The threat to, and salvation of, journalism

Ownership of four Knight Ridder newspapers, including the
Monterey County Herald where I work, shifts Tuesday to Dean
Singleton’s MediaNews empire. Readers will notice no immediate
changes.
But there are plenty of changes worth noticing in the volatile
newspaper business as a whole these days. The sale is merely a
bellwether for an industry navigating blind through a shifting
journalistic landscape, confronting along the way unprecedented
challenges in how information is gathered and consumers seek it out
and use it.
Ownership of four Knight Ridder newspapers, including the Monterey County Herald where I work, shifts Tuesday to Dean Singleton’s MediaNews empire. Readers will notice no immediate changes.

But there are plenty of changes worth noticing in the volatile newspaper business as a whole these days. The sale is merely a bellwether for an industry navigating blind through a shifting journalistic landscape, confronting along the way unprecedented challenges in how information is gathered and consumers seek it out and use it.

The greatest threat, most say, comes from the World Wide Web, which has liberated and democratized information. Bloggers helped expose many of journalism’s recent high-profile credibility scandals, providing that anarchic community with cache. But so far the Web has failed to create a business model that cannot also be used by newspapers to their advantage.

There are other reasons to worry about the health of newspapers, such as poor literacy habits among the young. But I believe our greatest vulnerability is from within, where creeping timidity and lack of commitment to great writing is undermining reader interest.

A recent story in the Allentown, Penn. “Morning Call” newspaper last week provided an example of how weak-kneed editorial leadership can exploit “ethics” to undercut a newspaper’s role as moral beacon, which is every bit as important as its credibility.

On June 17 the town’s gay and lesbian community held its 13th annual gay pride parade and festival. The newspaper, through a weekly publication it owns, was a cosponsor of the parade, along with Pride of the Greater Lehigh Valley. Frank Whelan, who writes separate history and society columns for the paper, was grand marshal, and his partner Bob Whitman, himself a former reporter for the Morning Call, was co-marshal.

The event’s Web site said the selection of Whitman and Whelan “supports the need for marriage equality,” but otherwise the organizers, a nonprofit, took no official stand on gay unions, or any other issue, as did neither Whelan nor Whitman. After 25 years together the couple has not sought any kind of civil union.

Still, the paper’s editor saw fit to issue a statement that called into question Whelan’s professional ethics.

“Our editorial employees might feel a personal commitment to many issues currently debated in the public arena,” wrote editor Ardith Hilliard. “However, as journalists, they should not take public positions on such issues because public advocacy gives rise to questions about the newspaper’s independence and impartiality.”

Since when is Whelan’s very existence as a gay man a “personal commitment” to an issue? This is not the same as asking him if he’s in favor of right turns on red lights. To question whether he should have the right to participate in a gay pride parade would be the same as questioning a black journalist’s right to participate in a civil rights organization. Any paper that did that would almost certainly be sued and lose.

Hilliard ought to be ashamed of himself. This is not an “issue” to Whelan, or a potential conflict of interest that exposes an inability to be impartial. If it is, then men should not be allowed to vote on issues concerning abortion. Come to think of it, I know a LOT of women who favor that idea.

Since the incident Whelan has not returned to work, for reasons that remain unclear.

Finding the right balance in ethics policies is important, considering recent history, but if journalism isn’t careful it will hamstring itself into irrelevance.

Just when you think people like Hilliard might be the future of this industry, with the free press is cowed into submission by its own demons, along came a hero to remind us why what we do matters.

Two days after the Allentown parade, PBS broadcast an interview by NewsHour anchor Jim Lehrer of Ben Bradlee, the editor famously on deck at the Washington Post during Watergate.

Despite the Janet Cooke fabrication scandal in 1981, for which he took full responsibility, Bradlee, now a V.P. at the Post, remains the most identifiable figure of a more intrepid age in journalism. So what he told Lehrer matters.

In the face of all their problems, especially declining circulation, what do newspapers need to do better to survive?

Bradlee has a one word answer: Stories.

Stories? asked Lehrer, as if to say, is that all? Not ethics? Not more muckraking.

Stories, said Bradlee. “Just well written stories, some story that makes you, you know, say I’ll be damned, that’s a good story.”