CJR - a swan song in des moines, by Gilbert Cranberg

by Gilbert Cranberg
Cranberg, who hired Geneva Overholser at the Register in 1981, is the paper's former editorial page editor. He is now George H. Gallup professor of journalism at the University of Iowa's School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

In 1981, when a young editorial writer, Geneva Overholser, was first hired at The Des Moines Register, the paper was closely held by descendants of Gardner Cowles, a family that gave highest priority to publishing a top-notch paper. When she returned as its editor in 1988, after a stint on the editorial board of The New York Times, the Register had become a Gannett property. Stock analysts and the company's thousands of stockholders imposed different priorities. Gannett, of course, is not the only media company at which editors face bottom-line pressures, but it is one of them, and Over-holser's rise to become one of the more visible and respected newspaper editors in the nation was not without struggle against such pressures.

She gave up the struggle in February, as did her managing editor, David Westphal. Both resigned, staying only long enough to insure an orderly transition. (She was named in April to be The Washington Post's new ombudsman.) The resignations were widely seen, as The New York Times put it, as "public symbols of a battle between news professionals and business executives that is raging behind closed doors at many of the country's newspapers."

In 1990, at the company's year-end meetings, Gannett honored Overholser as its "editor of the year." Perhaps this surprising and previously unpublished conclusion of her acceptance speech best suggests just what it is that Overholser was getting tired of:

Here's my dream for the next risk-taking, history-making endeavor: Let Gannett show how corporate journalism can serve all its constituencies in hard times. As we sweat out the end of the ever-increasing quarterly earnings, as we necessarily attend to the needs and wishes of our shareholders and our advertisers, are we worrying enough about the other three? About our employees, our readers, and our communities?

I'll answer that: no way. And we're not being honest about it. We fret over declining readership and then cut our newsholes so that we have insufficient space to do the things we know readers like. We fret over a decline in service to our customers, and then pay reporters (and others throughout the company) wages that school districts would be ashamed of. . . .

Our nation is crying out for leadership, our communities are crying out for solutions, and newspapers can help -- newspapers that are adequately staffed, with adequate newsholes. But not newspapers where underpaid people work too hard, and ad stacks squeeze out editorial copy.

I'm blessed to be the editor of a great newspaper, but too many people in my newsroom think the greatest years are past, and we're just hanging on by our fingernails. Too often by far, being an editor in America today feels like holding up an avalanche of pressure to do away with this piece of excellence, that piece of quality, so as to squeeze out just a little bit more money.

Yet we work in a business in which "hard times" mean a 25 percent profit margin cut to 18 percent. We need to be honest about the impact of this fact on our communities, our employees, and our readers, as well as our advertisers and our shareholders.