What Fitzsimmons Didn't Say
With Knight Ridder on the market, Tribune’s Dennis FitzSimons has supplanted Tony Ridder as the media world’s most embattled ceo. Wall Street is grumbling about Tribune’s sorry showing in ’05 (anemic stock price, embarrassing circulation scandal, a belated $1 billion IRS bill, etc.), and FitzSimons is scrambling to convince investors that he can wring more money out of Tribune’s properties. In December he made his case to the all-important analysts at conferences in New York. He spoke of Tribune’s “important journalistic mission.” As a public service, CJR supplies below some of the missing context.
Said: “Our focus on cost reduction, given our current revenue environment, has been intense.”
Unsaid: Despite all the sky-is-falling rhetoric, Tribune remains enormously profitable. Yes, newspapers are suffering through a difficult transition, but Tribune’s operating profit margin for 2005 is over 20 percent. Exxon Mobil, on the other hand, which just reported the highest profit in U.S. history, has an operating margin of 17 percent.
Said: “We’re also redeploying resources and re-engineering processes, especially in publishing.”
Unsaid: By way of example, FitzSimons mentioned Tribune’s newly consolidated D.C. bureau, and how it will save money while simultaneously improving coverage of Washington “through greater collaboration.” The former is a given, the latter is dubious. The number of journalists in this new bureau has been reduced, dramatically in some cases (Newsday went from fourteen to five, for instance, while The Hartford Courant went from five to one). And the kind of journalism the nation needs out of Washington — investigative, explanatory — is both labor- and time-intensive.
Said: “We are local media.”Unsaid: So of course they killed Chicago’s 115-year-old City News Service, shuttered eleven community papers owned by The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and decimated Newsday’s New York City desk — all part of a companywide drive-by that netted 900 jobs and counting (800 from the publishing side, while the ad sales force grew). It’s hard to see how this will sharpen “Tribune’s edge,” which FitzSimons told The New York Times recently is “its unique ability to cover its local communities like no one else can.”
Said: “Our stations in Philadelphia and San Diego have moved to the news outsourcing model we’ve used successfully in Miami.”
Unsaid: Outsourcing meant laying off the entire news staff in Philly and San Diego and airing a product produced by local NBC affiliates — not exactly a commitment to that “important journalistic mission.”
Said: “We’ll continue looking to serve our readers in ways that deliver the most value to them, so we’ll be investing more in research to determine what’s important to our readers.”
Unsaid: The debate over how to balance what readers want with what they need to be educated participants in a democracy is real, and FitzSimons may actually believe, as he told The New Yorker last year, that “journalists make ‘too many fake arguments’ about how newspaper companies are trying to ‘dumb down.’” But solving the declining readership puzzle need not — and must not — mean wholesale surrender to the entertainment/diversion aspect of journalism.
Said: “Our tradition of journalistic excellence isn’t going to change . . .
Unsaid: After the Los Angeles Times won five Pulitzers in 2004 — a record for the paper — the staff received bupkis from corporate on this historic achievement. Instead, then-editor John Carroll got word that the home office was displeased with the Times’s revenues, and was demanding deep cuts. Carroll ultimately quit; Dean Baquet, his successor, will need guts and luck in the coming budget battles.
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