LETTERS: This Former Knight Ridder Exec Isn't Selling

By: E&P Staff Letters on the Knight Ridder debate, a non-profit plan to save newspapers, Time reporter (now on hiatus) Viveca Novak and more.

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This Former Knight Ridder Exec Isn't Selling

I sincerely hope that the recent pressure on Knight Ridder to sell itself, restructure, or whatever it is that critics want, accomplishes nothing. Knight Ridder has a positive, if not spectacular, record as an investment, and in the current atmosphere of corporate misconduct and mistrust, it is a company with a long, proud record of integrity.

While I understand the need for profit growth, I also know that there is more to business, especially the newspaper business, than simple dollars and cents.

Those who follow the newspaper industry, and every journalist, know that in this business, there is a dual responsibility. We need to make profits which reward our shareholders, but we also have a powerful obligation to inform our readers, to be a strong influence for good in our communities, and to be the kind of watchdog for the public interest that only a good newspaper can be.

It's difficult to balance the two responsibilities. Nobody is perfect; everyone would like high profit margins and Pulitzer prizes at the same time. Despite the obstacles, I think Tony Ridder has done a first rate job of steering the company to the kind of balance that's required.

For shareholders who cannot tolerate the vagaries of the newspaper business and have maximum profit as their only goal, I say, "Sell, if you must, and invest in some cash register company without a soul."

I retired in 1995 as senior vice president, operations, Knight Ridder, so I am biased. But from experience I know what kind of company it is. Under current circumstances, I'm not interested in selling my stock.

Gus Harwell
Port Orange, Fla.

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Newspaper Saved!

Joe Mathewson's great idea for non-profit newspapers -- given present day problems -- may be the best new idea this year. However, surely he must know that there have been non-profit magazines for a long time now. Some have membership bases like American Craft Magazine, American Folk Art Magazine, and Sculpture, but many do not (i.e. GLASS, which I edited for 7 years as a program of the non-profit art facility called UrbanGlass in Brooklyn). All are available on the newsstand (unlike AARP magazine, probably the biggest member-based nonprofit of all) and take ads to cover costs. As non-profit publications they are eligible for foundation and government grants and for tax-deductible donations and, not a small thing, they do not pay taxes. It is in my opinion a small step from quarterly or monthly glossies to newsprint weeklies or dailies. First step: a mission statement, a board, and registration as a non-profit 501-C3 organization.

John Perreault
Founder, Artopia
www.artsjournal.com/artopia

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I want to endorse Joe's positions and hope that you will put me in touch with others, too. During the 1990s I wrote a sequence of Op-eds for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. Since 2000 I've been heading up a US-Cuba people-to-people coalition. And so I have been face-to-face with the power of public information -- unconstrained and constrained.

Rick Shnitzler
Lead Organizer
TailLight Diplomacy
Philadelphia, Pa.

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Too Hard on Viveca

Just read "Viveca Novak: Another Plame Journo Kept Her Editor in the Dark," and believe you're being way too hard on Viveca -- January, March, May, what's the big deal?

First, note that "March" and "May" both start with "Ma", so it's easy to see how anyone could confuse them. Secondly, March is the mathematical average of January and May so really, she wasn't that far off after all.

Mike Bertrand
Madison, Wis.

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Re: A Tough Look at Sulzberger, the 'NYT' and the Miller Affair

Good God! Reading your piece about the latest doings at The New York Times is little short of horrifying. This is a paper with a storied history, yet in the last few years has had one reporter -- Jayson Blair -- actively fabricate and plagiarize his stories, and another -- Judith Miller -- get it all wrong on WMD in Iraq, and then go to prison for a very questionable stand in which she declined to name a White House source. That source -- I. Lewis Libby -- has since been indicted. Collateral damage at The Times included editors Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd amid the Blair debacle.

No newsroom -- no business -- can function effectively when there is one ongoing crisis after another. The Times needs a respite from this sort of thing. Perhaps it also needs a housecleaning -- your story tends to indicate that it does.

Paul Kellogg
New York, N.Y.
The writer is a freelance journalist.

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Tragedy and Farce

Re: Book Blames Government for Media Crisis

"The media crisis is not due to incompetent or corrupt journalists or owners, but rather to a highly concentrated profit-driven media system that makes it rational to gut journalism and irrational to provide the content a free society so desperately requires."

Thank you for publishing this paragraph from "Tragedy and Farce," since it will save me from reading it. The media crisis is SOLELY due to incompetent and corrupt journalists and their editors who have thrown journalistic standards out the window and kow-towed to the Bush administration, prostituting themselves in return for access (see Judith Miller and "if my source is wrong, then I'm wrong" as if the concept of corroboration was some unknown idea).

The tragedy is what journalism has become. The farce is what this book claims is the cause.

Marc Rubin