From the book of Knightfall
Knight Ridder and How the
Erosion of Newspaper Journalism
Is Putting Democracy at Risk
karya: David Merritt
We . . . do not sacrifice either principles or quality on the altar of the countinghouse.
— John S. Knight
ON ONE OF those delightfully fresh South Florida fall mornings,
Jim Batten is moved to get out of his office to start our conversation.
‘‘Let’s take a ride,’’ he said to an old friend of a dozen years, so
we left through the sixth-floor double doors freshly plated with a
new name, Knight Ridder Newspapers, Inc., picked up his car in the
parking garage, and turned onto Biscayne Boulevard, heading north
away from The Miami Herald building.
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We had much to discuss that morning in 1975 because each of
our lives had just taken turns of their own. I was, at thirty-eight,
only three months into the job of executive editor of two Knight
Ridder–owned newspapers in Wichita, Kansas. He, at thirty-nine,
had recently moved from the editorship of The Charlotte Observer to
the post of vice president of news for the one-year-old corporation
built by the 1974 merger of Ridder Publications, Inc. (RPI) and
Knight Newspapers, Inc. (KNI). The merger had turned two re-
14 / KNIGHTFALL
gional newspaper companies into the nation’s largest in terms of total
circulation, and it had opened exciting possibilities for thousands of
the companies’ employees.
The two of us shared much history, including years together as
reporters at the Knight-owned Observer and in Knight Newspapers’
Washington bureau; a tennis rivalry battled out on courts in North
Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland; southern upbringings; and wives
who had known each other as students at Queens College in Charlotte.
Most important, we shared a conviction that newspaper journalism
was an exciting and worthy way to make both a difference and
a living.
That conviction was matured and strengthened by our experiences
with Knight Newspapers, Inc., which was much more a collection
of newspapers than it was a corporation. Even after it went
public in 1969, Knight Newspapers was almost wholly an expression
of the values of John S. Knight (JSK), its founder, and Lee Hills, its
president. Fierce independence from commercial concerns and local
autonomy for editors were primary operating principles. The corporate
staff was minimal and of little moment as far as the journalists
were concerned, and many of the journalists’ Holy Grail was to be
the editor of a newspaper, for they believed, with JSK, that, ‘‘There
is no better or higher title than editor.’’
So on that morning I needed the answer to a question.
‘‘Jim, why in the world would you give up the editorship of a great
newspaper for a corporate job?’’ I asked, giving the word corporate a
disdainful roll off the tongue.
I anticipated a more measured James K. Batten answer, one typical
of his Virginia Tidewater mannerliness and habit of careful reflection.
This was not that.
‘‘Somebody has to watch the bad guys.’’
Newspapers and Coat Hangers
Publishing newspapers is a good way to make money.
Publishing newspapers is an important undertaking, and you can
make good money doing it.
WHY THIS MATTERS / 15
Both statements are true but describe totally different concepts.
On the one hand, setting out to make money by producing newspapers
expresses a specific objective, not unlike setting out to make
money by producing coat hangers or carpets. You decide to do it
based on a calculation of desired profit, what materials to use, how to
use those materials most efficiently, and how to market the result.
Eventually, you must decide what level of quality you want in the
product, lowest to highest, with the decision driven by your assessment
of the potential market. Decisions about how to react to market
changes and competition invariably refer to and are controlled by the
original objective: making coat hangers or carpets or newspapers in a
way that produces a profit of a certain level. Over time, the efficiency
of your operation determines your level of success. If your financial
goal is not being achieved, you must find new efficiencies or adjust
the quality of the product, upward or downward. (There is, after all,
a need for lesser quality carpets or coat hangers.) Quality is a manageable
variable in the calculation. Success is measured by whether the
profit goal is met.
On the other hand, setting out to produce a newspaper that makes
a difference in a community or a nation and to make money doing it
is unlike any other business enterprise one can imagine. All other
businesses begin, appropriately, with single-minded focus on the
bottom-line objective. Newspapers have a built-in conflict, a natural
and deep tension between the polar opposite, though not mutually
exclusive, objectives of public service and making a profit. In the best
newspaper operations, symbiosis exists, a comfortable, reinforcing coexistence
between the journalistic and business aspects. But as with
symbiotic relationships in nature, when one partner becomes dominant,
the other dies and the partnership fails.
The driving force in newspapers that have public service at the
core, in contrast to other businesses or newspapers published simply
to make money, is a qualitative calculation: You want to act in ways
that achieve certain nonmonetary goals, that reflect the conviction
that journalism is a public trust, an institution that serves, advances,
and protects the public welfare and supports a free democratic society.
The ability to make some level of profit doing it is a necessary
16 / KNIGHTFALL
supporting factor in the qualitative calculation. The acceptable level
of profit is a function of the owners’ desires, needs, and values. Because
the calculation began with a core decision about quality, profit
becomes the variable in that calculation rather than quality; profit is
an enabling force, not the driving one. Success is measured first by
whether the nonmonetary, public goals are met. The obvious problem
with this, of course, is that measuring profit is easy—it’s simply a
number—while measuring quality is complex and subject to facile
rationalization.
Of course, if you cannot manage to make a profit at all given your
qualitative goals, the newspaper will fail, but for most of the 220 years
of American newspaper history, making a profit by producing newspapers
was not particularly difficult for the people who owned them.
In fact, for most of U.S. history, failing to make a profit with a newspaper
required a high level of incompetence or inattention or truly
wretched luck. After all, until the middle of the twentieth-century
newspapers were by far the dominant news medium. Journalistically
good newspapers made money; journalistically bad newspapers made
even more money, at least in the short term until their failure to serve
the public well caught up with them.
Compared to most business ventures, operating margins in newspapers
have been incredibly high. Family dynasties lasting a century
or more were built on operating returns as high as 50 percent. Profits
of 20 percent to 30 percent were virtually automatic, leaving owners
free to take the profits or, as many did, plow them back into the
enterprise in the name of expansion or improvement in the newspaper’s
quality. Some people produced newspapers because they deliberately
chose that over coat hangers or carpets. Some chose it
motivated by the ideal of a public trust; some were motivated by the
power and prestige it could bring; some by the sensational margins.
Journalism and Democracy:
Fully Interdependent
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not require that
the press be accurate or responsible or fair; only that it be free. It does <!– /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:”Trebuchet MS”; panose-1:2 11 6 3 2 2 2 2 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:647 0 0 0 159 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –>
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not confer special status on a form of business; it confers on every
citizen the opportunity to be heard without government interference.
It was designed that way because the people who wrote the Constitution
believed that truth, in a fair encounter with falsity, would always
prevail; that the open clash of competing ideas produces better outcomes
as a democracy seeks to answer the question, ‘‘What shall we
do?’’
A free press is essential to a functioning democracy. A functioning
democracy is essential to a free press. The synergy of those two ideas
is important because a free society cannot determine its course—that
is, self-determination does not exist—without three things: shared,
relevant information; an agora (that is, a place or mechanism where
the implications of that information can be discussed); and shared
values (at a minimum, a belief in personal liberty itself ).
To understand the threat to democracy posed by a press that does
not have public service as its driving force, it’s useful to examine the
synergy between journalism and democracy.
