Old Values, New Life

In this town you could be putting out The New York Times and people would bitch," says Mike Levy, publisher of Texas Monthly and outspoken assayer of all things Austin.
 Levy is no doubt right, but he also would agree that Austinites long have had reason to grumble. They live in a city where news should be bubbling as energetically as the limestone springs that feed their beloved Barton Creek. Under the pink-domed capitol at the heart of Austin, a colorful bunch of lawmakers and lobbyists convene every other year to divvy up an $80-billion biannual budget, while they massage and manipulate the future of the nation's second-most-populous state. A couple of blocks to the north of the capitol, scientists, artists, and scholars at one of the largest state universities in the nation explore issues and ideas with nearly 50,000 students. And on Austin's northern fringes, a concentration of high-tech enterprises rivaling Silicon Valley is spreading amoeba-like into the next county.

 One of the fastest-growing cities in the nation, Austin is - or should be - a great news town, but for years, more often than not, the city's news potential seemed to elude the hometown newspaper. While Austin metamorphosed into a thriving city of a half-million people, a city proud of its thriving music and cultural scene and its hip-cowboy style, the Austin American-Statesman remained a vestige of the city's recent small-town past.

 Now, under the leadership of the veteran newsman Rich Oppel, who eschews fads and gimmicks and tries to rely on old-fashioned journalism basics, the paper has begun to wake up.

 The American-Statesman - second in size to TheAtlanta Journal and Constitution in the Cox chain of sixteen dailies and fourteen weeklies - has long been saddled with a reputation for mediocrity, but by the mid-90s, the label "mediocre" would have been complimentary. Readers could expect to find a big front-page photo and a feature about a cute kid or a huggable creature, but finding comprehensive, thoroughly reported hard news was a dicier proposition. For news from city hall - at a time when the city found itself caught up in one contentious issue after another, most having to do with the effects of rapid growth - many residents had come to rely on the homegrown alternative weekly, The Austin Chronicle. News about state government, which should have been the American-Statesman's franchise, was spotty at best. Blue newspaper wraps in front yards every morning were tangible evidence that The New York Times had found a news-hungry market in Austin.

 Local cynics joked that the Statesman was too quick a read for the bathroom.
 "You had a sense that we were dumbing down the paper," a longtime political reporter and columnist, Dave McNeely, recalls. "I remember sitting in on a meeting where the discussion was how to reach the twenty-eight-year-old unmarried mother of two living in Williamson County" - home of Austin's fastest-growing suburbs - "who makes less than $25,000 a year. There was some kind of market research that showed the declining readership of women, and Atlanta" - Cox headquarters - "was probably putting on some pressure, but we were leaving behind the people who were reading us in the first place."

 Newsroom morale was as sluggish as a dog-day afternoon in August; it was so bad that the paper was planning to bring in a mediator to try to resolve the tension between Maggie Balough, the longtime editor, and her reporters. Balough had her supporters in the newsroom, but the prevailing notion seemed to be that she wasn't forceful enough to set a tone and direction for the paper. Publisher Roger Kintzel, who came from the news side of the business, knew he wasn't happy with the product, but he couldn't seem to articulate what he wanted - at least in terms that Balough could take and implement. "Maggie was flopping around like a fish in the bottom of a boat," columnist McNeely recalls. "She couldn't figure out what Kintzel wanted."

 Their differences erupted on Valentine's Day, 1995 - known thereafter, of course, as the Valentine's Day massacre - when Kintzel fired his editor. (Balough is now the editor of Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists.)
 "My sense of the paper," says Kintzel, now the publisher of TheAtlanta Journal and Constitution, "is that it wasn't bad, but it wasn't growing. It wasn't growing intellectually; it wasn't growing with the community. Our circulation penetration was beginning to slip."

 Kintzel had no lack of applicants for editor, but Oppel wasn't one of them - not initially. Oppel, bureau chief of Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau since 1993, longtime editor of The Charlotte Observer before that, was in Dallas in April for the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. With his wife, Carol, he flew down to Austin to visit their son, Richard Jr., a reporter in the Austin bureau of The Dallas Morning News. The city appealed to him, particularly after a Sunday-morning run on Austin's Town Lake hike-and-bike trail. After two years in Washington, he missed being part of a community and running his own newsroom. He recalls sitting down with a cup of coffee that morning and taking an editor's long look at the American-Statesman.

 He called Kintzel, who arranged to meet him at the Austin airport just before the Oppels flew home the next morning. "What Rich didn't know," Kintzel recalls, "was that three or four other editors had made the trip down from Dallas just the day before." In Oppel, however, Kintzel found an editor with both the experience and the reputation to restore respect and credibility to his struggling newspaper. The Oppel era began on July 1.

 At 53, Oppel is a short, compact man with a fringe of white hair and the suggestion of pugnacity. After a Florida boyhood and a stint in the Marines, he got his newspaper start on the police beat for the Tampa Tribune in 1962. He was an Associated Press reporter in Florida and Michigan, an associate editor of the Detroit Free Press, and executive editor of the Tallahassee Democrat before spending fifteen years as editor of TheCharlotte Observer. The Observer won three Pulitzers during Oppel's tenure, including the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1988 for almost ten years of coverage of television evangelist Jim Bakker.

 Oppel says he didn't arrive at the American-Statesman with a detailed blueprint and timetable for what he wanted to do. "The blueprint occurs in your genes after fifteen or twenty years of editing a newspaper," he says. "Basically I'm a fundamentalist. I believe in accuracy, fairness, and balance. I believe in reporters, great reporters who can write narratives, create characters, reporters who are skeptical and inquisitive. I believe you have and show affection for your community, although not in a pandering way. It's not something you chart out."

 Charted or not, changes were quick and noticeable. The cute stories fled the front page, and stories in general became longer, with greater depth. Reading the paper took longer, in the bathroom or elsewhere.

 One of Oppel's first hires was a former Houston Post columnist named Juan R. Palomo, who would cover religion, a beat that Oppel had emphasized during his years in Charlotte. (Oppel's wife is a student at the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest in Austin.) Palomo had been fired by the Post in 1991 for attempting to announce in his column that he was gay. When an anti-gay activist tried to mount a crusade against the American-Statesman for employing a gay religion writer, Oppel stood up for his reporter. "Oppel basically said 'Fuck you' to the guy," says Evan Smith, Texas Monthly's deputy editor, "and he said it over his signature. That was impressive."

 Oppel had been in Austin only a couple of months when the city council authorized a secret settlement with the South Texas Nuclear Project, a multibillion-dollar nuclear-power plant originally financed by Austin, Houston, and other Texas cities. Alleging that equipment in the long-delayed, hugely expensive plant was defective, the city had sought more than $1 billion in damages. Oppel warned that the paper would go to court to have the settlement made public. "This is the taxpayers' and the rate payers' money, and they deserve to know whether the city is coming out of this with a fair deal," he was quoted as saying in an American-Statesman story about the settlement. "We believe there is no reason for secrecy here." The American-Statesman got the information.
 Investigative reporting began to appear with some regularity. Veteran statehouse reporter Mike Ward found that the huge Texas prison system had spent $33 million to buy a bad-tasting, soy-based meat substitute called VitaPro, to be fed to inmates and marketed to other states. Ward also reported that the prison director who arranged for the deal, reached without competitive bids, subsequently quit to become a thousand-dollar-a-day consultant to the company that produced VitaPro. In another story, the paper found extremely loose accounting, sloppy contract procedures, and poor management at Capital Metro, the city's public transportation agency, and did a thorough job of investigating the inner workings of the rapidly expanding Austin Community College District.

American-Statesman reporter Diana Dworin found waste, inefficiency, and mismanagement in the Austin Housing Authority, an agency with an annual budget of $20.8 million. Dworin also found that deserving families were sometimes on a waiting list for a year while good apartments sat vacant. Business writer Kirk Ladendorf went to South Korea and came back with an interesting and thorough three-day series on Samsung Electronics, the Korean company that's building a $1.3 billion memory chip plant in Austin, its first in the United States.

 As one veteran reporter put it, "We've always had good people here, but we needed a leader, someone who could point us in the right direction. Oppel has the experience and the confidence to do that."

 Kathy Warbelow, who worked for Oppel in Detroit in the late 1970s, left the Detroit Free Press last March to become the American-Statesman's managing editor. Shortly before she arrived in Austin, the American-Statesman broke a story that questioned the lucrative contract the city had awarded to build Austin's new international airport. Primarily in response to the American-Statesman investigation, the city revoked the first contract and accepted a second one that turned out to be $13 million lower.
 "I was in the D-FW Airport," Warbelow recalls, "and there was this guy from Dripping Springs" - a small town west of Austin - "and when I told him I was moving to Austin to work for the American-Statesman, he just went on and on about what the paper had done on the airport story. He kept saying, 'That was really a coup!' He was feeling that the newspaper had really done something for him, had really done something for taxpayers."

 Oppel also assumed a higher profile in the community than his predecessor had. From the beginning, he has written a Sunday column, and he hasn't been reluctant to provoke. "This is a weird city," he wrote early on. "I haven't seen such a lust for conflict since I covered the Miami Beach City Council 25 years ago. An Austin moderate is someone who is low on ammo."

 In another column, he dared tweak the vocal Austin environmental community. "I have earnestly tried to generate appropriate Austin angst for the Barton Springs salamander," he wrote. "But I am more interested in understanding why this city seems to have no vision that energizes long-term planning."

 At the same time, Oppel was willing to take on Jim Bob Moffett, the environmental community's b?te noire. Moffett, chairman of a Louisiana-based multinational mining company called Freeport-McMoRan, took the City of Austin to court for opposing some of his efforts to construct a 4,000-acre residential and commercial development in the environmentally sensitive Barton Springs watershed.

 In December 1995, Moffett threatened to sue three University of Texas professors, two environmental activists, and two reporters from TheAustin Chronicle for criticizing the company's environmental record in Louisiana and Indonesia and for calling attention to a report that seemed to implicate Freeport-McMoRan in human-rights abuses in Indonesia. Moffett's tactics prompted the American-Statesman's new editor to blast the company in a December 15 column. (See "A Fire-Breather Gets Scorched," cjr, March/April 1996.) "As long as the discussion follows sane guidelines, we stand with TheAustin Chronicle, the environmentalists and the professors who received the threatening letters," he wrote. "Let the debate go on. Let the threats be withdrawn."

 Austinites noticed, partly because during Roger Kintzel's tenure as American-Statesman publisher, the paper had usually sided with Freeport-McMoRan and the company's real-estate arm, FM Properties, in its frequent bitter disputes with the Austin City Council.

 By the end of 1996, the consensus inside the newsroom and out was that the American-Statesman still has a way to go but is a much improved product. "Oppel has dramatically improved the front part of the paper," says Louis Black, editor of the Austin Chronicle, "he's put together an arts and culture staff that's incredibly strong, and their coverage of the city council has improved dramatically. It used to be that the council wasn't a story for them."

 "It's left behind its reputation for flakiness," says Paul Burka, Texas Monthly's executive editor. "It's a solid newspaper."

 The paper's circulation is solid, as well. According to figures released in November 1996 by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, only the American-Statesman and the Houston Chronicle showed growth among the biggest papers in Texas in the past year. The American-Statesman's average daily circulation was up 2 percent, to 181,272, while Sunday circulation increased slightly, to 239,898. American-Statesman publisher Mike Laosa was quoted as saying that he hoped the circulation figures reflected the quality of the product, but he also credited the strong Central Texas economy for some of the paper's growth. He noted that the paper's market penetration was keeping up with the growth in the number of households.

 Trying to keep up with Austin-area growth helps explain why Oppel found himself on a Tuesday night sitting at a makeshift rostrum in the food court of the recently opened Lakeline Mall. It is here on the Travis County-Williamson County border that the Austin-area population is exploding. Oppel, competing with dining noises from the nearby Philly Grill and JalopeÐos Cocina, is attempting to explain to perhaps a hundred listeners that the American-Statesman now views itself as more than an Austin paper. The bureau covering the area, he explains, has increased from one or two people to ten, and instead of creating a special section, the paper is seeking to incorporate Williamson County news into the regular news flow.
 Sitting at booths and tables in the food court, Oppel's listeners are eager to engage the editor. One man angrily gestures toward Oppel and in a strident voice accuses the paper of lying, of deliberately slanting its coverage leftward. A young woman who identifies herself as a twenty-four-year-old school teacher also attacks the paper's "lies." Oppel responds courteously but firmly.

 Other questioners - a number of them complimentary - want to know why Mexican stocks can't be reported in dollars, why the paper doesn't offer more hunting and fishing coverage, and why the American-Statesman tolerates the liberal leanings of Ben Sargent, its Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist. "Most cartoonists," Oppel says, "operate from the left. They're revolutionaries, bomb-throwers. They operate from a different ethos. They aim at the viscera."

 But someone from another political perspective blasts the paper for endorsing U.S. Senator Phil Gramm in his race for re-election against Victor Morales, the Democrat. Morales, the high-school government teacher whose quixotic campaign against a well-funded incumbent attracted nationwide attention, no doubt expected the American-Statesman's endorsement, since the paper almost always reflects the tendencies of Travis County, the most reliably Democratic county in an increasingly Republican state. The American-Statesman surprised, arguing that Morales had never developed a compelling rationale for his candidacy and recommending a vote for the candidate who was better able to look out for Texas's interests in Washington.
 Some readers - including some American-Statesman staff members - saw the Gramm endorsement as Oppel pandering to a presumably more conservative Williamson County readership. Others speculated that publisher Laosa exerted his prerogative. Some members of the editorial board had argued that the paper would look silly endorsing arch-foe Gramm and that it should make no endorsement. But Oppel took the position that since the voter had to make a decision, the paper should, too. He won't say who decided what about Gramm, but "I knew Phil Gramm from Washington," he says, "and I also know he's not what he's stereotyped to be. And as far as Williamson County affecting editorial policy, it's important only in the broad sense that we don't see ourselves as only an 'Austin City Limits' newspaper. It's important to see ourselves as what we're becoming, a Central Texas newspaper." Oppel says he wants strong editorial writers - "I want them to be specialists, experts, and I expect them to be visible in the community and respected. I don't want wimps" - but he also says will sometimes overrule them.

 The Phil Gramm flap came and went with the election, but this being Austin, criticism and second-guessing come with the territory.

 "The paper's more lively, and Oppel's made some good hires, but I think he's hit a wall," Texas Monthly's Evan Smith observes. Smith argues that the paper has yet to figure out how to effectively cover Austin's indigenous high-tech culture; that it overuses wire copy, particularly on the front page; that its tongue-lolling pursuit of the rapidly growing suburban market threatens to thin out its coverage of downtown issues; that he should have hired columnist Molly Ivins and other distinctive voices; and that XLent, its weekly entertainment magazine, is a pallid imitation of The Austin Chronicle.

 Oppel isn't shy about responding to this and other criticisms:

On wire copy: "I like The New York Times a great deal," he says. "I tell our editors to be on the lookout for [ Times ] stories that move around seven p.m. for our front page and section fronts. At the same time, we're using a lot of local and regional material, and we've developed a closer alliance with our Washington bureau."

 On XLent : "The Chronicle is an alternative weekly that has picked up an idiosyncratic personality that most alternatives don't have," he says, "with a focus on politics that's a reflection of the failure of the American-Statesman over the years. We'll beat their asses on political coverage. We have a better fleet of critics than they can ever hope to have."

 On covering high tech: Oppel says he is taking a look at the four-person team the San Jose Mercury News has assigned to cover everyday life in Silicon Valley. "The transformation of the work ethic and the work place because of computers is a great missed story," he says. He believes that something similar to the Mercury News approach might be a way to get at the story as it evolves in Austin.

 On diversity, or lack of it, at the paper: "Look at my commitment to minority employment and advancement in Charlotte and in the Washington bureau," he says. "In Charlotte, we had 50 percent men, 50 percent women and 25 percent minorities. In Washington, we had a blue-chip staff, put together by me. Look at our hiring here, and you'll see that I value diversity."

Oppel says he has always been opposed to assigning reporters to the black community or the Hispanic community or some other specified area. "I insist on mainlining minorities into the ongoing coverage of the paper," he says.

 One hot rumor has it that Oppel is not long for the American-Statesman, that he's moving soon to Cox's crown jewel, the Journal and Constitution, to become managing editor and editor-in-waiting. Oppel says no, "I'm very happy and fully engaged here." Indeed, he does seem delighted with his current job.
 On a recent Saturday morning, Oppel was scurrying about the capitol rotunda overseeing the Sunday paper's large front-page photo of nearly a hundred Texas writers who had gathered in Austin for a literary festival spearheaded by Laura Bush, the wife of the governor. The capitol - built for giants and inhabited by pygmies, political writer Robert Sherrill once observed - soon will be the scene for Oppel's next big test: coverage of the always quirky, occasionally corrupt Texas legislature, which convenes in January for its often-stormy six-month biennial session. Oppel says he intends to track welfare as it becomes more of a state responsibility, tax reform issues, state spending on prisons and other big institutions, and the big-money influence of Austin's bread-and-butter businesses - lawyers, lobbyists, and trade associations.

 "That big pink building is our tire and rubber factory," political reporter McNeely says of the capitol, "and we ought to be the paper that lawmakers read to help them set their priorities. If we can do that, it reverberates not just statewide, but nationwide."

 "A good newspaper," Oppel wrote after his first week in Austin, "shows hustle, energy and wit. A newspaper ought to jump all over the big story and bristle with urgency. It should reflect the humor of the human condition." As lawmakers descend on the city in a few weeks, Oppel's newspaper has a chance to do all that.

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