The ABJ: Then, now, and later?

The muted  buzz from the third floor of the Beacon Journal is that the absentee Canadian owner could move it to smaller quarters within  a year - or sooner if it can find a buyer for the proudly towered edifice.

"It's like a  mausoleum," a reporter told  me a few days ago, confirming melancholy reports that have drifted out from others of the emptiness of the place that boasts high up on its front page of being "Informing. Engaging. Essential."

Mausoleum is not an exaggeration.   My source ruefully noted that the third floor is now the home of the news operation, advertising and circulation.  The second floor and mezzanine are vacant.  The first floor has only a guard station and a modest public service counter.  The paper is printed out of town.

The new building rose on the site of the razed Music Hall at 44. E. Exchange St. in the summer of 1930 to accommodate the Times-Press .  In 1938, the owner, Scripps-Howard,  sold it  to John S. Knight's publishing company  and there the building  has remained in powerful hands ever since.

When I arrived at the paper from Columbus in 1967 I was swept up by the lively environment of a  big noisy staff, the endless clattering of teletype  machines (news never stops) and the imposing figure of Jack Knight who often circulated in the news room from his corner office.

I had showed up at my desk with my right hand heavily bandaged from a serious cut suffered in a temper tantrum when  I slammed my fist against a jammed garage door.

Knight stopped short in his rounds, walked over to my desk and said:" I'm Jack Knight  What happened to your hand."

When I told him, he replied:  "Better be more csreful the next time," and walked away.

My years at the paper were more than rewarding.  Neither Knight nor  Ben Maidenburg, the feisty conservative editor who hired me after a contentious sit-down lunch, interfered with my political reporting (Ben merely sulked) , even though we came from different points on the political dial.  Working for these bosses, there was always the respectful sense of belonging to a professional operation.

But as the years passed, new store-trained editors arrived from distant sites  with strange ideas of newspaper vibrancy. Much of it came down to tinkered changes,which are now reflected in many mainstream papers .  No longer was it  the workplace of Knight's personal  family but rather an office  where you showed up at your desk, did the best that you could under the circumstances and prepared to move on.

The internal cohesion and driven competitiveness with other papers  broke apart with hiring freezes,  scrimping and catch-as-catch-can reporting.  Good people left, too many to the Plain Dealer - an exodus to the paper up the road that would have been treason in earlier times.   All that will be left of the soaring Knight legacy will vanish when they turn out the lights at 44 E. Exchange and move on, too.

John S. Knight: There was a human side, too...

AS I WAS READING a couple of more death notices for American newspapers, I recalled filmmaker Paul Jacoway's excellent one-hour TV documentary on the life of John S. Knight that was aired a week ago on Ch. 45/49. It was a sad reminder not only of the passing of the last of America's great publishers but also of the abject decline of the print media itself. Jacoway, a part-time University of Akron instructor, worked on the film for three years with Dr. Kathleen Endres of UA as his advisor and editor. It represented the careful assembly of a massive store of material for a journalist who towered above the field - and made a fortune from it.

I never met his brother Jim, who shared many of Jack's attributes, but for the 13 years that I worked under JSK's influence, my desk was no more than 20 feet from his office. Others have written about his life largely from a corporate viewpoint tracking the path of how he and his brother built a media empire. But Jack's passion as a newspaperman dedicated to the city of Akron was never an avocation. He lived it intensely every day, whether he was meeting with CEOs or union guys who ran the presses at the other end of the building. Presidents sought his advice as eagerly as I sought another bet with him on a particular football game. If he won, he arrived at my desk after the week end and primly explained to me how such bets required much research and thought. On the few times that I won, he sent his secretary to me with a $5 bill without comment in a sealed envelope. It was a game with our own rules.

With individuals of great power and influence, human qualities can easily be overlooked. Jack Knight was human, forever a professional newsman while burdened by the tragedies of two lost sons and the murder of a grandson who was being primed to take over Knight newspapers. After that, Knight seemed to retreat to lower expectations for the future of his beloved papers.

The little things about his passions for the newspaper business were clearly reflected when, after much prodding, I convinced him to speak at the Akron Press Club's first annual awards dinner. As it happened, the program was on his 80th birthday, and although he groused about giving up the day for a speech, I think he quietly liked the idea in a pouting sort of way. I found myself in the desperate position of having to work with him on several drafts of the speech and deleting some remarks, particularly his dismay over editorials that said nothing. He didn't want to wear his glasses and complained that I had not placed cards on the tables for questions - which I convinced him that I had. At times he appeared to be an unsure rookie prepping to face a big audience. He gave me strict orders that the speech and following questions from the audience (about 300 guests) would end abruptly 10:3o. Standing next to him on the dais, I reminded him of the time and said I would call it a night. He snapped that I was still holding some written questions on cards and insisted he would continue. I didn't argue.

I suppose that the thing that told me more than anything else about the man is that although my political ideas were to the left of his, he was responsible for my becoming a columnist. I'm sure he disagreed with some of the columns, but never tried to stop me.

While Pulitzer committees and presidents saw him as a fearless outspoken observer of critical issues facing the nation, he was also an editor who circled commas and raised questions in the margins of clippings that he forwarded to the reporter. Having lost a son in World War 11 he saw the folly of our later engagement in Vietnam and defended the young war protesters at the 1968 presidential convention in Chicago, He was attracted to their youthful energy against silly policies.

His voice in his Editor's Notebook column today would be welcome - and perhaps even a strong influence on politicians as we stare at Afghanistan and further losses in human lives and other heavy costs. In the bottom-line culture of newspapers and broadcasters today, you have to look hard to find the kind of courage and sensitivity that came naturally to Jack Knight. Yes, it's a different world, but hardly much better in his absence.

De-pressed newspapers

I'VE BEEN  searching for a "happy" to attach to a New Year greeting to the newspaper business but I might as well have been hunting for a truffle at the summit of  Mt. Everest.  Except for some untested initiatives that are being advanced as stimulants to revive the heartbeat at a few papers, nothing else suggests that publishers have the slightest clue about what to do next to meet the challenges to their besieged newsrooms.  Instead they have chosen to compete with themselves in ways that defy basic  Journalism 101 rules that once echoed in college classrooms.

Indeed, we seldom even hear the word "journalism" mentioned anymore in the fixes that are being prescribed to stop the bloodshed.  A couple of nostrums that are being watched with anticipation in the industry  are being applied in Detroit and Cincinnati, so try to stay with me on these.  In Detroit, the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press  proclaimed a "sweeping set of strategic and innovative  changes designed to better meet advertiser and reader needs"  that, among other elements of the sweeper, will restrict home delivery to three days a week - Thursday, Friday and Sunday.  On the other days it will be available at your local newstand.  Okay.   The papers said the cutback in home delivery was recommended by a "leading global design company"   to meet economic pressure.  But the question remains:  How do you improve readership, on which advertising revenue is based, by cutting doorstep delivery four days a week?   You don't, can't and won't.    Out of sight, out of...

And what about the Cincinnati Enquirer's plan to to limit the number of days that it will carry classified advertising? Oh?  And to shrink the popular TV grid to evening programs on major stations? 

I don't have to be reminded that all papers are experiencing circulation and advertising declines and all of the folks in the board rooms are twisting their handkerchiefs these days.  On the other hand, did  I see an industry figure the other day that said the average profit for newspapers is a lively 20 pct.?  

I don't know how long newspapers will be around, although my guess is that they might outlive their current projected actuarial tables.  But it is well within the comfort zone of mostly absentee  owners to blame their misery on the economic climate rather than an internal  systemic problem that has been slowly eroding the quality of their products for more than two decades. For every round of layoffs, cutbacks and hiring freezes, there was always someone with a title assuring the readers that none of this would affect the quality of the paper.  If you close a bureau, that affects the quality.  If you eliminate a beat, that affects the quality. If you replace experienced reporters with entry level journalism graduates,   that affects the quality.  It is with some relief that I no longer  see the word quality used to soften the blow of more layoffs.

Joe Strupp, a columnist for Editor & Publisher, put it this way: 

"Somehow newspaper owners continue to think that the way to handle economic downturns is to make their product worse by eliminating its most important asset, people.  But with fewer reporters to dig up news as newspapers transition to the Web their content is going look more and more like everything else on line, limited and poorly reported."

There has been  scarcity of professional imagination in recent years to retard the retreat from excellence in newspapers as most front offices are content to endorse  the cost-cutting decrees of the owners without a whimper.   But cutbacks are not imaginative.  Graphics changes are hardly imaginative although the editors love to talk about how many sections they have moved  to other places in the paper.   There are repeated appeals to readers to advise the papers on what should appear in their news columns each day, a decision once left to the professional judgment of editors.  Can you imagine a fire  chief arriving at the site of a burning home and asking the neighbors to advise him on how to put out out the blaze?

Editors have surrendered whatever are left of their options to the modern gorilla at the top of their chain of command:  Wall Street, a discredited gang that measures newsapaper quality with stock quotations.  If there is a longer range solution than simply cutting everything to the  bone - a point of no return - it should be fair to ask whether today's newspaper is really in the newspaper business or preparing the way or an indecent burial?

Shortly before his death in 1981, John S. Knight told me his great regret was that the Knight Newspapers board had agreed in 1974 to merge with Ridder newspapers, making it widely accountable to public stock.  He saw no way that the papers that bore his family's name with enormous success could escape the demands of Wall Street  on profit-and-loss statements in good times and bad.  He died a very rich - and highly respected - editor and publisher, the last by many degrees of his titled foresight that had placed quality at the top of his papers' pyramid. .