BY BRENT CUNNINGHAM

Rich Oppel, the editor of the Austin American-Statesman, once had a publisher tell him to stop investigating a major advertiser. Oppel threatened to quit, but did not. "Cowardice," he says, explaining why he didn't follow through. "As an editor, you wind up looking principle and pragmatism squarely in the eye. You just can't quit over everything."

Principle vs. pragmatism. News values vs. business values. This dilemma of the modern newspaper is embodied in the relationship between editors and publishers, arguably the most important relationship at a newspaper in terms of the quality of journalism that ultimately gets done. Together, the editor and publisher set and articulate the paper's values, its vision, and its strategy. "This is the crucial relationship at a newspaper," says Larry Jinks, former editor and publisher at the San Jose Mercury News. "It must be a true partnership, where there is power on both sides."

If most situations never reach the kind of showdown that Oppel faced, this relationship is all about striking a delicate balance. "There is no way of avoiding the sensitive nature of it," says Oppel, who declined to name the publisher or provide details, but said it happened before he came to Austin. "We operate in a business with built-in conflicts you don't find elsewhere: the profit goal and the goal of serving the reader. If you vigorously pursue the latter there will be unavoidable conflicts with the former."

Most daily newspapers are publicly owned, but even under private ownership, there is still a business culture and a news culture. Chris Waddle, executive editor of the privately owned Anniston Star in Alabama, gets along well with his publisher, Brandt Ayers. So well, in fact, that they are entering their eighteenth year together. Still, Waddle says most editor-publisher relationships are "based on fear. The publisher is afraid of how much the newsroom will cost him, and the editor is just plain afraid because the other guy holds the purse strings." The difference in his case, he says, is that he and Ayers share a love for and commitment to the community. "That's what these relationships should be based on."

The consequences of dysfunctional editor-publisher relationships are all around us lately. The Staples Center debacle at the Los Angeles Times was the result, at least in part, of a publisher who didn't share the values of the newsroom and who didn't communicate with the editor until it was too late. The publisher, Kathryn Downing, has said that she was trying to respect the so-called wall between business and editorial. But it is precisely at that intersection that business and editorial must meet.

More recently, The Daily Oklahoman gave us a classic case of an irreconcilable clash of values between a reformist, liberal editor, Stan Tiner, and an entrenched, conservative publisher-owner, Edward L. Gaylord. When Martha Steffens -- another risk-taking editor -- bolted the Press & Sun-Bulletin in Binghamton, New York, last November, she cited "deep philosophical differences" with her publisher, William Monopoli. And in January, Steven Smith resigned as editor of The Gazette in Colorado Springs after a publisher Smith had worked well with was promoted, and Smith's new boss "had a different set of perceptions on content and business strategies," according to Smith's published comments in the wake of his departure.

Firings and conflict-fueled resignations are rare. Most editor-publisher relationships absorb the occasional crisis, find ways to cope with the inherent friction, and continue to function, however imperfectly.

It is telling, though, that in most of these recent cases, when the smoke cleared it was the editor who was gone. Tiner, who would not discuss his falling out in Oklahoma, said editors elsewhere serve at "the whims of the publishing gods. If the editor and publisher don't get along, you can win a point here and there, but if you reach a situation where the disagreement is fundamental, then the editor is the one who leaves." Gene Roberts, former editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, says that wasn't always the case: "There has been a shift in the balance of power."

The relationship has changed because the news business has changed. It has become more business-like, complete with sophisticated marketing techniques perfected in corporate America. And the qualities that make a good journalist do not necessarily make a good c.e.o. Not so long ago, publisher meant owner. Newspaper families generally were invested in the communities their papers covered beyond simply owning a nice house in the suburbs and a country club membership. "If you have the right publisher, the paper is not just their toy, it's their reason for living," says Ben Bradlee, the former Washington Post editor who, along with Katharine Graham, formed one of the more successful and storied editor-publisher partnerships. But even in what many consider the classic relationship, managing it often took quirky and decidedly human turns. When Graham came to Bradlee with complaints about the paper, he would often ferret out who Graham had been socializing with in Washington's power circles, in an effort to determine the source, and thus the credibility, of the criticism. "If she came to me more than once about something, I tried to find out where it was coming from," says Bradlee. "It wasn't insidious. She knew I did it. Good journalists want to get at the root of things."

Today, publishers are often local representatives of large media companies based elsewhere. They are on their way somewhere else in the company, and are in town to fix something, to make the paper more efficient. Increasingly, publishers are not harvested from the newsroom. Mike Walker, of the headhunting firm Youngs Walker & Co., says most media companies today want publishers from what he calls the "revenue" side of the business. "Years ago it was nearly a requirement that publishers have news-side experience," he says. "Now, I don't see that very often. The biggest change is that publishers today spend a lot of time dealing with strategic matters, trying to get a jump on where the industry is going, looking at synergistic opportunities with organizations that, frankly, would have been sworn enemies not long ago."

The rise of electronic media threatens newspapers' advertising base and has created an on-demand market for news and information that has forced newspapers to rethink their role. "The pace of change in the industry is breathtaking," says Oppel, who, as the incoming president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, is making newsroom leadership the theme of his tenure. "The business model is changing rapidly, and I am constantly getting into gray areas where I must make decisions without real precedent." For example, the American-Statesman recently partnered with a rival, The Dallas Morning News, to produce a special section on high-tech business recruitment. "The ads are commonly sold by both papers and both papers produce pages for it," he says. "Is it the right thing to do? I think it is, but the key is disclosure. How do I explain that to my reporters? How do we explain it to the readers?"

As the publisher's job has changed, so has the editor's. "Marketing can no longer be a dirty word to an editor," says Walker. "The purists are somewhat disappearing." In the new corporate culture, editors and the newsrooms they guard have lost ground to business demands. As Geneva Overholser, former editor of The Des Moines Register, wrote in the American Journalism Review's "State of the American Newspaper" project, editors have had to become marketers, number crunchers, compromisers, money-makers, corporate creatures, and troublemakers. The problem with this, as Martha Steffens points out, is that there are quantifiable ways to measure success in advertising and circulation, but not in the newsroom. "There it is all about intuitiveness and trust and a feel for the market," she says.

This is not to say that all publishers are dispassionate bean-counters and all editors dispirited department heads. Their jobs have changed in the last twenty-five years, but at the core of the relationship remain two people, and therein lie the keys to both the success and the failure of these relationships. There are as many different editor-publisher relationships as there are editors and publishers. Gil Thelen, executive editor and vice president of the Tampa Tribune, likens it to a marriage. "It's best when you choose each other," he says. "When it's arranged, it's a great challenge."

Before she was hired as executive managing editor in Binghamton, Martha Steffens spent hours talking newspaper philosophy with then publisher Bernard Griffin. They found common ground in their commitment to community journalism. "He and I understood each other very well," says Steffens. When Griffin left for the Springfield, Missouri, News-Leader in 1998, Steffens -- who by then had been promoted to editor and had taken classes from Gannett on how to work with publishers -- wasn't consulted on who her new boss would be. "That's how Gannett works," she says. "The new publisher just arrives, and you are introduced. Bill [Monopoli] and I didn't get a chance to know each other the way Bernie and I did."

Communication is crucial. From regular, honest, two-way communication flow all the things that make a successful editor-publisher relationship possible. Donald Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, has breakfast each Tuesday with Post editor Len Downie. At the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, publisher Diane McFarlin and executive editor Janet Weaver exchange e-mail and phone messages daily, and visit each other when they can. In Orlando, John Puerner, the Sentinel's publisher since 1993 (he left last month to be publisher of the Los Angeles Times), wore a path in the carpet between his office and editor John Haile's, next door. "He was in here half a dozen times a day," Haile says. Once or twice a year the Sentinel's editorial board retreats somewhere for a day to talk. The idea is to develop a philosophical framework that guides the paper editorially as issues arise. "It was really helpful to me when I first arrived," says Puerner. "It allowed me to share my feelings and ideas and hear their views and let them explain the views of this community." Says David Greenfield, publisher of The Repository in Canton, Ohio: "More than any other of my department heads, I have to know the editor personally. I have to understand his priorities, his thought processes. I've got to trust him and he has to trust me, because any given day he could be my ruination."

Then there is the "no-surprises" rule. "Keep me informed on the really big stuff, but don't bury me in minutiae," says Mike Waller, publisher at the Sun in Baltimore. "That doesn't mean the editor has to ask my permission, just keep me informed. If we are about to accuse someone in a front-page story of doing something illegal, I expect him to pick up the phone and let me know that's coming."

Communication helps foster the mutual respect and trust necessary for a true partnership. "If the editor and publisher trust and respect each other you can do a lot," says David Hall, former editor of Cleveland's Plain Dealer, who departed over differences with his publisher. "Without that, you've got a recipe that will guarantee a mediocre paper." When a newspaper breaks a big story -- particularly one that involves accusing powerful people or organizations of wrongdoing -- there usually is a point at which the publisher decides to trust the editor's judgment. In the Pentagon Papers story, The New York Times was already under court order not to publish, and The Washington Post's lawyers were telling Katharine Graham she shouldn't, either. Ben Bradlee, meanwhile, was telling her she had to publish. "It was a pretty well-illuminated fork in the road," says Bradlee. "Kay decided to print, but God knows what would have happened if we had ended up in jail. You're only wrong once in this relationship."

In Charlotte in 1988, when the Observer toppled evangelist Jim Bakker and his PTL ministry, then editor Rich Oppel was ready to run a story that said Bakker paid more than $200,000 in hush money to his secretary, Jessica Hahn. PTL was already boycotting Knight Ridder papers, and Oppel says the losses were big enough that top company executives had taken notice. Publisher Rolfe Neill told Oppel that if he was wrong about the hush-money allegation, it would take the paper a decade to recover. "But he left the call to me," says Oppel, "and we were right."

Both the editor and the publisher must be secure enough with themselves and in their roles to accept, even encourage, challenges from the other. At the Tampa Tribune, publisher Reid Ashe hired Thelen in part because he would challenge him. "Gil is the kind of personality who will encourage me to question myself, challenge me in constructive ways," says Ashe. "If he gets me to see something more clearly and I change my mind as a result, then I win, too."

In Sarasota, Janet Weaver and Diane McFarlin are feeling their way into new roles as editor and publisher respectively, acutely aware of how their close relationship -- forged over the two years that McFarlin was editor and Weaver her managing editor -- is being tested. "Frankly, there are parts of it that scare me," says Weaver. "I don't like or want to disagree with Diane, but her view is a more global one now and my job is to advocate for the newsroom. If I'm going to serve her well, I must represent the newsroom vigorously." The change hit home for Weaver last fall when they started the budget process. In a meeting with other department heads and company executives, Weaver says McFarlin began grilling her "pretty aggressively" on the newsroom budget. "I didn't have all the answers and I knew she did," recalls Weaver. "It was the first time I looked at her and thought, 'Oh yeah, she really is the publisher.' It was uncomfortable." McFarlin's take on the meeting: "I have a different role to play now. I have totally stepped away from the newsroom. I felt it was important to signal to the newsroom that I wasn't going to be a ghost editor."

But the strength of the relationship being tested is what can ultimately see them through. Says Weaver: "If I had the type of publisher who made me feel I had to know the answer to everything -- this sense of being on trial -- I would probably be up on the roof. Diane allows me to admit failing without my feeling like it is being marked down somewhere. That's the thing I value most in this relationship. It helps you trust yourself."

John Puerner, who was a marketing executive for the Chicago Tribune before taking over as publisher of the Sentinel, says he relied heavily on John Haile, his editor, to guide him when he came to Orlando. "It's important to have an editor who understands where your knowledge gaps are," he says. Puerner wasn't clear, for example, on the independence of the editorial page from the rest of the newspaper. "We might endorse a candidate one day and the next day have a news story with some rather unflattering things about him," he says.

All these things -- the communication, the shared values, the respect and trust -- can come more easily if the publisher was once an editor. David Greenfield, publisher of The Repository, has been on both sides of the wall. He says he makes decisions every day based on his understanding of the nuances of the newsroom. For example, a local car dealer -- and big advertiser -- was upset over a story about a lawsuit that had been filed against him. The story came from court records, the result of a beat reporter making the rounds. As it turned out, the suit was without merit, and the car dealer came to Greenfield threatening to pull his advertising, and with specific suggestions as to how the paper should apologize. "In hindsight, we probably shouldn't have played the story the way we did," says Greenfield. "But I made it clear to him he wasn't going to dictate our response. I understood how that mistake could be made. In fact, I think I made it once."

But some of the most effective editor-publisher partnerships have involved publishers with no news experience at all. When Jim Squires was editor of the Chicago Tribune, the publisher, Charles Brumback, had no newspaper background and the two men were drastically different in style. Except in a couple of key ways: both were brutally candid, and neither wanted to do the other's job. "My relationship with Brumback was one of the most successful ever," says Squires. "We got along, I think, because we were totally up front. He once said to me, 'I've been adding up columns all my life.' I said, 'That's fine, because I've been doing journalism all of mine.'" Together they won Pulitzers and made money, but they never became interchangeable. In his book, Read All About It, Squires recounts a conversation he had with Brumback before Squires left the Tribune, in which the publisher paid him perhaps the ultimate compliment: "You were never one of us." Squires explains: "I didn't look at corporate as my allies. I looked at them as someone I could hornswoggle. The corporate ethic was my enemy because I was trying to keep as many reporters on the streets as possible."

Even when editors and publishers trust each other, their interests sometimes clash in fundamental ways. That's when, as Gene Roberts said, the editor loses. But Cole Campbell, the recently departed editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, doesn't like to characterize the relationship in terms of power. "It is a persuasive, deliberative relationship," says Campbell, who joined the faculty at The Poynter Institute in April. "How can the editor make his case? How can the publisher make his? In most situations, conflicts are worked out through deliberation and persuasion, and if you are coming from the same place on values and purpose, then the conflicts can almost always be resolved." When the St. Louis Rams went to the Super Bowl this year, coverage wasn't something the Post-Dispatch had in its budget. Campbell ended up sending thirty people to Atlanta to report the game. What did the publisher say? "He said don't send one person more than you need to." But he let Campbell decide the number. If you're not agreed on values and purpose, however, it's a different story. "The toughest thing to be these days is an innovator," says Campbell. "These large media companies are set up to perpetuate past success. That's just a fact of life today. When you see editors out of their jobs, it may not indicate a news side-business side clash, but rather a different appetite for risk-taking on the part of the publisher or the owner. That was clearly the case with Stan Tiner in Oklahoma. I know Steve Smith is an innovator. So is Martha Steffens."

Power, though, is impossible to ignore. Ownership has always wielded the ultimate power, and if that power is increasingly insensitive to the peculiarities of newspapers and their role in society, then a healthy partnership between publishers and editors is more important than ever. "It takes both the editor and the publisher working together to convince corporate that something needs to be done," says Walker Lundy, editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Even at its best, it is an unequal partnership. "When people talk about this relationship you always hear them say the publisher has an obligation to leave the editor alone," says David Hall. "Well, that's bullshit. He runs the paper. He can fire the editor. Great editors do not make great papers, great publishers do. No editor, over time, can be better than his publisher." But, because it is a partnership, there is a bit more to it. "A good publisher," says Harry Rosenfeld, former editor and now editor-at-large of the Albany Times Union, "will tolerate a good editor, and thus tolerate the flak that comes with publishing an aggressive, honest newspaper."

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe