OCTOBER 28, 2006

Gil Thelen tackles "hard truths" of newspapering in 2006 Buchheit Family Lecture

Gil Thelen, one of the nation's leaders in multimedia journalism, gave an insider's view of the newspaper business at the annual Buchheit Family Lecture Thursday, Oct. 26, at the University of South Carolina. Thelen's presentation, "Rogues, Rascals, Nostrums and Hard Truths," included his reflections on newspapering in South Carolina and the enormous changes under way in journalism.

The lecture series was started in 2000 by members of the Buchheit family in honor of the late Phil Buchheit, former president and chairman of Mid-South Management Co. and former publisher of the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. The Buchheit Family Endowment provides undergraduate scholarships, graduate fellowships and doctoral fellowships annually to students in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications.

Presented below are Thelen's remarks. Or you may watch the lecture as a QuickTime Video.

Rogues, Rascals, Nostrums and Hard Truths

by Gil Thelen

It is an honor — and a distinct pleasure — to talk with you tonight in the Buchheit lecture. It is especially nice to be back in Columbia, my home for eight years. Columbia and South Carolina occupy a special place in my career and a very warm spot in my personal life, in part because our two youngest sons were born here and were adopted into our family in the early 1990s. I’m especially glad for my family’s sake that the instinct of enraged South Carolina politicians to shoot editors of The State — an early 20th century occurrence — had by the end of the 20th century evolved to writing snarky letters to the corporate bosses of those offending editors . For those of you too young to remember, it was 1903 when Jim Tillman, nephew of Pitchfork Ben Tillman. assassinated founding State editor N.G. Gonzales.

I have two purposes for tonight. First, I’d like to recount some of my most treasured Palmetto moments. Second, I will discuss the state of newspapering from the vantage point of an editor who later became a publisher. My argument to you is that newspapers have reached a tipping point — a crucial juncture between obsolescence verging on irrelevance, on the one hand, and transformation into vital, full-service, multimedia news, information and entertainment powerhouses.

South Carolina memories

First, South Carolina the unforgettable. This city, Columbia, and this state are rich in memories for me. The memories extend to my college days at Duke in the late 50s. A bunch of us from the ATO fraternity piled into several cars and drove south to Columbia to watch the Blue Devils play Carolina in football. If memory serves, one those brothers was Jimmy Owens, now a retired Columbia internist. On the field, Duke was led by All-America lineman Mike Magee. Mike’s career and mine would later cross in Columbia, he as Carolina athletic director and me as executive editor of The State.

I don’t recall much about the game that fall night, but I do vividly remember my sense of REALLY being in the old Confederacy for the first time. Remember that I grew up in Wisconsin. I learned on that drive that the Carolinas state line separated more than two geographical units. The Durham of Duke, even then, related more to the Washington suburbs than it did to Monument Avenue in Richmond or Gervais Street in Columbia.

The stories

One of my first editing assignments at The Charlotte Observer, which I joined after reporting for 12 years in Washington, was a major project about the life and times of South Carolina Congressman John Jenrette, an endearingly charming rascal if there ever was one. Two of the Observer’s prickliest (to which my editing scars attest) and best writers, Columbia’s Henry Eichel and Washington correspondent Bob Hodierne, chronicled in a multi-part series Jenrette’s adventure — from selling underwater real estate in Myrtle Beach, to outdoor lovemaking with wife Rita on the steps of the Capitol building, to his indictment in the FBI Abscam sting operation.

The themes of South Carolina life I learned as editor of the Jenrette story were ones I would encounter again and again in the 11 years I would spend as editor of two terrific South Carolina papers. For openers, South Carolina language and culture favors subtle and implicit meanings and messages. I’d learn to decode the question “where are you from originally or who is your family’’ to mean unmistakably “you’re not from here, you’re an outsider and you better watch what you say and do.” I pretty much failed that test, mostly on stubborn Wisconsin purpose.

The personalities

South Carolinians cherish jumbo personalities, or at least turn a blind eye to their foibles. Jenrette the charmer was one. Another was Jim Holderman, who played adroitly to the South Carolina inferiority complex by promising world class status for USC. Caught up in Holderman’s gauzy dream, the Palmetto business and government establishment protected him in the face of overwhelming evidence of moral and ethical shortcomings. I regret it was the Greenville News and the Observer — not The State — that called him to account.

Those jumbo South Carolina personalities can also be quite sterling characters. I’ll always treasure hours spend aboard small planes with one of the great story tellers of our age, Alex Sanders. (Alex’s most recent gem, this one about Lindsay Graham: “If I had known how Lindsay would turn out, I would have voted for him.”) And who were more commanding senatorial presences than Fritz Hollings, he of oratorical and sartorial splendor, and Strom Thurmond, the virtuous Dixiecrat. Add to that list of finely etched SC personalities of my acquaintance Joe Riley, the late Carroll Campbell, Richard Riley, the late Isador Lourie, John Land. The list of my memorables could go on and on.

The power struggles

The Jenrette saga also spoke to South Carolinians’ resignation, or was it cynicism, to how public power was exploited for private gain. It wasn’t until the Lost Trust bribery scandals of the early 90s that South Carolina was ready to abandon its system of legislative fiefdoms for the modern system of a balance of power among legislative, executive and judicial branches of government. The newspaper I edited, The State, had much to do with those reforms. It launched a news crusade called Power Failure. The Power Failure series was followed by a highly unusual set of five, televised forums at college campuses that drove the statewide conversation about government restructuring and created unstoppable momentum for reform. That convergence, if you will, of newspapers, commercial and public TV, and higher education foreshadowed what would come later for me in Tampa.

Partisanship or not

A different kind of foreshadowing involved the Citadel and the admission of its first female cadet. The State reported the story vigorously and even handedly. Our lack of partisanship favoring the college aroused the ire of some of its very conservative graduates. Their complaints reached the ear of the chairman of Knight Ridder, Alvin Chapman, Citadel class of 1939. Chapman had engineered the purchase of the State-Record Company from the Morris family a few years previous and was especially sensitive to public perceptions about the transition to Knight-Ridder ownership. Frank McComas, my State publisher, and I spent the next few months convincing Chapman that we were not subversive forces at odds with the best interests of South Carolina. Later in Florida, I would have another guardian of rectitude, TV personality Bill O’Reilly, demand my head for deviations from O’Reilly’s view of how the world should work. My O’Reilly “misdeeds” included alleged lack of support for Christian school holidays and — get this — the Virgin Mary. Bless him for not bringing up The Tampa Tribune’s nonendorsement in the 2004 Presidential campaign. Others, including my top boss in Media General, took me to the woodshed — in public — for that departure from conservative orthodoxy. With full use of the 20/20 retrospectoscope, I am convinced our nonendorsement was the right call — although we could have done it more artfully; time has shown the current administration to be radical, in means and objectives, not conservative.

Higher education and the media

On a less contentious front, a word about the natural partnership of universities and serious news organizations. They each care about raising the quality of civic conversations and solving public problems. I am immensely proud of the groundbreaking work that South Carolina newspapers did with the University of South Carolina. We need more collaborations like the Southeastern Minority Workshop, which centered at USC graduated more than 100 journalists of color; or collaborations like the ASNE/USC credibility project that revealed the core issue the faith community has with journalism. That issue is journalism’s inability to place faith perspectives in secular stories, not the quality of reporting about religion stories. The faith community finds its questions unaddressed and its perspectives ignored in most stories about government, politics and community issues. That breach continues to this day.

The things I learned in the Carolinas (sorry about that Florida) have most deeply shaped my views about how newspapers can lead in their communities and how newspapers should be managed internally.

Community and the media

There is a clear link between the quality of life of a community and the quality of content in its newspaper. Columbia, Charleston, Charlotte, Myrtle Beach, Lexington, Ky., Austin, Texas, Anniston, Alabama, Tampa, Raleigh, Sarasota. All are communities on the move with strong newspapers courageously reporting the good, bad and ugly along the way. As much as civic boosters would like the newspapers to be cheerleaders for their cities, cheerleading does not grow civic muscle. Newspapers that help their communities chart a wise course and dispassionately face facts grow a city’s capacity to recognize and address the challenges of growth and change. While in South Carolina, I coined a phrase for that role of a newspaper. I called it being a “candid friend” to its community, akin to what we count on our best friends to do for us personally: lovingly and diplomatically tell us when our actions fail to square with our aspirations, values and intentions.

The “candid friend” newspaper is one that pays as much attention to the quiet moments in a community’s life as it does to the noisy, confrontational, conflict laden ones. The late James Carey, an eminent journalism scholar, liked to say that most history is about the battles and bloodletting in the middle of mighty rivers; what history rarely records is the quiet family and communal life going on the shores of those rivers in the midst of the combat. The same can be said for journalists as for historians. We must be the recorders of the quiet, constructive lives being lived every day in our towns and cities as well as the mayhem in the rivers.

The culture of an organization

Another of those Carolinas lessons involved what has come to be called the culture of an organization. When I started as an editor at the Observer, I was puzzled by a strange disconnect in our newsroom. The journalists were among the best I’d worked with (witness two Pulitzer prizes we won) but they didn’t look forward to coming to work. The culture was amiss, we would learn by painful self analysis. The management mantra was military: command and control. The top-down approach suffocated creativity and undermined trust and respect among and between the journalists. We would learn much later that this cultural disability, which is common to most newsrooms, was an important cause of slumping readership — our 21st century customer nightmare. (It was a cause because it crushed staff creativity and reinforced dullness in writing and presentation. But more on that later.)

We dealt with the cultural disconnect by creating team structures (the first in any U.S. newsroom to the best of our knowledge), building candid feedback systems, insisting on a learning discipline and empowering professionals to be accountable for their performance guided by editors who acted as coaches rather than drill sergeants. This empowered, team model — developed in Charlotte — was the one I used subsequently to drive change in the Myrtle Beach, Columbia and Tampa newsrooms and their parent organizations.

Convergence or multiplatform journalism

My name is associated with a third C word beyond change and culture. That word is convergence, meaning the organizational junction of print, video, digital and sometimes audio journalism. I find the word convergence isn’t very descriptive or very useful. I prefer to talk about multimedia journalism, now increasingly referred to as multiplatform journalism.

For those of you not familiar with the story, what we did in Tampa was construct and operate the first news structure in the U.S. with a newspaper newsroom, a TV station and an online portal under the same roof. The three — The Tampa Tribune, WFLA-TV and Tampa Bay Online — have a common owner, Media General of Richmond. Newsplex here in Columbia, a joint venture of the University and IFRA, operates on the same multimedia premise as the News Center in Tampa.

The premise is that more and more media customers — yes, customers — want news, information and entertainment when, where and how they desire, not when, where and how it is convenient for a media outlet to deliver it. The multimedia news organization is able to customize content delivery to serve multiple tastes, whether the mechanism is ink on paper, broadcast, web, blog, vodcast, podcast or whatever technical device is coming next. The key element in the equation is content, its quality and convenience. The delivery mechanism is secondary to combining news and information gathering resources to produce verified, credible, useful and authoritative content that is distinguishable from that of competitors.

I believe we succeeded in demonstrating not only the viability of multimedia publishing but its necessity in the fast changing information marketplace. Tribune journalism is quicker, more energetic and more visual due to the close association with online and broadcast. WFLA-TV content is deeper, wider and more authoritative because of the partnership with print. Tampa Bay Online has broadened its lead as the preferred regional portal. Total audience for Media General content in the Tampa Bay marketplace has increased, as has advertising revenue attributable to convergence. WFLA-TV is Florida’s most watched TV news station.

Information on demand

What’s the logic of multimedia or multiplatform publishing? I’ll go back 15 years to a chilling and foreboding comment made by the chemist brother of my managing editor, Paula Ellis. Paula asked him why he didn’t subscribe to a newspaper. He said: “The information I need finds me.” Again: “The information I need finds me.” Fast forward to 2006 and the comment — reported by another Tampa Bay newspaper — of Stephanie Garry, a young woman who edits the Independent Florida Alligator at the University of Florida: “… because we have been raised on the Internet, we see all of this as — that the media caters to our wants and needs whenever we want.”

The words of the Baby Boomer Charlotte chemist and the Gen Y Gainesville editor capture the new media reality: more and more customers — especially young ones — expect information content to be custom catered just for them — and to be free; technology has exploded, bringing multiple delivery devices. The meaning is clear to me: newspapers must evolve to be the umbrella brand that houses the traditional print sheet but also custom products such as city magazines and local health publications, niche publishing such as youth lite newspapers, video and text narrowcasting to handheld devices, increasingly rich and useful web sites with distinct identities jampacked with the information customers desire to navigate their increasingly complicated lives.

Gary Pruitt, chairman and CEO of McClatchy newspapers — the new Carolinas colossus with papers in Raleigh, Charlotte, Rock Hill, Columbia, Myrtle Beach, Beaufort and Hilton Head, gets it right when he says: “I do think that newspapers have a strong future, and it lies in the fact that they will be or are the last mass medium in each local market… (publishing) small niche products or direct-mail programs may seem nitty-gritty or competing at the low end, but it's that kind of business activity that will sustain the high-end journalism in the core."

Improving the product

That high end journalism in the core must get a whole lot better…..fast. Too much of it remains predictable, bureaucratic in perspective, overly long and irrelevant to the daily lives of citizens and customers. If editors and their newsrooms must dial up their energy, innovation and connection with customers and community, so too must their publishers and corporate bosses provide the necessary resources.

The roll call of newspapers cutting their newsroom staffing has become numbing: New York, Boston, Dallas, Baltimore, Orlando, Los Angeles, to name the largest ones. The editor in Dallas, Bob Mong, has my favorite new age sound bite to explain his 20% staff reduction: “I am trying to rescale the paper in a digital world.”

Content, remember, is king and our customers collectively aren’t stupid. Ultimately, I believe, they will choose the media brands that look out for their interests, get the facts right, care about their communities and deliver the goods in the most convenient and accessible ways. Jim Knight, one of founding brothers of Knight newspapers, put it more quaintly, more eloquently, perhaps naively, three decades ago: “If we are fair, if we are accurate…if we judge the news carefully in proportion to its importance, its interest and service, the readers will be with us. Some days they will despise us. Some days they will love us. But be fair and they will read us.”

Improving the profit

The cost-cutting that is reaching muscle and bone in many news organizations is due in large part to unreasonable profit growth demands by the investor community. My former AP colleague Conrad Fink, now at the University of Georgia, calculates that newspapers average about double the 11% profit of Fortune 500 companies but are hammered by what he calls “completely unreasonable” investor demands. “Wall Street knows only one mantra,” he says, “more, please, more.” I agree with his assessment.

Phil Meyer, the Knight professor at the other Carolina, is right to say “the key to (future prosperity) … is a stronger journalistic product...and this is what the industry is missing right now. Instead, they're doing the opposite, trying to save their way to prosperity by cutting back on the product.”

The Knight-Ridder model

It was those insatiable investors who drove my esteemed former employer — Knight Ridder — out of existence. What an incredible shame!

The Knight-Ridder I experienced for 20 years cared deeply about journalism excellence and public service. John S. Knight put profits in the right perspective: "We believe in profitability but do not sacrifice either principle or quality on the altar of the counting house." This viewpoint animated the company for several decades after Jack Knight’s death.

When Knight-Ridder bought the State-Record Co., the marching orders were clear: improve the quality of the papers as well as improve their bottom-line performance. I’ll never forget Jim Batten’s visit to Columbia shortly after I joined The State. Jim was a Knight reporter and editor who had risen to CEO of the company. He cared deeply about how great journalism could strengthen the communities his newspapers served. Jim asked me what it would take to elevate the State newsroom to a new level of excellence. I said our most immediate need was an investigative team costing at least $200,000 a year. He approved my recommendation on the spot. Other investments in our newsroom followed.

Jim’s untimely death from brain cancer in 1995 would mark the beginning of the end for Knight-Ridder. Until then, the company insisted on having a journalist as one of its two top officers. The pairing of a business-side leader with an editor to run the company produced a balanced and open organization that was a magnet for top talent, the key ingredient for enterprise success. Jim’s successor, Tony Ridder, did not appoint an editor as his No.2. Tony’s background was business, not news. The balanced leadership team was gone forever from Knight-Ridder.

I am not suggesting that editors are paragons of all virtue. They do however tend to bring an outlook that encourages healthy internal debate, favors a long-term perspective and rigorously champions journalists’ first amendment responsibilities. The best editors understand leadership. And confident, steadfast leadership at the highest level was conspicuously missing when the financial wolves attacked Knight-Ridder.

Knight-Ridder also lacked the two-class stock system that has so far buffered the New York Times, Washington Post and Media General from the most vicious forms of investor assault. But I am unconvinced that the two-class stock system affords any real protection against the financial attacks that will inevitably come. I have witnessed top executives in two-class stock companies outdo executives in unprotected companies genuflect to stock analysts and abandon strategic thinking at the first sign of profit trouble. Stay-the-course strategic rigor and courageous leadership are essential for any company that hopes to transform itself into the multimedia powerhouse I talked about earlier.

Leadership by design

What does that leadership look like? It’s David Zeeck in Tacoma telling fellow ASNE editors to quit whining about new demands and, as always has happened, find a way to fit new responsibilities, such as writing a blog, into their inevitable 65 hour week. It is Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Miami Herald, issuing this command to his newsroom: "We are beyond being satisfied with incremental change and giving polite head nods toward other media platforms. We are going to execute fundamental restructuring to support that pledge. Every job in the newsroom — EVERY JOB — is going to be redefined to include a web responsibility and, if appropriate, radio.” It is Los Angeles Times rank-and-file editor Bob Baker writing: “If newspapers are going to die, as most smart people seem to think, let's go down swinging. Let's go down like the Texans at the Alamo. Let’s publish the best, most interesting, most audacious stories we can, on our own terms. Let’s not be businessmen. Let’s be artists. Let’s put our art - the stories that we love to write, edit and publish - on the market and see who buys it.” I don’t agree fully with Baker’s sentiment, but I love his fire, which we desperately need more of.

Is returning to private ownership an answer to those insatiable and unreasonable investor demands of today? The Philadelphia newspapers will be ones everyone watches on this one as a group of local business figures navigates private ownership. Instinctively, I’d like to shout go team go! My experience flashes up caution signs about certain kinds of private ownership, however. Those very same Philly newspapers were dreadful rags under the private owner who sold them to Knight-Ridder, Walter Annenburg. The bondholders and bankers who provide private owners the means to finance improvements in their papers can be as brutal task masters as Wall Street stock investors. Recently, those new Philly owners ordered deep staff cuts, citing demands from their bankers in the face of advertising declines. And for every Anniston or St. Petersburg, there’s Santa Barbara, the current soap opera of a private owner running a good newspaper into professional and community disrepute. Michael Kinsley recently warned in Time magazine about the civic and professional dangers of people who got rich in other businesses buying newspapers as play things: “As a rule, rich people don’t buy expensive toys for other people to play with.” By that he means mere staff and community to play with.

Embrace, diversify, transform

No, there are not any easy roads away from the current crisis facing all traditional news organizations. Part of the answer is fully embracing the need for multimedia, multiplatform innovation in content delivery. Another is quickly diversifying our portfolio of products to gain niche audiences and revenues. Yet another is transforming our content to address fully our customers need for relevant, authoritative, unique local news, information and entertainment. Newspaper Next, an important innovation project at the American Press Institute, puts it this way: “The land rush to meet local information needs has barely begun. If newspapers see the opportunities and commit the necessary resources, they can become the preferred providers of a wide range of community, consumer, civic, recreation, entertainment and other information. This will enable them to serve their communities in new ways, attracting new audiences and serving new business customers — a natural fit with their time-honored civic mission of helping communities lead better lives through information.” Finally, the answer is all about talent and leadership, men and women willing to fight to attain the strategic vision of vigorous, enterprising news and information organizations that are essential for democratic government.

Like Jim Batten, I continue to believe in newspapers and their vital role in a democratic society. As he so eloquently and inspirationally put it, “newspapers, well edited, well published, are wonderfully situated to be instruments of helping America find its way, solve its problems and seize its opportunities.”

Good evening. It’s been a great pleasure to be with you again in the heart of South Carolina.

While in South Carolina, he was co-founder of the Southeastern Multicultural Workshop, a university-based program that graduated more than 100 nontraditional minority journalists into newsrooms. He teaches at colleges and universities, is an active member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and has been a Pulitzer Prize juror. He graduated from Duke University and did postgraduate work at Cornell University.