By Daniel Schulman
John Lavine has a motto, and it is one that has been embraced by a growing number of his followers in the newspaper industry, whose livelihood can be saved, he says, only through “revolution, not evolution.” When he assumed the deanship of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in January, in a transfer of power so rapid that it shocked members of the school’s faculty, he brought that credo to bear on the vaunted journalism school, where, in his own words, he plans to “blow up” the curriculum and remake the educational model.
For years now Lavine has been preaching his adapt-or-perish gospel to media executives and editors through Northwestern’s Media Management Center, which he founded in 1989, and its affiliated newspaper industry think tank, the Readership Institute. His ideas have increasingly gained traction, particularly in the newspaper industry, where editors have used the institute’s studies, which focus on the factors that drive readership, as a roadmap in stormy times. Lavine believes the slow decline in readership can be reversed, and that over the years journalists have lost touch with the audiences they serve. In our desire to inform, he says, we have neglected to check if anyone was actually listening. The future of journalism — of an informed society — depends, Lavine says, on placing the needs of readers, viewers, and listeners at the forefront of our mission.
Lavine was handpicked to lead Medill after the school had weathered a fairly rocky stretch under his predecessor, Loren Ghiglione, a veteran newspaperman and, before coming to Medill in 2001, the director of the University of Southern California’s journalism program. While Ghiglione was well regarded at Medill, and has been credited with bringing an international focus to its curriculum, he had the unenviable job of presiding over a deeply divided faculty, as had other deans before him. Unlike other journalism schools, such as those at Columbia and Berkeley, Medill is also home to a degree program in integrated marketing communications (IMC). There has long been tension between the journalism and marketing faculties.
During the last two years of Ghiglione’s tenure Medill went through a period of soul-searching. Two committees evaluated the school, and both returned reports that were critical. “They were saying you and a couple of other schools should be setting the table for the rest of journalism education,” Abe Peck, the chairman of Medill’s magazine department, told me. Meanwhile, a strategic planning committee, chaired by Peck and made up of Medill faculty members from both journalism and marketing, had been convened to chart a new course for the school. The process was drawn out and sometimes fractious, but the committee ultimately produced a plan that was satisfactory to the faculty.
In many ways, it was hard to see how an integrated marketing program, with an emphasis on corporate marketing and communications, fit into Medill, which has built its reputation on journalism. Members of the IMC faculty, meanwhile, increasingly felt that the program would always play second fiddle as long as the school was known, almost exclusively, for its journalism. “They were unhappy,” Peck said. “They wanted to be full citizens of the school. They were looking at their options.” As some IMC professors saw it, one option was to secede from Medill altogether, and for a time the department shopped itself to other schools at Northwestern. By last fall members of the IMC faculty had begun expressing their displeasure directly to Northwestern administrators.
To Northwestern’s provost, Lawrence Dumas, John Lavine must have seemed like the perfect person to solve Medill’s problem. Here was a school divided between its journalism and marketing factions, and here was a man who was comfortable in both worlds. Northwestern had big changes in mind for Medill, and Lavine — who spent the first half of his career building successful media companies from the ground up, and whose Readership Institute preaches to newspapers a gospel of holistic marketing — has a track record of seeing things through. Dumas first asked Lavine for advice, then, when he liked that advice, offered him the deanship with the unanimous recommendation of Peck’s strategic planning committee.
When the appointment was made public, on December 7, the timeline of Ghiglione’s departure, originally slated for August, had dramatically shrunk. Now Ghiglione would step down in January. Earlier in the fall, Dumas and Lavine had anticipated that faculty members might resist the sweeping changes they envisioned, so to ensure a speedy transition Lavine had recommended that faculty governance, the quasi-democratic process through which faculty representatives vote on things like curriculum changes, be temporarily suspended. Lavine, who said he planned to lead the school through a three-and-a-half-year transition and then step down, wanted to remove bureaucratic roadblocks. “I’m blowing up the whole curriculum, why do we need a curriculum committee?” Lavine asked when I interviewed him in May, adding that he would always solicit the input and advice of his colleagues.
As Medill’s dean, Lavine’s opportunities to influence journalism, already extensive in the newspaper world through his work at the Readership Institute, will only grow. He will have a larger platform from which to advocate the changes he believes will save journalism from irrelevance. More importantly, he will have to address a fundamental question that has long been debated in journalism, one that goes to the heart of Lavine’s salvation strategy: Is he about selling the best of journalism, or pandering to the perceived desires of readers and viewers? Will he teach young journalists to sell good journalism or teach them to debase good journalism to sell it? Not until a curriculum is set, and perhaps not even until Medill graduates its first Lavine-era students into the profession, will we know what his ideas will mean for Medill, and for journalism. In the meantime, there are clues to consider.
Just a football field or two from the banks of Lake Michigan, the pair of buildings that house Medill are situated on the far edge of Northwestern’s campus in the college town of Evanston, Illinois. The buildings, in their own way, represent the school’s past and its future. Dating back to 1899, Fisk Hall, Medill’s original home, is built of brick and draped in ivy, designed in the Romanesque Revival style. Nearby, the McCormick Tribune Center, opened in 2002, is angular and boxy, evoking a corporate headquarters. John Lavine’s office is on the second floor of Fisk. It is a mini-museum of Native American art and artifacts, which Lavine avidly collects. Lavine, who turned sixty-five in March, has animated blue eyes, framed by rimless glasses, that he trains intently on whomever he is speaking to. He is bald and wears his beard so close-shaven it is little more than thick stubble. When we met he was reflective and relentlessly on message, giving the impression, at times, that he was reciting talking points.
Lavine grew up an only child in the northern Wisconsin town of Superior, which borders the lake of the same name. As a boy, his passion was magic, and though he was adept at sleight-of-hand, his stubby fingers were never quite suited for it. A counselor at the summer camp he attended encouraged him to become an escape artist, and in high school, Lavine recalled, “the game used to be ‘tie John up before he had to be somewhere and see if he could get out.’”
While a student of government and international relations at Carleton College, in Minnesota, Lavine supported himself by performing magic and escape acts. His longtime friend, Howard Tyner, who was two years behind Lavine at Carleton, remembers entering Laird Hall one day, which had an atrium that stretched to the roof four floors up, to find Lavine dangling upside down from the ceiling, writhing out of a straightjacket.
Tyner, who went on to become the editor of the Chicago Tribune and later the editorial vice president of Tribune Company’s newspaper division, credits Lavine with launching his journalism career. Lavine hired Tyner out of college as the sports editor of the Chippewa Herald-Telegram, a daily in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, which Lavine bought in 1964 from the owner of a small newspaper chain where his father had been the general manager. At the age of twenty-three, with less than $3,000 in the bank, Lavine purchased the Herald-Telegram for approximately three quarters of a million dollars. Lavine’s father had recently died of cancer and, when he took the reins of the Herald-Telegram, Lavine was also placed in charge of the Portage Daily Register, which his parents had purchased a few years earlier. “Overnight, I went from having no employees and no debts to having a hundred employees and owing a million dollars,” Lavine said. The only employees younger than he were the newspaper carriers.
Not long after buying the Herald-Telegram, Lavine acquired a second paper, and then a third. Eventually, he presided over a Wisconsin chain that included four weeklies and four dailies. He later branched out into film and medical publishing.
In 1984, while still running his newspaper group, Lavine began teaching media management and economics at the University of Minnesota. Five years later, he came to Northwestern and began to sell off his holdings in order to put all of his energy into starting the Media Management Center (then known as the Newspaper Management Center). The center, which educates senior media executives, also conducts extensive research on a range of topics, and one of its major thrusts is understanding audiences. Tyner believes Lavine’s focus on audiences began back in Chippewa Falls, and that the lessons he learned there have guided his career. “If you walked down the street in Chippewa Falls, people knew exactly who you were,” he said. “They all read the paper and they had absolutely no problem telling you what they thought about it.”
After Lavine took over at Medill, his agenda for the school remained something of a mystery. To outsiders, though, one small clue to the changes already in motion was Medill’s redesigned Web site, which had previously been dominated by the school’s journalism program. Now, the Web site opened with a question — “Where would you like to go?” — giving visitors the option of the journalism program or the IMC. And in an effort to correct the impression that Medill’s sole focus is journalism, and perhaps to appease the marketing faculty, the name of the school has been informally changed, though what it has been changed to differs depending on whom you ask. Michele Weldon, an assistant professor of journalism at the school, told me that faculty members have been asked to refer to it simply as the Medill School, while Tom Collinger, an associate dean and professor of marketing, said a more accurate name would be the Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrated Marketing Communications.
Some Medill alums, and some faculty members at the school, too, found Lavine’s appointment troubling. He was seen as a businessman and an entrepreneur, not necessarily someone who would enhance the core journalistic values and techniques that Medill has advanced, but someone who could do damage to them. That notion was only reinforced when Lavine spoke of creating “one Medill,” and by his references, vague though they were, to narrowing the gap between the journalism and marketing sides of the school.
In May, four months after taking over, Lavine spelled out his vision in a nineteen-page document that he called “Medill 2020.” It is a carefully worded and sometimes inscrutable manifesto illustrated with Venn diagrams, attempting to show where the fields of marketing and journalism overlap. It is quite heavy on jargon, using phrases like “relevant, differentiated storytelling,” “channels of interaction,” and “customer-centric,” and largely devoid of the kind of watchwords — “investigative,” “watchdog,” “truth-telling” — that tend to rally journalists. Laid out in a Q&A format, it seems in part an attempt to answer his critics. Q: “Are your loyalties on the business side?” A: “Prior to being a professor, I had the exciting opportunity to be a newspaper editor and publisher, a publisher of medical journals and a movie company executive. In each of those roles, we had a unifying strategy: Create a great product that informed, told the truth — whether it was popular or not — and motivated the audience to spend more time with our content. Our audiences grew and everyone, including advertisers, benefited.”
Lavine’s vision, as represented graphically in Medill 2020, looks like this:
The shaded center depicts what Lavine sees as the overlap between marketing and journalism, and his belief that at their core these two disparate practices share a common mission, which is to captivate audiences. To capitalize on this overlap, Lavine sees “team taught” classes in Medill’s future that will infuse the school’s curriculum with aspects of both programs. The marketing side will bring its knowledge of engaging and targeting specific audiences to journalism students, while journalism professors will help marketers hone their writing skills.
To the extent that Lavine’s plan seeks to commingle elements of marketing with journalism, it has shocked some of his colleagues in the academy. Thinking deeply about the future of journalism and the needs of audiences is certainly a worthy and necessary effort, says Mitchell Stephens, a journalism professor at New York University. But “the notion that journalists are supposed to get together with people in the integrated marketing program and put more energy into the marketing aspects of their ‘product’ is disturbing. Can you imagine a narrower educational experience than challenging students to tune their writing to the needs of focus groups?”
Faculty members at Medill tend to balk at the suggestion that journalistic principles will be usurped by those of marketing, or that the curriculum will be diminished by the new focus. Lavine certainly doesn’t think so. “At the edges, the integrated marketing faculty will be selling things, and that is anathema, and should be, to the journalist,” he told me, referring to his Venn diagram. “At the edges, the journalist will say things that are enormously unpopular and that’s anathema to the marketer. But in the center the journalist must, when trying to build or deepen an audience, know how to market. And, in the center, the marketer who’s helping the journalist must know more about messages and storytelling to help market the media.”
Yet no one at Medill, including Lavine, can yet describe precisely the form this overlap will take, the specific components of audience understanding journalism students will learn, or even how deep a journalist’s knowledge in this area should be before it begins to conflict with his journalistic judgment.
The Medill faculty is now trying to answer some of those questions as it begins to piece together the school’s new curriculum, which will be in place for the 2007-2008 academic year. When I asked Lavine about what students would learn at the Medill he envisions, he told me, “They need to really understand who’s reading the newspaper, who’s listening to the radio news, who’s watching television news and not assume that it’s their parents or their families or everyone who’s as educated as them or their race or their gender or their age. Who’s really out there? Most important, with all of those things, we have hard research that shows students what motivates and what inhibits the audience from connecting with the medium, and we can teach that.”
The research that Lavine refers to was pioneered by the readership think tank he ran at the Media Management Center, which suggests that its philosophy will be deeply rooted in Medill’s curriculum. Since 1999, when it was founded, the Readership Institute has conducted a series of large-scale studies that attempt to zero in on the factors that drive or impede newspaper readership. Its first study, “Impact,” which was released in 2000, explored, among other things, the culture and management practices of ninety newspapers, which the institute found to be uniformly change-averse. Its later research focused on the psychology of readership, identifying various reader “experiences” that cause readers to connect with a newspaper. An institute white paper from 2004, “Reaching New Readers: Revolution, Not Evolution,” urges newspapers to play to the positive experiences readers have when reading a newspaper, such as a sense that it gives them “something to talk about” or “looks out” for their “civic and personal interests,” while aiming to avoid negative experiences, such as the perception that a paper is giving the reader “too much” information.
Randolph D. Brandt, the editor of The Journal Times, a 30,000-circulation paper in Racine, Wisconsin, began as one of Lavine’s most outspoken critics, but has become one of his most ardent supporters. When he heard Lavine speak about the Readership Institute’s findings in 2001, Brandt bridled at the notion that newsrooms were resistant to change. “I tried to look for why somehow this was a strength of newsrooms, instead of a weakness,” he said, but “the more I thought about my own experiences in newsrooms, I realized that he is right. For all our talk about openness, newsrooms can be very closed places that don’t foster a good culture for accepting and adopting change.”
In 2002 and 2003, Brandt worked with the institute to remake his paper top to bottom, from its content to its customer service and marketing practices to the culture of the paper itself, and The Journal Times became one of the first newspapers to put the Readership Institute’s findings to the test. On the institute’s advice, reporters and editors were encouraged to use different story forms, such as Q&As and analytical pieces, and to eschew, when possible, the inverted pyramid for more lively storytelling methods. The paper also introduced such institute-influenced content as “debatables,” articles that explore the issues and controversies behind the news (aiming to draw readers into an online dialogue and give them “something to talk about”), and “newstrackers,” graphic representations that briefly summarize the background of a story, its new developments, and where it might be headed. Under the institute’s guidance the paper’s front page, which had often led with the major national or international news of the day, became intensely local. The Journal Times then embarked on an aggressive marketing campaign, publicizing coming stories and branding itself in the community with, among other things, television spots.
“What the Readership Institute did is made us think a little bit more about what we were reporting on, who it was serving, and why we were doing it,” said Dustin Block, the Journal Times’s city editor, who began as a reporter at the paper.
Brandt credits the institute with helping his paper to stop a decade-long circulation slide. (Since working with the institute the paper’s circulation has fluctuated but has basically held steady.) And the journalism seems reasonably intact. The Journal Times’s innovations have been recognized not only by its readers, but by the industry itself. In 2005, the paper won ten first place awards in the Wisconsin Newspaper Association’s annual contest, including those for its environmental and community reporting and for its Web site.
The Dayton Daily News is a more recent client of the institute. Its redesign, which launched in April, was a response to an 11 percent circulation decline over the past five years. Working off the institute’s advice to listen to readers, the paper surveyed its readers and responded with radical changes to its content, such as banning jumps and creating an editorial page that is ideologically balanced. The latter change, which goes so far as to counter liberal editorial cartoons with conservative ones, was made to combat the paper’s liberal image in a city that has become increasingly conservative.
“We have to respect the fact that reading is a voluntary act, and we better pay attention to what our readers tell us they want to read if we’re going to be satisfying to them and if we’re going to maintain our competitive position,” the paper’s editor, Jeff Bruce, said. “The good news is that what they want us to do are some of the things we hold near and dear. They want us to do the kind of stories that help them understand the world around them. They want watchdog journalism.”
When the redesigned paper hit newsstands, though, Bruce’s blog lit up with comments from longtime readers, many of whom criticized the paper for pandering. One angry reader, summing up the sentiments of many, wrote: “Deer sirz, I lick tha noo DDN. I kin reed it reel gud. Colorz is pritty. Them wurdz make my hed hert.” Another wrote, simply: “USA Today Light.”
This reaction is not uncommon to newspapers that have remade themselves based on the institute’s research. Some readers feel these papers are trying to appeal to the “lowest common denominator,” as one Dayton Daily News reader put it. “Your new format is a not a step forward but rather a step down to the ordinary,” a reader of the institute-inspired Greensboro, North Carolina, News-Record wrote not long ago on the editor’s blog. Bruce acknowledged that there have been complaints, from readers and from within his newsroom.
“Morale is very low among the reporters,” one longtime reporter at the paper told me. “There’s a whole feeling that we dumbed down the paper . . . . In the beginning we weren’t doing anything other than local” news on page one, the reporter said. “They had to back down somewhat on that. It’s a little bit ridiculous when we’re doing features about somebody auditioning for Survivor and meanwhile 23 killed in a bomb blast in iraq is buried on page A-18. And we are still doing a lot of that.”
In Dayton, as with all the reinvention projects influenced by the institute, the effort centered on making the paper more appealing to so-called “light readers,” who are generally described as people who read the paper two or three times a week and are mostly between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. The committee charged with leading the paper’s redesign, which included staff members from circulation and marketing, editorial and production, were told to work under the assumption that no change they could make to the paper, however dramatic, could alienate longtime readers. “I’m certain that came from the Readership Institute,” the reporter said, “that’s verse and chapter from them.”
Asked about this, Lavine said that more often than not newspapers can make sweeping changes without losing core readers, and “even if a few of my generation leave,” he said, “so what? If you don’t start building younger readers you’re not going to have a newspaper or a magazine or a television show.”
If some of Lavine’s prescriptions, and those of the Readership Institute, don’t seem particularly new — or revolutionary — that’s because they aren’t. Some, such as using bold graphics and alternative forms of storytelling to entice readers, have been around for years and were notably part of USA Today’s oft-cribbed and wildly successful playbook. Others, such as listening to your audience, bubbled up with the civic journalism movement, which Edward M. Fouhy, the founder of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, described in 1996 as “an effort to reconnect with the real concerns that viewers and readers have about the things in their lives they care most about.” Nor is there anything novel about the notion of concentrating on local coverage.
While incorporating those ideas and others, Lavine’s philosophy applies a more holistic approach to the challenges facing the media, advocating organization-wide transformations, not just those that affect newsrooms. The Readership Institute is also among the first to back up its ideas with a large body of research, and newspaper editors like Jeff Bruce and Randolph Brandt are far from alone in believing that research holds some of the answers to their problems.
Lavine often uses the word “seismic” to describe how times have changed for journalism. Back when he ran newspapers it was not unusual that a paper, even a bad one, would be read by 80 percent of the community it served. It has been jarring for him to watch all of this fall away in an explosion of choice. “In much of the twentieth century all we had to do was inform,” he told me. “Now we have to recognize that there is a real partnership. The media still have to inform, but if the public doesn’t feel it’s worth their time, it doesn’t matter what you write.”
The journalism business is indeed in the middle of a profound transition, and there is no shortage of anxiety among reporters and editors about who and what will be left standing when the transition is complete. So it is easy to understand how someone like Lavine, with his message of salvation, could appear to be a journalistic Moses. And maybe he is. Many of Lavine’s colleagues at Medill sound cautiously optimistic. “Hopefully we are rowing toward the Elysian Fields,” says Abe Peck, “and not Niagara Falls.”
Others on the faculty, though, worry that Lavine’s solutions could hasten journalism’s decline. They know that in today’s hypercompetitive media world it is more important than ever for newspapers and other old guard media to know their audience and shrewdly market their work. But they also know it is the quality of that work — including things Lavine does not dwell on, like investigative and explanatory reporting — that is ultimately what is worth preserving and passing on to the next generation. Over the next three years, as the former magician reveals his bag of tricks, Medill will be a place to watch closely.
Daniel Schulman is an assistant editor at CJR.
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