January/February 2001

January/February 2001 | Contents

CURRENTS

IN REVIEW:
Private Ownership Rides Again

Public ownership of newspapers is not quite complete. A flurry of new private ownership makes for some interesting media-watching.

HONOLULU

Almost overnight, Gannett's Honolulu Advertiser went from the verge of monopoly to the brink of war. After an antitrust suit blocked Liberty Newspapers' plan to close the 118-year-old Honolulu Star-Bulletin and leave the field to Gannett, David Black, a Canadian publisher, bought the 64,000-circulation Star-Bulletin for $10,000 as part of the settlement.

Black got the Star-Bulletin's name, newsroom employees, and other basic assets. But he lost the office space, advertising, printing, and circulation services the Star-Bulletin had shared with the Advertiser through a joint operating agreement. Critics wondered how Black, who runs the largest privately held newspaper company in Canada, would compete.

Then, in December, Black bought RFD Publications. In addition to a press on which to print his newspaper, and an experienced advertising, distribution, and circulation staff, Black got a 280,000-circulation free weekly, which provides ad revenue and the ability to cross-promote. He plans to add a Sunday edition and to sink $25 million into the Star-Bulletin. Stay tuned.

PORTLAND

Bob Pamplin, Jr. wants to save journalism from the sensational and unbalanced coverage he says is rampant. To that end, the millionaire businessman-farmer-minister-philanthropist -- whose father built Georgia-Pacific into the nation's largest lumber company -- scooped up seventeen weeklies last year in the Portland suburbs and fired up a 50,000-watt all-news radio station. Next month, he plans to launch The Portland Tribune, a twice-weekly broadsheet that will be delivered free to 150,000 homes in the city. His papers will employ 130 reporters and have a combined circulation of 400,000, on a par with the Newhouse-owned Oregonian.

The Pamplin strategy is to keep content local and undercut the Oregonian in the suburbs, the only place that readership is growing. "Advertisers desperately want a choice," he says. "When you can guarantee them circulation equal to the Oregonian's, and you can target each community, and you can put them on the radio, what do you think is going to happen?"

SAN FRANCISCO

We all know that Hearst bought the San Francisco Chronicle and, faced with an antitrust lawsuit, basically paid Ted Fang ($66 million a year for three years) to take the Examiner off its hands. Thus did San Francisco remain a two-newspaper town.

But Fang's attempt to produce the Examiner on the cheap -- a handful of reporters and loads of wire and syndicated copy -- has been plagued by misspellings, truncated stories, and plain old screw-ups (a front-page headline said the NCAA was challenging the Florida vote, when actually it was the NAACP). As if this weren't enough, editor Martha Steffens resigned in mid-December, and managing editor Robert Porterfield was fired soon thereafter.

The Examiner's emphasis on intensely local news could work in San Francisco, which despite its cosmopolitan population is at heart a small town. Still, as one early Examiner defector put it, "They might need a few more reporters."

NASHVILLE

To Brian Brown, a software entrepreneur-turned-newspaper publisher, the death of The Nashville Banner in 1998 left The Tennessean a monopoly and the market hungry for a new voice. As well as a new competitor for advertising.

So Brown defied the naysayers and started The City Paper, a five-day-a-week, intensely local tabloid that launched November 1. Brown, the sole investor and unafraid to tinker, already has redesigned the paper and its distribution system. Out of a press run of 40,000, about a quarter are home-delivered, and the rest are scattered in racks and office buildings around town. Home delivery will soon go from free to $5 a month. Wire copy may also be added.

And although Brown did not intend to go head-to-head with The Tennessean, his thoughts on that, too, are changing. "It was not my goal," he says, "but I think it is inevitable."

SALT LAKE CITY

The Salt Lake Tribune was family-owned for most of its first 126 years. Then, in 1997, for a tangle of tax reasons, the paper became a subsidiary of Tele-Communications Inc. Under the deal that made the Tribune part of TCI, the descendants of Utah's Senator Thomas Kearns -- who bought the paper in 1901 -- retained the option to buy the paper back in 2002. That's how things got lively.

The Deseret News, Salt Lake's Mormon-owned, afternoon paper, wanted to go a.m. The News and the Tribune live under a joint operating agreement. The two papers have been arguing for years over who is to pay the costs associated with the News's switch to mornings.

Then, in 1999, AT&T bought TCI and found itself -- unintentionally -- in the newspaper business. It began looking for a buyer. The family insisted AT&T was legally bound to honor the buy-back deal. But the News wanted AT&T to sell the Tribune to the Mormon church.

In an attempt to extricate itself from this brewing war, AT&T in June solicited bids from both the News and the family. The family outbid the News, and thought it had a deal.

Enter Dean Singleton, chairman of Denver-based MediaNews, with an even higher bid. AT&T announced on December 1 that it was selling the Tribune to MediaNews. The family sued to block the sale, but they lost the first round in court in December. An appeal has been filed.

-- Brent Cunningham

MAGAZINES: A SILICON SAVIOR

Call it Silicon Valley meets the Rust Belt. Since 1976, In These Times has struggled to stay afloat as a class-conscious, left-leaning newsmagazine based in Chicago offering stories about politics, cultural issues, and labor struggles. Circulation peaked at around 38,000 in the late 1980s, but beginning in the early nineties, the paper started a long, sickening slide. Paychecks were skipped, free-lancers were stiffed, circulation fell to under 10,000. As one member of its board of trustees put it, the bi-weekly felt as if "it had one foot in the grave."

Enter Bob Burnett, a founding vice president for engineering at Cisco Systems, who, after retiring in 1991 at age fifty, began casting about for something to do. A sixties antiwar activist who had become a Quaker, Burnett sent ITT's editor, Joel Bleifuss, a complimentary note about an editorial. An e-mail correspondence began. When ITT's publisher, who had stanched the flow of red ink, indicated that she was moving on, Bleifuss asked Burnett if he was interested in taking over. He was. The magazine suddenly found itself rescued by a New Economy magnate with deep pockets and progressive politics. How deep? Burnett says only that he'll invest "a considerable amount."

He believes that a reinvigorated In These Times can prosper by pointing out what others ignore.

-- Daniel Lazare

A MISSING HERO

Truth can be better than fiction. Perhaps Adam Resnick and Nora Ephron, the writer/ director team of the movie Lucky Numbers, should have kept that in mind. The film, John Travolta's latest, got mixed reviews. It is loosely based on the rigging of the Pennsylvania state lottery in 1980, but it omits the true story of a radio journalist who risked his career, and challenged Pennsylvania's highest authorities, to uncover the fix.

In April 1980, the Pennsylvania TV personality Nick Perry officiated at the daily lottery drawing. Numbered, oversized ping pong balls bounced around in transparent vats. A senior citizen volunteer triggered the mechanism that sucked the lucky numbers to the top. The winner: 666. The record jackpot: $3.5 million.

Several days after the drawing, Sandy Starobin, a twenty-year radio reporter for Westinghouse Broadcasting in Harrisburg, got a call. The lottery was fixed, a source told him. Starobin investigated the story for months, following it from the state government to the Pittsburgh mob. He found that Perry and several accomplices had secretly injected the lottery balls with white paint, so that only the fours and sixes were light enough to rise to the top. The conspirators then bought thousands of tickets in combinations of the two numbers and won the money.

Starobin broadcast his story, but when the state Revenue Department investigated, it concluded that the lottery could not have been rigged. Starobin was pulled off the story by his Westinghouse superiors, but he went over their heads to the company's top lawyer, who told Starobin to keep digging.

Eventually, a grand jury convened. Nick Perry, a state Revenue Department official, and several accomplices went to jail.

Starobin subsequently contracted diabetes, went blind, and retired, but after a few days "staring at a wall I couldn't see anyway," he went back on the job, working with young reporters. He died at fifty-one in 1993, best remembered for a number of strong investigative stories and for his signature sign-off: "This is SaaanDEE StarrobiNN."

-- Hugh Bronstein

A KILLER CAMPAIGN

Jeremy Sheets raped and murdered a seventeen-year-old honor student in Nebraska. Jerome Mallet beat a Missouri state trooper and shot him in the head. Cesar Francesco Barone sexually assaulted and murdered three women in Oregon. In interviews, these three death row inmates talked about their childhoods, favorite sports, and nighttime dreams. In photographs, they stared unblinkingly at the camera. It was a controversial series, partly because the nature and details of the crimes were omitted, but especially because on each of those photos, there appeared a small green rectangle that read: "The United Colors of Benetton."

Killers selling sweaters? Or legitimate journalism? Ken Shulman, a free-lance writer from Boston, is preparing for a trial in Missouri that will deal with that question. The case focuses on "We, On Death Row," a Benetton campaign that ran from January to April 2000 and appeared in Talk, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone. Shulman, who has been a stringer for Newsweek, The New York Times, and The International Herald Tribune, worked with the Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani to create "Death Row." The close-up photographs of the inmates' faces, along with the interviews that ask many personal questions, aim to humanize the death row inmates. For this work, Shulman and Toscani both face civil charges of fraudulent misrepresentation and trespass.

Back in February 1999, Thomas "Speedy" Rice, a law professor at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, began sending letters to several prisons to request access for Shulman and Toscani. The letter, which described Shulman as "a free-lance writer with Newsweek," urged prison officials to participate in a "photo essay." "No profits are generated" from this project, explained Rice's letter, which named Benetton as the sponsor.

Potosi Correctional Center in Missouri was one of the prisons that agreed to participate. When Shulman arrived, he signed in, listing "Benetton" under "Business Name" on sign-in forms. However, when correctional officers at Potosi prepared Shulman's intake forms, they took credentials from Rice's letter, listing his business name as "Newsweek." Shulman signed those forms, but claims he paid no attention to the details.

On February 9, 2000, the Missouri attorney general, Jay Nixon, filed a civil suit against Shulman, Toscani, and Rice. Shulman posed as a Newsweek correspondent, Nixon claims, but was really there to exploit the prison and the inmates for the advertising campaign. Potosi prison officials say they thought they were participating in a photo essay. They were outraged to see their death row inmates featured in Benetton ads, and to find that inmate Jerome Mallet was paid $1,000 for working as a model.

"A key issue in this case will be whether the defendants can convince the court that this campaign was not part of an advertising strategy, that it was indeed journalism," says a Missouri assistant attorney general, Chuck Hatfield, who is preparing the state's case.

"I'm proud of the campaign and my work in it," Shulman says. But he could face unspecified punitive and actual damages. A trial is set to begin on October 18.

-- Charles Davis

LANGUAGE CORNER:
Nowhere to Go But Up

It wasn't clear in any of these examples what the writer and editor meant, because the math they used doesn't exist:

* An expert, we were told, said a proposed power plant "would use 150 times less cooling water per kilowatt than neighboring older plants." Multiplying anything by a positive number like 150 can only increase the amount we're dealing with. Maybe the expert meant the new plant would use one one-hundred-fiftieth as much water. Or maybe not.

* Rates of cancer from air pollution, another article said, vary widely, with New York City "four times the national average" (okay so far) and one rural county "five times below the average." If we multiply by five we don't end up "below" anything. "One fifth of the average," maybe? Why make the reader guess?

* A report on a survey of news practices said tough interviewing was "down 160% over two years." But nothing can go down more than 100 percent; once it drops that far, it's gone.

-- Evan Jenkins

For more information on writing right, visit the Language Corner.

PREVIEW:

STRIKING SIMILARITIES?

It seems a cruel twist that just as management and labor lay down their weapons in Detroit, they took up arms in Seattle, where the Newspaper Guild is on strike against The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The P-I dodged the Detroit scenario, but at press time it looked as though the Times would not.

Labor's delusion during the Detroit strike was the idea that Detroit is a union town, and that employers can't prosper there with jack-booted security guards. This notion caused continuing complacency. As late as June, for example, unions declined a $38 million settlement in a lawsuit that accused the owners of bad-faith bargaining. The lawsuit was later dismissed.

Management's delusion was the idea that by replacing striking workers, it could impose its will. The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press did achieve many of their goals. The new contracts, finally ratified in December, do not require workers, many of whom crossed picket lines, to join unions. Among journalists and maintenance workers, only one in five pays union dues. That makes the guild vulnerable to decertification when contracts expire in 2003.

But replacement workers generate a backlash. Combined daily circulation at the two papers was more than 888,000 before the strike and 603,097 at the end. Gannett, which owns the News, and Knight Ridder, which owns the Free Press, sank $300 million in losses and missed profits into the strike itself. Even with the freedom to impose work rules and to cut wages for 170 mailroom and circulation workers by 30 percent, to $11 an hour, the papers earned only about $65 million on $464 million in revenue in 1999. That's a profit margin of about 14 percent, barely higher than before the strike, and well below the margins that Gannett and Knight Ridder expect.

Teamsters president James Hoffa supported the December settlement. He bought ads urging people to resubscribe.

But cooperation came a little late in Detroit. Both sides at the Times might do well to pay attention.

-- John Lippert

LOOKING FOR A LEADER

The newspaper's circulation is under 10,000, but the search for its next executive editor is being closely watched in journalism circles. The newspaper? The Columbia Missourian, a ninety-two-year-old daily staffed by students at the University of Missouri Journalism School. The editors are salaried professionals. The current top editor, George Kennedy, is stepping aside this year.

His replacement will not only have to deal with competition from the Columbia Tribune, the city's family-owned larger daily, but also provide leadership on such issues as newsroom convergence, diversity, and computer-assisted reporting. Applicants are supposed to outline in their letter, "How do you think tomorrow's newspaper should be run?"

-- Steve Weinberg