All around the country, at newspaper after newspaper, the walls between the newsroom and the business departments, once a sacred barrier, are being knocked down, and replaced by a commitment across all departments to the marketing mission of the newspaper - to sell ads, raise circulation, and promote itself. Typically, Craig Wells, publisher of Knight-Ridder's Bradenton Herald in Florida says: "We've changed the culture of this organization forever."

 Wells's Herald has just completed a company-wide program in which, as in L.A., reporters, mid-level editors, and other newsroom professionals were placed on committees with people from circulation, advertising, and other business departments to map out marketing strategies. Included in this exercise was "business literacy" training for newsroom employees. Wells says he wants them to learn all facets of the Herald's business operations.

 "We believe as an organization that the more people are involved in the process, the better the product," he declares. "Everybody here is a stakeholder in the company. The strategic goal is the road map to the future. So everybody wanted to be involved. There really was no resistance."

 Few newspaper executives have gone to the lengths of Wells. But the practice of involving newsroom executives in business-side decision-making has become almost commonplace at many dailies. "We've done this for quite some time," says Steve Knickmeyer, managing editor of The Arizona Republic, where editors sit with business-side people on committees planning new sports and entertainment sections. "It's become a matter of course."

 Knickmeyer, like most of the new breed of marketing-oriented news executives, says the practice simply reflects good business sense in an era when newspapers are under intense competitive pressure. "We've overcome our fear of talking to people in marketing and ad-vertising," he says. "They understand there are places where they can't go. They can't tell us what to write. But it doesn't damage us to talk to each other."

 Many newspeople aren't convinced. Journalists at the Republic, as well as other dailies that have eliminated the divisions between the news and business departments, say they feel intimidated when they write about issues of importance to advertisers. So they often engage in self-censorship, and they don't suggest stories that risk offending important customers. "What happens in that climate - when marketing and advertising become more important than the copy - is that you begin to find you can't do anything controversial and count on management to stick by you," says Kim Sue Lia Perkes, a former Republic reporter who now works at the Austin, Texas, American-Statesman. "When you are a reporter, you don't want to believe that this is the sad state of affairs of the industry. You don't want to believe that newspapers have become just money-making machines instead of organizations interested in the public good."
 Perkes's views are echoed by Mike Meyers, a business reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where top newsroom managers are encouraged to be in constant conversation with business side executives. "Editors have traditionally been insulated - at least in the eyes of the staff - from the counting house," says Meyers. "What has changed is that in the 1990s, editors have a dual responsibility . . . . These folks are focus-grouped and New Age-journalismed to death. They are doing something to this business to make it a very different business than the one I got into. And I don't like it."

 The trend toward overtly incorporating business strategies into the newsroom began in the mid-1980s. Business-side executives started pushing a concept known as the "Total Newspaper," where editorial, advertising, circulation, research, and promotion functions were all coordinated around the idea that newspapers must be more aggressive in finding new ways to make money. The strategy, also known as the newsroom without walls, has caught on at newspapers large and small in recent years. An industry that routinely offers monetary incentives and stock options to news executives based on a company's financial performance has found it relatively easy to lure newsroom executives on board the marketing bandwagon.

 Many of the best-known editors embrace their marketing role. Rich Oppel, the well-regarded editor of the Austin American-Statesman, says he wholeheartedly endorses the notion of the top editor cooperating with the business side to promote the newspaper's marketing goals. "I work closely with the advertising and circulation and production side," Oppel says. "I think we're a team. There is a lot of mutual respect."

 For example, Oppel worked with the advertising people at the American-Statesman in redesigning the newspaper's biweekly fashion section and developing a new health and fitness section - which he says have sold "a ton" of ads. He supports involving news executives down to the mid-management level in business planning but he isn't "warm" to the idea of asking reporters to do the same. "I'd be wary of that kind of thing," Oppel says. "Reporters and copy editors should stick to the task of journalism."

 Oppel acknowledges that serving both the news and business interests can involve "pitfalls" and that members of the news staff must trust the integrity of their newsroom managers not to compromise the editorial effort. "If you're doing traditional public service journalism with vigor and clearly value it highly," he says, "then reporters will understand that it's okay to cooperate with people from the business side."

 The capitulation to bottom-line dictates, many journalists say, was particularly intense during the recession of the early 1990s and the recent period when newsprint prices shot up. But even as the newspaper industry has recovered its financial health, marketing and advertising strategies have continued to blur the lines between the news and the business departments.

 Here are some of the ways that these strategies have unfolded at different newspapers - and some of the controversies that have ensued.

NEWS AND BUSINESS-SIDE
MARKETING COMMITTEES

The Arizona Republic, the Houston Chronicle, and the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel have led the way in putting together committees, known as "cross-divisional" teams. They are made up of mid-level and section editors and advertising, marketing, circulation, and production managers who help plan new editorial sections, most often in the sports, entertainment, features, or special events areas of the newspaper. In recent months the Chronicle has used this new-products committee to redesign its television, fashion, and youth sections, and to coordinate the Chronicle's joint venture with a local computer-users organization to produce the group's magazine and sell advertising for it.
 The activity for those involved can be intensive. For example, at the Sun Sentinel, editors are working with business side executives on a heap of projects: to help market the paper's name in its promotional campaigns, develop new editorial features publications, revamp the editorial content of certain sections of the paper, improve color quality, coordinate the installation of new computer-based editing systems, and develop an employee performance evaluation system.

 Dwight Brown, vice president of advertising in the Hearst-owned Houston Chronicle, says the newspaper is "very proud" of its use of cross-divisional teams, which also involve top editors in devising strategies for bringing in new advertisers. Brown calls Mark Willes's efforts at the Los Angeles Times "brilliant. That's what newspapers have to do."

 At the Bradenton Herald, it is not unusual to find the directors of advertising, circulation, marketing, and general operations sitting in on news meetings. Publisher Wells encourages his business executives to find ways to boost circulation when important news develops. Wells says this doesn't mean the business side people try to dictate news content that might be favorable to advertisers - "they know where the line is. But they are free to join the discussion. What this really does is to strengthen the communication throughout the organization."

 Companies like Knight-Ridder, Gannett, and the Tribune Co. - even before Willes and Times Mirror jumped on the bandwagon - have been stressing better cooperation between the news and business departments in their management training and corporate accountability programs. And these companies tend to imitate each other's practices, as witnessed by an October 27 memo from Paul Seveska, a strategic marketing executive with the Thomson chain, to the ten Wisconsin publishers and other business executives who report to him. In it, he praised Willes's "reengineering" of the Los Angeles Times and his "introduction of the marketing process directly into the editorial department." Seveska noted that there is a similar move afoot at Thomson "to embrace the concept of introducing the marketing process into all operational functions of our company."

JOINT MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

 Journalists may be asked by editors to get involved in marketing efforts sponsored by the newspaper. For example, Knight-Ridder's Kansas City Star, as part of its efforts to connect with readers, has encouraged reporters and editors to moderate panels and lead workshops at newspaper-sponsored public forums on personal finance and women's issues.
 At the women's forum, sponsored by the Star and a grocery chain last spring, the newspaper's advertising department sold sponsorships and allowed advertisers and companies selling products to women to set up exhibition space. Some journalists felt that their participation made it look like they were endorsing advertisers' products and had stepped over the line into business promotion. As a result, Star editor Mark Zieman set up an ethics committee, which drafted guidelines that put limits on editorial staff participation in promotional events. He believes in encouraging newsroom staff involvement in the marketing and reader outreach campaigns - as long as ethical boundaries are maintained.

 "It is our job as journalists to be in touch with readers," says Doug Weaver, the Star's editor for readership and new initiatives. "If that requires us to get up on stage with 150 people, so be it." The key to maintaining the newspaper's integrity, he argues, is to insure that the newspaper, and not commercial sponsors, control the content of a marketing or promotional event involving news editorial staff - which he says the new guidelines will insure.

AUTO, REAL ESTATE, HOME SECTIONS

 Many newspapers resolve the tension between the news and ad departments by simply handing over production of copy in advertiser-sensitive sections of the paper to the ad department. At the Newhouse-owned Oregonian, for example, the home and auto sections are written by the ad department. The Denver Post, part of Dean Singleton's and Richard Scudder's Media News Group, has turned over production of the skiing, gardening, casino gambling, and some other sections to the advertising side. The editors say that as long as the copy is clearly marked as produced by the advertising staff, they see no loss of integrity in handing over certain how-to, light features sections to the business department. "Gardening is pretty innocuous," says one Denver Post editor. "How much dedicated, independent-minded journalism did you ever see in a gardening section anyway?"
 However, many reporters feel that a newspaper is shirking its duty to its readers when it doesn't put consumer interests first - by providing copy produced by an editorial staff that isn't slanted toward pleasing advertisers. This issue came to a boil at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Last August editor Tim McGuire met with about 130 newsroom employees who were concerned about McGuire's letter of apology to local car dealers for running a story tipping readers to car dealers' sales tricks (McGuire said the wire story was unfair to local dealers). The journalists were also upset about managing editor Pam Fine's decision to stop the presses to change a headline over a story in the Homes section advising readers not to count on homes as an investment with a high economic return (the original headline read money-maker or money pit?). Staff members complained that the incidents resulted in "a not so subtle message that reporters, editors, artists, and designers must tread carefully when working on pieces that could upset advertisers," as a story in the local guild publication put it.

 The guild recently asked the company to endorse a series of guidelines to insure that advertiser interests don't gain undue influence. McGuire rejected the guild's proposal, saying that the union was trying to intrude upon management prerogatives.

 McGuire says the tension between the news and advertising departments is an old one, and the controversy at the Star Tribune, which recently agreed to be sold to the McClatchy Co., has little to do with the company's efforts to better coordinate its news and business strategies. "This debate has been going on for forty years," McGuire says. "So many people over-react when we have conversations with the advertising department. But those who believe the conversations shouldn't take place are naive. It's not consistent with the roots of journalism."

NEWSPAPER TIES WITH LOCAL BUSINESSES

 The move toward knocking down the wall between the news and business departments has come at a time of high tension and staff reductions at The Arizona Republic. In January 1997 Phoenix Newspapers, the Republic's parent and a part of the Pulliam company, shut its afternoon newspaper, The Phoenix Gazette. The layoffs included many veterans - including Ed Foster, a reporter who in 1996 broke a series of stories about serious maintenance problems discovered by the Federal Aviation Administration at America West airlines.
 Foster's stories had provoked a letter of complaint from William A. Franke, chairman of America West, who also sits on the board of Phoenix Newspapers, to Republic publisher John Oppedahl. As reported in Arizona New Times, Franke said that Foster either was "biased or didn't understand the issues" and needed a "refresher" in journalistic responsibility. Franke went on to say that the story was "particularly offensive in light of the $900,000 we spent in 1995 and the almost $1 million we have spent year-to-date with your newspaper trying to convince the public we are a reliable, low-fare carrier."

 When Foster was let go, it was widely assumed that the newspaper company - which had once lent America West money to help bail it out of financial difficulties - had found him a liability. Perkes, the former Republic reporter, who was also let go in the layoffs, says that the newspaper's push to make the newsroom more aware of the company's business interests, combined with the company's ties to the business community, has left staff members deeply mistrustful of the paper's willingness to do tough coverage of influential business organizations. As Perkes says, "If you look at those who were laid off, you'll find in that pile a very strong core group of very aggressive reporters, people who stepped on the toes of people the newspaper did business with." For his part, Knickmeyer says that most of the laid-off reporters were "fat, lazy, incompetent, and slow . . . . People don't want to say that they were not very good at this. They want to say that [the layoffs were] all a conspiracy with the sacred cows and the power brokers. It's just not true."

 A number of lessons can be drawn from the controversies. First, there is a deep and growing cultural divide between newsroom managers and their reporters - particularly veteran reporters - who have a strong distaste for blurring the distinction between the paper's news and business operations. Second, reporters find it ironic that - despite all their talk about serving readers - the editors in many of these market-oriented newsrooms seem to be more concerned about offending advertisers, whose interests may be at wide variance with readers looking for solid consumer coverage. Third, the critics claim that newspapers are looking needlessly desperate in adopting marketing tactics at a time when the economy is surging and newspapers are reporting record profits. Finally, they note that, despite more than a decade of pushing marketing solutions to newspapers' problems, daily circulation is still stagnant or dropping - and that all these marketing strategies simply don't seem to be paying off.

 At the same time, there also is a growing weariness in newsrooms - a sense that, unlike times past, the aggressive movement of marketing into the newsroom may not be just another management push that is going to go away. "It used to be that you'd see lots of papers go through cycles," says one veteran Kansas City Star reporter. "Some editor would declare, 'I have to have a big bonus this year.' So, he'd come up with some ideas and all the editors below would march in lockstep. Then they'd move on to some other fad." But now, he says, with the coming of the newsroom without walls, "I just don't know . . . The more you cross that line between news and business - it's a slippery slope. Down you go."

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