to get out of this section? You give them consumer information to help them make choices about where to go. You don't do the investigative piece on rusty holes or fire hazards. You do that another time. All this raises an interesting point, if you think about what I just said--you're acknowledging that the partnership of news and advertising does carry an impact on content."

In Indiana, South Bend Tribune Features Editor Chris Benninghoff has resisted suggestions that she let the advertising department in on what stories will run in themed sections, such as health. "Wednesday is the health section, and while I'm sure a lot of advertisers would be grateful to know if there was a story on plastic surgery or optometry or something like that, that's been particularly difficult to think about telegraphing that kind of information," Benninghoff says. "I don't think you can guarantee what's going to run when, and you wouldn't want to talk to advertisers about what the spin of a story might be. I'm not sure readers could differentiate what came first – whether the story spun out of the advertising or advertising spun out of the story."

The Baltimore Sun's Proctor says one of his constant concerns is the advertorial sections. "I don't know that just because something is produced in advertising, it's immediately recognizable as an advertorial.... When the ad department produces a weddings section--what's the difference between that and coverage that we produce in the editorial section?... We have a whole set of procedures [at the Sun] that we agree to." That includes Proctor looking at prototypes for advertorials. If the content seems close enough to news copy that it might confuse readers, the advertorial section is labeled with a disclaimer that says the section was produced by the advertising department of the Sun and no member of the news staff contributed to its content.

Indeed, whether a line is crossed depends on how clearly the lines are drawn between departments in the first place. Friendly story pitches at one paper can be perceived as downright pushy at another. Even at newspapers where relations are cordial, someone can overstep the boundaries. It's all well and good when the goals of each department coincide. But when they diverge...

"The biggest source of, shall I say, anxiousness, is fashion and [including] local department stores, and that's when we tend to hear a little bit more or get a little bit more hints dropped. It's very uncomfortable, and I think it's uncomfortable on both sides," says Bacha. "Yeah, there have been times when an advertiser has been upset with our choices."

Whether all this sharing results in a stronger or softer paper for readers is a debate likely to continue well into the future. In the meantime, individual newspapers are trying to figure out what arrangement works best.

"I don't think there's any one-size-fits-all," Favre says of how solid a division there should be between news and advertising. "I've always operated with not so much walls but lines of respect in between departments, so that everybody understands the difference between church and state and there's no animosity or antagonistic relationship. I think to set up the hypothesis that they're enemies, that's the wrong way." And, he adds, to create a cozy arrangement in which the two sides "put our hands in each other's pockets, that's the wrong way as well.

"You need something in between. I think there's a relationship that can exist without any boundaries being crossed."