Trouble in Newspaperland

Stop the Presses: Editor Blames Problems on Marketing Dept.

By Jonathan Weber, 7-22-05

The editor of the Los Angeles Times, John Carroll, resigned this week amid a flood of hosannahs about what a great job he's done in rebuilding that great newspaper. I take a special interest in the Times because I worked there from 1989 to 1997, and I certainly agree that Carroll deserves credit for restoring the paper's integrity and spirit in the five years that he's run the place.

Yet today's interview with Carroll in the Columbia Journalism Review illustrates quite starkly one of the core problems in big-time newspaper journalism: its practitioners confuse their own interests, and their own measures of excellence, with those of their readers. In particular, newspaper prizes, and specifically the Pulitzer Prizes, are used as the standard of journalistic success, but those prizes reflect not what readers think, but what other journalists think.

There's nothing wrong with being proud of the recognition of your peers. But consider this exchange from the beginning of the CJR inteview:

"Paul McLeary: One of the reasons the Los Angeles Times represents a puzzling -- even disturbing -- case study for the rest of us is the striking disparity between its journalistic performance (13 Pultizer prizes in five years) and its circulation performance (daily readership down 6.5 percent and Sunday readership down 7.9 percent in just the past 12 months) ...

John Carroll: I believe content had nothing to do with the circulation decline; if anything, the decline was mitigated by our content. Where does the blame lie? The list is long..."

Carroll goes on to say that plummeting readership is the fault of the business side of the paper, and accepts the interviewer's unreflective assumption that Pulitzer Prizes are proof of journalistic excellence.

Now personally, as an editor, I am always happy to blame all problems on the business side. That's practically part of the job description of an editor. If people aren't reading, that's because the circulation & marketing department is falling down! That damn do-not-call list - how can you expect us to maintain circulation if we can't relentlessly badger people? Cutbacks in the marketing budget - if people aren't subscribing, it's because we don't have enough billboards and TV ads!

Yet in almost any other business, if the product was not selling, one of things people would question is whether the product is meeting the needs of its audience. And even if you believe - as I do, at least most of the time - that journalism shouldn't be measured by the same bottom-line standards as shampoo, you'd think that someone in Carroll's shoes might allow that there could be something going on other than lack of telemarketing.

My personal experience at the Times - and granted, this was before Carroll's tenure - was that important parts of the paper, most notably the Washington bureau, were far more interested in stories that would impress their peers and sources inside the beltway than they were in things that might be closer to the concerns of their readers in Los Angeles. It was also the case that enormous resources went into winning prizes - just entering the damn contests was practically a full-time job.

The LA Times once aspired to be a grand newspaper of the West, but those ambitions were scrapped in the recession of 1990. I spent three years working in a cavernous San Francisco office that was intended to house a full-on Northern California edition but in the end had only a handful of correspondents. The paper's circulation is well below what it was when I was there, despite the continued dramatic growth of Southern California and the West.

Newspapers around the country are experiencing similar problems, and there may in fact be no solution to it. But if the most revered editors in the country don't even admit the possibility that readership issues might be related to the style, voice and subject matter of the paper, then we can be sure pretty sure the declines will continue.

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