The Wichita Experiment

Two familiar refrains: if newspapers don't learn to listen to readers and adapt to the way they live, they'll die. And if newspapers treat their content as a mere commodity, they'll lose their souls. And damage democracy. And die anyway.

Newspaper people, as Des Moines Register editor Geneva Overholser noted in a recent speech, are dividing into camps -- the "News Readers Need" bunch vs. the "News Readers Want" gang or, as she described the opposing forces' descriptions of each other, "Arrogant Editors Who Think They Know Everything Yet Are Hopelessly Out of Touch With Their Readers" vs. "Finger to the Wind Marketers Dumbing Down the Newspaper at all Costs."

Wichita, Kansas, is in the middle of the country, and Knight-Ridder's Wichita Eagle is exploring some fertile middle ground in this great newspaper debate. If the ideals of journalism and the needs of readers can be described as a pair of circles, the Wichita effort is aimed at increasing the overlap.

At Knight-Ridder, the emphasis on listening/pandering to the reader (pick your participle) is part of the "customer obsession" drive that chairman James Batten started pushing after he rose to the top in 1988. Like a lot of newspaper executives, Batten had seen that the future, as glimpsed through declining penetration and readership projections, didn't work, and his company began surveying readers with a vengeance.

"Customer obsession" has led to experiments, the most prominent of which is the 25/43 project, named for the age range of the targeted readers. The 25/43 brain trust totally remade The News in Boca Raton, Florida, following the outlines of a vision induced by focus-group fever. "We wanted to see what happens if you do everything with the customer in mind," a Knight-Ridder executive told the American Newspaper Publishers Association convention last year.

In many quarters The News became a symbol of the evils of pandering (see "Doing the Boca," CJR, May, 1991 / June, 1991). At a newsroom retreat last year, Gilbert Cranberg, George H. Gallup Professor at the University of Iowa's journalism school, told former colleagues at The Des Moines Register that, after reading The News, he thought 24/43 referred to the IQ of the target group. "The techniques and influence of marketers," he warned, "have degraded political campaigns, and they could degrade the print press." The dollar-driven newspaper, he added, is a prescription "for catering to the self-interest of readers. What about interest in the larger community?"

Batten, it turns out, seems to have been thinking along similar lines, and about connecting "customer obsession" to the kind of goals the Cranbergs of the journalism world might approve of. In speeches he's been saying that, after three years of massive reader surveys, the finding that jumps out at him is that "people who say they feel a real sense of connection to the places they live are almost twice as likely to be regular readers of our newspapers as those who say they lack such ties." As he told an audience in Lawrence, Kansas, "If we can find ways to enhance these feelings of community connectedness, that may help produce at least part of the readership and circulation growth American newspapers are pushing for."

Batten has taken to quoting John Gardner, the founder of Common Cause, on the declining sense of community in America, and David Broder, king of the political pundits, on the need for political journalism that is centered more on the people than on the candidates and their consultants. At an ANPA meeting last year, he argued that newspapers haven't done a very good job of "enhancing people's appetites for news and information about public issues of the day."

Thanks in part to Batten, and to the Kettering Foundation, which has also been exploring this territory, and to a few editors and thinkers like Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism teacher who is writing a book with the intriguing title What Are Journalists For?, "community connectedness" threatens to become a buzzword in the industry. "So these are problems that we need to see as relating: the loss of readers, the loss of voters; the loss of a sense of place, the declining sense of civic membership; the rising disgust with politics, the decay of public discourse," Rosen said at a Kettering-sponsored panel discussion in New York last September. "Taken together, they lend urgency to my earlier warning, that if public life does not remain viable, the newspaper cannot remain valuable."

One thing that is missing, he added, "is a language that allows journalists to think about the readership crisis as journalists, as members of their profession rather than as adjuncts to the marketing enterprise. It may be advisable then to ask the editorial staff to worry about the problem of disappearing citizens rather than disappearing readers."

Experiments in "community connectedness" are popping up at a handful of Knight-Ridder papers, including the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer in Georgia and The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina, but The Wichita Eagle seems to be farthest down this road. Its editor, Davis "Buzz" Merritt, Jr., addressed the subject at the same Kettering-sponsored forum at which Rosen spoke. "We believe that if we can figure out what makes people connected to their communities, and involved," he said, "that will tell us some things about what our agenda as journalists ought to be." So the Eagle, he said, is "a newspaper in search of an agenda."

Wichita, with a population of 300,000, is a hard-working community with a solid economy based on agriculture, petroleum, and aircraft manufacturing. The biggest city in Kansas, it's afflicted with the standard 1990s urban ills, from a dying downtown to drive-by shootings. It's a flat place, spiked with the spires of some of its 500 churches and a cluster of taller buildings downtown. The tallest is the twenty-six-story Wichita Plaza Hotel, which housed Operation Rescue during the anti-abortion organization's wild "Summer of Mercy" campaign last year. A few weeks later, it housed the Gay Rodeo Riders.

Kansas has always been a bit of a political puzzle to outsiders. On the one hand, liquor by the drink was only recently legalized; on the other, the state has a long history of favoring abortion rights, although to call that issue very controversial would be to understate the matter. After the mostly male state senate used a technicality this spring to avoid voting on a bill to strengthen abortion rights, a measure anticipating the demise of Roe v. Wade, the women in the state assembly responded by sending a pointed message, successfully pushing through a resolution authorizing funds to provide each senator with a backbone. (The senators had avoided the abortion bill with a quick unrecorded voice vote, but the Eagle took names and printed the results.) Carry Nation, the famous tavern chopper, spent a lot of time in Wichita. On the other hand, so did the very symbol of bohemianism, Allen Ginsberg. "So home, traveller," he wrote in his 1966 poem, Wichita Vortex Sutra, "past the newspaper language factory uer the Union Station railroad bridge on Douglas."

At that time the newspaper language factory stamped out two products, the Eagle and the Beacon, both fairly awful. "The Eagle was the absolute lap-dog of the establishment. The Beacon was the scandal sheet," says Jon Roe, a veteran Eagle reporter and columnist. After the Ridder organization bought the papers in 1973 and merged with the Knight chain the following year, Merritt, a tall, courtly North Carolinian, rode into town to clean things up. He presided over the folding of the Beacon in 1980, which was done without any layoffs, and he seems to have earned the respect of his staff.

The bitter "Summer of Mercy," in which 1,786 people were arrested in Wichita over forty-five days, was one event that helped alert Merritt to the possibility that the Eagle was somewhat out of touch with its readers. "I don't think we knew enough about our community to know that that many people would invest that much of their time and energy" on both sides of the issue, he says. Another stunner was the 1990 state Democratic gubernatorial primary campaign, when Joan Finney first ran. "All the wisdom and political experience of the newspaper said she didn't have a chance," Merritt says. "Obviously, she knew more about what people were thinking than we did." Finney, a harp-playing, anti-abortion former state treasurer, won the primary and in now the governor.

In the primary, according to Merritt and other Eagle editors, both Finney and the winner on the Republican side, Mike Hayden, were maddeningly vague on a number of serious issues facing the state, especially taxes and finance. In September 1990, as Finney and Hayden squared off for the general election, Merritt wrote a Sunday column announcing a significant change in campaign coverage aimed at preventing such evasion. "We believe the voters are entitled to have the candidates talk about the issues in depth," he wrote. To make that happen, he announced that his reporters would be under orders to press hard to make the candidates fully address the major issues, or "pointedly" report the fact if they did not. "That has not always been the case with our and other reporters, and American democracy has been the loser," he wrote. "Voter participation is falling rapidly; voter interest in candidates and campaigns is flagging even more. Many reasons exist for this, but prominent among them is that people are feup with and numbed by slick, no-brainer, packaged candidates and campaigns. Why bother when you can't find out what anybody stands for except motherhood and apple pie?"

This was the opening gun for the Eagle's "Voter Project," innovations in political coverage subsidized in part by Knight-Ridder and grounded in the "community connectedness" thinking that had been going on both at the Eagle and at corporate headquarters in Miami. One of the goals -- in the 1990 race, in a 1991 local election, and in the 1992 Kansas presidential primary -- was simply to raise the level of the campaigns. But as Eagle managing editor Steven A. Smith wrote in National Civic Review last summer, the real goal is more ambitious -- to "generate new interest in the political process and reverse decades-long declines in voting behavior," not to mention newspaper reading.

One way the Eagle broke new ground was in how it decided which issues to emphasize. "I don't know how many times I've heard that newspapers shouldn't set the agenda, they should report other people's agendas," says Smith. "But the fact is, nobody is setting the agenda. The public has an agenda, and our job is to find out what that is and see that it gets covered." Using a research consultant and the paper's own research department, the paper interviewed some 500 local residents about important state problems. Then, using those data, the Eagle picked the set of issues -- education, taxes, economic development, and so forth -- on which coverage would center.

In addition to long takeouts on each of the various issues, the paper covered them in short form every Sunday in "Where They Stand" features that gave some background on each issue and summarized the candidate's position on it to date. Or their lack of a position. Finney's agricultural ideas, for example, were summarized in an October 7 "Election Watch" this way: "Wants agriculture secretary elected by all voters. No other stated position on agricultural issue. This week: did not talk about it." Editors say the candidates were often upset with the summaries, but soon were regularly feeding shifts in their positions to the Eagle, the most important paper in the state. The Eagle was also more aggressive than it had been in other political coverage, such as analyzing political advertisements and printing transcripts of important debates, speeches, and press conferences. Finney was particularly bitter about the verbatim publication of an inchoate answer she had given at a press conference on the subject of ortion.

"I don't know about other papers, but here it took a while to reeducate ourselves to become aggressive about issues," Smith says. "We had become transcribers to political campaigns -- getting A's statement and B's response and so forth. We had to train ourselves to be a little nasty." The paper's post-election research, Smith says, showed that people inside the Eagle's circulation area understood the issues much better than those outside it. Journalists' usual abhorrence of redundancy notwithstanding, Eagle editors came to believe that this was largely the result of the weekly repetition in its Election Watch section.

The other half of the Voter Project was also something new: the Eagle openly insisted -- in news coverage and in a full-court promotion -- that citizens ought to vote. Such coverage, tied together with a Your Vote Counts logo, was salted with personal columns by reporter Roe, a history buff, on the struggles for suffrage. A series of articles on voting trends focused on how small a percentage of the electorate actually picks leaders. The paper printed -- on page one -- information on how and where to register. House ads pushed similar themes, and advised that people could register to vote at the newspaper's own front desk, as well as at the usual official places.

Interestingly, the Eagle pushed this campaign beyond the bounds of its readership, joining forces with ABC affiliate KAKE-TV, which ran regular register-and-vote spots. Shortly before the elections in 1990, '91 and '92, the Eagle distributed a simplified voters' guide -- written for roughly the sixth-grade reading level -- to about 135,000 nonsubscribing households and to local adult literacy classes.

While voter turnout actually fell in the 1990 gubernatorial race and the 1991 local election, the Eagle can make a credible case that both drops were attributable to special factors, and would have been greater had it not been for the Your Vote Counts project. After this spring's presidential primary, Merritt sent a congratulatory memo to his staff, noting that voter turnout in the Eagle's primary circulation area was 43.3 percent, compared with 31 percent for the rest of the state.

"I'm not going to make any big claims about this," he says. "This is not something you can hope to effect short term. It's the right thing to do and it ought to work, and I think it will, over time."

Knight-Ridder's Batten, who has taken to criticizing newsrooms that are "over-stocked with journalistic transients who care little about the town of the moment," can trace his own career from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Washington, D.C., to Detroit, back to Charlotte, and to Miami. At The Wichita Eagle, too, half the paper's editorial staff comes from somewhere other than Kansas, including Merritt (North Carolina), Smith (Oregon), metro editor Peter Ellis (New York), and executive editor Sheri Dill (Missouri). Partly for this reason, the reportorial point man in the paper's "community connectedness" forays has been the affable and hardworking veteran Jon Roe, because he is, well, community connected. A Wichita resident for forty years, Roe came to the newsroom as a seventeen-year-old copy boy in 1957. He left and came back four times, most recently for a stint as news director for a local TV station, where "my blood pressure was as high as my ratings."

Among Roe's talents is the ability to synthesize vast numbers of interviews, an essential skill in the Eagle's new effort to connect with its community. To do that before the April 6 presidential primary in Kansas, the paper joined forces with a local college, Wichita State University's Elliott School of Communication, to talk to 192 area residents in long, open-ended interviews meant to dig deeper than the usual survey. In a three-part series, Roe described how these people see the complicated connections between society's ills, and how frustrated they are by a political system that cannot seem to address them. "What the people said was No," Roe wrote. "No to Band-Aid solutions to complex problems. No to single-issue politics as usual and the usual politicians are next to worthless in solving their problems." When it comes to what they can do about this, however, Roe reported that the consensus breaks down. Some of the voters are looking for "the guy on the white horse"; others, he suggested, are begiing to suspect that "the guy on the white horse is us."

Aside from election coverage, one of Merritt's favorite examples of what the Eagle is trying to do these days is another Roe effort, a special report about Wichita's political culture, about its habit, as Merritt put it in a brief introduction, of approaching civic challenges "in a strange, usually frustrating, often ineffectual way.

"Historically, we argue and fiddle while challenge turns into crisis," he wrote, "the destroy the leaders who emerge to help us out of the crisis," often because solving a problem involves spending civic money, which seems to go against Wichita's self-reliant agrarian and entrepreneurial grain. In the piece, produced as a twelve-page insert, Roe reveals that the same pattern in city history has occurred over and over again, from an 1870 "Downtown Crisis" -- when the city's business section was flooded every time it rained -- to the 1992 version, a downtown battered by malls and badly in need of revival. "It was a provable thesis," says managing editor Smith. "Wichita chews up its leaders." The report's title, "Don't Let 'Em Catch You Leading," has apparently become a catchphrase around town.

"One of the things we've discovered," Merritt says, "is that it's okay to have an attitude in the news columns. People want to resonate with an institution like a newspaper. If they don't share some values with you, how can they? You can't go too far down that road, but you can do certain things."

"It's not that we take a stand on approach A or approach B," says Smith. "But journalism has taken this idea of objectivity so far that we're removed, distant. We want our city to be a good place to live; so do our readers. What can we do to make the city better? This stuff encompasses all the core values of the profession, the things that brought most of us into the business."

Not quite everything on the readers' agenda, of course, has to do with rebuilding democracy or downtown.

Much of the task of finding out what people in Wichita have on their agenda falls to the Eagle's research guru, executive editor Sheri Dill, who returned to the newsroom not long ago after a few years with the paper's marketing department. Her recent explorations have centered on people who show up in her surveys as strongly connected to their community in various ways but not connected to the Eagle -- people who, she says, "ought to be readers." Dill recently isolated such a group and then sent out some two dozen reporters who had volunteered for the project to ask members of the group what their interests are and why they don't read the paper.

When the journalists reported back early this spring, they met in a drab, wood-paneled room and, with a hint of tension in the air, ticked off what they'd learned about readers' desires -- more home decorating hints, for example, more local school news, more news about a disease that one reader's relative had contracted. "Some of these people are pretty self-involved; they are not curious about the rest of the world," one reporter said. "These folks are going to be tough, tough, tough to satisfy, with all their really divergent and atomized interests," said another.

Dill, low-key but dogged, kept the discussion going, writing down on a blackboard the subject headings until she had a list that did not seem too unreasonable: "Good" News, Religion and Charities, Kids and Schools, and so on. She closed the meeting with a request that the reporters think about how to respond to these readers "without doing chicken dinners. Maybe there's nothing we can do; we don't have to do anything. But maybe you'll think of something we can do."

To some extent, this is the way Dill and Merritt are trying to bring the Eagle into the promised land of community connectedness -- not with directives but by trying to get reporters and editors to adjust their own ideas of news. Volunteer committees are rethinking a number of areas of coverage, including women's news, the local zoned "Neighbors" suburban sections (which may soon expand or get folded into the main paper), news about minority and ethnic groups, and news for younger readers.

The editors and the committees regularly hold open discussions on such topics at brown-bag lunch meetings, at which the notion of community and how to cover it is often the unseen guest. One result of such sessions is a regular series of short articles on "People Who Make A Difference" around Wichita -- a piece on Jerry Shaw, for example, who tutors local Native American children from poor families; on Anna Moon, a retired teacher who brings to schools her musical presentation on blacks in history; on Jim and Betsy Scantlin, whose daughter has not regained consciousness since she was run down by a drunk driver eight years ago, and who now counsel other parents whose children have been severely injured. Even on big news days these pieces get front-page play.

The women's committee is currently debating whether a special women's section is desirable (not to mention a step forward or backward for women). Like blacks, women are slipping away from newspapers faster than the public at large, and Dill -- who did research on women for Knight-Ridder and the Eagle before she got into community connectedness -- finds interesting parallels between the two sets of data. She and others in Knight-Ridder involved in researching women have found that although nearly all women describe themselves as having no time to read, a large percentage of them do in fact make time for reading they find compelling or useful.

And what women tend to want more of, Dill maintains, is much the same as what readers in general in her more recent research are asking for -- more on education and schools and children, more on churches and charitable activities and religion: things that connect people to their community.

Merritt talks a lot about maintaining the "core" of the newspaper, and he makes it clear that he thinks some papers currently reshaping the definition of news have failed to do so. "I'm not persuaded that the Boca Raton concept maintains that core," he says. "Maybe it does, but I'm not persuaded."

Maintaining that core, he contends, "takes the fear out of the marketing aspect. If it turns out that what people really want is a list of 100 license plates a day, why shouldn't we give it to them? As long as we're protecting the core, why should we be so arrogant? Why shouldn't we give them the information they need for their lives?"

Judging by the evidence, however, Merritt doesn't seem interested in taking the information-without-meaning route. The next big deal at the Eagle is a nine-week series starting on the last Sunday in June. Another mega-project with Jon Roe on point, this one is aimed at giving readers not only a framework for discussing the major civic problems outlined in Roe's earlier series -- crime, education, government, and politics -- but also a nudge toward doing something about them. Tentative title: "The People Project." The rough idea is to use text and graphics to lay out the competing analyses -- "crime is caused by a permissive society" vs. "crime is caused by poverty," for example -- that can block discussion and lead to political paralysis. Readers will be provided with Eagle fax and phone numbers, and each article will be followed up with another based on readers' reactions, in a sort of ongoing, front-page civic conversation.

Part of the conversation will be electronic. NBC affiliate KSNW has agreed to gear some of its news coverage to the People Project, producing its own stories on education, crime, and government, and scheduling regular call-in segments for viewer reaction. All-news-and talk radio KNSS will also coordinate its programming to focus on these issues. At the end of nine weeks, after a summary, the Eagle plans to reproduce the series in a tab and distribute it to nonsubscribers.

And three times during the People Project, the paper will rent a big hall where community groups -- "anybody who wants one" -- can get a table and continue the discussion, "a town meeting kind of thing without a leader," Merritt says, "just a great circus of ideas."

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