Bottom-line Journalism: A Newspaper Tradition    

The current wave of whining ignores the fact that cutbacks, penny-pinching and profit-mongering have long been part of the business.

About a month after I became publisher of the Detroit Free Press I found an old photograph under a pile of newspapers on a closet shelf in my office. It was a picture taken in the Free Press newsroom one March evening in 1916. It was not unlike other pictures I had seen of the Free Press taken when the paper was younger: collections of men in vests and shirtsleeves momentarily abandoning the tasks at hand to pose stiffly for the photographer. But the thing that caught my eye was the large table in the lower right-hand corner of the photograph.

It is a substantial piece of furniture with stout, carved legs. The reason I was drawn to the table is because I recognized it. Its distinctive spiral-carved legs were unmistakable.

It had apparently survived the move to the present Free Press building when it opened in 1925, because when I started at the Free Press in 1950 it was being used in an advertising department conference room. I recall seeing it some years later in promotion and marketing before the business operations of the News and Free Press were merged in 1989 and those departments were moved to the News building.

I suspect it is either still being used somewhere or is consigned to a storeroom waiting to be delivered to the next department in need of a durable, well-made table.

I remember looking at the picture and thinking, God love the Free Press. Save a nickel, save a dime.

Thinking about it all again, I find myself wondering if perhaps there had been a Free Press office manager hovering over that 1916 newsroom, regularly cautioning the staff not to inflict unnecessary wear and tear on the table since the plan was to use it for another 75 years or so.

Bottom-line journalism, furniture division.

Curious thing, this preoccupation we all seem to have these days with the notion that America's newpapers are on a fast track to perdition, led by people whose DNA is numbers-based and whose determination to do serious damage to news operations in the name of profits is nothing short of a sacred quest.

This phenomenon seems to have descended on us with a suddenness that appears to imply that the people who own and operate America's newspapers have only recently conceived this innovative corporate strategy that involves the business of trying to make more money than you spend.

It is all seen now as a cataclysmic trend that threatens the continued existence of American journalism as we know it and is being denounced with such regularity in the trade press, in business publications and at meetings of journalism organizations that it seems to have overtaken privacy, ethics, public journalism, freedom of information and Web sites as the new hot topic in the newspaper business.

The truth is, of course, that there has never been a newspaper publisher who, from the moment he or she first decided to put ink to paper, did not understand that a prudent business course should probably involve making a profit. I suspect that, moldering in some dusty German archive, is a letter from the publisher of a weekly in Mainz dated 1440 telling Johannes Gutenberg how much he likes the new type but asking if it might be possible to make it with a less expensive wood since production costs are starting to get out of hand.

So understand that none of this is new. Cutbacks and economies have always been a part of this business and probably always will be. And there will never be a serious shortage of newspaper professionals prepared to complain about even the most insignificant rollback, the rationale being that it may be small now, but it's sure to get worse.

There was a time when all this was called a "downhold," a word that does not have the same kind of business page appeal that "bottom-line journalism" has. Downhold probably originated with the wire services which had--unfairly or not--the reputation of being notoriously penurious. In fact, the Associated Press folks were always fond of reminding the rest of us that their employers had elevated stingy to an art form and that it was impossible to spell CHEAP without AP.

"Once Upon a Distant War," William Prochnau's fine book about the young war correspondents in the first years of the Vietnam War, reports that Neil Sheehan moonlighted briefly on UPI's night desk in Tokyo without pay. His boss, the Tokyo bureau chief, was an accomplished skinflint who, according to Prochnau's book, protected UPI's money as if it were his own and in the mid-1960s complained to a visiting UPI man: "Do you have any idea how much the war in Vietnam is costing me?"

While Sheehan risked his life covering the war, he was besieged endlessly by UPI in Tokyo ordering him to sign up new clients for the wire service and to collect from clients who were in arrears. Especially galling to Sheehan was UPI's repeated insistence that he collect from a Saigon newspaper the money it owed for "Peanuts" and "Bugs Bunny" comic strips. Sheehan, incidentally, got his paying job with UPI after his predecessor quit because he could not live on what the wire service paid him.

The history of American journalism is strewn with outrageous examples of downholds and cutbacks, and not just from small-town dailies trying to make it in tough times. In his book, Prochnau points out that in the 1960s the New York Times deducted $12 a day from the pay of its overseas correspondents who were on expense accounts because of the money they saved by no longer having to pay for room and board at home. This amounted to about 30 percent of the pay of its Vietnam correspondent, David Halberstam.

Halberstam, as reported in Prochnau's book, aggravated his cost-conscious editors in New York not only because he regularly wrote 4,000 words when 400 would have done, but because he sometimes filed the same story more than once, using different cable companies as insurance against the unreliable communications system in Vietnam.

So while Halberstam was filing some of the best and most important war reporting ever done by an American journalist, his editor fretted over cable tolls that were costing the Times 23 cents a word.

At the Free Press in the 1950s and 1960s, new additions to the staff arrived with their own downhold horror stories from the papers that had employed them before they got to Detroit. They joined the after-work crowd in the damp basement bar of the American Legion hall across from the paper, and when the conversation got around to the newspaper's miserliness, which it always did, the newcomers would quickly pick up the beat by offering, "You think that's cheap? Listen to this...."

When a reporter from Iowa was hired at the Free Press we were all impressed with his story of the editor who had the copy pencils sawed in half because copy editors had been throwing away pencils after using only the first half.

When I started at the Free Press in 1950 the copy boys were ordered to only half-fill the paste pots because the copy editors generally used only half the pot during a shift. So at the end of the day the paste pots were nearly empty, as opposed to the "full pot" days when half a pot of cracked, drying paste had to be scalded out of the pots by the copy boys.

There was a time at the Free Press when, in order to get a new notebook, reporters first had to present their old notebook to show that all the pages had been used. All because some functionary examining the notebooks left on reporters' desks discovered some in which only half the pages had been used.

Virtually no aspect of the news operation escaped the squeeze. Travel was high among the targets because you could save more money by not sending a reporter to cover a story in Grand Rapids than you could by under-filling a hundred paste pots.

All travel--even if the destination was only 50 miles away--had to be approved personally by the managing editor. So we were embarrassed but not surprised in 1963 when the Free Press decided not to send anyone to Dallas to cover the Kennedy assassination. The embarrassment was compounded when we learned the Detroit News had sent a reporter to cover the story.

I was working as the weekend assistant city editor two days later when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot. Without bothering to obtain the required permissions, I sent a reporter to Dallas, figuring all I was risking was a journalistic career which, to that point, could hardly be described as lustrous. The reporter, Gene Roberts, now managing editor of the New York Times, left for Texas with a pocketful of money, some of it in rolls of coins, that had been obtained from the circulation department on the strength of my IOU.

Roberts got to Dallas the easy way: He flew. Other staff members had to rely on their ingenuity to get out of town on assignment. The creativity of reporters to devise alternative methods of travel--meaning cheap or free--to get to a story was sometimes awe-inspiring.

But on a summer night in the late 1950s, one Free Press reporter set the standard for all the others when he went to cover the murder of a suburban Detroit woman on Michigan's Mackinac Island, a resort area 300 miles north of Detroit.

Unable to reach the managing editor to get his approval to book commercial passage to the assignment, the night city editor agreed to let the reporter try to get there on his own with the unspoken instruction: Don't spend a lot of money on this.

The reporter hitched a ride on the DC-3 that flew vacation editions of the Free Press to the center of the state, where the papers were picked up by distributors. He rode the last 200 miles in a truck with no front passenger seat, sitting on a bundle of state editions and helping the driver make his drops along the way.

In Mackinaw City the reporter got a free ride to the island on an early morning work boat by agreeing to help the crew unload it when they arrived. A member of the Mackinac Island State Park Commission arranged for the reporter to sleep, without charge, on a cot in the basement of the island's yacht club.

After four days of respectable coverage, he caught a free ride back to Detroit with two state police detectives and was greeted warmly by his colleagues in the newsroom, not nearly so much for his journalism as for his resourcefulness.

I don't mean to trivialize the serious economic problems facing this country's newpapers by reducing it all to a series of anecdotes. I understand fully that these are problems that will not be solved by cutting the copy pencils in half, even if we still used copy pencils. Newspaper operating profit margins have dropped from nearly 19 percent in the mid-1980s to 12.5 percent in 1995. And if costs--especially newsprint--continue to rise, it means newspapers seriously interested in staying in business are going to have to take whatever steps they must to make sure that happens. It has never been any different.

I also quarrel with the notion that newspapers will prosper as businesses when more resources are made available to newsroom operations; that a strong editorial product is somehow a guarantee of success. If that were the case, then the only newspapers closing their doors would be those that are journalistic embarrassments. There are too many examples to the contrary for that to be the case. More newspapers die from bad management than from bad journalism.

In fact, I think American newspapers are better than they have ever been, that they are doing a much better job of connecting with their communities and are providing broader and more insightful journalism than I can ever recall. And if you pay attention to datelines, they do not seem reluctant to send staff to wherever the story happens to be.

What I want to say, finally, is that the only thing new about bottom-line journalism is the name. Newspapers will continue to be a vital part of the life of this country because the people involved in them will see to it.

There will be good times in this business and times that will be less than good, perhaps even painful, and the bottom line will be no more or no less a factor than it has ever been.

As for my decision in 1963 to squander Free Press resources to send a reporter to cover the assassination of a president, it resulted in no serious career repercussions.

I like to think I escaped the wrath of my editors because Gene Roberts bought the famous Oswald personal snapshots from a Dallas policeman for $150, enabling the Free Press to then sell European rights to the pictures to Germany's Der Spiegel, resulting in a considerable profit on the original investment.

Save a nickel, save a dime.