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What FitzSimons 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 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: “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: “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: “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: “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.
Richard Gizbert’s War
Richard Gizbert covered conflicts extensively (Chechnya, Bosnia) as a London-based correspondent for ABC News. In June 2004, he was abruptly let go after turning down assignments in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite the network’s insistence that such dangerous posts are strictly voluntary. Gizbert filed suit in London for unfair dismissal, and this winter he won a strongly worded verdict in labor court against ABC, which the network has since appealed. CJR’s Kevin Friedl spoke with Gizbert shortly after the dangers of war coverage were again underscored by the injuries to ABC’s Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt.
In what capacity did you initially work for ABC?
I came as a foreign correspondent. I did war zones, like most people do, for four or five years. Gradually, as my kids got older and I was feeling less invulnerable, I drifted away from it. By the time Kosovo happened, I let it be known that I didn’t want to go there. The company was fine with it at the time; they’d seen it happen many times before.
Was it explicit that you would no longer cover wars?
In 2002, I signed a contract on the explicit understanding that there would be no war-zone work. About three or four months later I was asked by Marcus Wilford, the London bureau chief, if I’d go to Afghanistan. I turned him down. He said, “Richard, you ought to know there is some unhappiness in New York about this,” which kind of flummoxed me. I turned down two Iraq assignments and an Afghanistan assignment and then on June 9, 2004, Marcus sat me down and informed me that they were terminating me and they were going to replace me with someone who went to war zones.
Do you think your case has relieved some of the pressure on reporters to cover conflicts?
I have absolutely no doubt. When I was fired, I was one of four correspondents in the London bureau. Three of them went to Baghdad. Since I raised the case, all three of those other correspondents have at one time bowed out of the Iraq assignment. I understand why those guys couldn’t testify on my behalf, but it would be nice if they bought me a beer.
Will high-profile incidents, like the injuries to Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt, prompt changes in the ways the press covers Iraq?
I think it’s inevitable. We’ve got to find a different model to cover this war. NBC was smart to go out and hire someone like Richard Engel, who is an Arabic speaker, does six weeks in and two weeks out, and is completely committed to the story. You can always find correspondents who are young and keen and want to do the story for their career, for the story, or both. But the old rotate-everybody-in, everybody-does-their-fair-share model, simply cannot apply to a place like Baghdad.
Language Corner: Taking Issue
Through his pain, Robert Brown found a bit of humor.
“One day will you please address the ‘issue/problem’ issue (er, problem),” his note said. “In my dictionary, I don’t see ‘problem’ as a definition for ‘issue.’ Everyone is using ‘issue’ in a problematic way (when will there be ‘issuematic?’).”
The e-mail from Mr. Brown — who said he lives in New York City, owns an art gallery, and writes about gastronomy on the side — touched a nerve. Most fads are ignorable, but the “issue” fad has been as sweeping as any in memory. The word is used in countless sloppy ways. A weatherman warns of “cloudiness issues.” A sports announcer notes a team’s “penalty issues.” And from the print world: “health issues, such as high blood sugar”; the college whose chief, according to a news article, “wants the mold issue resolved”; radio stations that “bombarded their listeners with the issue.”
As a standard-English alternative to the wimpy “issue,” we should certainly consider the straightforward “problem.” Or “concern” or “weakness” or “question” or “topic” or “matter” or . . .
— Evan Jenkins
A lot more about writing is in Language Corner at CJR’s Web site, www.cjr.org, under “Journalism Tools.”
Hard Numbers
807: Minimum number of journalists who were arrested worldwide in 2005.
100: Decrease from the year before.
59: Percent of the 150 journalists who died on assignment last year who were murdered.
8, 5, 4: Months, respectively, that three Iraqi journalists working for Reuters were held in Abu Ghraib without charges before being released this winter.
39: Minimum number of journalists who have been abducted in Iraq since 2004.
79: Number of newspapers banned in China in 2005.
124: Number of appearances Senator John McCain has made on Sunday morning talk shows (on ABC, CBS, and NBC) since 1997.
5: Number of McCain appearances, per year, over those of any other political figure.
36: Combined number of Freedom of Information Act requests placed with the Pentagon by USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times between October 2000 and February 2005.
73, 42, 34: Pentagon FOIA requests by The Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, respectively, during that period.
6: Number of media outlets, including MSNBC, The New Yorker, and Newsday that Bill O’Reilly has placed on his list of “media operations that traffic in defamation.”
Sources: RSF, International Federation of Journalists, CPJ, Reuters, AP, Media Matters, Raw Story, billoreilly.com
To read the articles in the March/April 2006 issue, click here.
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