From the Head Fellow: New Owners, New Spirit, New Optimism
By Charles R. Eisendrath ’75
Charles R. Eisendrath ’75
Dear Mr. Zell, I wrote last April, I want to repeat to you a suggestion I made to yesterday’s (Wallace House) seminar speaker, Brian Tierney of The Philadelphia Inquirer/Daily News:
Consider becoming the first “new breed” newspaper owner to announce that profits exceeding the historical 12% norm will be re-invested in covering the news. The admiration attending this kind of statesmanship might surprise you. It would have a Larry King/Time cover dimension because everyone knows a country based on an informed citizenship can’t function well without one, a result of so many news companies failing their audiences. In other words, here is an opportunity for true national service. There’s a war on and an election coming. If you are so inclined, this is the moment, your new properties, the instrument.
Not hearing back from Sam Zell isn’t surprising. Although the Michigan alum visits Ann Arbor, we’ve never met. Nevertheless, I date my outing as journalism optimist (after decades of noisy gloom) to a crystallizing moment when I wrote the letter. New ownership has changed priorities at some old companies while online options burgeon all around them. Brian Tierney had just visited Wallace House, invited by his chief senior photographer, Jim MacMillan, a Pulitzer winner and then-current Fellow. The journalistic grapevine had offered me only bad stuff about Tierney, so I introduced him as “a reputed bum.”
Tierney laughed, then amazed us. Instead of droning on about profit margins and stock price, the publishers’ mantra for the last 25 years, Tierney talked about loving newspapers. Delivering them as a kid in West Philly. Hating to hear them whine about going broke while banking bigger profit margins than most companies in America. At the end of the evening, I think half of ’07 wanted to follow him home.
Since then the Inquirer’s circulation has risen 2.3 percent, the biggest gain among the 50 largest dailies, while circulation among them dropped an average 3.6 percent. Bill Marimow, part of the dream team assembled by Eugene (“Pulitzer Gene”) Roberts, who led the paper to 17 Pulitzers in his 18 years there, has returned home as editor. Will it reach Nirvana in cyberspace? Excuse me, but that’s like faulting Abraham Lincoln for not having jobs for all the slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation. Some things you admire just because they are admirable.
Yes, I continue working on Tierney, who returns to Wallace House next semester. He’s an adman. How can he resist my pitch that, since he says he isn’t making anywhere near 12 percent anyway, he can be a hero for free?
Updates to come...and that’s enough about old media.
A sea change is flooding the spirits of Fellows passing through Wallace House with a new taste for risk, adventure, entrepreneurship. Until recently that word implied journalistic impurity.
For example, just a few years back, “What’s-he-thinking?” stares led me to withdraw a suggested seminar with David Farrell ’93, whose new company was hiring journalists to revolutionize the corporate “clip sheet.” Last fall, ’08 couldn’t get enough of him. Lone Buffalo, Inc. now employs 40 journalists — that’s about as many as the Ann Arbor News, daily circulation: 50,000.
Debbie Caldwell ’94 once called from the Dallas Morning News in a moral funk because a startup Web site wanted to hire her, a right-thinking newspaperwoman. How could they get her so wrong? She is now vice president and managing editor for content of Beliefnet Inc., the largest online player in the fast-growing field of religion/spirituality news, which was just snapped up by News Corp.
MediaFriendly — a creation of Ben Davis ’92, formerly of NPR and ABC — locates camera crews for television networks and matches stories to expert sources at universities. Contracts include CNN, Fox and ABC on one side; Yale, Michigan and Stanford on the other.
In January 2005, the most unlikely of entrepreneurs arrived at my door for his second “Whither Me?” Fellowship conference. Chris Carey was a “Columbo”-style investigative reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He suspected the paper’s new owners would not support that kind of work and wanted help organizing a non-profit Web site around his study topic, “The Criminal Subculture in the Securities Industry.” I refused. For-profits are more viable because more potential funders want to amass money than dispense it. I would help with that.
Carey launched Sharesleuth.com with two emails to financier Mark Cuban. Elapsed time: one week. The site is not without controversy stemming from Cuban’s behavior as a brand-new media mogul, but it is raising hell in an industry where that is a public service.
Far as I know, ReadTheSpirit.com is the latest KWF launch. Its creator/director is David Crumm ’02, another unexpected proto-mogul who before last summer covered religion for the Detroit Free Press. It is a new kind of Web hub that connects readers with religious/spirituality media. The first of six books it will publish before the end of 2008 (about interfaith heroes) appears shortly.
Overall, Dan Gillmor ’87 is KWF’s most famous media innovator. Adding experience as tech critic for the San Jose Mercury News to a long newspaper career, Dan wrote the book “We the Media,” which changed the way a lot of people think about reporting. Recently, he became founding director of The Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
The class of ’08 is pawing at the future of all this. Ron Parsons from Yahoo! News led a survey of interesting local news experiments online. The research jibes with the study plan of Rochelle Riley of the Detroit Free Press: new journalism delivery systems. Several others have joined a freewheeling discussion. Will it become a start-up? You can’t walk out the door without tripping over an opportunity that’s been waiting for somebody to kick it to life…whether or not Zell, Tierney & Co. take my dare.
