Jan Schaffer
Executive Director
Pew Center for Civic Journalism

Speakers:

Bill Keller
Managing Editor
The New York Times

Ann Marie Lipinski
Senior Vice President and Editor
Chicago Tribune

Gary Pruitt
President and Chief Executive Officer
The McClatchy Company

Introduction: By Jan Schaffer
Executive Director
Pew Center for Civic Journalism

Journalism is no longer monolithic. No one size fits all. Sure, all journalists share core values - accuracy, independence, fairness and objectivity. And most share some aspirations: They want to uncover wrongdoing, spotlight injustices, make a difference in their communities - even help community life go well.

But they no longer share identical goals for their news organizations. Increasingly, large national news organizations define "news" differently than smaller, regional news organizations do. And, regional newspapers, empowered by technological advances, are navigating future strategies that are very different from national newspapers. They even see some different roles to play in their communities.

In part, national newspapers deal with a demographic community, a community of elites, perhaps, or of special interests. Regional news organizations, on the other hand, more often focus on geographic communities - towns or metro areas that contain many smaller neighborhoods or ethnic groups or communities of interest.

We invited three news leaders who are building these roadmaps to tell us where they are heading over the next five years. How will they position their newspapers to be vital to the community and successful in the industry?

Be specific, we said. Give us five goals for the next five years. And, for starters, we will presume that we all embrace vigorous reporting and quality journalism.

Bill Keller, Managing Editor of The New York Times, a national newspaper and the best journalistic brand in the world, sees a search for more interesting niches, national zoning, growth here and abroad - all leveraging The Times' tremendous base of talent.

The Tribune Company, on the other hand, is constructing a powerful national network. Ann Marie Lipinski, The Chicago Tribune's new top editor, plans to build on corporate synergies and strong storytelling. "Great newspapers will thrive not by imitating other great newspapers but by speaking in a cadence unique to their readers and unique to their markets."

While at McClatchy, an unabashedly local media company, Chief Executive Gary Pruitt plans to leverage each newspaper's biggest asset: Being the sole mass medium in each of its markets. He envisions supplementing news with direct marketing, niche products and direct mail. McClatchy Web sites will be news venues, database caches and community portals - all guiding us through the data smog and "moving us from the Information Age to the Knowledge Age."

All three are bullish about the future of newspapers. And all saw newspapers embracing a critical civic role. Says Keller, "I think that an ability to define communities across lines of interest and ideology is the best reason to believe that newspapers - however the words are actually delivered - will survive."

Bill Keller
Managing Editor
The New York Times

A little more than a year ago, the digital division of The Times had a party at a downtown sushi emporium to celebrate the acquisition of a software design company called The Buzz. At this soiree, Joe Lelyveld, the executive editor of The Times, was introduced to the head of The Buzz, who looked at Joe with an expression of pure wonder and said, "This is great, I've never met a content person before."

And I don't think that he meant, "Boy, that's the coolest line of work he could imagine." I think he meant something like: "People still do that?"

A year or so ago, the digital guys had all the juju in the media business. They were the creative, risk-taking, future-building, paradigm-smashing visionaries. They moved at Internet speed. And, by implication, we were old media - pathetic figures who stood in the rear-view mirror of progress, bleating something irrelevant like, "Yes, but how will you make money at it?"

It seemed, then, that the only salvation for us sad-sack content providers was to rush eagerly into this new world of convergence. A world in which newspapers, magazines, television and the Internet all flow together, somehow, into something that nobody could quite explain but in which everyone passionately believed.

In the conventional wisdom, this was a world in which news consumers would be served by a couple of great media conglomerates, reporters would become interchangeable, multi-tasking gerbils and the news would become digitized video nuggets accessible on your Palm Pilot. The defining intelligence of American journalism would be Yahoo. As my English wife would say, Ya-bloody-hoo.

In the past year, a number of things have become clear about this emerging world and I hasten to assure you I believe there is an emerging world and this is not going to be just the whining of a Luddite. One thing that's happened is that the markets have rendered a verdict on new media as a business proposition and the verdict is, to say the least, skeptical. The market would like to see some revenues, if you please. And until it does, it's going to hold you, or at least your stock options, underwater. That's one reason that The Times' plan to issue a tracking stock to underwrite our digital operations has been put on hold.

For a while yet, new media will be dependent on the kindness of old media.

Another thing that's happened is that content has begun to gain more respect. There's a growing realization out there that an awesome distribution network is only valuable if you have something of value to distribute. I don't believe for a second that AOL bought Time Warner just for its cable operation.

Perhaps the most significant flaw in the conventional wisdom was that the fascination with the conglomerates in the industry, the constant attention focused on mergers, joint ventures and synergies has somewhat disguised an equally important trend in the other direction.

I don't pretend to be a media visionary, but it seems clear to me that there is an accelerating "nichification," if you will, of the media.

The proliferation of cable, the 1,000 flowers of the Internet, the first stirrings of broadband, the new program-it-yourself technology like TiVo - all of these things are creating countless niche alternatives to the big network, mass-market, prime-time Goliaths of news.

Scale still matters of course. It matters a lot if you're trying to show a return on investments. But scale isn't everything. So rather than a small number of media conglomerates jockeying for the faceless masses and offering the same intellectual junk food, I imagine there will be, more than ever, intense competition to find interesting niches and occupy them.

For a paper like The Times, which is in a considerably better situation than most other papers, this presents both threats and opportunities. The threat is that our readership will be nibbled away by niche publications, namely online. But the opportunities are for us to use our tremendous base of talent - reporters, editors, critics and columnists - to move into new niches and serve our existing market in new ways.

Far from finding this prospect alarming, I think of it as a cause for celebration, full of promise. We've defined our niche as people like the loyal readers of The New York Times - curious, educated, engaged, culturally alert. You know who you are.

We think this is a pretty big niche, much bigger than the few million who now read The Times. The kind of journalism we do may be distributed in the form of ink-on-paper or in the form of bits and pixels, but I don't foresee a day when it won't have a rather large market. On the contrary, I think the proliferation of raw, untested information sources on the Internet puts an added premium on what we do, which is to assign smart people to sort out the riot of information and make sense of it.

Where will we be in five years? I should say, I suppose, that all of this is just me speaking and not some authorized voice of The New York Times.

In five years, for starters, I have no doubt that there will be newspapers printed on the byproducts of forest management. I'm quite confident that our circulation will be substantially greater than the 1.1 million daily and the 1.7 million Sunday that we now sell. Growth will be more dramatic outside of the New York region as we continue to open new print sites across the country. We have about 15 sites now outside of the New York area but we'll also be growing in this region.

This rosy scenario is not necessarily true of newspapers as a whole. Some of our growth, sadly, is cannibalizing the readership of local and regional papers that no longer give demanding readers what they want.

In the past few years, The Times has prospered as a newspaper, I believe, by avoiding false choices. Are we a national newspaper or a regional newspaper? Well, we're both and we must be both. We've added reporters and subscribers in both arenas. And this is important because we derive a lot of our identity, our energy, our authority from having roots in the financial and cultural capital of the world.

Are we a time-sensitive, breaking-news organization? Or are we producers of thoughtful, in-depth stories? Well, we're both and we have to be both. To do things in-depth you need people covering the day-to-day stuff, following the flow of events. So we've invested in more reporters on the ground, and we've invested in the kind of time-consuming, labor-intensive projects that most papers can't afford to do.

In five years, our newsroom will have changed into a more multipurpose workplace, continuing a trend that's already begun. We'll extend our journalistic franchise more extensively into the Internet and television, but we will maintain a distinction between quick reports that satisfy an immediate appetite to know what's going on and the deeper work that demands more time.

In five years, we may have moved selectively into some kinds of national zoning, either by region or by subject matter. Our digital news operation already sends e-mails to readers tailored to their interests. This has become standard procedure in news on the Web. We send out e-mails on international news, books, cinema and technology for people who want those subjects.

Zoning a national print newspaper is a much more difficult proposition and one with some serious journalistic and business perils. But I can imagine that features will be added or emphasized to suit local interests or even categories of readers- Pacific Rim news for the West, Latin American and Caribbean news for the South, college news for campus towns and more localized entertainment listings.

In five years, I foresee a big growth in our international presence. We've begun experimenting with branded inserts into foreign newspapers, something that works for The Wall Street Journal. We'll expand our distribution of television products and, of course, the Internet is ipso facto a global medium.

In five years, we'll be a significantly bigger presence in television. We now produce documentaries and some collaborative ventures, most recently with ABC's 20/20 and Nightline. Next year, we'll have upwards of 35 hours of our own produced programming on the air, which is not very much but it's three times as much as we did this year. You don't have to be a network or attached to a network to develop a significant presence on TV.

In five years, we expect to be, as we are now by most measures, the dominant newspaper site on the Internet. And I hope we'll be one of a handful of news sites, including the TV sites, that dominate the landscape of news and information on the Web.

My colleague, Martin Nisenholtz, who runs our digital division, says that in five years we'll be a little bit closer to a time when all information in every format will be available everywhere to everyone. He is a media visionary.

In five years, that will be a comparatively small elite with this kind of access, but we'll have a sample to study and will be able to see how that changes the landscape of the news business.

We're already playing with a variety of ways to compliment and exploit our in-depth news reports online. These include wireless news alerts, webcasts designed specifically for broadband users and a lot of information services tailored to the needs and interests of individual users.

The fragmentation of the news audience and the proliferation of niches have a potentially scary side. Maybe this is a romantic notion but I think there are other things that humans want from their content providers besides a periodic delivery of news about subjects that already interest them.

I think audiences want to plug into a social experience, to look in on what the neighbors are up to. I think they want to plug into a civic experience to get a sense of what's important for them to know about the world and their own country. I think they want some serendipity, some novelty and some surprise.

And I think that an ability to define communities across lines of interest and ideology is the best reason to believe that newspapers - however the words are actually delivered - will survive.

Ann Marie Lipinski
Senior Vice President and Editor
Chicago Tribune

From the time my daughter, now 6, could speak she would play newspaper. She invented a newspaper called Bostona - for reasons neither her father nor I have ever been able to determine - where she pretended to work as a reporter.

One day when she was about 3 1/2, I came home to find that she had been promoted to managing editor, until recently my title at the Tribune. "Well, congratulations." I said. "And what does the managing editor of Bostona do?"

"Oh," she said in her most world-weary voice, "I talk to people about their problems."

I think of that answer often and find it as worthy a description of my job, and perhaps that of my fellow panelists, as any I have ever heard. Dwindling circulation, rising newsprint costs, increased competition for staff, declining ad revenue. And that's not even talking about the journalistic challenges.

But with all that, I remain an editor who is bullish and enthusiastic about the future of newspapers. It turns out I'm at the right company, one that recently spent over $6 billion to buy a group of newspapers, including Newsday and the Los Angeles Times, betting the future on a medium seemingly more aligned with Gutenberg than Gates. But a year into the dot-com decline, ink-on-paper is still looking pretty good.

I'd like to highlight a few things that will help keep newspapers looking pretty good. So five of those, if I may.

The first: one of my favorite photographs in the Tribune archives is a shot of Clarence Darrow making his closing argument at the Scopes monkey trial. In the frame is a lone radio microphone with the call letters WGN. That stood for "World's Greatest Newspaper," the late Colonel Robert McCormick's brazen claim for his beloved Chicago Tribune.

McCormick would probably regard a woman as editor of the Tribune about as highly as I regarded his use of a printing press to advance a suspect political agenda, but I'll give him this: For a conservative Midwestern newspaper publisher, he was a great technological visionary.

While his fellow publishers were banding together to lobby against the upstart medium called radio, McCormick created a radio station. And when television - an even greater threat - came along, McCormick went and got himself one of those stations, too, branding it with the same call letters.

I recount this to explain the bemusement with which I and my Tribune colleagues regard questions about new technology overtaking print. As focused as we are on growing and nurturing the newspaper, we also understand that each medium has a role to play in both our corporate and our journalistic successes.

If you visit me in Chicago, your trip from O'Hare Airport to my Michigan Avenue office will take you past the WGN television studios on the northwest side of the city, the Chicago Tribune printing plant on the near west side of the city, the WGN radio studio on the first floor of Tribune Tower, the Tribune Internet offices down the hall from me, and the Tribune's own Chicagoland Television Cable cameras right outside my door.

This week, a Tribune investigative series on mob influence in the Chicago police department that was a year in the making by one of our finest investigative reporters found a home in most of those Tribune venues, significantly expanding the audience for a brilliant story beyond our newspaper subscribers.

My bosses and the gurus on Wall Street can and have made the business case for what is glibly known as "synergy," but let me make the journalist's case. Finding things out and telling people what we know is the essence of what we do. McCormick understood this and, like him, newsrooms need to seek new ways to tell their stories, both within their news pages and beyond, in ways that deepen and do not compromise our social purpose.

Secondly, a couple of months ago an editor from a well-known daily newspaper, which may or may not publish in our nation's capital, came to Chicago and took me to lunch. He was researching a book about the newspaper industry and wanted to talk to me about the Tribune. He asked about staff levels and why they weren't exactly the same as at his newspaper. He asked about the A-section and why the space configurations were different from his newspaper. And there was a similar line of questioning about the newspaper's Internet operations and editorial ratios.

By the end of it, all I could think of was that great musical question posed by Professor Henry Higgins, "Tell me why can't a woman be more like a man?"

The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times are all great and wonderful newspapers, none of which is ideal for the readers of Chicago. Just as the Tribune would be presumably ill-matched to the needs of those markets.

There is such a sameness across the land in the ways in which newspapers are both good and bad - the monotony of syndicated columnists, no matter how talented; the gray and pat coverage from Washington or the campaign; the predictability of the portfolios divided into world, nation, metro, business and sports.

Great newspapers will thrive not by imitating other great newspapers but by speaking in a cadence unique to their readers and unique to their markets.

There are certain core values that all great journalistic enterprises must embrace - honesty, fairness, accuracy. And those are not geographically bound. But there are many ways to achieve journalistic excellence and few of them have anything to do with parroting the other guy.

The third point is a short one and let me try this out on you. I'm kind of grappling with the language myself, but it's something I've been thinking about. I attended an interminable two-day - it felt like two weeks - conference on journalistic excellence. There was a half a sentence up on the board which stated: "The next great newspaper will..."

And all these answers were flying up. There was one that struck me and that I've thought about and it may be the only thing I wrote down over the two days. One person finished the sentence this way: "The next great newspaper will need to personify itself as the number-one citizen in the community, the one who beats up the bully, who cries at the tragedies, who provides the big ideas to create economic development, who is the school teacher/tutor for children when their schools fail them."

I'm not a big fan of what has come to be called public journalism. There's some redundancy in that to me. I'm not sure I even understand what it means. But I do like this notion of the newspaper as the leading civic voice of a community.

In 1993, the Chicago Tribune undertook a yearlong series of stories called "Killing Our Children," which set out to chronicle the homicide of every child under the age of 14 in our six-county metropolitan area. We published more than 200 stories before the end of the year, the work of 150 reporters and photographers.

What you felt over the course of that year was a sense of a steamship turning course, of an entire city becoming engaged around a single important subject.

The Tribune did the same thing with a series of stories on the death penalty in Illinois that resulted in a pro-death-penalty governor calling a moratorium on the death penalty in our state.

Looking forward, I look back to those and know that the next great newspaper, and our newspaper if it will continue to be great, needs to find more of those occasions, more of those moments where it can stand up and either gather up all the lone, lonely voices out there speaking independently on a subject or put an end to something that nobody else is talking about. In that sense, it does become the leading citizen of a community, no matter how small or how large the community.

The third thing, and many people in this room know him, comes from Bill Kovach. Ten years ago, when I was crossing to the dark side from reporting to editing, becoming metro editor of the Tribune, I got a long and wonderful letter which I keep in my top desk drawer from Bill Kovach, who was a great newspaper man and at the time was curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard.

He gave me many, many wonderful pieces of advice. One I want to talk about today, because I think it's more prescient now than it was at the time. He wrote, "You are now a manager, and under the rules of the game as it's played today, you are expected to be a businessperson as well as a journalist. You can't escape that but you can avoid thinking like a businessperson."

"You can, in fact, turn it to your advantage and the advantage of the news department and your readers. You can do this by listening to the business people, their problems and their plans. More importantly, learn more about their problems than they know. Usually they react more than they think. Use every tool at your command to learn about circulation in your area and about advertising. Be informed so you can't be misled or bulldogged into doing something you know is wrong."

Underlying all of this is the fact that, in the modern world of journalism, there are many voices promoting, protecting, defending, and expanding the commercial interests of the newspaper. Only one voice represents our First Amendment rights.

There are many times I have longed for the simplicity of my predecessors' lives - editorships free of business realities. They thought it was tough to compete with six different newspapers in town, all of which were being read by millions of people reading three and four newspapers a day. I'd take that on any day.

As Bill noted 10 years ago, that's an unrealistic notion any longer, and most editors I know have become, if not quite the experts in circulation and advertising exigencies that Kovach envisioned, smart enough on the subjects to hold their own.

What so many of us have failed at is the cross-training, the education that goes the other way. The cross-training that might have prevented, say, the Staples Center incident at the Los Angeles Times. At the Tribune, we have recently begun something called news disciplines - two- and three-day training sessions on journalistic values that are mandatory for every company executive, from the chairman on down.

Every day a good editor walks through the doors prepared to teach and lead. And that leadership, in the coming five years and beyond, will be just as relevant outside the newsroom as it is inside. An editor's ability and interest in articulating the journalistic mission to non-journalists may be the most important business contribution and journalistic contribution we can make in the coming years.

The fifth one, and this is an old-fashioned one, but it's the everything-old-is-new-again and is, maybe, the most important thing from a day-to-day editing perspective. When a reporter goes home at the end of the day and her husband asks what she did, she may well respond that she wrote a story. But in most cases, that would be a lie.

We write lots and lots of reports and lots and lots of accounts, but we rarely write newspaper stories, things that we would define from our earliest reading experience as having beginnings, middles and ends, characters, plots and other tools of engagement. We all recognize those when we hear them. We read them to our kids every day, but we very rarely read them in our own newspapers.

Last year on a Monday in mid-August, nearly 20,000 more people than usual bought a copy of the Chicago Tribune in Chicago. There was no pressing news that day. God knows, our city's sorry baseball teams had done nothing to draw readers to the newsstands.

The reason for the circulation spike was part two of a four-part series that recounted a year-old story of the shooting death of a rookie Chicago police officer and the toll that his death had taken on his partner and the police force.

Although it was a shooting that was well-reported at the time, the series, "Partners in Peril," offered a brilliantly told reconstruction of the drama playing out beneath the surface of the news headlines - a gripping tale of a naive cop's fantasy of police work set against the reality of urban crime.

It was a newspaper story with a beginning, a middle and an end and a cast of characters as riveting as those found in fiction. A human drama so engaging for readers that even Sunday-only subscribers from the Chicago Tribune felt compelled to buy the paper throughout the week to read the resolution.

One reader sent us a letter describing a scene he witnessed that Monday morning. He wrote, "I sat in stunned silence at a restaurant on West Randolph Street. I had bought the Tribune to catch the second part of your story and was reading intently when I looked up and saw different customers reading the same article. I tried to follow their eyes and then it dawned on me that there was this total hush in the room. This was usually a very noisy place at 6:30 in the morning."

"I saw the owner of the restaurant sitting at his usual table. He looked up at me and asked if it weren't the saddest story about this policeman."

I replied, "Yes, it is the saddest story I ever read."

Not everything we report can or should deserve such treatment, but we need to get much better in the coming five years - and the five years beyond that and the five beyond that - at recognizing the right opportunity. Reporting and story telling, the oldest, most old-fashioned tools in our tool belt, can silence a downtown diner on a busy Monday morning.

Gary Pruitt
President and Chief Executive Officer
The McClatchy Company

This has been an interesting year for newspapers. We've seen the Tribune Company buy Times Mirror, Gannett has bought Central Newspapers Inc. and we've had more consolidation than in any other year in the history of the newspaper business.

People have come to believe that mid-sized media companies with regional newspapers cannot survive. That our position is untenable. That the position of mid-sized newspapers or regional newspapers is destined to decline.

We disagree with that as a company. We plan to survive - not only survive, but thrive - through a combination of business savvy and journalistic commitment.

You heard from three very different companies, The New York Times, a national paper, the best newspaper and best journalistic brand in the world. The Tribune Company, which has created the spine of a national network. Maybe the full skeletal and nervous system aren't complete, but I don't underestimate them.

At McClatchy, we don't have any national pretensions at all. Our future resides in 10 local markets, such as Minneapolis, Raleigh and Sacramento. In each of these markets, which are growing one-third faster than the national average, we're the leading local media company. Newspapers are our core business but we supplement with direct marketing and, finally and importantly, the leading local Web site.

Newspapers are a funny business, aren't they? People have been predicting their demise for the past several decades. They've always been wrong and I think they're wrong today. But we all know the evidence and it sounds compelling:

• Circulation is declining at newspapers around the country. At McClatchy, we've had 15 consecutive years of circulation growth, so I don't think you need to take it as inevitable that circulation will decline. But as an industry, circulation is declining.

• The number of other media outlets is exploding and growing. The number of TV stations, cable stations, radio stations, magazines, weekly newspapers, Web sites, skywriters probably, are just growing like crazy.

• The number of daily newspapers is declining - the only major medium that's declining.

• And newspapers as a medium are losing advertising share to other media.