Letters

THE HERALD BEGS TO DIFFER

David Villano's report on The Miami Herald contained so many factual errors, distortions, and omissions of balancing information that it's tough to know how to reply. But because cjr was founded in part to expose the journalistic sins with which this article was filled, I think it's important to set the record straight. What follows is a sampling of specifics.

1. Publisher David Lawrence did not tell Villano that the Herald would be increasing revenues in 1996 by $28 million, or nearly 10 percent. Lawrence told cjr's factchecker that the statement was false, yet it remained in the piece. This fabrication, of course, makes it look as though the Herald's managers are particularly greedy, cutting budgets and staff at a time when revenues are soaring. With newsprint heading even higher in 1996, the Herald is anticipating only very modest revenue growth, in the low single digits.

2. Villano says the Herald is closing bureaus. It is not. The last time the Herald closed a bureau was nearly five years ago, when it closed Atlanta and New York to redeploy staff to areas of greater strategic concern to the paper.

3. Villano's entire discussion of Miami Herald bureaus was a mishmash of inaccuracy and distortion, apparently intended to illustrate his false contention that the newspaper is lowering its "range and aspirations." The one-person bureau in the Florida community of Naples was closed in the summer of 1987. The one-person bureaus in Stuart and Fort Pierce were briefly expanded in an unsuccessful experiment to increase circulation in those communities. They were finally closed six years ago.

Villano said, "At the remaining satellite bureaus -- Vero Beach, West Palm Beach, Tallahassee, and Key West -- news staff is near-skeletal." Not really. Vero Beach had one reporter and has one today, whose mission has been expanded to cover central Florida as a roving correspondent. West Palm Beach was reduced recently from three reporters to one. Tallahassee, the state capital, was increased several years ago from two reporters to six, a recognition of the importance of state government decisions to the future of South Florida. It now has five reporters. The size of the Key West bureau, two reporters, has been unchanged for at least fifteen years.

4. It took some real effort to write around the Herald's continued journalistic excellence. Villano said the Herald won seven Pulitzer Prizes from 1980 to 1989, as though such honors were a thing of the past. Actually the paper won eight during that period. Villano failed to mention that the Herald won three more Pulitzers in the '90s, including the highest Pulitzer Prize of all in 1993, the Gold Medal for public service. Also unmentioned was the fact that the newspaper was a Pulitzer finalist four more times in the last three years and that the "group of journalists" to whom Herald executive editor Doug Clifton spoke last spring was the Investigative Reporters and Editors convention, at which the Herald received the organization's highest honor for investigative reporting.

5. The fact that El Nuevo Herald remains a Spanish-language supplement to The Miami Herald was cited as an example of lowered "range and aspirations." Whatever some unnamed reporters may have hoped, El Nuevo Herald was never intended as anything but a supplement to the Herald. Even as such, it has a newsroom staff, newshole, and page count that exceed all but a handful of the 1,600 dailies in the United States. It is not "largely a translated version of the main paper." Less than a quarter of El Nuevo Herald's content comes from The Miami Herald.

6. The description of the Calvin Kovens story was so distorted as to be absurd. Yes, the Herald's editors did decide, over reporters' objections, to delete references to Kovens's twenty-year-old criminal conviction from an investigative story about his business dealings. The old case had nothing to do with the issues under investigation. You can argue with the editors' judgment, but you can't argue with the fact that the resulting front-page story was a factual, tough-minded -- and fair -- piece that revealed business dealings Kovens did not want known.

7. Villano reported that Clifton refused to be interviewed for his cjr story. Villano chose not to tell readers why. Clifton was interviewed once before by Villano, for another story about The Miami Herald, and concluded that he is an unfair and unreliable reporter. Clifton told Villano that was the reason he would not cooperate with him again. Clifton told Villano's editor at cjr the same thing. In retrospect, Clifton's refusal to cooperate with a predictably hostile reporter seems like sound judgment.

The search for a successful future for daily newspapers has never been more challenging, nor more potentially exciting. The need for intelligent, informed, fair, sensitive journalism criticism has never been greater. Sadly, what we got from cjr in this case was a mean, shallow, inaccurate clip job.

Clark Hoyt
Vice president/news
Newspaper Division
Knight-Ridder, Inc.
Miami, Fla.

The editors reply:

1. In one of the sentences Hoyt refers to, Herald publisher Lawrence is paraphrased saying that "job and section cuts are expected to help the Herald increase revenues by $28 million in 1996." It should have said "the job and section cuts are expected to help the Herald save $28 million in 1996."

 Rather than a "fabrication," this was an error, which cjr regrets; it did not happen the way Hoyt reports, but in a more complicated fashion, compounded at each step. In one of those steps, cjr's factchecker read the faulty phrasing to Lawrence. She understood him to challenge not the language, but the dollar figure. cjr changed the figure accordingly, to $28 million (which, if it had represented a revenue target, would have been a nearly 10 percent increase, as we erroneously reported). In any event, since cost cuts, by definition, do not increase revenues, the phrasing should not have passed muster at this magazine.

2. The Herald did indeed close bureaus in New York and Atlanta, as well as Stuart and Fort Pierce, in recent years, as cjr's story says and Hoyt's letter confirms.

3. At the time cjr's article was written the Tallahassee bureau had four reporters -- down two from 1994 -- since one of five slots was empty from November to February. Otherwise, Hoyt's numbers agree with cjr's; the dispute is about what level of staffing can fairly be called "near skeletal," a description that came from a Herald bureau reporter. Such a discussion about range and aspirations ought to include context about how the Herald's state staff has shrunk. Hoyt notes that the West Palm Beach bureau, for example, "was reduced recently from three reporters to one." A fuller report might have noted that the paper had "thirty news people in our two Palm Beach offices" in 1983, as a Herald article from that year boasts. That number was down to about ten in 1989, seven in the early 1990s, three in 1994, and one now.

4. The impressive number (yes, eight) of Pulitzer Prizes that the Herald won between 1980 to 1989 was clearly mentioned in the context of the paper's ambition and achievements during those years -- not to imply that the paper stopped winning prizes after that. The article goes on to mention the Herald's total number of Pulitzers (fourteen), Liz Balmaseda's 1993 Pulitzer, and the IRE's "top honors," as cjr put it, for the "Crime and No Punishment" series.

5. That many reporters hoped El Nuevo Herald "would become an independent journalistic force," as the article reported, is not in dispute. cjr's judgment that it remains largely translated from the main paper was based on interviews, and on examination of six days' worth of El Nuevo Herald, in which more than half the local news was translated from the Herald.

6. Details of the Calvin Kovens incident were confirmed by two former Herald editors, and Hoyt does not dispute them. You can, indeed, "argue with the editors' judgment."

 7. Editor Clifton, in explaining to cjr why he would not talk to David Villano, complained about a piece the author had written some months earlier about the Herald in South Florida magazine. As we told Clifton, to us that piece seemed solid, fair, and measured, as does Villano's cjr article, which was based on new and extensive reporting in and out of the Herald newsroom. That the cjr piece was read as "mean" in some quarters troubles us. It was meant as a serious critique of an important newspaper, a paper struggling under corporate pressure in a time of exciting and alarming change.

WRITE ON

Your short item on reprint rights ("All the News That's Fit to Re-print: Writers vs. the Times," January/February) states that "publishers generally have policies that give free-lance writers secondary publishing rights . . ." and that many newspapers are writing free-lancer contracts "in the interest of retaining some measure of secondary publishing rights." A reading of U.S. copyright law makes clear that publishers do not give any rights at all to free-lance writers, because the rights aren't theirs to give. They can't "retain" secondary rights because they don't have them in the first place.

What cjr should have said is, "Although for years free-lance writers have retained secondary publishing rights under the law . . ." and "in the interest of obtaining some measure of secondary publishing rights."

To make the free-lancer's position perfectly clear: we have no objection to a joint venture with publishers -- our property, their marketing. The objection is to some publishers' idea of what to do with the proceeds. The New York Times, for example, predicts income from electronic publishing over the next five years of $80 million, some of it earned with free-lancers' property. The problem is, they want to keep it all.

Dan Carlinsky
Chair, Contracts Committee
American Society of Journalists and Authors
New York, N.Y.

Please allow us to make one small correction and add a few footnotes to the item on the protest against the new all-rights contract for free-lancers at The New York Times.

The National Writers Union is not a plaintiff in the pending federal copyright infringement suit against the Times and five other major publishers and database operators. That suit was filed in December 1993 by NWU president Jonathan Tasini and ten other members.

Late last year, there were other developments on the electronic-rights front. In November, Ski and Skiing magazines -- both owned by the Times Mirror Company, whose Newsday is a defendant in Tasini v. Times -- agreed to begin paying free-lancers for the reuse of their articles on SkiNet, their new World Wide Web site. Under the agreement, whenever an article by a free-lancer is posted on SkiNet, the magazines will pay an additional electronic-rights licensing fee of 10 percent of the original print-rights fee. This base fee will rise commensurate with the increase in the number of readers at the Web site. The SkiNet license has a one-year term.

In December, the NWU's new collective-licensing agency, Publication Rights Clearinghouse, signed an agreement to establish a transaction-based royalty system in conjunction with the UnCover Company, which operates a fax-for-fee service of reprints from 17,000 popular magazines and academic journals. In October, UnCover and its sister CARL Corporation (a for-profit spinoff of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries) were acquired by Knight-Ridder Information, Inc. -- whose corporate parent was simultaneously beginning to issue odious Times-style all-rights contracts to free-lance contributors at its chain of newspapers.

Irvin Muchnick
Assistant Director
National Writers Union
New York, N.Y.

THE THIRD MAN

As the co-author of a forthcoming biography of "the Murrow boys" -- the group of marvelous journalists whom Edward R. Murrow hired and directed before and during World War II to help create CBS News -- I was bemused to read the caption on page 58 in your January/February issue. The caption correctly identifies Murrow and William L. Shirer but ignores the third American in the picture.

He was Thomas Grandin, a not insignificant figure in the history of broadcast news. After Murrow hired him in 1938, Grandin was based in Paris with Eric Sevareid and covered, among other things, the Nazi invasion of France. Shortly before the fall of Paris, he was forced to leave CBS in order to accompany his refugee wife back to the United States. Grandin went on to many other successful pursuits in journalism, government, and business and died in 1977.

Stanley Cloud
Washington, D.C.

CORRECTIONS

The man in the photo on page 44 of the January/February issue is not 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, but retired producer Jim Jackson. CBS's publicity department, which supplied the mismarked photo, regrets the error, as does cjr. Also, the title of Lawrence K. Grossman's recently published book was misstated: the correct title is The Electronic Republic. Finally, the photo on page 35 should have been credited to A. Tannebaum/Sygma.

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