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Knightfall
Knight Ridder and How the
Erosion of Newspaper Journalism
Is Putting Democracy at Risk

karya: David Merritt

INTRODUCTION:

CAN NEWSPAPER

JOURNALISM SURVIVE?

The central idea of this book is that newspaper journalism is endangered,

which puts American democracy in peril.

Given the inexorability and pace of technology, we may not need

newspapers in our media mix at some point in the future—perhaps

sooner than later. But we will need newspaper journalism, because

democracy can thrive without newspapers, but it cannot thrive without

the sort of journalism that newspapers uniquely provide.

The question is whether newspaper journalism can be successfully

migrated to new technologies—the Internet or whatever might succeed

it—before it becomes extinct, suffocated like the dinosaurs by

the impact of the twenty-first century giant meteor labeled greed.

It is a race against time and circumstance.

What is newspaper journalism if not simply journalism that is in a

newspaper?

It’s much more, and these are the characteristics separating it from

all other kinds of journalism and pseudojournalism:

◗ Its content is not shaped by a limiting technology, such as broadcast

with its time strictures and, in television and online, bias

toward the visual and against permanence.

◗ Its usefulness is based far more on completeness and clarity than

immediacy.

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◗ Its claim on credibility is based on its length and depth, which

allow readers to judge the facts behind a story’s headline and

opening summary paragraph and then look for internal contradictions.

◗ It has intrinsic value and relevance to people rather than merely

amusing or entertaining them.

◗ Opinions and analysis are labeled as such and are presented separately.

Those are, at least, the values newspaper journalism aspires to, if

not always achieves.

It is a form of journalism that emerged from decades of evolving

standards and practices and from newspapers’ deliberate and layered

process of collecting, sorting, writing, and editing information.

This book is an effort to explain what is happening to newspapers

and therefore to newspaper journalism in the United States, why what

is happening endangers democracy, and what steps might move both

back from the abyss.

The 300 million people who constitute our nation are unable, each

and on their own, to discover the facts necessary to make communal

decisions. Instead, they rely upon specialized collectors, processors,

and disseminators of information. For most of the nation’s history,

newspapers have been a constant and substantial, often dominant,

supplier of the facts that we use to make decisions about public matters.

Over those two-plus centuries, newspapers changed in form and

substance just as the society around them changed. One attribute persisted

through all the changes, however: A newspaper provided a set

of facts common to all who read it; a tangible record of shared information

on which citizens could base their deliberations and decisions

about what to do. Most cities of any size had two or more newspapers,

giving citizens more than a single source, and most American households,

at least through the early years of the twentieth century, read

more than one of them.

Newspapers built elaborate staffs and developed processes to collect,

sort, prioritize, and interpret information. Reporters were as-

INTRODUCTION / 3

signed to seek out information, particularly about the activities of

government, doing, as Walter Lippmann put it, ‘‘what the conscientious

citizen would do given the time and resources.’’ Editors were

appointed to evaluate and critique this flow of facts from city halls

and legislatures, police stations and battlefields, schools and businesses

and ballparks. The physical structure of newspapers provided

not only a repository for information but also a context for it. Editors’

choices about the placement of stories within the pages and the size

of headlines on the page provided a guide to relative significance, at

least as evaluated by the editors. Newspapers represented a sophisticated

and multilayered social transaction that was dependent for its

success on the good intentions, professionalism, judgment, and experience

of journalists and the willingness of readers to extend credibility

to the process.

The people who owned newspapers discovered early in the nation’s

history that you could make good money publishing them. For

some newspaper owners that was enough. Other, differently motivated

owners believed that publishing newspapers was an important

public service, and the fact that you could make good money doing

it only made the process that much more rewarding. For them, the

journalism that they did was the driving force; the purpose of the

business part of newspapers—the advertisements and the revenue

from circulation—was to make the journalism possible.Well into the

twentieth century, newspapers of both sorts held a virtual monopoly

on mass communication of information, but it was not to last.

Other methods of telling news were developed, and with each new

method came fresh predictions that newspapers were doomed. First,

radio would cause the demise, it was claimed, because newspapers,

with their long production times and clumsy distribution systems,

could never overcome the immediacy and intimacy of a radio broadcast.

And seven decades ago when television was developed, paving

the way for TV newscasts, there were similar, even more dire predictions,

because now broadcasting included pictures. And two decades

ago Ted Turner, the mogul who invented CNN and twenty-fourhour

broadcast news, proclaimed that newspapers would be extinct

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by the end of the twentieth century. Now, we hear, the Internet will

do the job.

Those predictions have not come about. Radio couldn’t kill newspapers,

nor could television, CNN and its copycats, nor, as yet, the

Internet. But greed can kill newspapers—and thus newspaper journalism—

and it is in the process of doing so. And if newspaper journalism

becomes extinct because the people who own newspapers do not understand

and appreciate its intrinsic and crucial strengths and its role

in democracy, much more will be gone than simply one particular

and traditional way of transmitting news and information.

With a handful of exceptions, American newspapers are being

eroded, their traditional values subverted, their journalistic resources

stripped away, their dedication to public service and local communities

hollowed out, leaving a thin shell of public relations gimmicks

that pretend to be public service and entertainment that pretends to

be news.

What’s going on is serial suicide on the part of the companies that

own most of America’s newspapers, not, as some apologists suggest,

serial murder by evolving technology, changed societal circumstance,

or altered public taste. If something doesn’t change in newspaper corporate

boardrooms, the source of the information that Americans

need to govern themselves at all levels will be an unreliable and constantly

shifting array of broadcast and Internet outlets that are often

irresponsible, untrained, understaffed, and driven wholly by profit or

ego. That information will be incomplete, unverified, and laced with

the poison of partisan bias and narrow interests, if only because it has

not been subjected to a rigorous editing process.

This period of decline did not arrive suddenly for America’s newspapers,

and its progress is gradual though, without major change, inexorable.

How the decline began and how it is proceeding is one

part of an immensely complex story, and saying with confidence and

specificity what the decline implies for the future is a difficult proposition

in a constantly shifting media environment. However, certain

things are clear:

◗ American democracy cannot succeed in the long term if the information

that fuels self-determination becomes unavailable or

INTRODUCTION / 5

is so narrowly held that only a tiny minority of citizens possess

the tools to make rational democratic choices. To answer democracy’s

‘‘What shall we do?’’ question—that is, to arrive at public

judgment—citizens need three things: shared, relevant information;

an agora (i.e., a place or method of discussing the implications

of that information); and shared values (at a minimum, a

belief in the value of democracy itself ). When citizens do not

have access to shared, relevant information and do not have an

active agora in which to act upon their values, democracy is left

in the hands of insiders and special interests and at the mercy of

their values.

Increasingly, American newspapers are failing to provide

those essentials of democracy because they are being strangled

by bottom-line concerns. For the last forty years, the consolidation

of newspaper ownership into publicly held companies has

increased. At the same time, accumulation of newspaper company

stocks by institutional investors has exploded. Most institutional

investors are not interested in the quality of journalism or

the communities it affects; they are interested in short-term,

ever-increasing profits. When newspaper profits fall, excessive

concern about the next quarter leads to quick fixes on the cost

side: hiring freezes, downsizing of space devoted to news, and

cutbacks in travel, training, distant bureaus, and staff. Fewer reporters

and copy editors and reduced news coverage reduce a

newspaper’s quality and erode its ability to provide relevant information.

◗ Newspaper journalists and the newspaper process, historically

and to this day, are the primary first-gatherers and sorters of the

shared information essential to democracy. The journalists, by

instinct and training, and the newspaper process, by its deliberate

and layered nature, are uniquely suited and positioned to

provide meaningful information.While a majority of Americans

tell pollsters that they ‘‘get their news from television’’ or, increasingly,

the Internet, the fact is that most meaningful broadcast

news and most ‘‘facts’’ bandied about the Internet, at all

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levels, national and local, originate with newspaper organizations.

(This is easy to verify. Read The New York Times, The

Washington Post, and TheWall Street Journal daily for a week and

watch national television news and news-magazine shows daily

for that week and the week following. Calculate the percentage

of broadcast stories on substantive matters that are original, untouched

by one or more of those newspapers. Try the same experiment

with your local newspaper and television stations. The

numbers will approach zero.) While the news organizations that

underlie newspapers continue to erode, broadcast, cable, and the

millions of individual Internet sites that trade in ‘‘news’’ simply

cannot afford to take over that first-gatherer-and-sorter role because

their economic models were built from the beginning on

cannibalizing newspapers, not on maintaining full, freestanding,

news-originating operations.

◗ Absent fundamental change by the people who run the corporations

that own the great majority of America’s newspapers, the

nation will become dependent for democracy’s plasma upon

three or four newspapers in the largest cities, and those will

maintain their missions only as long as they are in the right

hands.

◗ The narrowing of informational channels is an enormous threat

to personal and civic autonomy.

There is, however, hope. A slim chance exists that at least some

newspaper companies will successfully transfer their news-gathering

and sorting expertise onto emerging technologies before they fritter

away their once-deep pool of reportorial and editing talent and

thereby surrender their wondrous advantage and squander their primacy.

While most newspapers already haveWeb sites, those sites also

depend on the reporting and editing depth of their host newspapers’

staffs, and their operators have not yet figured out how to make

money in a medium where user expectations are to not pay for anything.

Figuring out how to make money on the Internet will require

INTRODUCTION / 7

substantial investment and experimentation, things that corporations

focused on ever-increasing profits are unlikely to do.

Some major newspaper companies, most notably the Tribune

Company and Media General, Inc., are experimenting with the concept

of ‘‘convergence,’’ which involves cooperative pooling of broadcast,

newspaper, and Internet reporters and editors who are trying to

develop ‘‘multiplatform’’ skills and understanding so that their work

can be effective in any of those mediums. Whether convergence will

be the savior of high-level journalism or just another step in its dilution

is the subject of much debate within the profession.

Whatever the future holds, understanding in detail what happened

and is happening to American newspaper journalism is important, if

for no other reason than to provide markers along the way back from

the abyss.

This book reflects the views of a journalist who spent forty-two

years as a reporter and editor for Knight Newspapers and Knight

Ridder, Inc. It is not the history of Knight Ridder, for no single point

of view can reliably and objectively encompass all of the complex dynamics

of a major corporation over nearly five decades. It is a story of

Knight Ridder told by an informed participant/observer with a specific

point of view.

The 1974 merger of Knight Newspapers and Ridder Publications,

Inc. began a journey by people and institutions through the elastic

labyrinth of the last third of the twentieth century and years of

complex technological, cultural, and spiritual twists and turns. The

journey transformed two mid-century family-owned newspaper companies

with vastly different cultures into a prototypical twenty-first

century American media corporation that is, like other companies in

other fields, now forced to redefine its place in a constantly shifting

financial and public service environment.

There are no pure heroes and no pure villains in this story. The

players were doing what genetics, background, training, and the immediate,

ever-changing environment urged them to do. But choices

have consequences, and when those choices arise between competing

foundational beliefs—that is, conflicting core cultural values—one

value system is bound to suffer and the other prevail. When the pre-

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vailing value system sees journalistic quality as an expense to be minimized

rather than an asset to be leveraged, the implications are

profound for our society.

More important, journalistic performance and a viable democracy

are fully interdependent, so a decline in journalistic quality caused by

the erosion of foundational missions and dedication to public service

has important and negative implications for public life, which is the

way democracy is expressed and experienced.

This story is part reportage, part memoir, part analysis and argument.

The reportage involves dozens of interviews with the participants,

as well as extensive reading and research. The analysis and

argument are capsulized in this introduction. The memoir portions

are designed to show firsthand how the forces at work on newspaper

journalists affected one life spent with one company, Knight Ridder,

and to contribute a narrative thread to the larger fabric of what has

happened to American newspapers.

My undeniable and inescapable bias will become clear soon

enough, but let me state it concisely at the outset: Newspaper companies

have an obligation to public service and a special obligation to

democracy that outweigh all other considerations, save actual survival.

When, as has happened, public service and democratic obligations

become secondary to profit considerations when actual survival

is not at stake, vital aspects of American life are put in great peril.

While such a retrospective bias comes easily and is comforting to

hold, it does not, and cannot, provide the answers to the difficult

underlying questions of how the current state of affairs could have

been avoided and what now needs to happen. All along the route of

this journey, choices were made by people who intended to make

what were, by their inner compasses, right choices. The consequences

of those choices were occasionally unpredictable, but in the main

were foreseeable because the choices were based in competing underlying

philosophies that led only in one direction or the other.

This book is not intended as a paean to the past, a yearning for

lost innocence or some supposed golden age of perfect public service

journalism. Such a time never was. It is an attempt to sound, through

one company’s example, a cautionary note—perhaps even an alarm—

INTRODUCTION / 9

about the future. If, as seems likely, current journalistic and business

trends continue, our democracy’s need for the relevant information

that is its plasma will be imperiled because the bulk of the nation’s

corporately owned daily press will not be able to meet that need while

its leaders are motivated more urgently by the profit demands ofWall

Street than by a desire to serve democracy,

The question—for citizens and for the nation’s public life—is

whether the environment that now molds the behavior and values of

newspaper companies will provide enough oxygen to keep newspaper

journalism alive long enough. The answer is crucial.