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What Happens When
Gannett Takes Over
Gissler, former editor of The Milwaukee Journal, is a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
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| Ben Ivory, Executive Editor of The Courier-Journal |
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| Dennis Ryerson, Editor of The Des Moine Register |
How have the famous mastheads fared under the nation's largest newspaper chain? Has Gannett, which once ran mainly smaller, mediocre papers, shown a big-league touch, improving both papers? Or, as critics predicted, has Gannett's affinity for the light-and-bright and its demand for ever higher earnings harmed journalistic quality?
More than sixty-five interviews, and trips to both cities, suggest a complex verdict. Each the legacy of a distinguished family, the Cowleses in Des Moines and the Binghams in Louisville, the papers today are bonanzas, with pre-tax profits probably far exceeding 20 percent. Flashes of excellence, especially when a big story breaks, still keep them among the nation's better papers. Yet in scope, tone, and substantive day-to-day coverage they often disappoint. And in the background, plaguing both papers, is a bloodless newsroom battle.
As new, Gannett-honed leaders take firmer control at the top, a cultural clash over journalistic values and standards has intensified. Beloved traditions - ranging from the look of page one to the way city government is covered - are yielding to new marching orders. "We had a ten-year grace period under Gannett," says Mike Pauly, fifty-eight, the Register's longtime news editor who retired in September. "Now the management mandates have exploded."
The struggle is not a morality play with neatly cast heroes and villains. It's a human drama about coping with social trends and market forces in the era of chain ownership. Some reporters remain resistant - while declining to be quoted. Others have departed or adapted. A top Register newsman says: "I keep my head down, write my stories, and go home."
What does the record show? On the plus side, The Courier-Journal has essentially sustained its circulation at 235,000 daily and 321,000 Sunday. The Register (165,000 daily and 279,000 Sunday) has suffered massive circulation losses in rural areas since the 1970s, but is holding fairly steady in the Des Moines region, its core market. Both papers have invested in themselves: more newshole, more color, better equipment (the Register is building a new $51 million printing plant). Both have sizable editorial staffs, 220 in Louisville, 205 in Des Moines, and some first-class reporters and editors. Both have widened suburban coverage and created new sections, partly aimed at young adults. Both have won Pulitzer Prizes under Gannett - two at the Register, one at The Courier-Journal, bringing the total to fifteen and nine respectively. And both have solid records on newsroom diversity, a Gannett hallmark; The Courier-Journal's new executive editor, in charge of all newsgathering, is black - a first for the paper. Certainly some readers are content. "Gannett shows that you can produce a quality newspaper and still make a helluva lot of money," says Malcolm Chancey, sixty-five, retired chairman of Louisville's Bank One.
But the two papers also have changed in disturbing ways. Many readers and staff members rightly worry about misguided mission and erratic news judgment, about local news stressed to the neglect of national and world affairs, about shorter stories making room for a profusion of graphic touches, about loss of veteran re-porters, sagging morale, and leadership that lacks local roots and institutional memory. With ample cause, serious readers often want deeper digging - into education, housing, government waste, economic development. When they don't see it, some share the terse view of Louisville's Suzy Post, sixty-four, executive director of the Met-ropolitan Housing Coalition: "Bottom-line thinking often clouds social conscience."
And then there is tone. Fifteen years ago, both papers irked some readers and delighted others with aggressive stories and sharply liberal editorials (often tackling global as well as local issues). Today, the papers seem less feisty on the front page and more muted and parochial on the editorial page. Longtime Register reader Arthur Neu, sixty-four, a lawyer and former lieutenant governor living in Carroll, 100 miles west of Des Moines, put it well: "The paper is still good, but it doesn't set off sparks as it once did. The press has a duty to stir things up."
Iowans often lament the Register's diminished statewide role as the paper refocuses on Des Moines and central Iowa - the "Golden Circle" in management parlance. "It's like watching an old friend die," says Larry Fruhling, fifty-six, a noted Register writer who took early retirement in June, partly because he felt the paper that once set the state's agenda was "pissing away its franchise." Several unnamed members of the Cowles family, which still controls the Minneapolis Star Tribune, recently expressed similar if less barbed criticism to The Wall Street Journal, saying they were reluctant to sell the Minnesota daily to Gannett because they felt the Register had deteriorated under the chain.
In both cities, management turnover is another legitimate concern. For the anxious newsrooms, the newest Gannett leadership snaps the last major links to family ownership and signals greater obedience to the mother corporation. But equally troublesome, for readers as well as staffers, is Gannett's revolving-door system of executive advancement. In the last year and a half, The Courier-Journal's news department has had three different top editors. "Chains keep transferring middle and upper managers," said Michael Gartner, fifty-nine, former editor of both the Register and The Courier-Journal, during a lecture last April in Louisville. "No one stays anywhere long enough to understand his or her town, let alone develop an affection for it. And you simply cannot cover a town if you don't know it, understand it, and, probably, love it."
Gannett executives view much of the criticism as unfair or uninformed. They say fault-finders undervalue the fresh perspective of new editors and publishers, and often overlook the money invested in the news operation. They agree that more investigative reporting is needed, but contend more is done than critics acknowledge. Further, they argue, detractors tend to glorify the past and ignore economic and demographic forces - such as Iowa's declining farm population - that would compel any owner, family or corporate, to make painful changes. In fact, Gannett executives believe that their strategy of "listening to readers," while controlling costs, will help their papers flourish while others might perish.
They make some reasonable points. Sometimes, critics are too sentimental and rap the company too severely - a pastime in most newsrooms. As Rox Laird, forty-seven, a veteran Register editorial writer, notes: "I'm not the biggest fan of Gannett, but they get blamed when a lot of newspapers are doing the same thing." Certainly, the papers are not identical - despite the rotating globe that dominates each paper's lobby (ironic given the skimpy international coverage). The Courier-Journal has a crisper look, more of an investigative edge and often a stronger editorial voice. The Register has retained some special traditions, a political cartoon on page one, a Sunday sports section printed on peach-colored paper, and its famous Iowa Poll, exploring not only politics but also issues from nude dancing to control of hog farms.
Yet, at both papers, many complaints about scope, depth, and direction seem on target. Plainly the Register and The Courier-Journal are at crossroads as each adds to the lore of "life after Gannett" - and to the larger debate over how corporate journalism will be practiced in the next century.
A TALE OF TWO GHOSTS
Des Moines and Louisville differ in size, geography, and tone. Located in the heart of Iowa, a lush, largely flat state subdivided by cornfields, blacktop roads, and small towns, metropolitan Des Moines has a population of 415,000 - less than half that of metropolitan Louisville. With its well-scrubbed midwestern look and diversified economy (home to more than a dozen life insurance companies), Des Moines is "seductively comfortable," in one resident's phrase.
For its part, Louisville was built along the treacherous Ohio River. Anchoring the northern border of a more rugged, often poor state, Louisville had been noted for southern civility and brawny, midwestern-style industries. The gentility continues but today a service economy dominates, with United Parcel Service the biggest employer.
The two cities share a poignant similarity: a once-renowned regional newspaper sold because of disunity among restless heirs. Under the Cowles family, the Register - with its Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington bureau and editorial page - reached every corner of Iowa. The powerhouse Sunday edition in the 1960s sold more than 520,000 copies. To the east, the Bingham family's Courier-Journal told the often jagged story of Kentucky. The paper exposed rural poverty, coal mine hazards, and defective schools and stood for civil rights, making enemies and winning respect. Memories of the two families, ever rosier with time, haunt the papers today like ghosts of grandness past.
The biggest change since Gannett's arrival is the new financial imperative. Under family ownership, a 10 percent pre-tax profit meant a fine year; often it was less. However, for the families, the papers were also the centers of their universe. "Our family built its identity around the publishing of a great newspaper," says Charles Edwards, fifty, whose great-grandfather, Gardner Cowles, bought the paper in 1903. "Now the Register is just part of a vast business with thousands of employees."
Edwards served twelve often trying years as publisher under Gannett before resigning in 1996 ("It was time to move on and they didn't beg me to stay"). He affirms that the family loved making money but that, in a tough year, it would settle for a trimmed dividend. With Gannett, as with most big media companies, "we had to suck it up and cut expenses," he says. Thus discontent with Gannett in both cities, especially among staff members, is partly traceable to a belief that the families would be less susceptible to the industry's quarter-to-quarter push for higher profit.
Of course, both families sometimes cut costs. For example, the Cowleses killed the afternoon Des Moines Tribune in 1982, three years before the sale to Gannett. Similarly, the Binghams' afternoon Louisville Times, which Gannett closed after buying it along with The Courier-Journal, probably was doomed under the family, too. Yet some family members wince at the degree of financial squeezing today. "There are a lot of symptoms but the disease is profitability," says Barry Bingham Jr., sixty-three, who was editor and publisher of The Courier-Journal when his father, perplexed by family discord, triggered the sale to Gannett. "If I had to run it under Gannett's profit objective, I couldn't do any better than current editors." In his best year, he recalls, he achieved a 12 percent pre-tax profit, adding: "Now, I hear they're edging up to 30 percent."
Family ghosts are particularly apparent when debate turns to three issues - the Gannett-wide News 2000 program, the local marketing strategy, and the respective statewide missions.
When Gannett launched News 2000 in 1991 to raise the performance of its newspapers, key precepts were sound: listen harder to readers, serve as a community watchdog, improve local and minority coverage. Yet, at both the Register and The Courier-Journal, resistance emerged, partly out of fear that focus-group chats with readers would supplant journalistic instincts, partly out of distaste for Gannett's hype and accompanying corporate requirements. Evidence of effort - such as holding a town-hall discussion with readers, sprinkling color graphics on page one, increasing minority sources in day-to-day stories - had to be submitted to Gannett headquarters (outside Washington, D.C.) for review and scoring by other chain editors. Seasoned journalists in Des Moines and Louisville were indignant. "It's cookie-cutter journalism," says Pauly, the Register's retired news editor. "We're scored by how well we fit a formula predetermined out East." Implicit in newsroom disdain is the notion that family ownership would shun such systematic intrusion. Recently Gannett revised News 2000 and dropped scorekeeping, but suspicion toward the program continues.
Family ghosts also appear when the Register's editor, Dennis Ryerson, and The Courier-Journal's new executive editor, Bennie Ivory, lay out their zealous keep-it-local strategy: follow readers into suburbia, attract young adults, close the gender gap (fewer women than men read papers), reach out to minority neighborhoods, make the paper's design more enticing. While most staff members accept the strategy's broad validity, there are signs that the rhetoric isn't matched with enough reporters and newshole for truly in-depth local coverage - and that other aspects of the paper, such as national and world coverage, suffer.
At The Courier-Journal, for example, the metro desk struggles with five fewer general-assignment reporters than in 1990, while harried city hall reporter Sheldon Shafer, fifty-three, must also cover the county government. "You just take cream off the top," he says. At both papers, vacant positions may go unfilled for months, stirring suspicion of subtle cost-cutting. And while The Courier-Journal and the Register have added some space for national and world news, the diet still is thin.
At times, the reader-friendly strategy can produce dubious news judgments. In July, when a woman lost a toe to an escalator at the Des Moines airport, the Register stripped the story across the top of the front page. One toe? Ryerson supports the decision, saying "the accident was the talk of the town." But he is less inclined to defend the front-page story and graphic that ran the next day offering tips on riding an escalator ("hold on to the handrail").
In August, The Courier-Journal used its Metro section cover for a ho-hum color spread on workers building the University of Louisville's new football stadium. Relegated to an inside page was a story on a report about social conditions in Louisville. Among other things, it showed that the West Side, home to many blacks, had an infant mortality rate seven times higher than the largely white East Side. Ivory, not party to the decision, concedes the report could have made a provocative Metro centerpiece.
Critics also wonder if the local-news commitment will be backed by sufficiently aggressive reporting. For example, the Register in July lavishly covered the sale of Equitable of Iowa, a highly regarded, family-owned insurance company, to a giant Dutch company. Many readers, according to Ryerson, praised the paper's work. But a pertinent question was missed: How does such absentee ownership affect Iowa? That issue, a bit dicey given the Register's out-of-state ownership, was left to the Business Record, a scrappy Des Moines weekly, to explore. "I take responsibility," says Ryerson. "We should have fleshed out the coverage." Similarly, The Courier-Journal in August impressively covered the UPS strike, once it began. But even though Louisville is UPS's international distribution center, the paper did not adequately examine worker discontent in the months leading up to the walkout.
Family ghosts float above the two papers' divergent state missions. The Courier-Journal, facing stiff competition from the Lexington Herald-Leader in eastern Kentucky, has remarkably retained its statewide role, maintained seven Kentucky bureaus, and even expanded the once-thin edition that, since the Bingham era, served a small readership in the state's far reaches.
In contrast, the Register - facing a rural decline predating Gannett ownership - has gradually reduced its statewide role, closing bureaus and shedding costly outstate circulation. The most symbolic change came in the early 1990s when publisher Edwards, in consultation with Gannett headquarters, formally redirected journalistic resources to the Golden Circle and ended weekday carrier delivery in nineteen outstate counties. Today, criticism persists. "The decline and fall of the The Des MoinesRegister is the most significant Iowa news story of the last decade of the twentieth century," James Flansberg, the Register's popular, recently retired columnist, wrote last June in The Daily Tribune, a small paper in Ames, Iowa, run by Gartner, the former Register editor. Flansberg deplored the loss of the Register as a unifying, opinion-shaping force in Iowa. In a dig at Gannett, he added that the Cowles family exemplified "how to get enormously rich without being greedy."
Even some of Flansberg's friends consider his blast overstated. Yet, he struck an emotional chord with disgruntled current and former staffers. Consider Ken Fuson, forty-one, a former star reporter. He is among about thirty-six staffers, half of them veterans, who have left the paper over the last two years. Like many colleagues, Fuson grew up in a small Iowa town and dreamed of working for the fabled Register. "I never will be able to express how happy I was when I was offered a job," he says. But last November, after fifteen years, he left for the Baltimore Sun, impelled by the paper's diminished sense of mission.
For Ryerson, the Flansberg critique suffers from selective reporting. Ryerson says it overlooks the drop in farm population (from 36 percent of Iowa's populace in 1940 to 9 percent today); the pressure from competing outstate papers that moved to morning publication and added Sunday editions; and the Register's major stories in the last year on such significant statewide issues as water quality and legalized gambling. Moreover, he argues, non-Gannett papers in other states have also retreated to core markets.
But the Register is not just another paper. Its statewide sweep was once unmatched in the nation. As Flansberg put it: "Iowans in every corner of the state knew what other Iowans were up to." So, in that sense, the Register's focus on the Des Moines region is a genuine loss and Gannett, if not entirely to blame, surely is implicated To placate angry readers, the paper recently restored delivery of its larger final edition to 8,400 subscribers just outside the Golden Circle. While a nice gesture, it also underscored a sad truth: the paper's famed front-page motto - "The Newspaper Iowa Depends Upon" - no longer really fits.
A TALE OF TWO LEADERSHIPS
For years, the leaders at the Register and The Courier-Journal seemed to buffer the newsrooms from Gannett. Now company loyalists have greater control of the papers' destiny, stirring newsroom concern about management style and commitment to quality.
At The Courier-Journal, publisher Ed Mannasah and executive editor Bennie Ivory, neither with Kentucky heritage, are Gannett travelers. Mannasah, fifty, an amiable, clean-desk executive who wears a diamond ring the company awards outstanding publishers, arrived in Louisville four years ago after stops at seven Gannett papers in a half-dozen states. Ivory, forty-six, an approachable newcomer, joined the paper in May after Gannett editing posts in Jackson, Mississippi, and Wilmington, Delaware, among other places. He replaced Mark Silverman, forty-seven, a hard-charging Easterner and veteran Gannetteer, who was named editor and publisher of the Detroit News after barely a year in Louisville.
At the Register, Barbara Henry, forty-four, a talented, tough-minded twenty-three-year Gannett employee, became publisher a year and a half ago, replacing Edwards and shattering a symbolic link to the Cowleses. She has worked for five Gannett papers, as a reporter, editor, and publisher, most recently in Great Falls, Montana. The Register's editor, Ryerson, forty-nine, does have Iowa roots. A good-natured native of Ames, he was the Register's editorial page editor between 1989 and 1994. But he is closely identified with Henry, serving as her executive editor in Great Falls before appointment in 1995 as the Register's editor by then publisher Edwards.
Mannasah and Henry receive good grades from business leaders for their civic involvement. "I listen and learn before I try to lead," says Mannasah about his publisher role. Henry, meanwhile, is a Chamber of Commerce board member. Still, some staff members fret about getting too close to downtown interests. For example, the Register's newsroom was abuzz in August when a business-editor candidate was seen in Ryerson's office talking alone to the chamber president and, later, a local banker.
Some staffers worried that business leaders were vetting the candidate for Ryerson and his boss. He says outsiders would never influence the choice. "It simply was a chance for the candidate to meet some people in the business community," he says. Still, the reaction highlighted newsroom jitters.
Tangled amid the angst is the fact that, from day one, neither the Register nor The Courier-Journal folded meekly into the Gannett empire. To ease transitions, Gannett named publishers with ties to the past - Edwards in Des Moines and George Gill in Louisville. A respected former managing editor as well as business-side executive, Gill projected an artful mix of cooperation and independence. When his Gannett boss wanted to economize by reducing outstate circulation, Gill went over his head and prevailed. When Gill and other publishers tallied their performance during budget sessions at headquarters with Gannett's buttoned-down top brass, he would drawl: "Unit 107 reporting from Louisville," a mocking of the chain's computer code for the paper. It was "arrogant humor," says Gill, sixty-three, who retired four years ago after serious back surgery dulled his enthusiasm for the job.
After Gill left, his editor, David Hawpe, a passionate leader and the last top editor dating to the Binghams, was seen as residual buffer. However, under Hawpe, the paper's News 2000 scores were low. Many believe this contributed to a management shuffle in 1996; Hawpe retained his title but his power was restricted to the editorial pages. He says he requested the arrangement; skeptics are dubious. His replacement, Silverman, was Gannett's corporate director of News 2000.
Silverman got mixed newsroom reviews. Credited with sharpening aspects of the paper, he pushed state bureaus for broader stories and led epic coverage of the Ohio River flood in 1997. But he was faulted for an overly formulaic approach to page one (always two "no-jump" stories) and for intimidating subordinate editors.
"It was the talk of the building," says Phil Coffin, forty-four, the paper's night metro editor before recently joining The New York Times. "Department heads came out of meetings feeling ravaged." Coffin says the prevailing newsroom opinion was that Silverman, "a brash, big-city, strong-talking guy," had been appointed to knock the renegade Courier-Journal into line.
Silverman rejects the notion. "I was not a hit man," he says. "My job was to make a newspaper with a marvelous tradition better." His two goals, he says, were to increase enterprise reporting and improve local coverage, and he feels he made progress. Although News 2000 influenced his thinking, it was not an agenda item, he says. As for being too formulaic, Silverman says he stressed a consistent format but always aimed to surprise readers with several strong front-page stories. Nor, he says, was he slavish about length. "Many a day," he recalls, "my complaint was that a good story wasn't long enough." He concedes that some subordinates felt he was harsh, but he believes he also won support and promoted "a healthy debate about stories."
Many staffers, however, contend newsroom give-and-take decreased during what some still refer to as Silverman's "reign of terror." "It was like a kink in a garden hose," says one. When Ivory took over, he detected tension. "Never," he remarked at a brown-bag staff lunch, had he "seen so many tight asses." Now, Ivory says, he wants to create a "loose and communicating newsroom." Some feel he is off to a solid start; some say he represents "Gannett lite"; many watch and wait.
In Des Moines, Edwards remembers his own brushes with impatient Gannett bosses. An example occurred after Geneva Overholser, Edwards's choice for editor in 1988, was named Gannett's "editor of the year" two years later. Accepting the award at the company's year-end meeting of top editors and executives, she questioned the chain's devotion to large profits and urged it to worry more about "our employees, our readers, and our communities." The jab was stunning. A livid Gannett executive, says Edwards, demanded to know if Edwards had cleared the speech; he replied that he did not review his editors' addresses. Edwards now says the incident taught him a lesson: "I knew we were going into a new era."
Overholser continued to speak out for journalistic quality, becoming the nation's most prominent female editor and leading the Register to its last Pulitzer in 1991 for stories on a rape victim. Although she went along with reducing the paper's state role, staffers still saw her as a buffer against Gannett. When she resigned in 1995, saying she was "worn down," her departure spurred stories about the battles between newsrooms and boardrooms in America. While her departure was muddied by the belated revelation of her romance with her managing editor, who also resigned, many at the paper still find her an inspirational advocate of sound journalism. Overholser, now The Washington Post's ombudsman, says "It was Charlie Edwards who was the buffer." In any case, both are gone.
A TALE OF TWO PRIZES
Despite defects and internal tension, the two papers still do some hard-hitting journalism. For instance, The Courier-Journal has investigated scandals in the University of Louisville's sports programs and helped topple the athletic director. The Register still probes Iowa's problems. In June, it revealed that killers of children in Iowa tend to get lighter sentences than other murderers. But a consistent reputation for high attainment is expensive. Ponder the tale of two remarkable journalistic achievements:
In 1975, a decade before Gannett arrived, Jim Risser, of the Register's Washington bureau, began investigating possible corruption in America's grain exports. After two stories, Risser was told by the paper's top editor, Michael Gartner, to take as much time as he needed and follow the trail wherever it took him. Over the next year and half, Risser produced 150 stories. Six firms were convicted of criminal conspiracy and Risser won the Pulitzer for national reporting.
Flash ahead to 1986, a year after Gannett bought the Register. The paper was having a bad fourth quarter when the then editor, James Gannon, brought a portfolio of pictures to publisher Edwards. The photos by staffer David Peterson depicted the misery of recession-struck farm families. As Edwards tells it, he was moved but hesitant. A major photo spread would cost more than $30,000 in newsprint and the timing would probably anger Gannett headquarters. "To hell with it," he finally said. "Let's do it." To make Edwards feel better, Gannon remarked that the pictures could win a Pulitzer. Later, Edwards was rebuked by his Gannett boss and he promised to make up the difference in the next budget cycle. Edwards worried he might lose his job. But the anxiety was eased the following spring when the pictures did win a Pulitzer.
The disquieting contrast between family and corporate ownership continues. It suggests that, under Gannett, excellent work is possible but the relentless demand for profit makes it harder, even career-threatening, to open the purse wide. It's doubtful that today the chain-trained leaders at the Register or The Courier-Journal would ever authorize Risser's boundless investigation. Such boldness probably requires too much money - and, in turn, too much moxie.
