NY Times Editor Sounds Alarm

The industry is newspapers and the man is Gene Roberts, managing editor of the Times, since August 1994, and before that for 17 years the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. At the Inquirer, it is fair to say, Roberts was responsible for more serious investigations than all of Rupert Murdoch's papers on four continents over their entire lifetimes.

Roberts, now 64, is an interim man at the Times, brought back near retirement age and planning to exit next summer. He sounds like a statesman more than a lame duck, though, and if there is anyone can rally a much-demoralized profession, it is he. Roberts left the Inquirer after chain proprietor Knight-Ridder started squeezing his budget. He had planned to leave anyway, but what concentrated his mind was incessant budget meetings. "In my last year at the Inquirer," he said during Q. and A. after a lecture at New York University Dec. 3, "we had to go through 9 budget revisions, all downward." Not his idea of the journalism business. "If I'd wanted to be an accountant, I'd have been one."

Roberts, in a baritone Southern drawl that makes Bill Clinton sound like a city slicker, argues a devastating case against the chain newspapers that clank across the land. Absentee managers discover that, in the short run, at least, they make more money by publishing less news, shallower news, more celebrity puffs.

Roberts cites a study of the fate of the Louisville Courier-Journal since it was bought by Gannett, the longest chain. The overall news space did go up, but much of the increase consisted of features, soft news, and wire copy. The average local news story shrank. Wire service copy -- almost always the most rudimentary and least probing -- went up by a astounding 76 percent. So it happens that at a time when the Federal government is foisting more power upon the statehouses, coverage of those muck-filled precincts declines. Less scrutiny translates into emboldened lobbies and mindless legislation.

During the civil rights era, "a double handful of Southern newspapers, independently owned, stood up for civil rights, and made an incalculable contribution." And where have all those flowers of enlightenment gone? Gone to chain gangs, almost every one. Little Rock's Arkansas Gazette, which called for Federal intervention to enforce the court order to integrate Central High School in 1957, is now Gannettized, as is the Nashville Tennessean. In Greenville, Mississippi, the Delta Democrat-Times, owned by the Hodding Carter family, which spoke up against the White Citizens Councils at a time when you could get your house burned down for doing that is now owned by a chain with the perfect Orwellian name of Freedom Newspapers. Roberts scrupulously notes that Gannettization has done the Jackson, Mississippi papers some good. But even a Times-owned affiliate in Winston-Salem, N. C., demands that the editors fill out forms quantifying the time reporters spend on different sorts of stories.

When newspapers are getting yanked around by time-and-motion experts, it's hard not to lapse into small town, Front Page, green-eyeshade nostalgia. Your present-day columnist, who happens to have organized this lecture, stands ever-skeptical about golden ages. But Roberts is a practical fellow who does not seem enamored of gloom and doom simply because the '90s are less noble than the '60s. He does know that the question is not only what is to be done, but who is to do it. He is dubious about government action. "I wish in retrospect that we had limited newspaper ownership in some way to x papers in x towns, but we didn't. I tend to think at this point that [the spread of the chains] is irreversible."

As he speaks, these publications teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, so they would need an infusion of money to do this work. Foundation executives please note: Roberts, although he is most definitely not an accountant, calculates that the whole venture could be funded for $1.5 million. Marshall Loeb, the just-appointed incoming editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, might find this an interesting way of reviving interest in his bimonthly.

To the question of whether reporters could be expected to bite the hands that pet them, Roberts was laconic: It's not every newspaper editor who would say, "If you're in reporting for the right reasons, occasionally you have to put your job on the line." Emblazon those words over every journalism school in the land. For that matter, every school.