American newspapers have been doing a bad job for a long time of relating to people of faith, especially evangelical Christians. Coverage before and after November’s elections — when the emergence of “values voters” surprised the nation’s press — comprised just the latest chapter in that poor performance.
Read the rest of this entry »
Since we’ve been doing this for four years now, you might say we finally have our own “Top 40″ list of hit-makers. But as we observe annually in this space, we are not honoring what we’d call the Ten Best newspapers but ten papers that have made great strides, and can serve as a model, in one (or several) important areas: Attractive design. Community awareness. News generated by staff initiative, not recycled wire copy. Interesting marketing ideas. Even, this year, compelling obits. Once again, we found much to like across the U.S.A., and so did many newspaper readers, so let the hits keep on comin’. — Greg Mitchell
The Times-Picayune
New Orleans
Tourists looking to experience New Orleans like the locals do should pick up a copy of The Times-Picayune. “Go into a coffee shop in New Orleans and you’ll see our paper being read at nine out of 10 tables,” says Editor Jim Amoss (a Big Easy native), “and that’s not just because of the pungently written stories we’re able to do on occasion, but all the little things we do every day.” The Times-Picayune is a big paper (260,720-circulation weekdays and 287,001 on Sundays) that hasn’t forgotten the importance of being a small-town paper for its readers. So while it aggressively covers Big Issues like the city’s public school crisis — landing the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ top prize for photojournalism this year — the paper also devotes a surprising amount of real estate to such community newspaper staples as engagement announcements, high school sports and the police blotter. “If you’re arrested for driving while intoxicated, you will show up in the Times-Picayune,” Amoss warns.
With its gumbo of news from the suites and streets, each copy of the Times-Picayune opens a window into New Orleans’ soul. Nowhere is that more evident than in the sprawling pages of obituaries that sketch the often-extraordinary lives lived by ordinary New Orleanians — all in a style as spare and as evocative as a Raymond Carver short story.
Consider this simple sentence from the May 23 obituary of lifelong New Orleans resident Rodney Jude Schexnider, 65: “He was a member of The Plantation Revelers Social and Pleasure Club, as well as Brick Layers Union Local No. 1.” That day, the biggest newspaper between Houston and
St. Petersburg found room to note with dignity the deaths of numerous uncelebrated locals who, in the New Orleans way, were laid to rest above the ground. Among them: Tyrell “Baby” Bailey, Sheetrock layer and plasterer; Clarence “June Boy” Wilson, an industrial worker; and the retired owner of the Dauterive Trailer Park, whose very name tells a story: June Doris Bergeron Dauterive Lailhengue.
This close attention has its roots in a hardheaded decision the Times-Picayune made in the late 1980s to aggressively zone editorial and advertising. The paper looked like a lot of other Advance Publications properties did at the time — dull and gray and utterly unlike its hometown. A couple of redesigns later, the Times-Picayune now is as colorful as a Mardi Gras float, and reaches readers and advertisers with six-way daily zoning. On Thursdays and Sundays, the Times-Picayune inserts, and also distributes for free, “Picayune” sections of extremely local news that are zoned 19 ways — and are so popular that readers line up when copies arrive at suburban bureaus. “They are vehicles for zoned advertising,” Amoss says, “and they are fat with zoned advertising.”
Fat, colorful and ready to share neighborhood lore: The Times-Picayune surely qualifies as a New Orleans local.
– Mark Fitzgerald
The Hartford Courant
Connecticut
Keeping editorial quality high in tough economic times is hard enough for today’s newspapers, and even harder for their photography and graphic departments, which always seem to be trimmed first. But not at The Hartford Courant. Despite a cut in photo staff from 23 to 15 in just the last two years, The Tribune Co.-owned paper keeps winning awards for visuals.
In just the past few months, the Courant garnered its third straight Angus McDougall Overall Excellence in Editing Award from Pictures Of The Year International (becoming the first paper ever to win the prize three times) and received nine other awards from the organization. Other recent nods include eight awards from the National Press Photographers Association, along with the Society for News Design’s ranking as one of the top five newspapers in the country for design.
The paper also was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in April for feature photography, recognizing the dramatic pictures that ran with its five-part series on heroin addiction in small towns.
“Photojournalists here are journalists first,” explains Thom McGuire, assistant managing editor for photography and graphics. “There is a commitment to visual presentation.” McGuire contends the best visual images come from giving staffers a chance to find great photos, allowing them input into which pictures are chosen, and making their input count as much as the reporter or editor. He also requires the results of every photo assignment to be reviewed by a picture editor.
Despite a daily-circulation drop in the most recent FAS-FAX, which saw the paper go from 194,526 to 190,402, the Courant’s visual efforts still receive kudos from around the country. “They sweat a lot of the details,” raves David Kordalski, assistant metro editor/visuals for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland. “They seem to be bold when they need to be bold.”
On the writing side, the Courant has held its own with in-depth investigations and big projects, while still keeping tabs on local towns. A special 80-page Sunday section that ran last fall about Connecticut’s link with slavery garnered a Sigma Delta Chi Award, while a 2000 series on bad doctors earned a Pulitzer Prize. In addition, the paper took New England Newspaper Association “Newspaper of the Year” honors in three of the last four years.
Since Editor Brian Toolan’s arrival in 1998, the paper has made many major editorial changes, such as expanding sports coverage by about eight pages per week, hiring a full-time investigations editor, and increasing the investigations team to six from two. “It is the highest order of journalism,” Toolan says of the investigations effort. “You truly give your readers something they can’t get anywhere else.”
– Joe Strupp
Chattanooga Times Free Press
Tennessee
With Tennessee its home and Georgia on its mind, the Chattanooga Times Free Press is in a good state. During the past 12 months, the TFP has received numerous awards and increased its circulation and ad revenue despite the U.S. recession.
“They’re not just doing one thing well. They’re hitting on all cylinders,” says Walter E. Hussman Jr., whose privately-held, Little Rock, Ark.-based WEHCO Media owns the paper.
Hussman is also publisher of the TFP, which was merged from The Chattanooga Times and the Chattanooga Free Press in 1999. Since then, it has renovated its newsroom, installed a new press, did a redesign, launched sections devoted to entertainment and high-school sports, and increased its presence in southeast Tennessee and north Georgia (with bureaus and zoned pages in both places). And the TFP offers “a larger news hole than a lot of newspapers,” says Executive Editor Tom Griscom. “Walter believes in news. He looks at it as a major driver of circulation.”
Over the past year, daily circulation rose to 77,748 from 77,425, and Sunday to 102,430 from 100,784.
Also drawing readers is the unusual daily presence of two editorial pages: liberal (Times) and conservative (Free Press). This dual approach satisfies people of different ideologies, and makes it harder for candidates to “spin” when meeting with representatives of both pages. “It’s fun,” says TFP editorial cartoonist Bruce Plante. “Politicians don’t know what hat to put on!” The paper also attracted readers to its Web site this spring with 48 Internet-only pages covering the war in Iraq.
Young people are on the radar, too. The TFP helped resurrect the newspaper at a largely minority local high school by providing funding, giving advice, and printing the paper. This fall, the TFP will start publishing a thrice-annual, in-paper section created by 36 students from 18 area high schools.
And the TFP helps employees with a mentor system as well as in-house training sessions every other week.
Among the paper’s recent honors: top newspaper in the state (Tennessee Press Association) and best print quality/over 75,000 circulation (Southern Newspaper Publishers Association). In addition, Plante won this year’s national Fischetti competition for editorial cartooning.
– Dave Astor
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Texas
This Texas paper is a star, and it doesn’t need a telegram to prove it. A Poynter Institute study and the latest FAS-FAX figures do nicely. The Poynter report last year said the Fort Worth Star-Telegram is “proportionate to circulation size, the best-staffed 200,000-plus paper in the nation.” And, since 2002, the S-T’s daily circulation rose to 228,325 from 226,065 and its Sunday numbers rose to 336,883 from 325,747.
The large-staffed paper tries to make at least half of its stories “positive,” while also doing lots of investigative and in-depth reporting. Its staff recently wrote about conflicts of interest involving the state’s House Speaker, and published an award-winning 2002 series about the Jim Crow era in Texas. The reader-friendly S-T’s page 2A “News 2 Use” feature (containing advice about health, personal finance, and more) now goes to other papers via Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
The S-T also devotes ample space to every death, wedding, and high-school graduation in its region. “We have the resources of a 200,000-circulation daily, but try to think like a 5,000-circulation weekly,” says Jim Witt, the paper’s senior vice president and executive editor.
Also, the paper publishes three zoned editions covering Fort Worth and the suburbs. “Our first and primary commitment is local news,” says S-T President and Publisher Wesley R. Turner.
Turner adds that customer service “complaints are at an all-time low.” Columnist Dave Lieber recalls meeting a disabled man who didn’t subscribe because he couldn’t go far to retrieve the paper.
“I made one call to the vice president for circulation, and he arranged for the paper to be put on the man’s porch until the end of time,” says Lieber.
All this takes staff, and the S-T has about 375 newsroom people and 1,400 employees overall. But it’s still one of the most profitable of Knight Ridder’s papers. The reason is simple, though often ignored in this era of understaffing: “If you do a great job with content, it brings readers to your paper,” says Witt. “And readers bring advertisers.”
And success brings awards. Recent ones include the John S. Knight Gold Medal to Turner as Knight Ridder’s employee of the year, three top-10 citations from the Associated Press Sports Editors, and the National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ Will Rogers Humanitarian Award to Lieber for his community service efforts.
– Dave Astor
Belleville News-Democrat
Illinois
Like many others who came of age during Watergate, Greg Edwards saw how muckraking journalism could change the world. By the early 1980s, he was working at The Philadelphia Inquirer, then the paragon of investigative reporting. So when the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, an afternoon daily owned by Capital Cities/ABC, called looking for an editor, Edwards must have cringed when he saw the paper for the first time and read the front-page headline, “Belleville loves a parade.”
Edwards took the job, though, and said that while still true, that “wouldn’t be a front-page headline anymore.”
The News-Democrat could easily have remained in the suburban shadow of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the other side of the Mississippi. But under Edwards’ guidance, the paper has gained attention with its reporting, producing stories that prompted frequent lawsuits as well as citations from Investigative Reporters & Editors Inc. (IRE). During the 1990s, for example, the paper aggressively reported on alleged sexual misconduct by local Roman Catholic priests long before priest abuse became a national story, and its 1992 reporting on racial profiling by police and lack of African-Americans in municipal jobs was picked up by CBS’ “60 Minutes.” Most recently, it was an IRE finalist for a 2002 expose on the corrupt local housing inspection system.
Investigative reporting isn’t limited to big, occasional series, but is stressed throughout the paper. In that way, says Ed Bishop, editor of the St. Louis Journalism Review, it’s gone from “a minor-league paper” that produced reporters for the Post-Dispatch to “a place where people go and stay.” Another distinction: it’s one of the few papers its size with its own editorial cartoonist, Glenn McCoy.
Edwards believes the emphasis on hard-hitting, local reporting has contributed to the paper’s ability to grow circulation for the past 20 years, despite a shrinking home county of St. Clair.
Today, it stands at 54,255 daily, 64,649 Sunday, up 34.7% and 33.3% from 1983, respectively.
President and Publisher Gary Berkley, who has been with the paper for 25 years, says that population growth to the north and south, guaranteed same-day home delivery, shift to credit card payments, and emphasis on service also have supported the growth.
Evidence that business and journalistic success can be compatible, the paper also has excelled on the ad revenue side — despite competition from Pulitzer Inc.’s Post-Dispatch and its suburban weekly group, two small Illinois dailies, and direct-mail giant Advo. Knight Ridder, which has owned the News-Democrat since 1997, gave the paper the Alvah Chapman Award for excellence in operations in 2001. Last year, Ad Director Jay Tebbe won General Excellence in Knight Ridder’s James K. Batten Award competition for, among other things, growing color advertising revenue 15% in 2001 and making the paper’s money-losing TMC profitable. Says Berkley: “We generate revenue, we watch expenses, and we make money.”
– Lucia Moses
The Tampa Tribune
Florida
During the past three years, The Tampa Tribune has been the poster child for newspaper convergence, ever since it moved into a new multimedia home with a local television station and Web site owned by parent company Media General Inc. But the newspaper’s recent circulation rise and editorial improvements have more to do with focusing on basic newspaper operations than any links to its electronic brethren.
“We didn’t look for quick fixes, but instead focused on the core Tampa metro market,” Gil Thelen, executive editor and acting publisher, says about the paper’s recent successes. “We have made measurable, quantifiable improvements.”
Those improvements have resulted in a 6% daily circulation increase during the six months ending March 31, according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations FAS-FAX. In that time, the Tribune’s daily circulation rose to 238,176 from 224,921 a year earlier, while Sunday circulation jumped to 313,693 from 298,623. Thelen credits convergence for some of the improvements, saying it has forced the paper to be more visual, like its broadcast and Web siblings.
But the majority of credit likely goes to editorial expansion, better circulation and marketing efforts, and crucial zoned price cuts. For example, Thelen expanded staffing at the Tribune’s Pasco County bureau north of Tampa, which went to 29 editorial employees from 23, while also adding two more pages per day of news in that edition. The paper also dropped its Sunday single-copy price, to 50 cents from $1, in a portion of Pasco County and in Pinellas County, where the competing St. Petersburg Times is based. That price drop is credited with boosting circulation by 8,000.
“We also changed our introductory pricing,” notes Circulation Director David Kirkman, who said some residents in specific areas of competition can sign up for new subscriptions at a 20% discount. “We are looking at (price cuts in) the areas where advertisers are more interested.”
Customer service saw improvements within the last year through a new incentive plan for carriers, which pays each carrier $50 per quarter if they get only one complaint per 1,000 deliveries. If no complaints come in, the carrier receives $100. The incentive works both ways, however, by charging carriers $1 for each complaint they receive, and $2 if it relates to Sunday delivery.
Advertising revenue increases, which averaged more than 10% in recent months, are credited in part to a reorganization that combined the Tribune’s sales staff with Media General’s nearby Hernando Today of Brooksville and 13 company-owned weeklies. “The results have been outstanding,” says Tribune advertising director Bruce Faulmann, adding that the papers are focusing more on local, small retailers. “We also hired 10 sales people who do nothing but dig up leads for new business.”
– Joe Strupp
The Palm Beach Post
West Palm Beach, Fla.
The Palm Beach Post has a simple approach to doing it right. “The Post is a traditional paper of record,” says Editor Edward M. Sears. “We haven’t tried to invent anything inside of that. We just stress good writing and reporting.” This old-fashioned formula hasn’t gone unnoticed. The paper gained national attention for its coverage of the 2000 Presidential Election and all those flawed ballots in its backyard. This year, it won a top American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) prize for team stories on local Bishop Anthony O’Connell’s resignation after he admitted to allegations of sexual abuse.
The Post’s image as a “rich people’s” paper comes from assumptions about its audience and has practically nothing to do with its content, says Sears. “Some people think we live on that little island of coverage, but [it's] only a minor part of the paper,” he says. The Post reports on everyone “from the richest people in the world to the poorest,” he says. “Lake Okeechobee is the third world.”
Competition from the Palm Beach Daily News, The Miami Herald and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel makes the Post a better paper, says Publisher Tom Giuffrida. “Competition requires us to spend more money on newsgathering,” he says. “There are days when you wish you had the whole market to yourself … but we have a bigger and stronger newsroom than other papers our size. We have to try harder for every reader.”
The Post, with a daily circulation of 167,531, also reaches out to its readers with a lively editorial page that invites public discourse. “We have large numbers of people who disagree with us on damn near everything,” says Sears, who is proud of the strong stand his paper takes against Everglade development projects and the fact the newspaper has never endorsed Gov. Jeb Bush. “We’ve been called a liberal paper,” he says, “but I don’t think we’re that predictable.”
The paper’s ombudsman, C.B. Hanif, is a vital part of the Post’s image of accountability. “There are times when I’d rather eat ground glass than read his column,” says Sears. But Hanif’s critiques of the paper run just the same, because the Post relies on another traditional value — it serves readers, not itself.
– Rafe Bartholomew
Financial Times
London
The pink newsprint of the Financial Times grabs attention on newsstands, but as the FT enters the sixth year of its campaign to become a must-read paper for American business, its most important branding advantage may very well be its concise writing. At a time when USA Today is giving its once-derided news McNuggets plenty of elbow room, the FT maintains a rigorous goal for its reporters: “If you’re writing a news story, you should be able to write it in under 500 words. If you’re doing analysis, you’re not going to get more than 700 words. And we do not have turns in our stories,” says Lionel Barber, the FT’s U.S. managing editor, using Fleet Street argot for what American editors call jumps.
Appropriately, it was war which demonstrated the effectiveness of that strategic weapon. Every U.S. daily of significant size responded to the Iraq war by expanding their news holes, and shoveling them full of copy that was often very good, and almost always very long. The FT expanded its news hole too, but reported the war in crisp, get-to-the-point articles that mixed breaking news and context seamlessly.
War coverage was organized immaculately, with each page assigned a theme, such as diplomacy, battlefield, economic fallout, or reconstruction. The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman called the FT coverage “really smart.”
FT packages also benefited from a decision made before the shooting started, to bring a European and global perspective to the news. “We knew the American media were going to be so American-focused, that we made a deliberate decision to go another way,” Barber says. Among the standout journalists was Roula Khalaf, whose Arabic perspective gave a special depth to her analyses.
In the run-up to the invasion, FT editorials were not as hawkish as its British peers were, and its war coverage was neither as gung-ho nor as panicky as American papers sometimes were, depending on battlefield events.
Since becoming serious about its American presence in 1997, the FT’s U.S circulation has increased from 32,000 to about 130,000 at its last audit. During the war, sales often hit 150,000, the paper says. More Americans, it appears, discovered that a paper that is unashamedly pretty in pink was best able to make sense of the chaos of war.
– Mark Fitzgerald
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Florida
True story: A spring break visitor was floating in a Sarasota swimming pool and idly watching the nervous stutter-step of a lizard scrambling above him on one of those huge insect screens that seem to enclose every backyard. “What a perfect image of Florida,” he thought. The next day, a photo of a lizard on an insect screen appeared in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
Every day, in fact, a small, horizontal photo that reflects some aspect of Sarasota is published on the skybox of the B-section front. It might be a picture of sailboats on the bay, the Ringling Museum of Art, an outdoor art show. Or a lizard on a screen. “For me, the strip celebrates the physical beauty of this part of the world. No one who lives here year-round should take it for granted,” says Publisher Diane McFarlin. She is quick to point out she introduced the strip to the paper, but it was not her idea: “That really is a rip-off — I stole that from the Ventura County (Calif.) Star.”
The daily Sarasota image, however, is just one way the Herald-Tribune reinforces a sense of place in its paper. Among the journalists on the 116,044-circulation daily are a full-time theater critic, a full-time arts reporter and a stable of other freelancers who critique the many music, dance and performance arts along what Sarasota boosters like to call the Culture Coast.
“We devote more resources to the arts than most papers our size because it is so central to Sarasota’s self-image,” McFarlin says.
Sarasota shines from Herald-Tribune pages because readers get to shape the paper in numerous ways. A feature called “Other Voices” invites readers to write about virtually anything. Kids provide the content for “Camp Florida West.” The letters pages are so popular that, like a radio contest, readers whose submissions are printed have to wait at least 30 days before they can try again. There’s even a weekly column in which readers write about their pets. “At first, I thought that would be really hokey,” McFarlin says, but readers loved it, and soon, so did she.
Herald-Tribune reporters learn what is important to readers by serving as “reader advocates.” Each week, a different reporter is taken off all assignments and spends the days taking calls from readers, answering their questions and fielding their complaints on everything from the accuracy of news stories to the annoying folder creases.
“Too often, you can pick up a newspaper and not know immediately where you are,” McFarlin says. But one look at the Herald-Tribune and you know you are in a place of sunbathing and sculpture, ballet and beaches, lounge chairs — and lizards.
– Mark Fitzgerald
The Janesville Gazette
Wisconsin
One of the most fervent advocates of abolishing the rule against media cross-ownership sits behind a desk not at Tribune Co. or Gannett Co. Inc., but at a family-owned evening newspaper in Janesville, Wis., pop. 60,100. As Publisher Sidney H. “Skip” Bliss likes to say, The Janesville Gazette has been making cross-ownership work since 1930, when his grandfather bought the town’s first radio station, WCLO-AM. Parent company Bliss Communications now owns eight radio stations, and three other dailies in Michigan and Wisconsin that it would like to hook up with broadcasting. Skip Bliss has lobbied the FCC to drop the ban on same-market ownership of a newspaper and a broadcast property.
The irony is that the FCC this week may keep the ban in place in small markets like Janesville. Indeed, the Gazette just narrowly avoided losing WCLO and its FM sibling WJVL back when the cross-ownership rule was being written in 1975. “They issued a letter requiring divestiture … saying we were one of 12 or 13 markets with ‘egregious’ cross-ownership,” Bliss says. Just as quickly and capriciously as the divestiture threat came, it passed.
Ever since, the 22,814-circulation Gazette and its stations have been an example of how small towns can benefit from cross-ownership. Radio stations have been dumping news staffs for the past two decades, but WCLO employs three full-timers and a part-timer, who are out in the community competing against Gazette reporters. And while syndicated talkers such as Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlesinger dominate the AM dial, Janesville gets live local talk and news. “That was all Skip. He said, we’re not going to give up on AM talk,” says Robert S. Dailey, vice president of Bliss’ broadcast group and a morning-show host.
The 158-year-old Gazette, which has been in Bliss family hands for four generations, has long been an example of an early-adapting independent paper.
In 1967, it became the third paper in the nation to go offset with a Goss Metro press, and endured a two-year typographers union strike as a result.
“This place has kind of been run (like) a blend of the great things that come with independent ownership and the strength of the corporate structure of public ownership,” says Bliss, who in 1991 bought out the shares of all other family members. It’s an atmosphere that fosters longtime employment, says Editor Scott Angus, a 25-year veteran himself. While papers the size of the Gazette are usually seen by reporters as tickets out of towns the size of Janesville, the newsroom until six months ago had had no turnover at all for three years.
There are comics polls, and then there are comics polls. The latter is what The Grand Rapids (Mich.) Press is conducting this Sunday, Dec. 7.
The Press will publish a 12-page section featuring two or three samples of 73 different comics — 33 of which the newspaper now carries, and 40 of which it doesn’t. There will also be an accompanying intro describing each of the 73 cartoon features. Read the rest of this entry »
Like many people who spent their careers putting mostly black ink on white paper so it could be thrown on people’s porches at 5 a.m., I have been worrying about the future of independent nail salon insurance and newspapers. Most of the content newspapers provide is available free online and many of our best advertisers have found they can reach their best customers more efficiently using lower-cost, Web-based alternatives. Read the rest of this entry »