Jim Moss, publisher, Times Herald-Record, Middletown, N.Y.

What has happened at newspapers since Sept.11? And what comes next? How will next year’s budgets be affected, if at all? What are company leaders saying to shareholders? Can newspapers build on the good will they have earned in these past weeks?

Who better to answer these questions than the men and women who run newspaper companies?

Poynter has posed a series of questions to a number of newspaper executives around the country. Jim Moss, publisher of the Middletown, N.Y., Times Herald-Record, responded with the following comments:

Poynter.org: The public's need for comprehensive news reporting of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath comes at a time when advertising spending and media company revenues are both falling. How do you balance demand for expensive news coverage with declining profits?

Moss: For as long as I've been a publisher, when we have news reportage of major significance we have simply expanded the newshole the requisite amount to cover it without regard to where we were bugetarily at the moment. I've explained it in month-end reports and have never been taken to task for doing so. That has been true in two corporate environments (Knight-Ridder and Ottaway/Dow Jones). I wouldn't be comfortable in a corporate environment that expected otherwise. Perversely, in this instance revenues and earnings are so depressed that the additional expense was sort of papered over by lousy financial performance anyway.

Like many peers, your newspapers have obviously spent more money producing Extra editions and devoting expanded coverage to the terrorism stories. How do you explain that to Wall Street?

It's been my sense that Wall Street places a larger premium on financial performance than it does on what we are as products and any unique role we may play in our communities, society, or democracy. That said, I don't think you can "explain it to Wall Street."

This is budget season at a lot of companies. How do you go about preparing a budget for next year in times like these?

This has been far and away the toughest budget season I've encountered. Revenue performance this year has been so dismal that you have to hedge against a continuation of that into the next year and adjust expenses accordingly. It has been a deep adjustment and has not been pretty.

Newspapers and others have generated a large reserve of good will with readers because of the public good your extensive coverage has served. How do we build on that, sustain that, and still run a business?

It may seem or sound simplistic but we have to tout ourselves and toot our own horn. We all agree that we simply don't promote ourselves nearly enough. It was a key finding of the Readership Study done by NMC at Northwestern. We need to get beyond nodding in agreement and do something about it.