Mr. Roberts' Project   

And how it all too painfully anticipated the latest newspaper cutbacks.

FOUR SUMMERS AGO, I was casting around for a legitimate job, having spent the previous five years contentedly going broke writing two books, researching another and doing some magazine work. Gene Roberts, meantime, was finishing up his tenure as managing editor of the New York Times, packing up all his sundry frogs--gifts from globetrotting friends and staffers--and looking for a partner for his next adventure.
Quite an adventure it turned out to be. I know, because I was there.
Gene invited me to direct an enterprise we called the Project on the State of the American Newspaper. Gene promised it would be the most comprehensive assessment ever undertaken of an industry we both loved but had come to be desperately worried about. And as the series was to be published in American Journalism Review, I packed my bags and headed for College Park, that unlikely piece of real estate where Washington and Baltimore collide like Venus and Mars.
The project was funded by a $2 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the philanthropic giant based in the same city where Gene in the '70s and '80s muscled the Philadelphia Inquirer into a world-class paper. His approach was what you might have expected of one of the industry's seminal editors: Hire the best journalists available, give them their heads and print what they find.
We would let others wring their hands about dwindling credibility and marginal readers. We wanted to get at the problems behind the problems. Our charge was to dig deeply, to scrutinize the media companies and their business practices the way newspapers cover other industries but seldom their own. We challenged our reporters to document the growing and often deleterious (it seemed to us) impact of the corporatization of newspapers, not only on the industry but on society.
So Ken Auletta traveled to Chicago and Fort Lauderdale and Orlando to assess Tribune Co. Cynthia Gorney dissected the bruising, multi-chain battle for San Francisco Bay. Pulitzer winners Buzz Bissinger, James Risser and Peter Arnett crisscrossed the heartland to report back, respectively, on what was happening to weekly and independent papers and why foreign news was vanishing from mainstream dailies. The protean William Prochnau crafted two epic newspaper tales--one about the mean little empire built by the Lords Thomson (father and son), the other about that fabulous redoubt of the Chandler clan, the Los Angeles Times. The husband-and-wife team of Charles Layton and Mary Walton reported in devastating detail how newspapers had largely abandoned the nation's statehouses, then came back with equally strong individual contributions--Charles on the dubious use of newspaper marketing, Mary on the rise of instant chains with owners more familiar with the First Bank and Trust than the First Amendment.
The series began in May 1998, and by the time it concluded in January 2000 Gene had proven true to his word. All told, it ran to 18 stories and something like a quarter million words. Incredibly, many of you read every one of them--or at least said you did. Now the series is being anthologized in two volumes by the University of Arkansas Press. The first book, "Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering," is being published this month and focuses, as the title suggests, on the companies and corporate trends that are reshaping our news landscape. The second, which deals more with newspaper coverage of government, will appear early next year.
The introductory chapter Gene and I wrote for the anthology is excerpted in this issue of AJR, beginning on page 32. If it is a dark piece, it's because the project's writers did not find much room for optimism, and neither do we. Indeed, more than a year after the series ended, its main themes are depressingly current. An industry that reaped unprecedented profits the past few years is responding to our present economic slowdown as if it's 1929 all over again. Editorial staffs are being cut, newshole is being slashed, training is being jettisoned (see "Dimming Beacon?"). Good people are being driven from the business, all in the name of unrealistic and short-term profit margins. The bean counters have won.
Or have they? As is always the case in America, the people constitute one last line of defense. As Geneva Overholser, the distinguished editor and syndicated columnist who also contributed to the series, recently asserted, "One thing is essential to any solution: Readers must become aware of what is happening to their newspapers."
If they do, their indignation will rise and may yet shake the big-desk types who manage not from their guts but from the stock ticker.
If they don't, well...let's just hope they do.