A
Big Plan
To Stay Small
BRINGING IT HOME: Troy Turner, the
Star's executive editor, head of table oversees a story
meeting. Emphasis at the Star is on local news and on localizing
global stories. © Bill Wilson
BY
LIZ COX
The question hanging in
the air around the conference table at The Anniston Star’s
4:30 p.m. story meeting on this particular Wednesday is: Bibles
or brothels? That is, executive editor Troy Turner wants to know
which story his senior staff thinks is likely to be of more interest
to the newspaper’s 26,173 readers, and therefore merits the
fifth slot in the following day’s page-one lineup: that Alabama
Governor Bob Riley, with some controversy, has begun holding weekly
Bible-study sessions in his Montgomery office, or that the state
of Nevada might begin taxing prostitutes? Because think reader
is one of the guiding precepts at the family-owned Star, and one
to which Turner refers frequently in some variation or another
when talking or writing about the paper. Think reader,
and think big.
The Star is a small daily, but its publisher, sixty-eight-year-old
H. Brandt (“Brandy”) Ayers, has thought big since he
and his sister, Elise Ayers Sanguinetti, took ownership of the
paper upon their mother’s death nearly thirty years ago.
Ayers’s father founded The Anniston Star in 1912 in
this hilly tract of northeastern Alabama, roughly halfway between
Birmingham and Atlanta, and his grandfather ran the Star’s
forerunner for several years around the turn of the twentieth
century. Over time, Anniston’s only daily made a name for
itself as what Ayers and several staff members call a “crusading”
paper, in large part from its pro-civil rights stance during the
1960s — a lonely position at that time in this area.
These days, thinking big often means looking well beyond
the thirty-two square miles that make up Anniston proper. Star
reporters have been dispatched in recent years to Mexico, Cuba,
Brazil, and Russia to write what Turner calls “global-local
stories” — stories from afar that have some specific
local import. While the Star, like many small papers, has
relied on wire copy for news from Iraq, a reporter is poised to
accompany to Iraq an Anniston-based unit of Army reservists trained
in handling chemical weapons, should the unit’s services
ever actually be needed. International reporting is an unusual
priority for a paper of this size, and one that earned the Star
the Overseas Press Club Award in 2001, and the Associated Press
Managing Editors’ International Perspective Award in 2002.
In the late afternoon of this Wednesday, Turner brings two staff
members — Kevin Qualls, one of the Star’s four
photographers, and J. Wes Yoder, a rookie reporter — to his
office to discuss their trip to Durban, South Africa, the following
week. The plan is to report on Habitat for Humanity’s Jimmy
Carter Work Project, which built houses in Durban last year and
will build in Anniston in June. “We want to let Anniston
residents know what kind of results they might expect here,”
Turner says. He also hopes to report on HIV and AIDS while in
South Africa, what he calls “another huge global-local issue.”
Anthony Cook, a former Star metro editor now at The
Birmingham News, says the Star aims to show readers
“why things are happening on the other side of the world,”
and why they matter here “on Quintard Avenue and Noble Street.”
Here off Quintard, north on Highway 21, and up a freshly paved
blue-black macadam driveway, on 78,000 square feet of what used
to be the U.S. Army’s Fort McClellan, sits the Star’s
new headquarters. Ayers bought this land from the Army in 2001
(the fort closed in 1999), and then poured $16 million into this
modern, metal-roofed construction that houses the Star’s
editorial and business operations, and the executive offices of
the paper’s parent company, Consolidated Publishing Company
(of which Ayers is chairman). There are two dailies and four weeklies
in the Consolidated stable — the Star is the largest
by circulation and reputation — and all six papers are printed
here. Three miles separate this place and the former Star
building, just west of the train tracks, where the staff worked
for four decades, though the true distance is best measured in
light. Windows are abundant in the new structure, including eight
skylights. Not so at the old place, where, Ayers says, it was
as if someone “put you in a box for forty-two years and put
the lid on.”
The airy new building is one part of Brandy Ayers’s big strategy
to stay small. In December Ayers announced plans to establish
a nonprofit foundation to ensure that the Star and its
sister papers remain independently owned in perpetuity —
or in Ayers’s words, to “keep our newspapers from becoming
just an undistinguished link in a long corporate chain.”
Under a complicated formula, the foundation will eventually hold
Ayers’s — and his seventy-nine-year-old sister’s
— Consolidated stock. (A portion of the stock will first
go to Ayers’s thirty-three-year-old daughter, Margaret —
who is the only Ayers heir — and then to the foundation upon
her death.) The stock will support the newly formed Ayers Family
Institute for Community Journalism, which will offer a graduate
program in community journalism in partnership with the University
of Alabama. Chris Waddle, the director of the Institute and the
Star’s vice president of news, describes the effort
as “the coming together of a newspaper and a university to
form an honors graduate program in the middle of a newsroom, something
like a teaching hospital.”
Waddle hopes the Knight Foundation, which gave the institute a
$50,000 planning grant, will fund the foundation until it inherits
the Consolidated stock. In the meantime, three task forces are
at work planning the details of the institute’s curriculum,
infrastructure, and student-recruitment process. Waddle anticipates
welcoming the program’s first class — of a dozen or
so students — in the fall of 2004. The mission, Ayers says,
is to diminish the distance between newspapers and the neighborhoods
they cover.
Assorted framed certificates
and plaques adorn a stretch of the Star newsroom’s
interior south wall, including six 2002 Alabama Press Association
Better Newspaper Awards, ranging from Best Economic Coverage to
Best Sports. In 1997 Time magazine called The Anniston
Star one of the “best papers you’ve never heard
of.” Turner boasts in a job advertisement for a new metro
editor: “Our circulation is less than 30,000, but our reputation
is that of a giant.”
One staff member wonders aloud why the Star has this reputation,
which another calls “a bit larger than life,” and which
Ayers says “does not bear close examination,” although
he says it in a way that makes clear that he mostly believes just
the opposite. He ascribes the Star’s standing in the
newspaper world to “a nostalgia for the independently owned
paper that’s also independent in its own community,”
a paper that “loves and spanks.” The Star is
one of a dwindling number of locally owned, nonchain daily newspapers
in the country, and one of a handful in Alabama. Jason Landers,
the Star’s chemical-weapons reporter, has worked for
two comparably sized papers and deems the Star the best,
by far. “The biggest difference — and you can’t
imagine how big a difference this is — is that at other papers,
it seems they’re mostly interested in making their paper
look good to sell to a bigger company,” he says. The priorities
at the Star, Landers says, are to remain independently
owned and “to do good journalism.”
Independent owners, of course, can be as high- or low-minded as
any chain, and just as acquisitive. This does not seem to be the
case in Anniston. Ayers says he aims for a 10 percent profit margin,
less than half of what many publishers target, and that he does
not consistently reach that goal. The $16-million new facility
has something to do with missing that mark. Moreover, the Star
has a full-time editorial staff of thirty-eight, a headcount that
exceeds by almost 50 percent the rough industry standard of one
newsroom employee for every one thousand readers. The Star
is one of the smallest dailies in Alabama to have a correspondent
stationed in Montgomery, the state capital. Also unusual for a
paper the Star’s size, Landers says, is its “commitment
to go after a story no matter where it’s at”; he recently
pitched a piece for which he needed to travel to Portland, Oregon.
“Two weeks later I was on a plane.”
Other Star reporters confirm that they are given a long
leash. And, they point out, they are digging for stories in exceptionally
story-rich terrain, terrain that has attracted big-name media
to Anniston to report on the issues the Star covers day
in and day out. Monsanto produced polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)
at a plant in western Anniston from 1929 until 1971, and the chemicals
are present in Anniston’s soil, water, and the bodies of
some of its residents. Multiple lawsuits are pending. 60 Minutes
came to Anniston last fall and declared it “America’s
most toxic town” — old news to the Star and its
readers. Seven percent of the country’s aging cold war chemical
weapons are stored at the Anniston Army Depot, awaiting potential
incineration, and residents are bitterly divided over how to dispose
of them. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation came to Anniston
in February to report on the community’s preparedness for
an accident or a terrorist strike at the depot. Landers, an Alabama
native, has been writing about these issues for the year and a
half that he has been on the chemical-weapons beat, which has
formally existed at the Star for more than a decade, and
unofficially since the early 1980s.
When Fort McClellan closed in 1999, thousands of civilian and
military jobs disappeared, and Anniston continues to struggle
economically. In 2002 Forbes magazine ranked Anniston last
in business and career opportunities of all ninety-six U.S. metropolitan
areas with populations below 177,000 (Anniston’s population
is 24,296 in a county of 111,338). Local and state economic problems
have been fodder for the Star’s editorial page —
as well as its front and business pages — for years. Among
existing steady jobs in Anniston are those at the Union Foundry,
which was one target of a recent five-part New York Times
series about dangerous workplace conditions. Seventeen days before
the Times series ran, the Star reported on safety
and environmental issues at Union Foundry, over two days, on page
one. Sara Clemence, twenty-eight, is the Star’s environmental
writer and one of the reporters who covered the Union Foundry
story. This is Clemence’s first staff newspaper job, which
she started less than a year ago. “Sometimes it scares the
hell out of me that I’m the one on the ground covering this
stuff,” says Clemence, who has one of the paper’s most
controversial beats, reporting on Monsanto (and now its spin-off,
Solutia), PCBs, and the related lawsuits. Twenty-three-year-old
J. Wes Yoder, who co-wrote the Union Foundry pieces, graduated
from Auburn University in 2001, and has been with the Star
since September.
Clemence and Yoder are not the only relative novices in the newsroom;
six of the Star’s thirteen reporters have been there
for a year or less, and several have limited previous experience.
Like many small-town newspapers, the Star is something
of a training ground, what Turner calls a “learning newspaper.”
Some reporters qualify that, calling it a “learning-by-doing
newspaper,” and noting they do not get as much coaching as
they would like. Either way, it is a distinction, says the former
metro editor Anthony Cook, that is the Star’s blessing
and curse. Turner notes that “rookies take a little longer
to develop, and meanwhile their work is showing up in our paper
every day.” On the upside, the Star gets a steady
influx of idealistic reporters, eager for experience, and the
paper’s reputation draws bright recent graduates (who are
typically paid about $23,000 a year). “I would love to see
the type of newspaper they’d be turning out if the same group
of people were here five years from now,” says Cook, who
concedes that the chances of the Star’s retaining
this reporting staff for that long are “slim to none.”
As Time wrote in 1997, the Star “develops reporters
who make reputations elsewhere” — people like The
New York Times’s Rick Bragg, a native of nearby Possum
Trot, Alabama, and a Star reporter in the 1980s, and Seth
Lipsky, the editor of the year-old daily, The New York Sun,
who covered politics for the Star in the late sixties.
The Anniston Star’s
commentary department, three men strong, is quarantined behind
glass in the southwest corner of the newsroom. Experience reigns
here. Bruce Lowery has worked for the Star for fifteen
years. John Fleming joined the paper in 1998, after several years
of reporting for news wires in Africa. Harvey H. Jackson is a
history professor at nearby Jacksonville State University and
has written for the Star since the early 1990s. Together,
they have criticized President George W. Bush’s unilateral
approach to the Iraq situation, opposed the death penalty, and
come out in favor of incinerating the chemical weapons stored
at the Anniston Army Depot — all controversial stances in
this neck of the woods, and all characteristic of Ayers’s
self-described “love ’em and whup ’em” approach
to journalism.
Not every Star reader appreciates this approach, which
has earned the paper the nicknames The Red Star and The
Scar. Here, too, there is a certain distance between the paper
and some of its readers. Last year, one reader wrote a letter
to the editor saying that the Star is out “to destroy
our city by only printing one-sided, far-left biased political
reporting,” and that the paper “bites the hand that
feeds it.” Another reader recently wrote to cancel her twenty-five-year
subscription because of an editorial that called a war protestor
“thoughtful and courageous.” One Anniston resident,
an employee at the Waffle House on Quintard Avenue, had this to
say when asked about the Star: “It’s too much
bad news.”
On a Thursday in late February, the news in The Anniston Star
is decidedly mixed. Both the University of Alabama and the Auburn
University men’s basketball teams lost key NCAA games the
previous night. A French cement company has announced plans to
build a plant in western Anniston, which will bring a dozen new
jobs to the city. And in the end, it is hard to say which got
better billing — the Good Book or Nevada’s prostitute
tax. An Associated Press version of the Bible studies story shares
space on page one with a Knight Ridder story on Iraq and three
staff-bylined pieces (a typical Star page-one mix). The
brothel-tax story appears on page 8C. But it is teased in bold
on the top-left corner of 1A — sin cash — beneath The
Anniston Star’s tagline: “a home-owned newspaper.”
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Liz
Cox is an assistant editor at CJR.
