Nelson Poynter was right.
The evidence is today’s issue of the St. Petersburg Times.
There’s news in this newspaper.
Twenty-five years after Nelson Poynter created the Modern Media Institute to assure that this area would continue to have a vigorous, independent, locally owned newspaper, the St. Pete Times, while perhaps not perfect, remains vigorous, independent, locally owned.
And contains news.
Welcome to the annual meeting of the National Advisory Board.
We’re very pleased that you’re here to celebrate the 25th year of the school Nelson Poynter created.
We’re even more pleased that we can rely on you to guide our determination to go forward in the spirit of Nelson Poynter. I promised, and meant, that we won’t spend our valuable time together looking back and praising ourselves for what Poynter has become.
We’d rather focus on what journalism has become, and how Poynter can help in the next 25 years.
But with your indulgence, and as something of an introduction for new board members to the spirit of the Institute, I’m going to put on the screen some of the more pithy views of our founder.
They are remarkably current 23 years after Nelson Poynter’s death.
He understood the challenges of new technology.
He understood that for journalism in service to self-government the technology would be a means, not an end.
He may not have imagined how an Internet, or cable, or other devices could fracture a mass audience, but he understood the value of marketing that is founded on the needs of the news consumer.
Perhaps most remarkable is how prescient Nelson Poynter was — half a century ago — about the potential effects of corporate ownership.
When Dow-Jones went public in 1963, he took note.
When Gannett and Knight and The New York Times companies went public in 1967 and 1969, he became all the more determined to keep his news organization independent.
His successors have kept his faith.
The school has been the beneficiary.
Now what?
Where the school goes, and how, is the focus of this meeting.
I HAD PLANNED TO APOLOGIZE for the unusual mess you’ve encountered — a long walk from the parking lot, holes in the porte-cochere, the kitchen walled off for remodeling, the graphics lab undergoing change.
But those are signs of progress. So no apology, only a fervent hope that it doesn’t diminish your experience at Poynter or, God forbid, result in something dropping on your head. When the construction is complete, we’ll have roughly twice as much classroom and office space.
So, okay, what should we do in it?
One objective we have clearly defined is to deepen and broaden our programs for leaders of newsrooms and to reach out to business executives of news companies.
We have enough experience to know that while we may have become familiar and attractive to people in newsrooms who wish to polish their skills, we are very much perceived as a journalist’s, not a business executive’s, school.
Put it another way: Poynter has succeeded in becoming, in its first 25 years, a school for journalists. Now it must become a school for journalism.
We’re gearing up, in both Ethics and Leadership areas, to do more to help editors understand the legitimate commercial needs of the business and to help media business executives appreciate the fundamental values of the newsroom.
Dean Karen Dunlap and the Poynter faculty will have an opportunity during this meeting to tell you more about developments in curriculum and focus.
But we didn’t want to wait for Karen to tell you about an important faculty development, the appointment of Gregory Favre as the Distinguished Fellow in Journalism Values.
As a corporate executive for McClatchy, as the editor of the Sacramento Bee and through a career as an accomplished print and broadcast journalist, Gregory has earned a reputation as an editor of substance, as a leader with distinctive and high principles, and as a mentor of other leaders, especially journalists of color. He is a role model and an inspiration to more than one generation of journalists. We’re honored that he is joining Poynter.
We hope soon to announce other appointments that will enlarge Poynter’s capacity to teach from experience.
Journalism needs our help.
THERE IS INCREASING EVIDENCE that the concentration by news media companies on satisfying shareholders is undermining the integrity of news.
Last year, in this same room, one participant gave the most chilling report I’ve yet heard about the bottom line.
We were discussing Journalism and Business Values. An executive of a major-market TV station confided that the owner was pressing the station to increase profit by 2 percent in the year 2000.
That doesn’t sound so bad, except that the station already was at 69 percent.
When I was a reporter years ago in Ohio, Governor James A. Rhodes had a slogan.
“Profit is not a dirty word in Ohio.”
Profit is not a dirty word at Poynter.
Our endowment is a working news company.
The future of The Poynter Institute is fundamentally tied to the profitability of that company.
But profit has in some places become profiteering.
It is diminishing journalism.
I mentioned in the material we sent in advance of this meeting how disconcerting it was that all six people asked to tell a forum at Notre Dame what they considered the biggest ethical issue facing journalism today cited corporate avarice.
One of the six panelists said that the election-night failures to accurately report the outcome of the presidential election could be traced directly to budget decisions forced on major broadcast news organizations in the last decade.
Is this what a 71 percent profit target can beget?
Is print, producing 50 percent in some places, headed in the same direction?
Don Graham told Wall Street analysts last month that The Washington Post Co. was going to take a longer, more strategic view of its obligation to shareholders.
What a novel stance.
Does any of us really believe that listeners, viewers, and readers don’t notice when the scope of the news coverage is diminished, when hard news goes soft, when newsprint pages are downsized, when zoned editions are introduced as a great service to the reader, and zoned editions are eliminated — as a great service to the reader?
Just before Christmas, an acquaintance sent me an e-mail in which he described what is happening to the under-50,000-circulation community newspaper he edits.
With the editor’s permission — but with a promise to disguise the editor’s, the paper’s, and the corporation’s identities — I’d like to read some of what the editor wrote:
“I’m writing to seek your help.
“As you probably know, [Corporation One] is selling us effective at year-end to [Corporation Two].
“When we first learned a couple of months ago that [Corporation Two] would be the buyers, they seemed by far the best of the possibilities, as far as we could tell. Reports from friends in the industry, in this state and elsewhere, indicated they would be pretty good owners.
“We relaxed.
“It appears that was the wrong reaction.
“Here are some headlines:
“Our paper has for years been quite profitable, with margins in the low 30s and steady year-over-year profit growth.
“We had prepared a budget for [Corporation One], although something of an exercise, with a fairly aggressive margin of about 33 percent for next year.
“[Corporation Two] has told us they are looking for something in the mid-40-percent range.
“We’ve had to extract about $1 million in expenses from the budget we had prepared.
“Last week, we told about a dozen folks they don’t have jobs anymore …
“Eight positions will [be cut] in the newsroom … The newsroom payroll will be cut by about 18 percent. Similar cuts in operations costs.
“We will have to scrap our four-year-old [regional] edition, a bet on the future that we had high hopes for over the long haul.
“Despite an enormous investment of emotion and pride on my part, as well as the publisher’s, we concluded we couldn’t sustain it in the face of such dramatic reductions, and the new owners indicated no interest in short-term losses for what we thought would be significant long-term gains. …
“In the short term, I’m committed to making the best of the cuts and working with my colleagues — and leading my colleagues — to produce the finest newspaper we can in the new situation. But I don’t see any future in this. The paper, no matter how smart we are, will decline over the next year, and I don’t want to preside over that. …”
I’m writing, the editor said, to seek your help.
POYNTER MUST HELP EDITORS. Must help journalism. Must, if we can, help journalism companies.
We are gratified that Nelson Poynter gave us the wherewithal to aspire to the goals he set for the Institute.
We are sobered by the understanding that, as a school that owns a news company, we have our own obligations.
We beseech you to help us figure out how to keep our sacred trust.
