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Illustration by Brian Hubble
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Illustration of Pulitzer
Dick Weiss, deputy metro editor, knew there’d been a sea change at the St. Louis Post Dispatch when the newspaper’s new owner, Lee Enterprises, handed out what Lee employees have come to refer to, tongue in cheek, as the “prayer card.” Roughly the size of a trifold business card, the prayer card—distributed to Post employees not long after Lee bought the paper in 2005—listed the top priorities for the year:
- Grow revenue creatively and rapidly
- Increase readership and circulation
- Emphasize strong local news
- Drive our on-line strength
- Exercise careful cost controls
Weiss had gone to work for the newspaper 30 years earlier, inspired by the high-mindedness of Post reporters and founder Joseph Pulitzer’s lofty platform. Engraved on the newspaper’s lobby wall and published for nearly a century at the top of the editorial page, the platform promises that the Post “will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, fight demagogues of all parties ... never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong.”
For several years, Weiss had watched as the U.S. newspaper industry moved away from an emphasis on journalistic principles and toward an emphasis on business practices. He found the shift dismaying. It wasn’t that he thought newspapers should not turn a profit, shouldn’t protect their bottom line. “I’m sure Joseph Pulitzer wanted to grow revenue creatively and rapidly,” he says, “but the ethic in the newsroom was built around the cardinal principles, not around profit. The Pulitzer platform was about making the world a better place.”
When Weiss read Lee Enterprises’ profit-centered prayer card, he decided that he had to leave the newspaper. Then Lee Enterprises offered early retirement for Post employees of a certain age and tenure (a move that cost them $8.4 million but was expected to result in pretax savings of about $6.5 million in addition to reducing payroll). Weiss, only 54, took the offer, as did 40 other longtime newsroom employees. His last day, ironically—given that newspaper slang for “the end of the story” is the numeral 30—fell on the 30th anniversary of his first day at the Post.
The Minnow That Swallowed A Whale
When Lee took over the newspaper and the rest of the Pulitzer properties, observers in the industry saw it as a major leap for a little-known chain.
“Who is this Lee Enterprises?” asked the American Journalism Review in a lengthy analysis of the acquisition. “Founded in 1890 with A.W. Lee’s purchase of Iowa’s Ottumwa Courier, Lee has remained below the journalism industry’s radar, mostly because the vast majority of Lee’s 44 dailies (pre-Pulitzer) are under 30,000 circulation.”
Four years ago, Lee owned only 28 papers; now, after the acquisition of Pulitzer’s papers, it has 58. Only 19 have circulations of greater than 30,000 readers. Buying Pulitzer increased Lee’s ad revenue by 69.6 percent and its circulation revenue by 59.7 percent.
The fact that little Lee Enterprises beat out the much larger Gannett in acquiring the Pulitzer properties initially brought relief to many in the Post newsroom, given Gannett’s history in remaking the papers it acquired—moving them toward more graphics and shorter stories, à la the chain’s flagship USA Today, which it designed to resemble a television newscast. “Most people thought of Gannett as one of the worst possible options,” says Margaret Freivogel, a former Post editor who has come to have similar concerns about the Lee approach. Lee’s chairman and CEO, Mary Junck, says that as soon as the Pulitzer board began exploring, in 2004, the prospect of selling the company, Lee was interested. Pulitzer “fit the acquisition strategy that we had articulated,” she says, adding that she and the other Lee execs also admired Pulitzer’s journalism: “An important part of the Pulitzer legacy is the belief that what we do matters. It matters particularly for our readers and communities—and also our advertisers.”
Junck emphasizes what she sees as similarities in the Pulitzer and Lee cultures: “The founder of Lee Enterprises, A.W. Lee, said newspapers should ‘emphasize the “news” in “newspapers” and remain as local as the city hall or town pump.’”
But are the two cultures similar? That notion—that newspapers should concentrate on their local communities—is the only principle on the Lee prayer card that focuses on journalism rather than revenue. And the Post built its reputation on national and international coverage as well as local. Granted, the high-mindedness of the Pulitzer era was already fading when Lee took over. But Lee’s a textbook example of the national trend to drive revenue with more local (and more cost-effective) news.
“Survey after survey shows that consumers these days get national and international news from a lot of sources,” says Junck, “but there are very few places to get local news, and the best place to get that is in a daily newspaper and an associated website. That’s been Lee’s heavy focus.” Even the Washington bureau is intended to provide local news, she adds, by sifting out “what’s important to Missouri and Illinois readers.”
Post publisher Terry Egger says, “In any business, you have to ask yourself, ‘What are your core competencies; what is it that you do really well?’ We gather information for and about St. Louis. That’s what makes us valuable to the people we serve.”
It's All About You
The new Post is focusing more and more on its readers, and they’re driving much of its coverage. For example, on March 5, the Sunday Post-Dispatch used the word “you” seven times on the front page—and that’s just counting headlines and subheads. In the main story above the fold: “Your heart is racing. Your chest feels tight. Will you get the care you need?” In a promo for a Post poll to choose the seven wonders of St. Louis: “You’ve made your picks.” In a promo for an online poll, an urging to log onto the website and tell the Post “what you think about funding a new bridge across the Mississippi.”
The other front-page stories covered the president’s trip to Pakistan, the layout for the new Busch Stadium and ways in which lobbyists are circumventing state rules about gifts to Missouri legislators.
Ten years ago, the front page of the Post on the first Sunday in March carried stories about Bob Dole’s victory in the South Carolina Republican primary; the move of three key KMOX (1120 AM) personalities to what is now KTRS (550 AM); KMOX losses in listeners and revenue; the effects of a concealed-carry law in Florida; a vigil following the shooting of a pregnant 15- year-old whose baby was on life support; and promos for inside features on orphans from the war in Bosnia and school desegregation.
The “you” focus shows up in other ways, says former columnist Betty Cuniberti, who took the buyout: “The paper used to run a series of quotes about news events; in the re design, that was replaced by comments readers had posted to the online chat forums.”
Weiss says simply, “It’s the ultimate zoning: you.”
For William Freivogel—a former Post editor who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for editorials about John Ashcroft’s nomination as U.S. attorney general—there are some troubling aspects to the increasingly local, personal focus.
“The mantra has been ‘local, local, local’ for more than a decade,” he says. “I thought newspapers had learned a lesson from the 9/11 attacks. Readers need to understand things beyond their borders; they need to understand that what goes on in the world might have an effect on them one day.”
Freivogel questions the wisdom of the local focus for the very reason used to justify it: the decline in circulation.
In 1986, when the Globe-Democrat folded and the Post became the city’s only daily, its circulation was roughly 274,000. Ten years later, it was up to 321,000, but by the time Lee Enterprises took over the paper, that figure had fallen to 286,000. It now stands at 278,000, although Egger says “there’s added momentum with a recent surge in home delivery subscriptions.”
Newspapers across the country are watching both circulation and ad revenue drop. In response, they’re emphasizing niche publications and online content (the irony being that online is only as good as the print journalism that feeds it). As for online ad revenue, industry analysts say it will take at least a dozen years to equal print-ad revenue.
The other response is to make content so local, it resembles a community paper.
“If ‘local, local, local’ were the solution, wouldn’t the last 10 years of the mantra have gotten us someplace?” Freivogel asks. “A major metropolitan daily—yes, it has to cover the local news better than any other outlet, but it also has to be the city’s eyes on the rest of the world.” Instead, the Post relies heavily on wire services and other papers’ copyrighted stories.
Jon Sawyer, who was the paper’s Washington bureau chief before taking the buyout, now directs a new foundation, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which supports reporters covering international news. Under Pulitzer, he says, “the Post did more international reporting than any paper of its size. In 2002 and 2003, I traveled all over the Middle East for the paper, and I was able to write with authority about those issues.” If more newspapers had sent journalists, he adds, “We would have had a better debate over whether it made sense to go to war.”
Post editor Arnie Robbins says the paper does continue to provide solid international coverage. “[Reporter] Phil Dine was just in Afghanistan,” he points out. “Lee has never mandated all local. As a corporate parent, they are very uninvolved with our news coverage. We can still send a reporter to Iraq or Afghanistan or China and write about it in a local way—and a national and international way. But local news is something our readers can’t get anywhere else.”
Back to The Bottom Line
In the end, the question is how much money Lee is prepared to devote to newsgathering. When Lee took over, editor Ellen Soeteber told reporters the challenge would be to live up to their Pulitzer name. Five months later, she resigned, citing as one reason a lack of newspaper resources.
“The Pulitzer family ownership seemed to have some pride in what we could call ‘loss leaders,’” Sawyer remarks. “Part of it may have been wanting to influence policy —or maybe some kind of vanity in wanting to be involved in international events. But when you have a corporation with managers working towards their quarterly bonuses, every quarter becomes a kind of Bataan Death March to figure out what you can throw over the side to make the goal for that quarter.”
Terry Ganey, former Jefferson City bureau chief, says, “I was attracted to the Post because of its tradition of advocacy journalism: trying to change things for the better, and all the things the platform espouses about exposing corruption.” He and two other Post reporters were finalists for a 1993 Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism. He left with the buyout because he sensed less room for serious reporting. “Corporate ownership looks more at the bottom line than does the family who lives in the same town and has to face the community every day,” says Ganey.
Egger and others at Lee, however, don’t see quality journalism and moneymaking as mutually exclusive. A Lee newspaper in Glens Falls, N.Y., won an American Society of Newspaper Editors prize for editorial writing in 2004, and Lee’s Times of northwest Indiana was the Suburban Newspapers of America 2005 Newspaper of the Year.
Egger, like Ganey, points to the Pulitzer platform, still at the top of the editorial page. The Lee Enterprises-Pulitzer agreement stipulated that the platform would remain untouched for at least five years.
“I respect the platform a lot,” says Egger. “In addition, in these times, we find we have three obligations: We have a journalistic obligation, we have a civic obligation—but we also have a business obligation. You absolutely can and have to serve all three. One of my old bosses used to have a saying: ‘There aren’t any good newspapers that are broke or any broke newspapers that are good.”
Robbins sees some of the criticism of Lee as nostalgia for a warmer, more familiar era: “You talked to the editor, who happened to be Mr. Pulitzer, and who happened to be the publisher. The Post was a special place to work for a lot of people, and there was a lot about Pulitzer that was wonderful. It was also a company that, when it went public, didn’t have very big profit margins—and needed to.”
Rick Edmonds researches the newspaper business for the Poynter Institute, a school for working journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla. “It’s a split decision,” he says. “In the good old days, papers were bigger, broader and certainly had stronger international coverage. On the other hand, there’s a logic to living within your means. Before, newspapers made money easily, and there wasn’t a lot of discipline flowing from the financial side to do things differently. Now there have been deep circulation losses, staff cuts, increased competition and pressures on ad revenue in large metro markets across the country.”
Will a local-news emphasis turn circulation around? Maybe, says Edmonds. “But taken to its extreme, it becomes a vicious cycle. If you put less into the paper in terms of serious reporting, that begins to show in increasing circulation losses.”
Current Post reporters are waiting to see how the new focus plays out. Those who left took with them the romantic view of a newspaper that puts journalism above all practical concerns.
“People my age and older, when we got into the newspaper business, what drove content decisions was newsworthiness,” says Cuniberti. “We never thought about things like profit margins and ‘What can we do to appeal to someone who is 24?’ and ‘Maybe if we put more local news on the front page, more people will buy it,’ so there’s a kind of sadness among us that it’s turning into something different. But I liken it to chemotherapy: If you say to someone who has cancer, ‘Do you like chemo?,’ no one will say, ‘I love it’—but if this is what you have to do to live, I’m all for it.”
