Stories With Happy Endings   

Keith Olbermann's success and USA Today's triumph are valuable lessons for journalism.

Back in the 1970s, before he became a successful novelist, Pete Dexter wrote a column for the Philadelphia Daily News. I don't remember many specifics, but I do recall that it was very edgy, very out there, very different from most local columns in American newspapers.

I was a big Daily News fan for a number of other reasons, but if I hadn't been, I would have bought the paper just for Pete Dexter's column.

Back in the late 1960s, before he became a bestselling author, Joe McGinniss wrote a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer. The city had never seen anything like it. It was very tough and very timely – and very controversial. Joe took on the biggest of targets, the most sacred of cows, without fear. Everywhere you went in the city, people were talking about his column.

Not long ago, someone conducted a poll to determine Philadelphia's favorite journalists. Nearly three decades after he stopped writing the column, Joe McGinniss was getting votes.

Today's newspapers are much better than they were when McGinniss was writing his column. But most of them aren't very distinctive. One city's newspaper feels very much like another's.

ýnd while there are some wonderful columnists with idiosyncratic voices, like the Miami Herald's Carl Hiaasen, too many of today's papers don't have much personality. They seem awfully white bread, awfully safe, as if they are afraid of offending someone.

That's one of the attractions of the online world. In cyberspace there's not the same aversion to moving off of the well-traveled path, the same attachment to the common denominator, the same concern about being too fast for the room.

Like newspapers, television news is hardly the domain of the maverick. There's a cookie-cutter look and feel to network and local broadcasters, and network and local broadcasts.

Which brings us to Keith Olbermann.

 or five-and-a-half years, Olbermann and partner Dan Patrick anchored ESPN's "SportsCenter." Television hasn't witnessed much like it (see "His Way," page 42).

Olbermann was irreverent, provocative, shameless, intelligent, fun, even a little dangerous. Much sports reporting borders on the religious. Blasphemy never looked so good.

And the walk on the wild side worked. People watched. Advertisers advertised. The show was a monster success. It was worth tuning in even if there weren't any results you needed to see, or even if you didn't care about sports at all. The approach overshadowed, and transcended, the subject matter.

While Patrick remains firmly ensconced and en fuego at ESPN, Olbermann is moving to MSNBC later this month to try his hand at news. I can't wait for him to start.

It seems to me that there are many wonderful components to this storyline: a talented commentator who's not afraid to break the rules and follow his own instincts; a network that would let him do it, even though his schtick involved poking fun at its franchise; and an audience that not only accepted the approach, but adored it.

Maybe, just maybe, newspapers could boost their sagging circulations and the network news shows could stem the decline of their market share if they were more willing to stretch. There's a desperate need for interesting voices, provocative voices, voices that you want to listen to because they are so damn compelling.

Journalism, of course, needs to be serious. But not Serious, or sanctimonious, or staid. Journalism, like life, is better with the occasional wink.

There also are lessons to be learned from the saga of USA Today (see "USA Today Grows Up," page 18, and The Business of Journalism, page 60).

One jumps out: In recent years, the newspaper business has been dominated by a near-obsession with short term profits. Let the margin dip a little or the stock price sag, and it's time for the bitter medicine of downsizing and smaller newsholes and closed newspapers. If something's not an instant winner, get it out of here.

USA Today was hardly an instant winner. Parent Gannett (a company not known for ignoring profit margins, to be sure) sank $800 million into the turkey before things turned around.

But the company didn't waver in its conviction that there was in fact a market for this newspaper. Guess it was right. According to AJR columnist and newspaper economics guru John Morton, McPaper is now the biggest profit center in Gannett. It would be more expensive to buy something as profitable.

So sometimes believing in a concept and weathering the losses isn't just starry-eyed romanticism, but also sound business practice.

Speaking of starry-eyed romantics, that's what newsroom executives can be made to feel like when they make their cases to the money wizards about the importance of quality journalism.

ýut the people running USA Today say they have no doubt about what pushed their paper well into the black and what fuels its circulation growth. It's the emphasis in recent years on news, real news, much of it of the expensive enterprise and investigative variety.

Think about it: The paper long identified, and with good reason, with the shallow and the fluff and the glitz became a financial success when it shifted gears and focused its energies and resources on journalistic excellence.

Thank goodness there are some upbeat lessons in life.