Communication 273
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Memo to the class:
The question of newspapers and their owners has been on my mind recently. As I told you, Jay Harris, the former publisher of the San Jose Mercury News, and I are teaching a course at Berkeley called The Public Trust. It's our premise that somewhere in the last 30 years or so, certainly since Al Neuharth took Gannett public in the 1960s, an evolutionary change of then unimaginable proportions took place in the development of America's newspapers. That change turned upside down what we nominally think of as ownership. What had been an intensely private industry, largely made up of family owned newspapers or groups, suddenly and with a breathtaking sweep became a publicly owned industry. Where once these companies were owned by men and women with a focus on news and news values - a focus, if you will, on the public service mission of their family companies - suddenly they became owned by investors with little or no interest in journalism or its public responsibilities. We've talked about this in our class. Remember how I told you that at the Boston Media Conference put on by stock analysts last December, the executives of Gannett, the nation's largest chain of newspapers, never mentioned the word journalism even once? What we haven't talked about, though, is the possibility that a newspaper may have more than one owner or group of owners. I myself hadn't thought much about this until one day in February 1990, when I was in New York to judge the Pulitzer Prizes and a call came from St. Louis saying that the reporters had gone on a byline strike. All hell was breaking loose up in the publisher's office. The byline strike was carried out by members of the Newspaper Guild, which was then in nasty negotiations with the company over the next contract. There had been a lot of fiery rhetoric on both sides. The journalists talked of hitting the barricades, of shutting the paper down. The management made plans to bring in strikebreakers from our Joint Operating Agency partner, the Newhouse papers. It threatened to permanently replace any journalist who didn't cross the picket line and report for work. The byline strike was a step short of an actual work stoppage. It was a last desperate measure before the journalists said, to hell with it, we're walking out. What happened was that the reporters, photographers, graphic artists and anyone else in the Guild who might have a byline in the paper refused to have their names put on their work. (As a union member, Martha, of course, was part of this.) This was permissible in the existing contract. They were trying to embarrass the paper, and they succeeded. As a result of the byline strike, the paper looked both a mess and foolish. Whereas readers had been accustomed to seeing names with stories and pictures, now all these articles and photographs and graphics were appearing as if they had materialized out of thin air. Who wrote them? What was their authority? What was going on down at the paper? The management was furious and talked of disciplinary retaliation. The absence of bylines was affecting the credibility of the paper. It might even cost us money, if advertisers agreed with the Guild. Some executives declared the byline strikers should be fired. What I did was write a column, supporting the byline strike. Not surprisingly, this annoyed my boss, Joseph Pulitzer, but to his credit he merely held his nose and did nothing to keep the piece out of the paper. The business side people fumed. The editor was not supposed to be sympathetic to the union. As the British might say, I was a traitor to my class. Until then, I had been content to think of ownership in the conventional way. The owners of our paper, or of any paper, private or publicly traded, were the shareholders, some of whom had great personal fortunes invested in the company's financial performance. Through their officers and directors, these owners made fundamental decisions affecting the paper's future. What problems need urgent attention? Where should it spend its money -- on capital improvements, acquisitions, a new printing plant? The byline strike in the Post-Dispatch was a protest by journalists against the take-no-prisoners negotiating tactics of the company, which they perceived as a departure from its honorable tradition. Those tactics, they said, were a repudiation of the Pulitzer Platform ("never tolerate injustice") that ran every day on the editorial page. On one level, the strike could be described as a conventional labor action, intended to force a result at the bargaining table. But, as I told our readers, it also could be seen as something considerably more profound. On a deeper level, the strike was an assertion of ownership. It was a statement by caring journalists that they, too, were owners of the paper. And I had come to see that they were right. Journalists are shareholders in the spirit of the newspaper and in its traditions and in the maintenance of its principles. Without these qualities, the richest paper on earth is impoverished. The byline strike, as I saw it, was an exercise of these shareholders' rights to keep the paper on a course. It was disruptive of the day-to-day journalistic process, untidy in the questions it undoubtedly raised in the minds of the readers but ultimately as legitimate, and perhaps as necessary, as any act on the part of a paper's financial ownership to preserve the institution -- in the latter case by making it profitable and competitive. If you are wondering whether my name was on this column, it was. Firstly, the editor is not a member of the Newspaper Guild. He has many opportunities to make his views understood, at every level. More fundamentally, my column was a communication to the readers from the editor, who had to retain not only his identity but the responsibilities that went along with the job, as long as he was in it. You can't do that anonymously. But the shareholders and the journalists are not the only owners of a newspaper. There is a third class of owners, and that is its readers. You might call these the community as shareholders. Without the support and good will of these owners, no paper can survive, let alone prosper. These are owners to which the management and journalists of news organizations are not always sufficiently sensitive or respectful. In countless ways the readers depend upon us. They need us for information -- news of the day and commercial information. They send forth cries for help and understanding: Pay attention to us, they implore. The claims of these shareholders are as valid as the claims of the first owners on profits or of the second ones on tradition. They arrive as complaints, as demands for better service or more consideration, as a plea to be partners in the creation of a better community. Shareholders of wealth and property, shareholders of spirit, shareholders of community -- these did not quite exhaust the list of our owners. There was, finally, the ultimate owner of the Post-Dispatch and every other paper in this country. That owner is America: America the idea, the democracy. America invests in press through the First Amendment. More than money, more than talent, more than dedication, it is this resource that allows us journalists to freely gather and print news. It is this investment that allows us to say, without fear of official interference, what we believe to be the truth. And it is this endowment that provides us with the greatest right of all, a right that is unique to free men and women: the right to be wrong, as long as our error is not the error of malice. If we as journalists betray the owners of wealth, we betray our material benefactors. If we betray the owners of spirit, we betray tradition. If we betray the owners of community, we betray those who depend upon us. But if we betray the ultimate owner, which is our franchise under the First Amendment, by doing less than our very best, every minute and under every circumstance, then we betray all the other shareholders and ourselves as well and all that we stand for as journalists. Regards, Bill Woo
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