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CJR Grapevine
A Paper Prince Is Dethroned
First they agreed to sell the company he had expected to lead one day. Then they fired him. Then he sued them. "It's hardly a scandal," says Shannon Donnelly, society writer for the Palm Beach Daily News in Florida, who has been watching the hometown drama unfold. "This is a town where everyone is a millionaire and everyone has had trouble with their kids, especially in family businesses." But this particular family business is a journalistic institution. The Scripps League newspaper chain is an independent splinter off what became the Scripps-Howard empire, all of which has been closely held by the descendants of founder E.W. Scripps. And the plaintiff is suing his parents in part because he fears he'll never get a comparable newspaper job. Barry Scripps, 52, who had worked for Scripps League since college - most recently to "turn around" the Haverhill Gazette in Massachusetts - claims in the multimillion-dollar lawsuit that his parents' sale of the family chain to Pulitzer Publishing last year left him "in the stressful and humiliating position of being unemployed, without a source of income, having received no severance pay, and with few opportunities and insufficient resources for starting anew in a highly competitive industry." Left unmentioned was Barry's refusal of an offer of $11 million for his stock in the company, which was sold for about $215 million. He stands to collect a tidy sum for it - someday.The suit is nonsense, respond Barry's parents, Edward and Betty Knight Scripps, 87 and 70 (that's Mom's photo above). In court documents they say they had never promised Barry he'd have perpetual employment with the company - and even if they had promised, they'd still have expected Barry to prove he was up to the job. Which, they say, he wasn't. "This case," their court filing begins, "is about the ingratitude of a privileged son." Barry's lost legacy wou have consisted of some two dozen shoppers and sixteen papers, most of them published in smaller western towns. Barry's great-grandfather E.W. had built his empire of mass-circulation papers out of a single Cleveland daily he started in 1878, riding to fortune on the massed pennies of "plain and poor people" who appreciated his cheap prices, his thrilling fare, and his straightforward philosophy: "God damn the rich."
For Brill the Thrill Is Print
Steven Brill has been called everything from scum to a Medici in his two-decade career covering - and skewering, spattering, and shaking up - the legal profession. On the premise that lawyers are "too important to remain anonymous," Brill, 46, built a multimedia empire, high in visibility but modest in profits, that was dedicated to minding their business. The empire eventually encompassed print (The American Lawyer and a collection of regional law publications), cable television (Court TV), and online, with the subscription ser-vice Counsel Connect. In February Brill sold his stake in the whole enterprise to Time Warner - which already owned a majority interest - for a rumored $20 million to $40 million. His plans for the future are unclear.But odds are they won't stray far from the printed word. As the most vociferous champion ever of opening the courtroom to cameras, Brill helped change the face of American justice (into, among many others, Judge Ito's). Yet he still reveres print as the "stuff that has the most impact," as he said in March in a speech at American Business Press's annual Jesse H. Neal Awards presentation for excellence in business trade publications. "In 1969, many of us woke one morning to find a front-page story from a reporter named Seymour Hersh about American soldiers massacring women and children in Vietnam. Had we been hooked on the wonders of the Internet in those days, none of us readers wod have woken up that morning and said, 'Gee, I wonder whether Seymour Hersh has any information about Americans massacring women and children in Vietnam. Why don't I do a search?' This was information I didn't know I needed to know or wanted to know on that morning in 1969. Rather I paid the editor and the reporter, with my twenty-five cents for a newspaper, to tell me what they thought I should know. And I got my money's worth."
A Cybersage for IRE
When Brant Houston was named the new executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors in March, the national organization to train working journalists got a chief with seventeen years' worth of experience in daily journalism and a place firmly on the cutting edge. As the managing director for the past three years of IRE's National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, Houston, 43, led the drive to teach reporters how to stop worrying and love the database. It's a romance that has left some IRE members cold."Brant is a very focused, driven guy," says Mike McGraw, an IRE board member and a special-projects reporter for The Kansas City Star. "When he took over NICAR he took it from zero to sixty in half a second, and there was some concern on the board that NICAR was beginning to eclipse IRE."Choosing the cyber-literate Houston was "a sign of the times," says Deborah Nelson of The Seattle Times, chair of IRE's board. "But he's also well-grounded in the other essentials - interviewing, analyzing, developing sources, working with paper files. Computer-assisted reporting has celebrity status because it's new, and it's understood by only a few. We're hoping Brant will lead the way in making it another tool the average journalist can use to dig out facts." That's something Houston appreciates. "I started out in journalism on a typewriter," he says, "and I was reluctant to use my first laptop. I probably have a deep-seated hatred of computers." But, he adds, "I also started in journalism using index cards to track campaign finance stories, and then one day I found out there was a way I could do in twenty minutes what used to take five hours spread out all over the floor."There's been a revolution in information, and we're working to figure out our spot in it as journalists," says Houston. "But we're still looking for good stories, not good spread sheets."
Cisneros Goes to Broadcast
'He's like a puppy right now, he's so enthusiastic," says an old San Antonio friend of Henry Cisneros. "I tell him to watch out. You don't know these media-entertainment types. They're just waiting for you to fall on your ass."Cisneros, formerly President Clinton's secretary of Housing and Urban Development and before that the mayor of San Antonio, is the U.S.'s best-known Hispanic public official. In February he took over as president and c.o.o. of Univision Communications Inc., parent of the booming Miami-based Spanish-language Univision network. It's a job loaded with potential to influence the twenty-eight million members of the fastest-growing minority group in America.Though he has little broadcast experience, Cisneros at 49 runs the nation's fifth-largest broadcast network. With thirty-nine broadcast affiliates and 740 cable outlets, Univision claims a 77-percent share of the country's Hispanic viewing audience. Its only rival, Miami-based Telemundo Group, comes in far behind with an estimated audiencof 6.1 million households.Much of the network's popularity rests on its telenovelas - spicy soap operas produced primarily in Mexico - but Univision also draws large audiences with its news programming. Its Miami affiliate WLTV has had a higher-rated newscast than either CBS, NBC, or Fox, and in Los Angeles, the nation's number two market, Univision's flagship station KMEX-TV regularly beats its Big Three competitors among young adult viewers. KMEX also organized a massive two-year citizenship and voter-registration drive and spoke out last fall against California ballot initiatives targeting illegal immigration and state affirmative-action programs. That kind of political involvement is likely to continue with Cisneros in charge - and to prompt speculation about his future political ambitions. "I tell him to stay out there for six years and then come home and run for the Senate," Cisneros's San Antonio friend says. "He tells me, 'Don't even think such a thing.'"
CNN's Woman in Havana
Lucia Newman knows she's being watched. As chief of the new Cuba bureau for CNN - the first U.S. news organization to win Castro's approval to set up shop since 1969 - she has seen her work held under the microscope by Cuban officials, Washington, and, perhaps especially, the Cuban exile community. "They were watching us closely," says Newman, 45. "Now they're insulting us closely." Since she left her post in Mexico City as CNN's senior Latin American correspondent to begin reporting from Havana on March 17, opponents of the Castro regime in Miami have sent angry letters complaining about any report that's not "throwing buckets of criticism at Castro," she says. The Cuban government, meanwhile, seems to be reserving judgment; it issued no official complaint when - to Miami's delight - she reported on how difficult it is for Cubans to be independent journalists, not affiliated with the official media. "They're going to judge us on a long-term basis, not on the basis of a few reports," she says. Newman, her husband, and their two small children are now trying to make the island home. She's uprooted her own life many times before: half Chilean and half American, she lived in Australia for ten years, first working in print and radio, and eventually as a deputy producer at an Australian TV station. She had moved to Nicaragua to start her career as a foreign correspondent when N hired her.Now Newman herself seems thrilled to be sent to territory relatively uncharted by U.S. journalists. The island is - more or less - hers for the reporting. In her first few weeks she covered Cuba's handling of the U.S. economic embargo, but she also covered the world's longest (five days and four nights) salsa contest, and has "loads of ideas" for the future. "Did you know that you can get an eight-year jail sentence in Cuba for killing a cow? I said I was going to do every aspect of Cuban culture," she says, "and I'm doing it."
For NPR, Freedom in Variety
When Bill Buzenberg first went to work as a foreign affairs correspondent for National Public Radio eighteen years ago, he would call people for interviews and get the response "What? What's NPR?" Now as Buzenberg, 50, steps down after seven years as NPR's vice president for news and information, the network's news programs reach nearly 13 million listeners weekly. During his tenure alone, NPR earned nine duPont-Columbia awards and ten Peabody awards; it added 175 new stations for a total of 570, and its news budget nearly doubled, to $23.3 million. While NPR relies heavily on financial support from its listeners, it's often criticized for accepting money from other sources - government, corporations, special-interest foundations - that might compromise its independence. But Buzenberg argues that in the variety of its funders there is safety. NPR will continue to maintain its editorial independence, he says, "as long as no single funder (including Congress) can determine what will or will not be aired." A suessor to Buzenberg has not yet been named. With his wife, Susan, he is editing the memoirs of Richard Salant, the legendary president of CBS News in the '60s and '70s.
