Future

Future fine, Gene Roberts says

Matt Woody, a senior news-editorial major, won first place in the Society of Professional Journalists’ editorial writing competition. He attended the SPJ convention in October in St. Paul.

 By Matt Woody
Alumni News Staff

   The newspaper business constantly faces new threats, and its newest one, technology and electronic news, despite such claims, will not usher in the doom of print media.

So said Gene Roberts, managing editor of The New York Times, in his speech in October at the Society of Professional Journalists convention in St. Paul, Minn.

Instead, newspapers need to be concerned about a suicide of sorts, he said.

“The big threat to journalism comes from within our profession, not from the outside,” Roberts said.

Newsrooms with strangled budgets and a corporate approach to newspapering surely will do in print media much sooner than any so-called electronic threat, he said.

Roberts talked about a disturbing trend in the business. Continually, newspapers are being shuffled into fewer and fewer organizations, organizations that are more centralized and interested in profit rather than getting information to the public.

What they don’t realize, he said, is that “in the end, profit flow and information flow are intertwined.”

Along the same lines, newspapers are forging ahead into the Internet and other electronic venues at the same time that they are cutting back on the newsrooms that feed such outlets, he said.

Roberts said he found himself in the favorable position of working for a newspaper whose management is committed to bucking that trend.

He quoted The Times’ publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.: “I am seeing some newspapers in this country pour more money and resources into the future and watch the present deteriorate. And they are starving their current news operations in a hope that they can build something for the future. I think they’re out of their minds. On the other hand, I hope that by doing the opposite, that I will siphon away a lot of their readers.”

The other challenge from within that Roberts sees involves formula, rules and rote.

“If you had to list the deadly sins of the newspaper business, among the most deadly surely would be journalism by rote and rigid formula.”

Although many newspapers are steering toward formula journalism, Roberts said history taught that such an ap-proach did not work, because it destroyed the ability to react.

He recounted one such lesson from more than 30 years ago.

In those days, he said, there was a trend toward brevity, and as a result, many newspapers did not jump stories from the front page. One such paper was the Dallas Morning News.

“On Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot within two blocks of the newspaper. You could see the assassination spot from the newsroom windows. You can guess what happened. Except on a couple of days, one of the biggest stories of the 20th century was not jumped.”

Sure, there was plenty of coverage on the news pages, but it was delivered in small chunks. In the end, that confused readers and certainly didn’t serve them, he said.

Fortunately for the Dallas Morning News, Roberts said, a timely change in management brought with it freer thinking, which enabled the newspaper to adapt and outlive other Dallas dailies en route to becoming one of the most solid newspapers in the country.

Roberts urged the audience to listen carefully for those would-be death knells of journalism.

“Let us hope that more executives learn what some of us were taught in the streets and fields where the readers are — that you might get a large audience by being a quick, superficial read, but not an intense, dedicated audience.

“Let us hope that we as journalists can produce a strong counter movement for substance and continuity.”