What's Become of the PROJO's Mojo?
How We Work
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
How do you discuss managing a newspaper through a recession, the death of the publisher, a change in ownership, and all of that? What do you use for measures of how well or badly things went? There were many changes through the years, and they look different from the top editor’s perch than they do from other chairs in the newsroom.
I worked at The Providence Journal from 1971 to 1986, when I went to The Lexington Herald Leader. Eventually I wanted to be a top editor, and one of the reasons I left the Journal is that we were not getting exposure to the business side. To be a top editor you have to learn that side of the business, but the Journal wasn’t structured that way; news/business interaction was discouraged.
While I was in Lexington, the man who was the publisher and principal owner of the Journal — Michael Metcalf — was killed in an accident. That was a huge trauma for the organization. A new publisher, Stephen Hamblett, took over; a new editor, Jim Wyman, was named and he brought me back, with the understanding that I would eventually edit the paper. I came back to a different job with an entirely different set of responsibilities.
When I returned in 1989, Rhode Island was in a real estate boom; the economy seemed to be going on forever. At the paper, revenue had gone up precipitously, but expenses had too. Then in 1990-91 the bottom fell out of the real estate market. The governor closed savings banks and credit unions; 300,000 people had their savings frozen. The recession was deep and traumatic. The Journal’s staffing levels, meanwhile, were way, way above what the paper could afford. The publisher came down and said we’re freezing everything. You lose a reporter, you can’t replace him. It was like managing a train wreck.
So we had to come up with a rational plan for managing. We had to ask ourselves: What does The Providence Journal have to do? The answer: we have to cover Rhode Island. We are the news outlet that covers the state, the courts, the legislature, the major beats, sports, business, the arts. The other thing is, we have thirty-nine cities and towns, and we have to maintain a strong local-news presence. We have, within less than forty miles of the Journal’s front door, seventeen weekly competing newspapers and seven dailies. Plus The New York Times and The Boston Globe.
During the recession, we had let go of local news, and it was showing up in circulation and reader complaints. To be competitive, we felt we needed to refocus on local news, and starting in 1994, we laid out a plan to do this. We would get the money by closing the afternoon paper, the Evening Bulletin. And we changed the way we did local news. We tried to organize the newspaper for the reader — seven local papers within one. That was rolled out in 1995. Some people supported this; others resented it. That was an unhappy time.
Morgan has a pretty good point on one thing: there has been a reduction in staff. In 1994, we had 320 FTEs (full-time-employee equivalents) in the newsroom. In 2003, we had 258. After 1997, when Belo bought the paper, we slipped under 300 people. We stayed reasonably close to that until a Belo staff reduction, corporate-wide, in 2001. There was a buyout in the news department; we bottomed out that year. Then we replaced some people. But the buyout was about the only impact Belo had on us. They have never influenced the news department, what we cover or how.
At the end of 1999 the union contract expired and we went to war. A lot of resentment had built up here over the sale of the newspaper. You’d walk by people and say good morning and they wouldn’t speak to you. The contract battle lasted four years, until December 2003.
Alot of things happened in 2003. The biggest was the Station nightclub fire in February. One hundred died. People were wandering around carrying pictures of loved ones, saying things like, Has anybody seen my son? At one point we had sixty-two reporters asking one question — Who was at the fire and what happened? Our staff stepped up.
That same year we went to Iraq twice — Michael Corkery went, and so did John Freidah. Bob Kerr took a trip to Vietnam, where he had served during the war. We did some wonderful feature work — Jennifer Levitz on the Episcopal bishop going underground with the homeless; Kate Bramson on a rape in a small town. Ged Carbone and Cathleen Crowley — they followed up on a huge 1989 murder case, in which a cop had done six years for a murder he didn’t commit. Katherine Gregg, the statehouse bureau chief, produced a series on a drugstore company, CVS, and Blue Cross, and money that was paid to two Rhode Island senators. As a result of her and others’ investigative work, the two senators have resigned, as did the president of Blue Cross in Rhode Island.
At the end of the year I was saying, How do I do this better? Morgan writes that it’s going downhill, and I’m thinking, Morgan, you should have stayed. You would have been proud.
The Karen Ziner incident? From my perspective, she wasn’t taken off the story. The story had already run in the paper. It was about a woman beaten with a hammer and left for dead. Karen talked to her mother and sister. While Karen was on vacation, the woman recovered to the extent that she could read the story, and she was very angry about it. She had a detail she was upset about and she claimed Karen had harassed her family. I thought it through. I didn’t see any reason to hurt her anymore. And on a practical level, even if Karen went back there, the woman wouldn’t talk to her. Karen said she didn’t harass anybody. I said okay, but in any case, we don’t want you to go back there. She went ballistic! It was not a good conversation; I don’t think I handled it well. Then came the petition. Half of the names on it were people I’d gone to bat for over time. I went to some of these guys and said, What are you talking about?
Still, I don’t know why Morgan feels the way he does. Things change. A lot of things happened that were outside of our control — Metcalf’s death, the recession, a purchase by an outside company. You can either adjust to those kinds of things or not. Some people did not adjust very well. I think they romanticized the paper. I think we did a lot of great work in years past. I think we’re still doing great work.
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