Geneva Overholser - CJR, November/December 1999

November/December 1999| Contents

voices: newspapers
In the Age of Public Ownership, The Importance of Being Local

by Geneva Overholser
Geneva Overholser, a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group, will write regularly for cjr about newspapers. Among positions she has held are editorial writer for The New York Times, editor of The Des Moines Register, ombudsman for The Washington Post. She also served nine years on the Pulitzer Prize board.

It was yet another huge media buy — Viacom's September acquisition of CBS. But it marked, as the Los Angeles Times said, "a fitting close to what may well be looked back on as the decade of the media merger, a period in which about $130 billion in deals realigned an entire industry."

And this deal struck me powerfully. The day before the news broke, I had found in my files a booklet commemorating the day fifty years ago when Walter Lippmann traveled to Iowa to celebrate the hundredth birthday of The Des Moines Register and Tribune. On a June evening, he had told a dinnertime audience of Iowa's editor and publishers:

"There is, I believe, a fundamental reason why the American press is strong enough to remain free. That reason is that the American newspapers, large and small, and without exception, belong to a town, a city, at the most to a region."

The secret of a truly free press, he said, is "that it should consist of many newspapers decentralized in their ownership and their management, and dependent for their support . . . upon the communities where they are written, where they are edited, and where they are read."

When Lippmann spoke, 1,300 American newspapers — almost all of them — were independent and locally owned. Today, fewer than 300 are — and media mergers, affecting all levels and all kinds of media, show no signs of slowing.

In the newspaper business, we think often of the differences that this change in ownership makes, but perhaps we think too seldom about one of the most important of those differences: precious few of today's newspapers read or feel as if they are put together by people who know well, and love deeply, their community.

A powerful local identity, a characteristic personality, deep roots in the community — "a paper that, when you walk into town, you can hold your head up," as former publisher Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger says in The Trust, the new book about The New York Times by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones. How many newspapers today have these attributes?

We do seem to get part of the equation: we understand that — for most newspapers — the franchise is local, local, local. (Despite this understanding, we have too often seen expense-cutting strike at the heart of local coverage — school beats, cops, city hall, the county courthouse.)

We speak often, as an industry, of the importance of local news, of the interest our readers have in it and of the fact that no other medium covers it as we do. Most newspaper companies seek to strengthen this local franchise: efforts under the rubric of public or civic journalism, and many company-wide programs like Gannett's News 2000, designed to shape news content, are aimed at least partly at improving connections with the community.

But the results, all too often, are brittle and lifeless. We survey our readers and coordinate our staffers and plot our projects. But no amount of planning, no level of market research, can make up for ten years of living in a town — not to mention growing up there, putting your kids through school there, watching your folks grow old there. Our newspapers do not read as if they are written and edited by people who feel the city's pulse, who've long walked its streets, who love its quirks, know its history, and care deeply about its future — because, by and large, they are not.

Does the fact that newspapers aren't locally owned have to mean they can't feel powerfully local? It sometimes seems so. Local concerns are hard-pressed to match the powerful pull of Wall Street-driven, corporate headquarters. Standardization, efficiencies of scale, the lure to move up — and the simple fact that corporations demand loyalty first to the goals of headquarters: perhaps the pull away from hometown roots is inexorable.

But we can't afford to believe so. Local authenticity and commitment to place are too critical to concede; we must find ways to refresh and restore them despite new ownership realities.

And I think some ways do exist. Corporatization does not in itself determine that editors and publishers must change newspapers as frequently as they now customarily are doing. Distant owners don't prevent our hiring good people. Nor do they preclude editors from running lively, compelling newsrooms, with adequately paid people doing interesting enough work to keep staffers around long enough to get to know a place ( although we pay adequately only when corporate owners understand the damage to the company's interests in failing to do so).

Not having local ownership doesn't keep strong, confident editors from getting out into the community and bringing the community into the newspaper — or from seeing to it that their staffers do not confuse objectivity with detachment, or a good investigation with a perpetual sneer. It doesn't stop editors from nixing unfair, under-sourced, or ignorant stories.

Loving your community as a journalist means telling people things they don't want to hear and putting people in the paper who don't want to see themselves there. But we must be able to recognize success. We must show our communities the many examples of kindness and courage and tolerance that exist within them, shed light on the things that bind us together, help people who live in proximity to one another to hear each other.

Some things about newspapers of yesteryear are more dream than reality. But this is fact: papers used to be better at growing up out of their communities and reflecting them back to their citizens. They were warmer and more human, they mitigated loneliness by bringing lots of local people alive in their pages, they copied the rhythms of talk over the backyard fence, they weren't too fancy-pants to print news of the humble events that shape our daily lives.

In looking at papers from decades ago, of course, we have to remember that communities, too, have changed. The people today's papers serve have themselves become more mobile. But that's all the more reason to do a better job of giving them the information they need to govern themselves effectively, telling them the stories that give them a sense of their hometown, and introducing them to the people who live nearby.

Maybe it's even a reason to have an affirmative action hiring policy — for local folks who actually know things about their towns. And surely it's a reason to quit specializing, as so many do, in the wearyingly long list of explanations why this or that tidbit of news a caller wants in the paper can't possibly get in — and to start finding a way to print it.

As Lippmann said in Des Moines in 1949: "There is safety in numbers, and in diversity, and in being spread out, and in having deep roots in many places.