PRINT FUTURES

On a vastly beautiful spring day, April 2, the 2006 Andrew Silk Memorial Journalism Panel convened before a packed house to talk about what American reporting is coming to. In the last years we've seen CBS reworked into a kind of Disney version of itself, with the departure of producers and reporters like Don Hewitt, Mike Wallace, Dan Rather, Mary Mapes, Josh Howard, Betsy West, and Mary Murphy, and the lightened loads of Ed Bradley and Morley Safer—all on "60 Minutes." Ted Koppel's "Nightline" on ABC was lightened too, with shorter pieces on more fun subjects, and old Ted given a long "Special Projects" line— "corporate retirement" (though Ted has other ideas)—where NBC's Tom Brokaw is now winding, too...

Which segues nicely to magazines and newspapers, currently more affected by electronic journalism than ever before: Esquire, Rolling Stone, GQ, and New York all face-lifted, gym-toned, and shiny; The New Yorker intoxicated with its own importance (though it still breaks news, and features great critics); The New Republic and The Nation transformed into neocon and neo-left publications respectively, with photogenic editors who spend a lot of time chatting earnestly with Charlie Rose on PBS; Harper's Lewis Lapham furloughed early, allegedly for being too outspoken on the Bush administration...Meanwhile, The New York Times parses out its coverage strangely—on April 10th it relegated a huge story on the protests of Hispanics unhappy with congressional stalling on the illegal immigrant issue all across the country (500,000 demonstrators in Dallas alone), to page A-14—while featuring prominent pieces on parents letting children choose their own colleges; cheese in museums (!); and Phil Mickelson's getting the Masters Golf Tournament green jacket from Tiger Woods, on page one...To say nothing of Knight-Ridder's recent sale of its once-mighty chain to McClatchey, which seems willing to broker the pieces off auction-like; and the big New Times "alternative" weekly chain subsuming the Village Voice group and turning its many papers into McNewsburgers.

John Carroll '63, recently-retired editor of The Los Angeles Times, former editor of The Baltimore Sun, city editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer, combat correspondent in Vietnam, and currently Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard, took the current state of communications most seriously: "We're at a crossroads in journalism," he said. "[We have to decide] whether it's going to be all marketing, money, and propaganda, or whether we actually [cover] people and events. "

Carroll, a fan of old-fashioned reporting, where men and women unhook from their computers and headsets occasionally to establish a source base and physically rub elbows with the subjects they're writing about, took little encouragement from the rise of online Web-based reporting and blogs, on the grounds that this sort of electronic news is most often only a reaction to what gets dug up in print. "They don't have editors. No reporters. No fact checkers. They recycle in many cases," said Carroll, suggesting that this then sets off a chain of possibly wrong information and uninformed opinion, which has more to do with entertainment than journalism. "Eighty-five percent of stories you see on TV and on Web sites [still] come from newspapers," he said.

"Radio is even worse," he continued. "There is almost nothing that can be considered serious journalism. Instead it's 'Britney's Baby!' 'Brangelina!' and "TomKat!'"

Smiling ruefully, he passed the mike to Loren Ghiglione, also '63; both had worked on The Bi-Co News.

Ghiglione, the retiring dean of Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, a former aide to Senator Robert Kennedy, and former publisher of a small daily newspaper in Southbridge, Mass., worried about "the increasing partisanship of news and infotainment," but was more upbeat: "We need to be citizens of the world," he told the students in the room, as well as the many spruce-looking old grads. "I had a request from a former student who wanted to know whether to consider working for Al-Jazeera [the fiercely independent Quatari news service, mistrusted by the Bush administration in Iraq as 'pro Al Quaeda'], which is coming to Washington. I think we need to study in Africa, South America and the Middle East [in order to function well as reporters] in the future."

Ghiglione said he felt ways had to be found to regain the public's trust, that a higher priority had to be put "on thought and credibility," because "only a small minority believes we're fair and accurate. Unfortunately, many Americans think there is a liberal bias," he added. The way around that is hard work, he suggested: "Our mission is what it always was—to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable."

Norm Pearlstine '64, who established the first Far East bureau of The Wall Street Journal, was the editor of the WSJ and then editor-in-chief of Time, Inc., until he retired recently to write a book on the first amendment and the press, viewed the state of the profession with a publisher's eye:

"[Print] news is still very profitable," he said, nodding affably at Carroll. He mentioned that newspaper profit margins are still running at 19.5 percent, down from 23 percent in the late '80s but still workable: "One problem is a lack of innovation," he said, pointing out that USA Today was the last real newspaper innovation, and that was in 1982. Newspapers had a monopoly on people's attention for so long that they grew accustomed to their status, he said.

Since then, the dominance of speed, visuals, graphics, and presentation (shorter stories, color, special interest sections, trends)—"with the consequent feeling that one must read this NOW," has come to pervade print. [USA itself and The Metro papers, which are free "public transportation dailies."] "Magazines—and there are 8,000 of them—could naturally convey this emphasis better, and so they are doing better financially. They have a brighter future than newspapers."

Which was not to say, Pearlstine pointed out, that the game is over for dailies or weeklies. He felt more optimistic about Web sites and the blogosphere than did Carroll, and said that investment in new, local newspapers focused on local issues, even on individual blocks, was a good direction in the future:

"When I was young, I.F. Stone, with his little Weekly, covering Washington, was doing fine. He never had much backing. It was a matter of the right issues, and the right timing..."

Dennis Stern '69, the "kid" of the group, a lawyer and former New York Times reporter, city editor, and now Deputy to the President and Senior Vice-President of the Times, pointed out that many newspapers today are owned by funds like the Blackstone Group, and have corporate CEOs running them, which means they have shareholders to consider: "That's certainly what happened to Knight-Ridder. The best papers—The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times, are all privately controlled, and so are more free to act independently..."

"Except that for those of us who live in New York City, the Times is considered a right-wing paper," laughed Pearlstine.

Stern smiled and listed a number of moves the Times has made recently:

"We are making a significant investment in digital operations, hiring 100 new people. We're developing a research and development group—becoming much more agile—newspeople hate to change, once they've got a 'winning' formula. Our journalists are doing Web sites and podcasts. Our Web site is number one in the world, a 24-7 operation. We're acknowledging that the Web does some things better than print—the stock pages, for example, which seems obvious in retrospect..."

Stern maintained that "the core product is still on solid ground," and that the circulation is growing slightly: "The average age of our readers is 45, but 10 years ago it was 45, too. Newspapers will change, but they'll always be here." He nodded at Carroll, who acknowledged: "Guess I'm the voice of gloom..."

The Silk Panel was moderated by Mark Silk, brother of the late journalist Andrew Silk '78, commemorated by the annual workshop. Silk is director of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.

Greg Kannerstein '63, director of athletics and associate dean of the College, coordinated this year's panel.

— John Lombardi