A Call to Action   

We need a national commission to examine the news business.

In 1977, I was working in my hometown of Evansville, Indiana, covering the biggest stories of a still-stuttering reporting career. That summer I found myself at Graceland after Elvis died, and after a couple sleepless days I came back to write my blue suede shoes off. That winter the plane carrying the basketball team from the University of Evansville, my alma mater, crashed on takeoff and killed everyone on board. I spent much of that awful night in the makeshift morgue--ironically, the basketball court of the local community center.

That same season in Washington, D.C., Roger Kranz and Valerie McGhee were creating a review of the journalism industry as seen from the perspective of the nation's capital. Like most magazine startups, the creators had a lot more energy than money, and after two years they turned their baby, Washington Journalism Review, over to Henry and Jessica Catto. The Cattos operated the enterprise for eight more years before bequeathing it to the University of Maryland's College of Journalism.

And for the past 15 years we have kept it humming, through times thick and thin--mostly thin. If there's a better way to not make money than publishing a journalism review, I haven't found it.

In 1993, we changed the name to American Journalism Review, to more accurately reflect the broader focus it had already developed. But today's magazine remains utterly true to the mission its founders set forth 25 years ago, which was to keep a thoughtful and critical reporter's eye on our own industry.

We are sometimes teased for being overly earnest. Certainly we are more deliberate than hip. Through the years we have ruffled feathers, pointed fingers and taken enough names to remake "The Front Page" many times over. But we have made legions of fans, too--primarily because AJR, in my humble estimation, is unafraid, is consistently intelligent and timely, and most of all insists of digging deeply into issues rather than offering glib, fact-free thumbsuckers.

Our covers have been graced by what, to the outside world, are the faces of the American journalism industry--Mike Wallace, Al Neuharth, Tina Brown, Barbara Walters and Dan Rather, to name just a few. But inside the business, lesser-known faces were starting to exert control. These were corporate accountants, Wall Street analysts, Washington lobbyists, legislators and regulators. In the name of shareholder value, deregulation and business efficiencies, they have reshaped the journalism landscape. And for all the excellent journalism that occurs today--and month in and month out AJR celebrates that excellence--this landscape is not a sanguine one.

Newspapers are losing readers and market share, while their owners are melding into fewer and bigger monopolies. Newsmagazines are thinning. Network news divisions are shrinking faster than their audiences, and their trademark evening news programs grow less serious by the day. Local broadcast news would go dead if someone unplugged the police scanner. Cable news survives on shoutfests and cults of personality. Radio remains the poster child for how misguided was the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The Internet continues to hold tremendous potential for journalism, but I dare you to name five sites that are doing original reporting.

Impending events will only accelerate these distressing trends. The Federal Communications Commission, for instance, has bundled the remaining issues of cross-ownership and will soon likely relax its rules across that board (see The Newspaper Business). That will speed up the kind of conglomeratization that is asphyxiating true editorial competition.

A few months ago representatives of several dozen journalism schools, media companies and interested foundations met to discuss the state of the news industry. The session was hosted by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and its irrepressible president, Vartan Gregorian, who has long been concerned about the media and their civic obligations in a democratic society.

I suggested then, and will reiterate now, that Carnegie consider broadening this discussion into a blue-ribbon national commission on the news media and democracy. A half century after the Hutchins Commission, the media world is more confused and parlous than ever, the implications of its actions more potentially dire. Carnegie and Gregorian have the kind of clout that cannot be ignored, even by certain media suits who, ironically, prefer to go about their business outside the scrutiny of those pesky journalists.

Twenty-five years from now, I hope AJR is not lamenting this missed opportunity.