What's Become of the PROJO's Mojo?
Why I Quit
A prize-winning ex-reporter for The Providence Journal
charges that the paper traded journalistic ambition for the bottom line.
Its editor sees a daily still doing strong work in a complicated world
One sunny fall day almost two years ago, I found myself in a courtroom in Providence, Rhode Island, testifying against The Providence Journal, where I had worked for sixteen years. It was a bleak occasion, another unhappy chapter in a tale that has caused me to wonder how I could have so badly misjudged what my longtime employer had become and one that, it turns out, is ripe with lessons about the power of leadership.
I wrote much of what follows for a class at Harvard and, later, shared it with a few fellow journalists. They said it is a story that should be heard, that while it focuses on the decline of one daily it really is emblematic of what has happened to American newspaper journalism. In May, after submitting a draft to cjr, I tried to contact my former executive editor, explaining in messages what I was trying to write and requesting an interview. In response, the Journal’s publisher and lawyer called cjr, dismissing me as a disgruntled former employee and union activist. I was neither. I loved The Providence Journal. And the paper’s initial response says as much about the atmosphere at 75 Fountain Street today as anything you are about to read. (The editor’s response, an interview with cjr, is on page 41.)
As a student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government last year, immersed in the study of leadership and corporate culture, I thought and wrote about the role of the leader in the newsroom. In so doing, I came to see how great leadership had created a newspaper I could not have been more proud of, and, later, how its absence helped create a newsroom I had no choice but to leave. When I arrived in Providence, in 1985, the Journal had a consummate leader, an editor who mobilized, animated, motivated, and, above all, inspired his troops to follow his moral compass, one we would come to adopt as our own. Working for the ProJo, as the locals call it, became not merely what we did, but helped define who we were. That the same leader who had lifted us to great heights played Nero as it all fell apart is one of this tale’s melancholy mysteries.
By the late 1980s, The Providence Journal was riding high: big budget, big news staff, big stories, and a growing reputation. Bruce DeSilva, then Hartford Courant associate editor (a former Providence Journal reporter and now the news features editor for AP), wrote in 1989, in Rhode Island Monthly, the ProJo was an “outlandishly influential newspaper” with “a statewide dominance unmatched in the newspaper industry . . . . Reporters and editors who leave Providence for larger newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe say their new papers may have bigger reputations, but have far less influence over public policy and public opinion in the communities they serve.”
The collaboration of three men in particular — publisher Michael Metcalf and editors Charles McCorkle Hauser and Joel Rawson — created the culture that would give rise to the glory years of the 1980s and 1990s. Metcalf, whose family had been a major share owner since the early twentieth century, provided the money. He gave executive editor Hauser the power and the mandate to make the Journal great. Hauser enlisted Rawson to do the job. Rawson soon built a journalistic citadel, one reporters from across the country lined up to join.
To realize what Rawson created, one must know what he had inherited. The Providence Journal of the 1970s was, in DeSilva’s words, “less a newspaper than the state stenographer . . . . Day after day, the paper was crammed with local trivia . . . . Probing stories seemed to be unwanted.”
In the late 1970s, Hauser plucked Rawson off the copy desk and promoted him, in rapid-fire order, from night metro editor to editor of the Sunday Journal to managing editor, of the Evening Bulletin, the Journal’s p.m. counterpart, to what the Journal calls metropolitan managing editor, in charge of the whole show. Rawson, a Vietnam veteran and airplane pilot full of swagger, temper, and self-confidence, showed quickly at each post that he had a plan. The Journal under Rawson would continue to be a government watchdog, protector and advocate for those most disenfranchised, and the state’s paper of record, the standard for a respectable newspaper. But Rawson believed the paper could aspire to significantly more. Namely, the Journal could engage, absorb, and rivet its readers. To accomplish that, reporters under Rawson were to approach a story as a novelist or playwright might. Forget the inverted pyramid, Rawson said. Just tell a story, like Ernest Hemingway. He held weekly meetings, where reporters and editors talked about writing the news differently. He had his reporters read Didion, Wolfe, Catton.
Rawson borrowed from drama, too. One day, in the mid-1980s, he sat a group of us down in the editorial boardroom and played the movie, Witness. Afterward, he talked about the way the story had been crafted, even how the barn was erected in a barn-raising scene, and how we could apply such storytelling and barn-building techniques to our reporting/writing. We left the room electrified.
Writers flourished in this atmosphere, and mega-projects became the order of the day. Carol McCabe, the newspaper’s talented national writer, produced a succession of series that took months to report and write. Another reporter, Randy Richard, was assigned to write about Central and South America. His stunning five-part series on Americans buying babies from impoverished South Americans began on my first day on the job.
Rawson also emphasized investigative reporting, turning loose reporters who, over the years, would fell two Rhode Island Supreme Court chief justices, take on the mob, and generally leave big footprints in both the public and private sectors. The news those reporters produced was as hard as the indictments they begat. But true to the Rawson-ProJo culture, they presented their work as novellas: Puzo meets The New York Times. The Journal won a Pulitzer in 1994, and was a finalist seven times between 1981 and 1991. By the early ’80s, many in journalism circles were calling it one of the best writer’s papers in the country.
This was all brought about by a confluence of leadership, talent, and a publisher who took pride in the newspaper and was willing to spend well beyond the newspaper norm. Metcalf paid for a staff of about 340, almost twice the average for newspapers of similar size, and a very generous travel budget and newshole.
But it was also about a culture, a we-can-do-anything feeling that percolated across the news operation, from the reporter-star network downtown to the ten bureaus across the state, two in Massachusetts, and one in Washington. It was a culture nurtured by Hauser and Metcalf, but they operated behind the scenes. Rawson was the news general, commanding and inspiring the troops.
Prone to screaming in the newsroom, in anger and in glee, Rawson kicked wastebaskets and bellowed, he shouted over phones loud enough to be heard across the newsroom, he stomped around muttering obscenities. He was the leader as performing artist.
In the early 1980s, the paper began bringing in writing coaches and holding weekly writing contests. Winners were asked to contribute essays explaining their methods, compilations of which were published in 1983, 1986, and 1996, as books titled How I Wrote the Story.
The work that ProJo writers produced during those years was remarkable. Carol McCabe produced a powerful series on hunger across America. Irene Wielawski took us, with an intimacy seldom seen in newspapers, into emergency and operating rooms and the living rooms of first-year residents at Rhode Island Hospital. Bruce Butterfield brought readers into the sweatshop conditions in Rhode Island’s jewelry factories. G. Wayne Miller spent a year with a family living in poverty and examined the many and deep-seated reasons behind the near-hopelessness of breaking the welfare cycle. Journal writers sought out the great tales that would touch the soul and affect public policy.
In addition to writing essays for the Journal’s Sunday magazine, I was the newspaper’s education writer for more than a decade, contributing analytical pieces on topics ranging from date rape at Brown University to inequities in state funding of public education. During this period, there was intense competition at the paper, yet there was also remarkable group support, both at the daily brown-bag lunches and at our almost weekly reporter parties where we talked mostly about writing — and Joel Rawson.
In the late 1980s, a series of changes occurred that would eventually dictate the newspaper’s fate. Publisher Michael Metcalf was killed in a bicycle accident. Stephen Hamblett, who had worked under Metcalf, was named to succeed him. Hauser and Rawson left, Rawson to be number two editor at the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky. In his absence, the newsroom and bureaus hummed, but they seemed to lose some of their roar.
Then, three years later, Rawson returned — this time as deputy executive editor. Veteran reporters reacted like Parisians at the sight of the liberating allies. Newer staff members wanted to know the source of all the excitement: Who was this guy Joel Rawson, anyway? Joel, however, returned to a changing newspaper environment. And what lay ahead for The Providence Journal would really be determined in the executive suites.
For a time the newspaper continued to turn out strong work, and the Metcalfs and other old Rhode Island families continued to support it. In 1995, however, another series of ominous changes began. Over the next two years, the Evening Bulletin was killed, along with the Sunday magazine, the showcase for the personal essays and developed stories and photographs of our most talented staff. The science beat was eliminated and religion was cut to half a beat. A buyout sent some of the paper’s best writers out the door. The editors required several city-staff veterans to write for the local editions, and the paper instituted a reporter-intern program, hiring inexperienced reporters to man the state staff.
The staff became younger and cheaper. Though the paper denied it for a time, for anyone inclined to read the tea leaves, it was obvious we were being readied for sale.
In 1997 the Providence Journal Company was sold for $1.5 billion to the Belo corporation, the Dallas-based media company. Thirteen Journal executives, through stock options and special retirement plans that were cashed out after the sale, reaped more than $24 million.
When Robert Decherd, the ceo of Belo, visited the newsroom, he told us that Belo had great respect for the journalistic tradition in Providence and planned to build on the ProJo’s greatness, not deplete it. We applauded. And we had some cause to be optimistic. Belo was not a chain in the Gannett mold — the company owned just a handful of substantive television stations and newspapers, including the highly regarded Dallas Morning News.
But over the next few years, many reporters who left the city staff for other papers were not replaced. The Washington bureau staff was reduced from three reporters to two. The statehouse bureau, which once had as many as five reporters, was cut to three. Since 1996, the paper has never had more than a single daily courts reporter; in previous years two or three reporters were on the beat. With a depleted staff, the long-term projects that had so distinguished the newspaper became far less frequent. In the halcyon days, reporters had traveled across New England, the country, the globe. In the new order, getting approval to travel thirty miles could prove a chore.
In 1999 the paper’s labor contract with 500 employees, including the diminished reporting staff, expired, and the screws began to turn: hiring freezes, closure of the Newport bureau, and rapidly deteriorating management-union relations drove out many reporters and editors, some through buyouts, others just to escape.
In all fairness, its decline notwithstanding, The Providence Journal then, as now, produced some fine work. It is a decent newspaper, a cut above by today’s standards. The paper was a finalist in the public service category for a Pulitzer this year for its coverage of the Station nightclub fire, and in two of the previous three years was a finalist for deadline photo and editorial writing.
The occasional excellence notwithstanding, that the newspaper is a shadow of its former self is clear to anyone who reads it regularly. “Overall, it’s still a good newspaper compared to other papers its size,” says Hauser, who now lives in North Carolina but continues to receive and read the Journal daily. “But there’s a big difference in the things we could accomplish with the big budget and the big staff Michael Metcalf let us have. There’s much less staff-written and developed material.
“And the biggest difference is the way people are treated,” Hauser says. “When Carol McCabe and others took the buyout and left, nobody said one word. It’s very sad the way people have been treated in recent years.” McCabe, who now lives in Virginia, confirms that no one in management said thank you or goodbye when she ended her award-studded twenty-three-year Journal career.
Still, even as late as 2001, a core group of veteran reporters clung to the shreds of the Rawson culture, holding out hope that things would get better — with a contract settlement, with a healthier economy, with what we hoped would eventually happen, a more forceful Joel Rawson. He indeed became more forceful, but not in the way we had hoped.
In July 2001, the reporter Karen Lee Ziner, a twenty-two-year veteran who was as skillful with a fanciful feature as with breaking news, returned from vacation to learn that she was being removed from a continuing story she had covered from the outset. She was told that the subject of the story, a woman who had been beaten by her husband, had complained to the publisher.
Ziner, who was perceived by some in the newsroom as one of Rawson’s favorite writers during his days as managing editor, later that day ran into Rawson in the middle of the newsroom. She questioned the decision to take her off the story, as well as the editors’ request that she sign off on a correction that she believed was clearly unwarranted (she had relied on a police report that was later amended in a detail). Rawson had no beef with her reporting, but thought that the story was over. Ziner persisted, elaborating on why she felt it was important that she remain on it. An assistant city editor seconded her argument.
As Ziner recalls it, Rawson summoned her into his office, where, at the end of a heated conversation, they came to a standoff. Ziner said she thought the paper should stand by her.
“Well, Miss Ziner,” Rawson said, “you do not count.”
Two days later, I sat down and typed out a letter to Joel, explaining why we were upset — the message sent to reporters was that the newspaper will not back them up, the implication to subjects of our stories was that complaints get results. More than seventy reporters and non-management editors and photographers signed the letter, and it was delivered to Joel.
About two weeks later, The New York Times ran a story in its media section about the incident and our protest. Shortly thereafter, Rawson called a handful of reporters into his office and quizzed them about the letter. It became clear that he considered himself the betrayed, not the betrayer. And to be fair, there was some truth to that, though the culprits were in suits up on the fourth floor, not in the newsroom.
A few weeks later, managing editor Tom Heslin called me into his office and informed me I was being assigned to the night shift — 4 p.m. to midnight. It was a one-person shift, manned for as long as anyone could remember by the newest reporter on the city staff, and for good reason: the position entailed rewriting press releases, listening to police and fire scanners, and calling local police stations.
I was among the last of Rawson’s one-time Golden Boys, winner of half a dozen awards and a two-time Pulitzer nominee. “You and Joel should be ashamed of yourselves,” I said. And I quit.
Ziner, the subject of our protest, was subsequently assigned to the night beat, and it was at a hearing on an unfair-labor-practice complaint filed by the National Labor Relations Board on her behalf that I testified last fall. Sitting in an Indian restaurant the day of Ziner’s hearing, a group of former ProJo reporters marveled at our inability to appreciate what was happening at the paper as it unfolded.
We agreed that the most significant cultural change had not been the loss of staff, the demise of the magazine, or any of the other telltale signs. Rather, it had been the way reporters were viewed and treated by the managers in our midst. For years, the Journal had been about empowering, unleashing, even exalting reporters. Everything that was done — from the weekly writing awards to the monthly writing workshops to the publication of two How I Wrote the Story volumes — had been about celebrating the work of reporters/writers.
In the 1980s and early ’90s, editors asked reporters what they were working on. By the end of the decade, editors were telling reporters what to do. In sum, the atmosphere evolved from one of collegiality and collaboration to rigid hierarchy. And we, who are paid for our powers of observation, for so long did not see what was happening, perhaps because the architects of the changes were those with whom we had worked so long in harmonious, often joyous, collaboration.
I look back through the prism of what I learned last year, and can understand the importance — as well as the fragility — of organizational culture. I see how an organization’s culture can be shaped by a leader, reinforcing that leader’s ability to lead. I can also see how that leader can be betrayed, and turn around and play the betrayer. I can see that no matter how institutionalized a culture may be, when there is no one in power left willing to fight for its preservation, the situation is hopeless.
Last spring, Administrative Law Judge William G. Kocol ruled that Ziner’s assignment to the night shift constituted a violation of federal labor law. Referring to the letter I wrote to Rawson protesting Ziner’s removal from a story, Kocol wrote that the Journal “had an opportunity to assign virtually anyone from its staff to the night shift, but it selected first the leader of the petition drive and then the subject of the petition. I cannot conclude that this is mere coincidence.’’
Kocol wrote, “No credible, lawful reason exists to explain why [the Journal] took a veteran, award-winning reporter from the day shift and put her on the night shift covering mostly mundane matters.”
The judge ordered the Journal to return Ziner to days. The Journal appealed. A few months ago, a four-year contract dispute between the newspaper guild and management was resolved. As part of the settlement, Ziner was returned to day duty.
She called to tell me the news, and we both sighed.
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