'Print Person' Pontificates p.119

By: Tony Case

New York Times managing editor Gene Roberts says newspapers should not overestimate the degree to which readers will get their news via online services.

THE MANAGING EDITOR of the New York Times believes newspapers that have rushed to get online may have overestimated the degree to which readers will use such technology.
"The number of people in any given community, in percentage terms, who are willing to get their journalism interactively is ? blessedly, I say, as a print person ? very slim and likely to be for some time," Gene Roberts said at an Overseas Press Club luncheon in New York City last month.
Roberts noted that the San Jose Mercury News, whose readers are among the most computer-savvy in the country, has a relatively small number of electronic subscribers, compared to its print circulation.
The editor's views on electronic news transmission follow the widely held opinion of newspaper people that the Internet will never supplant their time-tested medium. And while newspapers continue to hedge their bets by investing in new media, they hardly appear ready to retire the ink-on-paper format.
The New York Times Co. boldly announced in December that it would spend at least $1 billion over the next six years on electronic media ventures, including broadcast and cable. At the same time, it predicted newspapers had a "long and profitable future."
Just two years ago, with equal fanfare, the company laid out the same sum to acquire a single newspaper property, the Boston Globe.
The flagship Times has made marked and often expensive editorial improvements, including putting color in the Sunday edition, expanding the sports section and beefing up metropolitan coverage for which the paper received a Pulitzer Prize last year.
The paper plans also to revamp its business report in March ? stepping up coverage of New Jersey, increasing the daily news hole by a page, and restructuring the Sunday section.
At the luncheon, the legendary Times and Philadelphia Inquirer editor railed against the corporatization and tabloidization of the press. He also reminisced a bit about his first six months in the Times' No. 2 newsroom post.
Roberts, who is said to have wrangled with corporate executives over budgets during his 18 years at the helm of the Inquirer's news operation, related that when he started in the business, 10% of a typical newspaper's gross went to the newsroom. Nowadays, he figured, it's more like 6%.
"This," he maintained, "has a real toll on a newsroom's ability to do its job."
When asked whether papers aren't force-feeding news about a complex world to a largely indifferent public, Roberts said the media would do well to report even more aggressively.
The U.S. invasion of Haiti received reams of press coverage initially ? but when the soldiers began to return home, the reporters followed, he pointed out.
"The very things that made it a news story continued to be there: The presence of American troops, Aristide was there, and there was a central question, which remains, of whether the Aristide government will succeed," Roberts said.
The newsman expressed concern over the increasing reportage of gossip as news, charging that this trend has affected virtually every respectable U.S. newspaper.
"I think that building a paper around the sensational is dangerous in the long run to any paper that views itself as an institution that is here to stay," Roberts said.
"Newspaper reputations, like all reputations, are earned over periods of time," he added. "For a daily newspaper, with the responsibility to serve the information needs of a given community, to go too much the way of 'Hard Copy' or the National Enquirer is not just a mistake, it's a major mistake."
Roberts defended his own paper's front-page reporting of opening arguments in the double-murder case of a certain fallen football star.
"Whether we agree or disagree with all the attention the O.J. Simpson case has generated," he told his table mates, "it is a uniquely American happening, on a scale we haven't quite had before."
One person present wondered if Roberts felt the American press had lost its luster, to which the editor replied: "I've never known a time in my career as a journalist in which we didn't encounter some hostility. I don't know that there's ever been an occasion when the press was welcomed with open arms."
While lauding the Times for its "reverence for substance," Roberts admitted to finding the Gray Lady, at times, slow in welcoming change.
"One of the charms of the Times is that you have this large, vast, somewhat bureaucratic organization, very dedicated to getting the news, and change doesn't come easy even when it's change you need to effect," he said, stopping short of offering any examples. "Any time you're trying to make changes at the Times, you're going to encounter frustrations."