Enquirer 2.0
In the spring of 1998, The Cincinnati Enquirer made a leap toward greatness with a hard-hitting investigation into the murky global practices of Chiquita Brands International. It failed disastrously. Ten years later, our hometown newspaper seems poised to triumph in a journalistic New World Order of mommy-blogs, data collection experts, and citizen journalists. Is this a good thing?
By Julie Irwin Zimmerman
Illustration by Kristin Stuart
It’s a rainy Wednesday morning in March and the women of Cincymoms.com are busy. KevinsMom tells everyone that the Hot Wheels at Meijer, normally 99 cents, are two for a dollar this week. Landonsmomma wants to know who else is heading to Maysville to see George Clooney at the premiere of the movie Leatherheads. Dozens of moms, spilling over four pages, debate how much to spend on their kids’ Easter baskets. “ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS for Easter?” writes mom22littlegirls. “Since when is Easter about a bunny who brings tons of gifts?”
It doesn’t look like journalism, this Web site dedicated to the kinds of women who say they’re too busy to read a daily newspaper. It has almost no relationship to that day’s Cincinnati Enquirer, where a Delta buyout offer, the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate cut, and the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq dominate the front page. Yet Cincymoms.com sits alongside the daily newspaper, and dozens of other outlets, as part of the Enquirer’s efforts to remain relevant in a media landscape that’s shifting at a dizzying pace. No longer just a newspaper, the Enquirer now calls itself an “Information Center” where social networking sites, blogs, community weeklies, magazines, and books are as central to its mission as the 212,000 newspapers the company distributes daily.
For those who are frequently frustrated with the hometown newspaper—which is to say, most of us—it may come as a surprise that the Enquirer’s efforts are gaining some traction in an increasingly desperate industry. According to Scarborough Research, a partnership between The Nielsen Company and Arbitron, Inc., the Enquirer ranks near the top nationally among newspapers in both the percentage of local weekly visitors to its Web site and in the combined local audience for the newspaper and its Web site. Gannett Co., the Enquirer’s corporate parent, long derided for putting profit ahead of quality, is garnering credit for its innovation and willingness to experiment.
“I don’t want to sound like a shill for Gannett, but I think they have their act together,” says Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, which is affiliated with American University’s School of Journalism. “That doesn’t mean everything they throw up on the wall is going to stick, but I think they’re doing things a lot more creatively and a lot more aggressively than a lot of newsrooms, where people are whining that they don’t have any resources.”
To be fair, the Enquirer’s efforts encompass much more than a group of moms judging the contents of each other’s Easter baskets. There’s CinciNavigator, which lets users search their neighborhoods for home sales, crimes, and live traffic conditions. There are more than two dozen community weeklies, full of stories on rubber-chicken dinners and school carnivals (recent headline from the Community Press Mason Deerfield: “Dog, Owners Getting Used to Each Other”). And there’s the Data Center, a treasure trove of databases on school test scores, unemployment figures, Congressional earmarks, and foreclosure sales.
None of it resembles what most of us think of as daily journalism, but that seems to be the point. As daily newspapers march toward extinction, the future of the news industry remains uncharted. Is it too far-fetched to think that the Enquirer, a paper that’s never enjoyed a reputation for groundbreaking journalistic excellence, could actually be navigating a way forward?
A DECADE AGO it was a very different Enquirer that made national news with its investigation of Chiquita Brands International. Then-editor Larry Beaupre had sent reporters Mike Gallagher and Cameron McWhirter to Central America, Europe, and Washington, D.C., on a year-long, wide-ranging investigation into Chiquita’s business practices. The resulting report served notice that the Enquirer—long considered a mediocre paper that favored corporate interests—was now a serious newspaper that would take on the region’s most powerful individuals and institutions. There was no more prized target than Chiquita’s owner at the time, businessman Carl Lindner, whose political and philanthropic donations gave him great influence with Republicans and Democrats, both locally and nationally.
In a special 18-page section, the paper laid out its findings: that Chiquita circumvented laws on foreign ownership of land by setting up elaborate shell companies to secretly control dozens of supposedly independent companies in Central America; that company subsidiaries used pesticides banned in the U.S. on foreign banana fields, endangering workers and nearby residents; that a Chiquita subsidiary called on the Honduran military to brutally evict inhabitants of a company town, which was then destroyed; and that a subsidiary bribed Colombian officials to use a government storage facility. The series portrayed a company that operated in a reckless, aggressive, and often lawless manner that was at odds with Lindner’s avuncular image in Cincinnati.
Beaupre had come to the Enquirer with a reputation for hard news, and he and other top officials at the paper were triumphant in the wake of the series’s publication. I was an Enquirer reporter at the time, and while there were plenty of snide remarks in the newsroom and a few petty jealousies, there was also a sense that this was a new era at the paper. Some saw it as a naked bid for a Pulitzer Prize, but who before had ever uttered the phrases “Pulitzer Prize” and “Cincinnati Enquirer” in the same sentence?
Then in June 1998, six weeks after its publication, came the stunning retraction stripped across the front page, framed in a thick black box. The Enquirer could no longer stand by the series because, it said, reporter Gallagher had hacked into Chiquita’s voice mail system, without his bosses’ knowledge or permission, to garner much of the evidence. The paper fired Gallagher, obliterated the series from its Web site, and paid Chiquita a settlement in excess of $10 million.
Nearly everyone involved with the project quickly left the paper. Gannett sent Beaupre into exile at its corporate offices in Virginia; McWhirter left for Gannett’s Detroit News and is now an investigative reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; Gallagher virtually disappeared. The rumors among his former Enquirer associates were that he was either working as a private investigator or embarking on a career writing children’s books. David Wells, who was supervisory editor on the story and is now editorial-page editor, is the only person involved in the Chiquita series still at the paper.
It’s hard to say how much l’affaire Chiquita influenced the future of the Enquirer. Certainly the paper reverted to its prior timidity on business coverage, and it hasn’t appeared as a finalist in any Pulitzer categories in the past decade. But the changes evident today have less to do with fallout from the Chiquita story and more to do with the apparent freefall of the newspaper industry. Since 2001, newspapers have dropped 8.4 percent in daily circulation and 11.4 percent in Sunday circulation, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The Enquirer’s Sunday circulation has taken a beating, falling from a high of 351,982 in 1995 to 289,266 in 2007. However, daily circulation—reported at 212,369 in April—was up 2.93 percent for the year, probably due in part to the death of The Cincinnati Post.
Across the country, newspaper companies have responded to the slide in readership and ads with layoffs and cuts in size. Reporters at the San Jose Mercury News, owned by the Denver-based MediaNews Group, were instructed to wait by their home phones one Friday morning in March; anyone who didn’t receive a call announcing a layoff was to report for work later that day. Staffers at the Chicago Sun-Times have grown accustomed to seeing colleagues ushered out, never to be seen in the newsroom again. The direction of the industry prompted the late columnist Molly Ivins to proclaim, “What really pisses me off is this most remarkable business plan: Newspaper owners look at one another and say, ‘Our rate of return is slipping a bit; let’s solve that problem by making our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.’”
READERS CAN ARGUE about whether the Enquirer as a newspaper is less helpful and less interesting—and there is a blog, cincynewsache.blogspot.com, devoted solely to critiquing what its anonymous author calls “the worst newspaper in the United States”—but there’s no denying it has changed drastically in the past few years. Early in editor Tom Callinan’s tenure, the paper’s response to slipping circulation was to try to lure younger readers with coverage of nightclubs and Nick Lachey. That approach alienated the core group of older readers without gaining new audiences, and it has been abandoned in favor of creating new products for specific demographic and geographic segments.
There’s Cincymoms.com for women with children at home, and CinWeekly, an alt-paper manqué aimed at the post-collegiate crowd. There are blogs for Reds fans (frontier.cincinnati.com/blogs/redsinsider/) and Bengals fans (frontier.cincinnati.com/blogs/redsinsider/), and theater (www.cinstages.com/buzz/) and symphony fans (frontier.cincinnati.com/blogs/classical/), and video to go with every kind of story, including some that don’t seem to benefit from a video component, such as shoppers camping out to herald the opening of the West Chester Ikea (Look! They’re still cold!). The Enquirer was an early test site for Gannett’s “Information Center” concept, which has now gone company-wide, and the changes reflect the corporate mission: to “gather...the information our readers and viewers want using words, images, and video, and distributing it across multiple platforms: the daily newspaper, online, mobile, non-daily publications, and any other media possible to meet our readers’ needs.”
The daily paper is still considered the heart of the Information Center, but it’s clearly geared toward Baby Boomers, especially women, which explains stories like a front-page centerpiece in March on plastic-surgery alternatives. Through Gannett’s relentless research and focus groups, editors surmised that traditional, older readers were alienated by the paper’s shift in the last few years, so they recently launched an in-house campaign that Callinan unofficially dubbed “Undoing the Damage.” When the paper was trying to be all things to all readers, national news often found itself elbowed out by entertainment features, how-to stories, and quirky items. Now national and international news stories are making a return to the front page. The campaign to make every story tight and bright is giving way to some longer stories—such as an April feature on the neighborhood known as the Bottoms that once occupied the land being developed as The Banks—on the assumption that older readers are more willing to read them.
Callinan is a lifelong newspaperman who’s spent more than three decades at Gannett. He arrived here in 2003 from the Arizona Republic; in the 1980s he served as Mike Gallagher’s editor at the Lansing State Journal. His approach to newsroom management is low-key rather than dictatorial; staffers describe him as genial, if a bit removed.
And while Callinan has spent his entire career in “old media,” he earned a master’s degree in management and new media at the Rochester Institute of Technology while editing the Gannett-owned Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in the late 1990s. He came to Cincinnati as “editor and vice president/news”; midway into his tenure that changed to “editor and vice president for content and audience development.” He angered some in the newsroom with high-profile changes when he arrived, such as reassigning the movie and television critics to reporting positions, but he says such moves reflect the need to make the product—and therefore the staff’s efforts—ever more local and more technologically oriented. These days, when a reporter leaves the paper, she’s more likely to be replaced by a videographer or a data-acquisition specialist than a traditional reporter.
Sitting in his 19th-floor corner office, with sweeping views of the Ohio River, Callinan admits there have been bumps in the road as the Enquirer transmogrifies from newspaper to Information Center. One widely touted feature on the Web site allowed readers to comment on every posted story, but editors disabled the feature quickly after receiving too many racist and sexist screeds, along with a sprinkling of pornography. There are excellent blogs that amplify coverage in the paper, such as Dustin Dow’s NCAA blog, full of breaking news and behind-the-scenes information that satisfies the cravings of serious college hoops fans. But there are also blogs that seem to be little more than daily diaries, such as the Foodie Report, where staffers wax about their favorite Weight Watchers frozen entrées. One promising blog—Footnotes, written by reporter Gregory Korte—examined election returns, demographic trends, and other data. It went roughly six months without a single new entry before disappearing from the main blogs page this spring.
The immediate feedback of the Web allows editors to see which stories people are most interested in. It’s a tempting tool, but it can lead to overkill. Take, for instance, the story of Brenda Nesselroad-Slaby, the Clermont County assistant principal who left her 2-year-old to die in a hot car last year. People felt strongly about the story, and by the thousands they clicked on the video at the Enquirer Web site of her police interview in which she agonized over her daughter’s death. But coverage in the paper, no doubt influenced by the Web traffic, veered toward the unseemly and voyeuristic as readers’ interest continued long past any new developments. As the blogger behind NewsAche wrote in February, “The turning point for me was the Slaby coverage, when it became clear the Enquirer was on a campaign to milk the deaths of children for Web traffic. When I wrote about that, I wondered whether I should cancel my subscription. I didn’t, but I might as well have. I realized only recently how dramatically that coverage soured me on the Enquirer.”
Callinan cites stories about Chad Johnson or the legal woes of Bengals players as examples that generate more clicks than their news value might dictate, and he says it’s a tough call. Newspapers have long been criticized for giving readers what the editors think is news, a sort of “eat-your-peas” mentality, rather than printing what people really want to read. But, he says, editors are increasingly adept at spotting when a story that has become popular online no longer belongs in the newspaper. Web traffic “will influence [coverage] the day things are happening; it will help guide our discussions for the next day’s newspapers,” Callinan says. “But this is what we go through: there will be stories that will continue to be viral online and you look at the newspaper and it’s—you’re beating this story to death. So there will be times where we say, ‘OK that’s an online story, let’s move on.’”
IF THE INFORMATION Center sounds like a Gannett corporate gimmick, to some extent it is. The company is constantly launching campaigns with titles like “Real Life, Real News” that are designed to shape and standardize news at their 90 newspapers. But new-media experts are genuinely impressed with the changes that have occurred in Cincinnati and throughout Gannett. Last year a piece in Wired had glowing things to say about the Enquirer’s efforts to involve readers in the process of journalism. Jan Schaffer of the Institute of Interactive Journalism—herself an old-media star who won a Pulitzer at The Philadelphia Inquirer—is another fan.
“Some of the stuff Cincinnati did in the last election, or CinciNavigator, is up there with the best of them,” she says. “I use [CinciNavigator] on the road when I talk about interactive devices. I think it’s wonderful.” Schaffer and others point to an investigation by The News-Press of Ft. Myers in 2006 as an example of the Information Center’s potential. The paper received complaints about exorbitant prices for a utilities expansion project in Cape Coral, Florida. Instead of sending staffers out to investigate and report back to readers, they enlisted readers’ help and were deluged with tips, leaks, and documents. Volunteer engineers looked at blueprints and accountants analyzed balance sheets. The News-Press’s citizen-journalist-assisted investigation led to a huge cut in fees charged by the city of Cape Coral and the resignation of one city official.
While Cincinnati’s efforts haven’t generated anything on the level of that investigation, Callinan argues, somewhat persuasively, that the weeklies, social-networking sites, and community pages bring the news organization closer to its communities.
“Certainly the paper has higher aspirations than ‘where’s the best place to get coffee,’ but because we’re in touch with these new reader segments—younger people, the weekly newspapers—what we find is we’re getting better journalism because we’re better connected,” he says. “Newspapers tend to sit in their ivory tower and cover their community—this office kind of represents that. But by having these touchpoints with the community—weekly papers that are very close to their communities, social networking sites that are close to their interest groups, such as moms—that just allows us to be closer to our communities for the bigger stories.” For instance, when Michel Veillette of Mason was accused of killing his wife and four children, friends and neighbors posted to the Enquirer Web site with remembrances of the family. In years past a reporter would have knocked on many doors before gathering enough such responses; now those same people were willingly coming forward with stories, and reporters could follow up with them.
The changes, though, have come at a price, one that favors keyboards over shoe leather and the role of the community over the skills of seasoned journalists. Advocates of citizen journalism sometimes portray reporting as something anyone can do, discounting the time and skills required to cultivate sources and the role of institutional memory in providing context to the daily rush of news. (As one reporter I know asked, “Does anyone want their health care provided by a citizen-physician?”) Devotees of this new form of newsgathering also tend to overlook the value of aspiring to objectivity. In some forms, citizen-driven journalism can be steered by the agendas through which community members see the news; in the case of Cape Coral, the public clamor was no doubt fueled by the fact that residents stood to save thousands of dollars by exposing problems that would thwart the utilities expansion. After all, if they were homeowners, they’d be assessed for the expansion: they had skin in the game. There’s also the matter of cost. Financially shaky newspapers would no doubt prefer to involve the efforts of volunteers if it means saving on salaries for professionals. There is certainly a place for citizen journalism. But there is also a need to have someone shape and guide the many voices competing to be heard, and to apply critical judgment in the execution of the reporting and editing.
So when the bigger stories unfold, do you send a data-acquisition person or a citizen-journalist to the scene? It’s one of the many questions they’re trying to answer these days in the 19th-floor Information Center at 312 Elm Street.
THE REAL POWER at the Enquirer lies in the office of publisher Margaret Buchanan. It is the business end of the newspaper industry that has seen the greatest challenges from the Internet, challenges that are prompting the cutbacks and layoffs in newsrooms across the country. Advertising—especially classified ads—is migrating rapidly to the Web; in 2007 alone, employment ads in newspapers dropped by 20 percent. Prospective homeowners used to buy the Sunday paper and pore through the house ads; now they jump online, and real estate ads in newspapers are a fraction of what they used to be. Advertising by department stores, once a mainstay of newspaper profits, has dwindled with the rise of retailers like Wal-Mart, which does little newspaper advertising. In the meantime, online advertising at newspaper Web sites is growing, though its rate of growth has slowed, and Web sites still contribute less than 10 percent of the revenue at a typical newspaper company.
The precarious business model caused newspapers, as a sector of the economy, to see their stock prices slide 42 percent in 2007, after falling 11 percent in 2005 and 20 percent in 2006. Four major newspaper companies—Tribune, Dow Jones, Knight Ridder, and Pulitzer—have changed ownership since 2000, some at rock-bottom prices. Clearly Wall Street isn’t enthusiastic about the industry’s future. Buchanan, a Cincinnati native and University of Cincinnati graduate who began her career at the Enquirer 26 years ago in the advertising department, returned here as publisher in 2003 after stints at Gannett papers in Idaho; Rockford, Illinois; and Elmira, New York. She has the rehearsed polish of a marketer who’s accustomed to persuading others to see things her way. She allows that the advertising model at media companies has changed drastically since she returned to the Enquirer and that online ads don’t bring in what print ads traditionally have. But, she argues, as readers migrate to the company’s many Web sites, the advertising dollars will follow. “The reality is the digital world is growing and building and that rate structure started with nothing and as its value increases so too will the value of the advertising dollar,” she says. “That will only continue to grow as the value grows.”
The business and journalism sides of a newspaper have always viewed their product through vastly different lenses. While journalists see what they do as a quasi-sacred trust, guaranteed by the Constitution and essential to a healthy democracy, the business side generally sees stories as the stuff that fills up the space between ads. The online migration of the industry holds the potential to magnify these differences: While many journalists see it as a chance to fulfill the same mission using different means, Buchanan describes the Information Center as a way to reach the readers that advertisers are targeting.
“Our customers tell us, ‘I’d like to reach, say, women 25 to 34, and I’d like to reach them this way,’” Buchanan explains. “And if we identify there are enough of those customers out there who have that need, we say, ‘What does that look like? What kind of product would we develop?’ And [the Information Center’s] job is to do the content.”
Cincymoms.com is a good example, Buchanan says. “The Information Center supports the content and the dialogue that delivers an audience that our advertisers want and value and will pay for.”
Buchanan—and many others—see this as a monumental shift in the way journalism is created. In the old model, editors decided what the most important news of the day was—what people needed to know even if it wasn’t always what they wanted to know. Sometimes it meant newspapers that were full of stories about city council meetings and poverty that weren’t directly relevant to every reader but seemed important to reporters and editors. The serious stuff shared pages with a healthy dose of weather stories, hot-lunch menus, and feel-good profiles of hometown heroes. But now, with the instant feedback of the Internet, we know what’s important to people because we know what they click on. We know that a Britney Spears story will generate more clicks than a story on Darfur, and that people would rather read about the best dry cleaner in town than the county commissioners’ meeting.
“That to me is exciting because how it used to work is that [editors] would determine what people wanted and that isn’t always exactly what people want,” Buchanan says. “That doesn’t mean today in the news pages of the newspaper they don’t use their journalism in the traditional sense, but once you branch away from the newspaper and you’re creating content digitally or in magazines, you’re doing it for different reasons. People wear multiple hats.” So, for instance, former reporter and Kentucky columnist Karen Gutierrez now moderates the discussions at Cincymoms.com, while former sports editor Michael Perry is now “managing editor for non-daily products and new initiatives”—meaning he’s overseeing the paper’s free-standing publications such as CinWeekly. These days, job candidates for the Enquirer must be able to shoot video, manage a database, or do something other than simply report and write stories, because there might be a new initiative in their future.
“You have to know when you’re a reporter and you’re reporting news, and that’s very important,” says Buchanan. “But there’s also still a lot of info we can gather that we know people want. Sometimes journalists will say ‘That’s not relevant’ when it is very relevant. And that’s where we missed the boat for so long; we didn’t recognize that, too, was very important to our readers. You have to do both.”
If you are on the business side, this development is a great innovation; on the journalism side it can look like a big chink in the long-standing church/state wall that has traditionally divided the editorial functions from the advertising side, with the attendant concern about what happens when one of those new advertisers is offended by a story. Callinan says Buchanan has stood up to advertisers before in defense of the Enquirer’s news coverage, notably when homebuilders complained about coverage of the housing downturn. Buchanan may well understand the responsibilities of the press and the distinction between news and advertising, but if the model of creating new info-vehicles to please advertisers takes hold, will her successor understand as well? It’s not so much the principles involved as the model being used that deserves scrutiny.
Yet for all its talk of sacred trust, journalism is still a business that must, on the whole, answer to shareholders and satisfy Wall Street’s desire for steadily increasing profits. And profits depend on attracting more and more people to consume the products that a business creates. So when it’s clear that people care more about high school football than the war in Afghanistan, the resources go into high school sports. Perhaps someday a new, nonprofit economic model for news delivery will emerge—there are experiments afoot, and there’s always the model of National Public Radio—but for now, news organizations are looking to give people what they want, and often it’s not journalism.
“I DON'T THINK it’s easy for newspapers nowadays; times are tough. But define tough. Is it not making [a] 30 percent [profit margin]? Not making 20 percent? Not making 10 percent?”
This is Larry Beaupre, on the phone from his office in Scranton, musing about the future of newspapers. After the Chiquita debacle, he was moved to Gannett headquarters in northern Virginia, where he wrote an ethics code for the company and carried out other tasks. Gannett fired him after he filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming that he was made a scapegoat for the Chiquita mistakes. (He received $550,000 in a settlement with Gannet in January of 2003.) He began consulting for newspapers and in 2000 was asked to help improve Scranton’s independent newspaper, The Times-Tribune. The paper’s owners liked what he did and in 2001 made him managing editor.
Beaupre doesn’t care to talk about the Chiquita story and says he doesn’t read the Enquirer enough to comment on its changes. He now runs a paper less than a third of the size of the Enquirer, in a town about one-quarter the size of Cincinnati. He could be forgiven for sounding bitter; instead he comes across like a melancholy Greek chorus, worried and saddened by the direction of the industry in which he’s spent his entire working life. And because he no longer has a corporate ladder to climb, he is unusually frank for someone who’s still working in the business.
In Beaupre’s opinion, newspapers don’t need to chase new models so much as do a better job at what they’ve always done. “It seems like we lurch from one fad to another,” he says. “There’s a lot of marketing mumbo-jumbo; some of it contains kernels of truth and some of it is B.S. If there are a number of people interested in pets and there are enough to make it worth your while to report on it, then that’s OK. It isn’t so much that these things are wrong to do, but if they’re being done at the expense of a story about a tax increase or how many people were killed in Iraq, then you have to reevaluate your priorities.”
As if to put a fine point on his argument, a few days after I spoke with Beaupre the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced a commission, led by former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson, to look at the impact of the loss of local news. The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy will examine how changes in news delivery are hurting local communities, leaving their citizens unable to make informed decisions. With “the thinning down of newspapers and local television in America, there is measurably less local, civic information available,” Alberto Ibarguen, president and chief executive of the Knight Foundation, told the Associated Press. “So what are the consequences of that?”
No one knows whether the precisely researched optimism of a Margaret Buchanan will triumph over the warnings of a Larry Beaupre; it remains to be seen where technology, financial constraints, and news consumers will take the industry. Do readers want 18 pages about a banana importer’s purported misdeeds—or can they discern a chest-thumping exercise from something that influences their lives? Can a newspaper make us care about something we can otherwise choose to ignore? Are we simply the sum of our demographic details—suburban moms with a set of priorities wholly separate from those of young professionals—or is there something that can bring us all together? There are those of us who love nothing better than to sit with a cup of coffee and immerse ourselves in the world that a newspaper brings into our kitchens every morning, who want lengthy profiles and spirited debate and an editorial page that does more than support children and oppose crime. But if Wall Street hedge funds and industry research are to be believed, our numbers are dwindling, the power is shifting, and newspapers ignore it at their own certain doom.
Ten years ago the Enquirer made a stab at greatness and failed. Perhaps instead of hyper-journalistic ambition and seriousness, it is now sufficient to tell people whether their pet food is on a recall list and let them share horror stories about their toddlers’ stomach viruses. Perhaps news organizations can still fulfill their civic duties and create new delivery vehicles on an ever-shrinking budget. But, amid the chase for new readers and worries about ad rates, it seems prudent to keep Larry Beaupre’s weary admonition in mind.
“A lot of newspapers have forgotten their central mission: to report news that is interesting and important in a way that’s relevant to their readers, from the chicken-dinner small stuff to the larger stuff,” he says. “A lot of American newspapers have found common ground by doing neither very well. They’ve lost their nerve; they’ve lost their faith in their own industry.”
Originally published in the June 2008 issue.