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Has Knight-Ridder's Flagship Gone Adrift?
Villano is a Miami-based free-lance writer
"The Miami Herald, which used to be a vigorous daily . . . is now thin and anemic, a booster sheet."
-- David Remnick in the September 18 New Yorker.
Thin and anemic? A booster sheet? What's Remnick talking about? Beth Keiser, a photographer at the Herald until she quit in 1994, believes she knows. Earlier that year, the eight-year Herald veteran stumbled upon the kind of story that had attracted her to journalism in the first place. For six months she followed a street gang of middle-class teen-age girls from a suburban Broward County neighborhood. The girls, some as young as thirteen, took part in drive-by shootings, burglaries, and other crimes orchestrated by a group of older, street-hardened boys. Keiser's photos, the first of their kind at the paper, offered a shocking glimpse of the incongruous daily routines of the troubled girls: schoolchildren by day, violent criminals by night.
But Herald readers never saw her photo essay; managing editor Saundra Keyes and executive editor Doug Clifton spiked it. Their explanation, as Keiser and David Walters, the Herald's Broward County photo director, recall it: the paper was now leaning toward stories that offer "solutions" to community problems, not ones that simply display and encourage an "aberrant section of society." Walters says he and every other mid-level editor involved in the project protested the decision, but Clifton and Keyes held their ground. Clifton (who declined a request for an interview but later spoke with an editor and a fact-checker) says that "gangs are a well-worn topic," and that he had opposed the idea when he first heard about it, before Keiser did the work. When some photos came in, he says, he saw no reason to change his opinion. "There were one or two strong pictures, the rest mediocre." Keyes backs him up.
Almost two years later, Keiser, who never knew of upper management's doubts until the end, still feels a sense of betrayal. When it comes to social issues, "The Miami Herald doesn't water down the news, it just ignores it," she says. "They're not interested in printing anything that will frighten their readers." Shortly after the incident she quit her job to accept a position in the Chicago bureau of The Associated Press.
Keiser is not the only staff member to express disillusionment over the Herald's brand of journalism these days, nor is she the only one to vote with her feet. In the past year some forty newsroom employees have moved on. And while the Herald has long served as a kind of training ground for American journalism's major leagues -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal -- a surprising number of staff members have opted for less prestigious positions at smaller-market papers. "We've always lost people to other newspapers, but this is the worst it's ever been," says Kevin Hall, a former Sunday magazine executive editor at the Herald and now a professor of journalism at Florida International University in Miami. "Just when you think the morale can't get any worse, it gets worse."
What's the problem? Clifton argues that his paper's critics are people who in the past "deceived themselves into thinking we were a national newspaper. We're not, and we never were. The Miami Herald is an outstanding kick-ass regional paper. Our region is from Tallahassee to Tierra del Fuego."
Still, many staff members say flatly that the exodus of talent is an unprecedented vote of no-confidence for Herald management and its strategies for boosting company profits. Despite robust earnings in recent years, the Herald is shrinking the size of its news staff, closing bureaus, and, perhaps more importantly, redefining its editorial mission.
To be fair, of course, this kind of unhappy drama is not unique to Miami. Many papers, the Herald included, face real financial challenges. And all across the country a lingering industry malaise, combined with the rising expectations of stockholders, has driven a philosophical rift between newsroom workers and their corporate employers. Journalists complain of corporate meddling in the newsroom; management complains of newsroom reluctance to reshape methods and mission. What separates the struggle in Miami from others around the country is the fact that the Herald is the flagship for Knight-Ridder, a chain with a reputation for putting the goal of high-quality journalism right up there with profit. The paper's unhappy reporters and editors cite a long list of complaints, but they generally agree on this: the newspaper industry may be ailing, but the Herald has been poisoned by its own frantic search for a cure.
The Miami Herald has long held a reputation as one of the very best of the "second-tier" newspapers. A decade ago, many at the paper envisioned it as an up-and-coming competitor to the nation's premier dailies. Former staff members proudly boast of the seven Pulitzer Prizes the paper won from 1980 to 1989. "In the early eighties we had the sense -- a kind of arrogance -- that we were the center of the universe for journalism," says Hall. "And in many ways we were." The paper established bureaus in Europe, Asia, and the region it saw as its special preserve, Latin America. Reporters were often dispatched across the globe to cover news. The Herald also spent heavily to position itself as a regional newspaper serving the entire state, with full-time news staff in satellite bureaus across Florida. To tap the growing Latin base in South Florida, it created a Spanish-language supplement, El Nuevo Herald, which many reporters hoped would become an independent journalistic force.
In recent years the paper has steadily lowered both its range and aspirations. El Nuevo Herald remains largely a translated version of the main paper, available only as a supplement to the English-language edition. Meanwhile, Herald bureaus in New York and Atlanta were closed, as were Florida bureaus in Naples, Stuart, and Fort Pierce. At the remaining satellite bureaus -- Vero Beach, West Palm Beach, Tallahassee, and Key West -- news staff is near-skeletal. In Miami and Broward, positions are being eliminated. The paper's Sunday magazine, for example, dropped from four full-time writers to three; Miami city hall is down from two reporters to one; and in one swift move a year ago three assistant managing editor positions were axed.
More cuts are coming. In October, Herald management announced plans to eliminate 300 positions by the end of 1996, dropping total employment to 1,900. The newsroom will lose forty more positions, all through attrition, bringing the total down to 415. Without support staff, that will leave 325 reporters, editors, and photographers, down from 353. Already, newsroom personnel say, the paper is critically short-handed. "You used to always see these great long yarns that started on page one and then jumped inside," says Mike Wilson, a twelve-year Herald veteran who moved to the St. Petersburg Times last January. "You rarely see that anymore because the resources at the paper have been stretched to their absolute limit."
Along with the cutbacks, Herald management has un- veiled a scaled-back version of the paper, which will debut in early 1996. Among the changes: two days a week the business and local sections will be combined; the Sunday life-style section will be eliminated; and four days a week El Nuevo Herald's features and sports sections will be combined. Herald publisher David Lawrence, Jr., says the job and section cuts are expected to help the Herald increase revenues by $28 million in 1996. That would be nearly a 10 percent increase over revenues in 1994 and 1995.
The paper's sense of purpose, according to many staff members, has been redefined by more than just cutbacks and downsizing. Increasingly, reporters charge, Herald management calls for stories that are lighter and less provocative. A former Herald reporter, Naftali Bendavid, now with Legal Times in Washington, D.C., says this disturbing trend emerged at the Herald in the early nineties, as reporters were encouraged to pursue "slice of life" stories rather than report on local government or social issues.
And while the Herald still does high-profile investigative work, particularly on such stand-by subjects as crime, public safety, and health, the paper's critics say it does less than it used to, and that such impressive work sometimes only serves to emphasize a somewhat diminished daily product. "Occasionally we would do a great piece of investigative reporting," says Bendavid, "but we wouldn't do enough good, hard reporting on a day-to-day level."
Foreign reporting at the Herald has also been restructured. While the paper has opened bureaus in South America, it has cut back on the rest of the world, which has led to tension. Last summer foreign editor Juan Tamayo resigned his post following a dispute with Clifton over the Herald's Bosnia coverage. According to a report published in New Times, Miami's alternative weekly, the dispute arose after Clifton posted an e-mail memo on the paper's in-house computer bulletin board. In the memo, Clifton admitted to a shocked staff that he hadn't read a Bosnia story in two years, either in the Herald or The New York Times. "Why is that?" he wrote. "Some of it is my personal failure. I'm callous, shallow, parochial, and maybe even stupid. But more of it may be my -- our -- professional failure. We dutifully report each day's events, one a bit more horrible than the other, and pretty soon they all begin to look and sound alike." He went on to argue that the story must be told "in a substantially different way" and, while complimenting that day's Bosnia story in the Herald, went on to critique it: "I'm not sure readers cared so much that 'terrified Muslims' were 'rounded up, deported,' as our headline and story reported. Yes, I care about man's inhumanity to man, but I care more about whether this latest event brings the world or the U.S. closer to a brink. A reader -- even a high-minded, liberal-thinking one with a world view -- wants to know 'What does this mean to ME?'"
Clifton says he was trying to stimulate debate; he got one. Tamayo, in his own posted e-mail response, wrote that the Herald is in need of "editors who can get excited about foreign stories and transmit that excitement to readers." Too many editors have "rolled our editorial eyes" at foreign coverage, he wrote, "pronounced it too complex, too alien, too boring. Can't pronounce the names. They are still killing each other; who cares?
"I don't believe this type of editorial MEGO culture -- My Eyes Glaze Over -- exists in any other U.S. newspaper that considers itself good," Tamayo wrote. "No other editor that I know has to ask himself why Bosnia is important to HIM. Certainly not at The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and not even The Dallas Morning News, which, with something close to our circulation and resources, regularly sends staffers, and yeah, photographers, to Bosnia."
"I was taught that sometimes we have an obligation to tell the readers things they don't want to hear," says Ed Wasserman, a former Herald editor and now the chairman and editor-in-chief of the Daily Business Review in Miami. "But now we're seeing a new phenomenon, in which newspapers are trying to ally themselves with the masses in a kind of overt and deliberate and calculated way in order to deliver the information they'll want to buy." Some Herald newsroom critics see just this sort of trend at their paper, and they blame it on Knight-Ridder's growing fascination with "public" or "civic" journalism, even though the paper's editors seem ambivalent about embracing that movement. (See "Are You Now, or Will You Ever Be, a Civic Journalist?" cjr, September/
October.) "At The Miami Herald we don't practice public journalism," Clifton told a group of journalists at a conference late last spring. "But we think an awful lot about the concepts."
Herald editors are certainly not ambivalent about the use of readership surveys and focus-group research when shaping editorial assignments. In October, Lawrence released a memo to his staff announcing that the paper would focus editorial resources on nine subject areas: local government, education, sports, environment, consumer news, Florida news, health and medicine, Latin America, and crime. Lawrence says these "nine pillars of excellence" are the product of exhaustive reader-preference research combined with months of newsroom soul-searching. Although Lawrence angrily insists that other subject areas -- such as world affairs, national politics, and economics -- will not be ignored, the Herald has been ridiculed for adopting research-driven editorial policies. New York Times media reporter William Glaberson, for example, suggested the Herald was pandering, asking, "What if something other than a product recall happened in London, Tokyo, Denver, or, say, Bosnia?"
Clifton bristles at the suggestion that the paper's editorial mission has narrowed and grown less ambitious. "Let's look at the facts," he says. "I submit that we long have, will tomorrow, do today -- publish strong stuff that doesn't shy from controversy. Always. Repeatedly." As examples, he cites a June series on no-show cops, about thousands of suspects who went free because police officers failed to show up for pretrial hearings; a November look into the death of a man in a Miami hospital after, as detailed in an internal hospital investigation obtained by the Herald, he had been subdued by eleven hospital workers; and a number of pieces that ran last fall highlighting the holes in the state's murder case against a death-row inmate named Joseph "Crazy Joe" Spaziano.
"We're not provocative?" Clifton says. "Pick up any five columns by Leonard Pitts or Carl Hiassen or Liz Balmaseda." (Balmaseda won a Pulitzer in 1993 for commentary.) Clifton says he is particularly proud of a series of paired commentaries by Pitts and Michael Browning -- a black and white team who toured civil war and civil rights sites in the South in a van last year.
Publisher Lawrence bristles too. He specifically cites Bosnia as the kind of universally relevant story that the Herald will always find space to report. He also rejects any implication that local reporting has grown soft, noting a long tradition of award-winning investigative journalism at the paper. The Herald boasts fourteen Pulitzer Prizes and last year, Lawrence points out, it received top honors from Investigative Reporters and Editors for "Crime and No Punishment," a 1994 series that explored the failures of the Dade and Broward County judicial systems. "Our fundamental responsibility will always be to inform our readers," says Lawrence. "And that means we'll always be committed to tough, aggressive journalism."
Lawrence arrived in Miami at about the time Knight-Ridder unveiled a new credo: "The customer is our obsession." Journalists tended to cringe at it, but the slogan encapsulated the corporate philosophy promoted by former Knight-Ridder c.e.o. James Batten for increasing readership at the company's newspapers. In a 1989 Herald news article announcing his appointment, Lawrence's mandate was laid out for readers: "Lawrence's appointment comes at a time when Knight-Ridder . . . has undertaken an intensive campaign to make its newspapers friendlier institutions, trusted and even beloved by readers."
Since then, the publisher's seat at The Miami Herald has been a pulpit of good will. Like few publishers in Miami before him, Lawrence has thrust himself into the community, sitting on numerous high-profile boards and committees, and contributing the company's money to local charitable causes. He pens a weekly column, typically profiling an unsung hero of the community or showcasing a reader's letter.
Lawrence prides himself on his public accessibility. His home phone number is listed. He encourages reader calls and letters and, as a rule, replies promptly. (He is also short-fused. When being interviewed, he's been known to snap at probing questions, a trait shared with executive editor Clifton. "Abrasive" is a word commonly used to describe the Herald's two senior executives.)
Lawrence does not limit himself to the activist-publisher role. Sometimes he returns to his news-side roots. (He was a member of the team that created The Washington Post's Style section, among other things.) Last fall, for example, the Herald published his lengthy account of a fact-finding trip through Latin America, where he interviewed various heads of state. His regular notes to reporters and editors commenting on their work -- staff members call them "Dave Raves" -- provide the newsroom with endless insights into the journalistic ethos of their publisher. Meanwhile, reporters say his arm reaches deep into the newsroom, shaping editorial policy and overseeing some reporting.
Since his arrival, these critics contend, the Herald's self-image seems to have evolved -- from detached observer, serving as the community's ever-vigilant watchdog, to civic champion, promoting its causes and healing its wounds. Under Lawrence, staff members routinely moan, "compassion" has become the newsroom mantra. In fairness, the Herald has always been something of a civic leader. Publishers mingled with local power brokers and the paper threw money at charitable causes. But the newsroom remained insulated from those activities.
Critics say that wall may be eroding. New Times editor Jim Mullin, whose weekly paper ran a long critique of the daily -- the incredible shrinking herald -- in June, says he's noticed a distinct reluctance at the Herald to investigate what he calls "pure politics" -- who has power and how it is used.
"The problem with the Herald," says Justin Gillis, a former Herald urban affairs editor who moved to The Washington Post last March after twelve years in Miami, "is that it wants to be warm and fuzzy but it also wants to be tough and aggressive. Well, that doesn't work, and the effect has been to undermine what the staff is doing."
Gillis contends that the paper's crusade of good will has triggered an alarming management-sanctioned practice he terms "special pleading" -- the ability of prominent community figures to sidestep reporting by appealing to the paper's chiefs. In 1994, for example, the wife of a federal judge was brutally raped in her home. After receiving a late-night plea from the victim's family, Clifton instructed a copy editor to disguise the rape as an "assault." To Clifton, this was an extension of the newspaper's policy not to identify rape victims. He says that "the whole town" knew that the woman's home had been broken into and that if the paper reported the rape, "you've de facto identified her." The elderly woman's family was fearful of what the psychic pain of being so identified would do to her. "The public interest was equally served" by his decision, he says.
But to Gillis, the higher public interest would have been served by reporting that a rapist was on the loose in the area; that's what the paper would have normally reported, he contends, except that a prominent person asked it not to. The decision not to report the rape incensed many staff members, and debate raged throughout the newsroom for days. "The widespread perception among prominent people in Miami, in the last several years," Gillis posted on the Herald's e-mail bulletin board at the time for the news staff to read, "has been that the way to deal with the Herald is to circumvent the reporting staff and talk to the top executives."
Gillis says other examples abound, primarily from the past three to four years. In another incident, he recalls, a well-connected Miami developer named Calvin Kovens, a social acquaintance of Alvah Chapman -- a director and retired chairman/c.e.o. of Knight-Ridder, whose office is one floor above the Herald's downtown Miami newsroom -- repeatedly threatened to use his influence if a reference to his past was not removed from an article about his questionable business dealing. Years ago Kovens had been convicted of mail fraud in a case that tied him to former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa. Kovens also was a minor Watergate figure who made controversial secret campaign contributions to Richard Nixon's reelection committee. Despite strong objections from some members of the news staff, Gillis says, Kovens persuaded senior management at the Herald to remove the references to his past.
Some reporters say a similar problem occurs when stories are written about the pet projects of Knight-Ridder and Herald management. Certain organizations and institutions, they complain, are rarely opened to scrutiny. As an example, one reporter points to "We Will Rebuild," a private revitalization agency created by Herald and Knight-Ridder officials after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. While other local media reported on the agency's ineffectiveness, infighting, and exclusivity, the Herald produced mostly glowing accounts of its achievements: group outlines goals for rebuilding s. dade; hurricane's unsung heroes are honored; and as 'rebuild' money flows, poor get special attention.
John McMullan, a former Miami Herald executive editor who retired in 1983 after twenty-five years with the paper, says he's noticed the recent conflict at the Herald. "I admire their attempt to solve community-wide problems, but what I'm not certain of is whether they also are reportorially examining these issues and presenting them to the public."
More serious conflict-of-interest questions were raised three years ago after the Herald's coverage of a controversial decision to locate a proposed performing arts complex. County officials considered three sites for the $170-million complex, including one adjacent to the Herald building on land to be donated by Knight-Ridder. Company officials lobbied hard for their site, and at one point Herald editor Jim Hampton wrote a signed column promoting the Herald site. Convinced that Knight-Ridder and The Miami Herald would unfairly benefit from increased property values once the complex was built, a group of local radio commentators openly challenged the Herald's objectivity in covering the story, claiming the paper's news reports did not disclose the widespread opposition to the Knight-Ridder site. The county commission selected the Herald site. Says Michael Lewis, editor and publisher of the business-oriented weekly Miami Today, which wrote extensively about the Herald's role in the controversy: "The Herald should not be placing itself in situations where it must function as both a newspaper and a developer, and it shouldn't be trying to influence elected officials for its own benefit."
Lawrence acknowledges his activist role. He also acknowledges the potential pitfalls for a paper that thrusts itself into community causes. But a paper the size of the Herald, he says, has no choice but to serve a leadership function. "There's no doubt we have a lot of power," Lawrence explains. "So the question becomes: how do we use it? The answer to that is to practice good old-fashioned journalism -- tell people what's going on in their community."
Of course the readership challenge lies at the heart of most newsroom debates today. The Herald's daily penetration in Dade County has fallen from 40 percent in 1985 to 36 percent a year ago. Penetration has also dipped in Broward County, where the population center of South Florida has shifted, an area that is now largely dominated by the Tribune Company's Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.
Nevertheless, the Herald is far from bleeding red ink. Knight-Ridder's 1994 annual report described the Herald as "the company's largest profit producer" during a year of record revenues, net income, and earnings per share for Knight-Ridder. Although the Herald does not disclose its own earnings, 1994 revenues topped $300 million.
Analysts say revenues increased a disappointing 1.8 percent in 1995, and the year was a difficult one for Knight-Ridder as a whole. The prolonged labor strike in Detroit (see "Which Side are You On?" cjr, November/December) contributed to an 82 percent plunge in third-quarter earnings. Skyrocketing newsprint prices (an additional $21 million at the Herald alone) and continued declines in readership were expected to depress year-end earnings. As a result, cost-cutting measures are expected throughout the company's thirty-two dailies. Knight-Ridder's two Philadelphia papers -- the Inquirer and the Daily News, currently stuck at a profit margin of about 8 percent -- have already announced sales price increases and the elimination of up to 250 jobs.
The measures come at a time of intense shareholder pressure to boost the price of Knight-Ridder stock, which has been stagnant for more than three years. P. Anthony Ridder, who succeeded Batten as Knight-Ridder's chairman last spring, has told the company's publishers to find ways to increase profit margins, partly by creating new products and services. Their bonuses are tied to financial goals. (The company-wide average profit margin is 16.5 percent, according to The New York Times, lower than such companies as Gannett and the Tribune Company, which have profit margins of 20 percent or more.)
Ridder's background in newspapering -- he worked as a paper boy and reporter, and in advertising and accounting in his apprenticeship years -- was mentioned by The Wall Street Journal recently, but the Journal went on to note: "So what's he paying attention to now that he's chairman and chief executive? Profit margins." His ascension to the Knight-Ridder throne, atop the Herald's waterfront newsroom and office complex, was met with considerable unease by newsroom staff throughout Knight-Ridder. He has been dubbed "Darth Ridder" for his bottom-line orientation. Before Batten's death last summer, many Knight-Ridder journalists believed the two men served as counterweights to one another. They worry now that Knight-Ridder may be losing its balance.
