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The Newsroom Trust and Other Novel Ideas
by Geneva Overholser
After all these years lamenting how profits trump excellence in newspapering, wouldn't it be a relief to find solutions? That's what Stan Tiner has been setting his mind to since January, when the Gaylord family decided he wasn't their idea of a Daily Oklahoman executive editor.
"Maybe I've been done a favor," he told me, "because when you don't have a job, you don't have anything better to do than sit around and think about how things in the newspaper business are going." Tiner came up with an idea about how we might boost journalistic excellence, and he unveiled it in a speech to the New England Newspaper Association:
"Why not dedicate a certain percentage of each newspaper's profits as a set-aside for the operation of a superior newsroom? I don't know what that number should be -- one-tenth of a percent or three-tenths or a half-percent? But set that number aside and let a trust of editors and reporters, with some public representation, be in charge of that."
"The Newsroom Trust" Tiner calls this: TNT. It "would be above and beyond the regular newsroom budget. It might range from a few thousand dollars at a small weekly to a few hundred thousand, or a million dollars at larger-sized papers. But the trust would allow for excellence that many editors no longer see possible. It would allow for travel, or research, or the hiring of writing coaches, or an investigative team to attack a large community problem.
"Think of the flowering this would make possible in journalism across the land. I predict that, within the first year of its existence, the American people would view us in a totally different light. But more important, we would view ourselves in a new and improving way, giving hope and work satisfaction a place in a profession where frustration and cynicism have reigned."
You may need some convincing: Who would make this come about? What would bring a publisher to do it? But think, for just a moment: What a nice (what a reasonable) idea it is: a percentage of profits for excellence.
If Tiner's TNT caught on with just a few publishers, it could grow quickly. As with published lists of philanthropists' donations, its very existence would make publishers want to be on it, and corporations want to see their papers represented.
Another cure that has long appealed to me would also rely on the power that comes with making information public. If we could establish an expectation that our newspapers' business practices would be as open as we try to make everyone else's be, we'd see fewer 40 percent profit margins coupled with shrinking newsholes.
Just imagine, if it became customary to report on ourselves or, more likely, each other, so assiduously that readers could:
* Trace the pattern of their local paper's beginning-reporter salaries, and compare them to salaries in other local companies and to those of reporters elsewhere.
* Chart the percentage of newsprint devoted to newshole, and how it's changed over the years.
* Know what percentage of revenues go to the newsroom, and how that figure has changed over recent years.
* Be familiar with the paper's profit margins, and how they have tracked newsprint price increases -- and decreases.
If the public knew more of such matters, the first response might be an even lower opinion of us -- so evident would be our emphasis on high profitability. But the next response would likely be a newly knowledgeable push for papers to better serve their communities.
Last September, when Robert Rivard was all set to leave the San Antonio Express-News to become executive editor of The Miami Herald, do you know how the Hearst Corporation kept him? By offering him resources for the paper. Seven figures, according to the Austin Chronicle, for more staffers, higher salaries, a bigger newshole. And Rivard said, "To walk away from that was something I couldn't do."
I'm hoping the profit-pressure pendulum has swung so far that the return toward excellence is coming, and the time for ideas like Stan's and mine is nigh. So I look for harbingers. In the Rivard story, I like to think I've found one. *
Geneva Overholser (genevaoh@aol.com), a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group, writes 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.
