“Newspapers” Items

Pushing for Better Informational Graphics

One of the interesting challenges of creating a new kind of editing role, the graphics editor, was helping others in the newsroom see the importance of involving the visual folks early in the process.  Roger Fidler, a like-minded design advocate in the 1970s,  created the Newspaper Design Notebook, a magazine/newsletter to push the concept of better design, better editing and better visuals.  He asked me to write an article about how the Chicago Tribune handled series and lessons other newspapers might learn from our experiences.  Vol. 3/No. 2 was the last edition of the Newspaper Design Notebook. Pity.

Planning. Teamwork. Execution.

These are the elements for the successful handling of a newspaper series. Unfortunately, no matter how valid that concept, most series are put together by luck, guts and a prayer.

Young Readers and the Future of the Chicago Tribune

In late 1973 and early 1974 I was part of a committee at the Chicago Tribune.  The committee members were all under 30 and most of us recent hires by the newspaper.  Our task was to explore what the paper should do to attract more younger readers.  This task was less about getting young adults to read newspapers but to read the Tribune instead of the Chicago Sun-Times.  Members of the committee: Ovie Carter, Gary Deeb, Howard Finberg, Clarence Page, Don Pierson, Bill Plunkett, Karen Schickedanz, Rick Soll and Linda Winer.  Here’s what we wrote in our summary:

Simply stated, the Chicago Tribune takes itself too seriously. This is not to diminish its role as one of the nation’s best newspapers. Rather, it is a suggestion that the time has come for the Chicago Tribune to slaughter, once and for all, many of its sacred cows.

Further on, we concluded:

What we are recommending, in a general way, is a relaxation of the restraint that prohibits surprise and thought-provoking material from appearing in the Tribune.   It is not a recommendation to relax or reduce in any  way the standards of journalism: Strict reverence for the facts, a sense of fairness, and an attention to thoro reporting.

Please note the unique spelling of thorough, as the Tribune was still gripped by a style book that used simplified spelling, a cause of the previous owner/publisher:  Col. Robert McCormick.

The  is available as a PDF file: chi trib_young readers group_02_1974

Opening page of William P. Cassidy's 2005 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly study on the role conceptions of print and online newspaper journalists

2005 Study of Print & Online Newsroom Roles

This is William P. Cassidy’s article “Variations on a Theme: The Professional Role Conceptions of Print and Online Newspaper Journalists,” published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 2, Summer 2005, pages 264-280. Cassidy was an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; the data came from his 2003 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Oregon.

The question behind the study was one the industry was arguing about at the time without much evidence: were online journalists a different species from their print colleagues, or the same people working at a different speed? Cassidy went at it with a national Web-based survey, sending 3,330 invitations between July 15 and August 25, 2003, and getting 655 usable responses — 456 print newspaper journalists and 199 online newspaper journalists — from 271 newspapers in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The response rate was 23.1%.

He measured the responses against the four role conceptions Weaver and Wilhoit had established: interpretive/investigative, disseminator, adversarial, and populist mobilizer. The headline finding, from the abstract:

A national survey (N=655) examining the professional role conceptions of print and online newspaper journalists revealed the print group perceived the Interpretive/Investigative role as significantly more important than the online group. No significant differences were found between the groups in their perceptions of the Adversarial and Populist Mobilizer roles. Results were mixed for the Disseminator role. The online group rated getting information to the public as quickly as possible as significantly more important than the print group.

In other words: print journalists scored higher on investigating government claims, analyzing complex problems, and discussing national policy (6.10 versus 5.74 on a seven-point scale). Online journalists scored higher on speed (6.46 versus 6.03). But on staying away from stories where the facts cannot be verified — the accusation most often aimed at online newsrooms in that era — there was no significant difference at all. Both groups took it seriously.

That last result matters, because the surrounding literature Cassidy reviews was full of the assumption that online publishing had corroded verification. He quotes Ann Brill’s characterization of the problem:

rush to production has allowed rumor to pass as reporting and electronic processing to pass for editing

Cassidy’s own reading of his data is gentler: “Perhaps online journalists are simply getting a bad rap from these journalists.” He suggests the online journalists in his sample, working for daily newspapers rather than Web-only operations, had absorbed the same newsroom norms as everyone else in the building.

I have a personal stake in this one. The credibility research Martha L. Stone, Diane Lynch and I did for the Online News Association — the “Digital Journalism Credibility Study,” published January 31, 2002 — is cited twice in the notes, in support of the point that the public rated online news about as credible as news from other sources. It is a small thing to find your own work in someone else’s footnotes, but it is a reminder that the arguments we were having inside newsrooms were also being tested, carefully, by people outside them.

The article also offers a useful bit of chronology for anyone dating the online news era, noting that in May 1992 the Chicago Tribune, in partnership with America Online, launched Chicago Online, and that by 1998 more than 1,600 newspapers had an online presence.

Reading this in 2026, the striking thing is that the study’s central dividing line no longer exists. There is no “print group” and “online group” to compare; there is a newsroom, and everything it publishes goes out digitally first. What has survived is the tension Cassidy measured — the pull between interpretation and speed. Twenty years on, with AI-generated summaries and an endless publishing clock, that tension hasn’t been resolved so much as industrialized.

Archival transcript of Hazel Reinhardt's newspaper readership demographics talk at the 1999 APME Conference in Memphis

Changing Readers: A Demographic Warning to APME, 1999

This is a set of excerpts from a talk given by Hazel Reinhardt at the 1999 APME Conference in Memphis. Reinhardt was president of Hazel Reinhardt Consulting Services and the former Minnesota state demographer, and her subject was the one part of the newspaper business that could be forecast with confidence. The document notes that copies of her slides were provided courtesy of the Northwestern University Media Management Center, and that the boldface in the transcript was added by Kees.

Her opening argument was that demographics, unlike almost everything else the industry worried about, were not a matter of speculation.

The numbers I’m going to show you for the next 10 years, outside of some major catastrophe, are the numbers that will be realized in the United States. There is almost nothing we can imagine that will happen to change that.

The readership numbers were the sobering part. Weekday readership had fallen from 78 percent of adults in 1970 to 59 percent; Sunday had barely moved, from 72 percent to 69 percent. Education and age were the two powerful predictors — 71 percent of college graduates read on a typical weekday versus 40 percent of those with less than a high school education, and 71 percent of adults 65 and older versus 45 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds. Broken into generations, the pattern was unmistakable: Pre-boomers at 70 percent, Baby Boomers at 58 percent, Generation X at 47 percent.

It’s a mystery to me that we could have known about this for so long but seemed to not want to talk about it: Each generation of younger people is reading less or less frequently.

From there she walked the audience through four population changes — an aging population, growing racial and ethnic diversity, a widening gap between rich and poor, and the concentration of population in certain regions and metros. She spent the most time on aging: Boomers were then 42 and 43, not 50; fertility was low; the number of Americans over 100 was projected to grow from roughly 37,000 in 1990 to about 137,000 in 2010 and 850,000 by 2050. Households with children would not grow; empty nesters would. Editors who had built their sections around “what’s of interest to families” were going to need another hook.

The hinge of the whole talk was Generation Y, which contributed only 15 million adults in 1998 but would add 65 million by 2010 — 29 percent of all adults. Everything depended on how that generation behaved.

If Generation Y reads at the same level as Generation X, overall daily readership will be below 50 percent by 2010 — 45 percent by 2015. Following that train of logic, the last American reading a newspaper would be observed in 2078.

Reinhardt offered a reason for hope — surveys showed Generation Y as more optimistic, more community-minded, more involved than Generation X — and then framed the challenge as a question the room had a very short window to answer:

The challenge to newspapers is how and what do we need to do to make a larger proportion of them newspaper readers than Generation X?

She also dismissed the industry’s favorite consolation, that people pick up the habit as they age. Asked exactly that in the Q&A, she was blunt:

If you did not read a newspaper when you were 35 and you did not read one when you were 45, why would you suddenly take it up at 55 or 65? You have established patterns.

You have a few safe years. Do not be lulled. You have a few years when you have the Boomers and Pre-boomers who are big readers with you. The future is whether you can get Generation Y.

Reading this in 2026, the arithmetic has long since resolved itself, and not in the direction the hopeful reading allowed for. What stands out now is not the forecast but the framing: Reinhardt was telling a room full of editors that the crucial period was the next five to 10 years, and that working on it that day was “none too soon.” Those were the same years the industry spent arguing about what to put on its websites. The demographic clock she described was running the entire time.

Clipping of David Noack's November 1998 Editor & Publisher article on the AP's fee-based news archive for The Wire

AP Launches Its First Consumer E-Commerce Venture

This November 21, 1998 article from Editor & Publisher, written by David Noack, reports on the Associated Press launching its first electronic commerce venture aimed at consumers: a fee-based archive for its online news service, “The Wire.” The service was available through The Wire’s Web site and the 250 online newspapers that hosted the AP’s online news service, with an official announcement expected around Nov. 23.

The subscription archive covered national, international, sports, financial and business stories dating back to July 1, 1997 — a big jump from the free two-week search, which held about 10,000 articles versus the new service’s 250,000. Individual pricing ran from $2.95 for a single article to a $99.95 “Annual Pass” for 1,500 articles, with a 20% revenue-sharing arrangement for newspapers that signed up customers.

Jim Kennedy, director of AP Multimedia Services, said the e-commerce component had been in the plans since 1995:

“This will be the first time that we have a text service of our own that goes directly to the consumer.”

“This was part of our original planning, but it took some time to get over some of these hurdles that we had with technically making this available to consumers and also editorially ensuring the integrity of the content.”

July/August 1997 TechNews magazine article about The Arizona Republic becoming the first North American newspaper produced entirely with a CCI database publishing system

First U.S. Database Publishing System

From the July/August 1997 issue of TechNews, the magazine of newspaper operations published by the Newspaper Association of America published a story about the conversion of The Arizona Republic to a CCI Europe database publishing system. This was work I led as the paper’s director of information technology. The new system replaced the Information International Inc. (Triple-I) pagination system that had made the Republic one of the first metro newspapers in the country to be completely paginated.

The Arizona Republic recently became the first newspaper in North America to be created entirely through “database-system publishing.” The Republic can now gather information once and distribute it in a variety of formats: from ink-on-paper to online, from fax to CD-ROM.

The first phase was completed June 2, 1997. The story notes that Phoenix Newspapers Inc. was doing this while also constructing a new 10-story building, launching Arizona Central, merging The Phoenix Gazette and Republic newsrooms and closing The Gazette, and moving more than 1,000 employees and their computers across the street.

Finberg described the timing of the switch to CCI’s database system as a lot like “changing the engine in an airplane at 35,000 feet. On paper it looks possible, but in your heart you know it will be pretty tricky. It is not something for the fainthearted.”

Dave Seibert, technology-development manager for news and information at PNI, is quoted on the hardest technical problem — getting CCI to talk to the existing SII text-editing system, which took about six months. David Neibergall, team leader for design, points to WYSIWYG editing, and to designers finally leaving the darkened room the staff called “The Cave,” a space required by the low-contrast green screens of the Triple-I system.

At the time of the article, the Republic was paginating more than 1,100 pages a week on CCI, with a common copy-editing and design database due that fall and reporters moving to Windows PCs in 1998. The piece closes on MediaServer and the ambition behind the whole project:

“With a database publishing system, we’ll have the tools to produce not only the newspaper, but also online editions, magazines, and more. The key is effective access to our content—text, photos, audio—regardless of the delivery method.”

Reading this in 2026, the vocabulary has changed but the argument has not. Create the content once, store it in a structured way, and deliver it wherever the audience happens to be. Every content management system and API-driven newsroom workflow in use today rests on that same idea — one we were arguing for, and building, a page at a time in Phoenix.

Seybold Seminars publishing conference session at Moscone Center in San Francisco, September 1996

Pagination and Paradigms at Seybold

In the 1990s, if you wanted to know where publishing technology was headed, you went to Seybold. The Seybold Seminars conferences were the industry’s gathering place for prepress, typesetting and publishing systems — the vendors, the consultants and the newspaper and magazine people who had to make it all work. This session was recorded live at Moscone Center during the San Francisco show, held Sept. 9-13, 1996.

I was introduced by David Cole, the technology consultant, who took some pleasure in my brand-new and rather vague job title.

Howard Finberg is now the Director of Information Technologies, a promotion that he just received last week at the Phoenix Newspapers Inc. Maybe at some point we will be forced to ask him exactly what a director of information technologies is but until then we would like to hear about the new paradox of buying, installing, and using of a publishing system.

My answer was that I’d let everyone know what the job was as soon as I’d read the description. The talk itself was about the pagination project at Phoenix Newspapers Inc. — replacing 15 aging Information International (Triple I) page makeup workstations, the big Raytheon-built terminals the staff called the “green-eyed monster,” and the design rooms kept dark enough for those screens that people called them “bat caves.” We selected CCI Europe, and by the end of August 1996 we were 82-85% complete on the rollout.

But the point I most wanted to make was that pagination was the wrong question.

We asked ourselves this fundamental question and if you have ever talked about this, if you are thinking about this, if this is a question for you…you really have to ask “do you want to paginate?” and I contend quite frankly, honestly, emphatically that the answer is no…not interested in pagination anymore.

What we actually wanted was a publication database — information in the middle, output neutral, feeding print and whatever came next. And that meant breaking the industry’s habit of treating the newsroom as the sole owner of anything valuable.

… we have a model in our industry that says information of value resides within the newsroom. I say let’s break that model, let’s break the paradigm, and say information belongs to whoever needs it and whoever can make use of it.

Much of the speech was about people, not machines: open committees that included the library and purchasing, cookies and free lunches to get staff to vendor demos, a full-time trainer, a Lotus Notes database of threaded project discussions going back to August 1995, and two “super users” from the design department who hated the title. One of them, Eddie Rossi, was quoted as saying the installation was going very well, “but not very elegantly.”

My favorite line in the whole transcript isn’t mine — it’s my boss’s, quoted secondhand: “if you want to know how to reorganize a newspaper, figure out who has control of the furniture, because that is what it is all about.” Nearly 30 years later, I’d still defend that as sound organizational theory.

A note on the transcript: it was typed from the audio recording, so a few things come out oddly. QuarkXPress becomes “cork express,” HTML becomes “HTMO,” and my confession about being a former Macintosh bigot gets rendered as “math bigot.” I’ve left them as they are.

Title slide reading "Back to the future" from a July 1996 NAA marketing and technology meeting presentation in Chicago

Back to the Future: A 1996 Presentation to NAA Marketing

In July 1996 I presented “Back to the future” at an NAA marketing and technology business meeting in Chicago. At the time I was Senior Editor / Information Technologies at Phoenix Newspapers

The argument started with the bad news:

We can’t get there from here
Unless we change the way we think about our business

That change meant seeing the difference between publishing as an industry and publishing as an activity. Publishers love the industry — and the presses — “Just like the railroad owners loved trains.” But people love the activity. My historical example wasn’t computers at all: in the late 1800s a more affordable printing press gave even the smallest towns competing newspapers.

The heart of the talk was a scorecard, rating newspapers against seven digital consumer needs — knowledge, interaction, networking, sensory experience, ubiquity, aggregation and customization. The tally: two advantages, three neutrals, two disadvantages.

I also warned against the era’s favorite word:

Don’t “repurpose” content
Repurpose our role

And about the delivery debate: “It isn’t about dead trees OR live wires.” Forget online, forget the Web, forget about the wires — focus on information value.

Two outside voices made the point better than I could. Mark Hauptschein, director of strategy and business development at Ameritech:

“The old way of throwing advertising – spraying and praying – will weaken over time. Marketing will become a form of content.”

And Eric Berg, Price Waterhouse director of technology:

“In the late 1990s, getting access to information will no longer be an issue. The real issue will be avoiding information. We’re going to need new technology which will enable us to filter, sort and extract the information which is relevant to us.”

The process section covered the questions we were all avoiding — what is news, what are the jobs, what kind of organization — plus the return of the 24-hour newsroom and a caveat I still like: going from hot type to cold type is evolutionary; going digital is revolutionary. Make sure the paradigm really shifts.

There was good news, too. No new technology has yet replaced an older one, and information providers have always found a way, from newsbooks to newsletters to newspapers. I closed with Darwin — survival belongs to the most adaptable — and with people:

Give them information
Give them tools
Give them training
Give them room

1993 Editor & Publisher article by David Astor on the Philadelphia convention of Sunday and feature editors

Gadgets Are Allies, Not Threats: Feature Editors Meet in Philadelphia

This is a report from Editor & Publisher of Nov. 6, 1993, written by David Astor, covering the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors convention held the previous month in Philadelphia. The headliner was Matthew Lesko, the New York Times Syndicate columnist behind “Mr. Info,” whose specialty was telling readers how to pry free information out of the federal government. Lesko’s best line was about a federal pasta expert:

I talked to a government expert on pasta who’s been studying pasta for 10 years. No one asks him about it. He’s like the Maytag man! I couldn’t get him off the phone.

Earlier in the convention I moderated a session about feature sections in the 1990s. Astor identified me as an Arizona Republic/Phoenix Gazette news executive — my title at the time. The panel included Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of the Washington Post; Patrick Yack, managing editor of the Eugene, Ore., Register-Guard; and Jane Amari, managing editor for design and features at the Kansas City Star.

The discussion centered on how the walls between sections were coming down.

The line is blurring between feature and news sections.

Downie noted that news sections were running more feature stories and feature sections were carrying more hard-hitting pieces. Yack said his feature staff wrote regularly for other parts of the paper and often put profiles on the front page. Amari pointed out the flip side: moving feature stories to Page One makes it harder to fill the feature sections. The panel also talked about the difficulties of paginating feature sections, while agreeing that, on balance, pagination was a welcome development.

Technology was the other thread. USA Weekend editor Marcia Bullard urged feature editors to get involved in fax, audiotex and on-line services as a way to build a “power base” at their papers. Downie’s response is the line I’ve remembered:

We have to use and harness these media to take our products to new audiences. Gadgets are allies, not threats. But they shouldn’t take away from intelligent editing and good reporting or we’ll die and there won’t be anything to resell.

He added that readers would soon have access to “tailored” information through new media, but that Newspapers will be the one place with a smorgasbord of everything.

The story closes with AASFE board business. Susan Bischoff of the Houston Chronicle became president, succeeding Sue Smith of the Dallas Morning News. I was listed as one of the regional directors, along with Jane Marshall of the Houston Chronicle and Betsy Moye of the Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier.

February 1993 memo to Pam Johnson proposing a new approach to The Arizona Republic's Saturday edition

Rethinking the Saturday Republic

A February 1993 memo to Pam Johnson about the Saturday edition of The Arizona Republic. It grew out of a conversation with John Oppedahl and the paper’s latest readership research, which suggested Saturday didn’t behave like the rest of the week.

For too long, many newspapers, including this one, have looked at Saturday as an extension of the weekday (Monday through Friday). While our readers (myself included) see Saturday more as an prelude to Sunday.

The research point that mattered most: one in four readers said they spent more time with the Saturday paper than with a typical weekday edition — and those readers tended to have children under 18 at home and two or more people employed in the household.

Understanding and responding to that difference is the opportunity and challenge facing the paper.

I proposed a small working group — the right mix of “thinkers” and “doers” — naming Phil Hennessy, Susan Love, Bill Hill, Amy Carlile, Vinton Supplee, Judy Nichols and Diana Shantic. Among the content ideas: a Saturday centerpiece much like Sunday’s, a week in review feature, color comics, a feature for parents and kids to read together, home and garden and auto packages, personal finance, and health or fitness.

Attached was a timetable running from committee selection in February through research, prototypes, focus groups and marketing, with a launch of a new kind of Saturday newspaper by October or November.

Editor & Publisher clipping from August 1992 covering an INMA conference panel on how to reinvent the newspaper for the next century

Advice for Next Century: An INMA Panel on the Future

An Editor & Publisher story by Ann Marie Kerwin, published August 8, 1992, reporting on a session at the International Newspaper Marketing Association conference in Dallas. The question on the table: how to reinvent the newspaper for survival in the next century’s media environment, at a moment when audiotex, videotex, databases and fax services were all competing for newspaper investment dollars.

The main speaker was Michael Schrage, a visiting scholar at the Center for Coordination Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who argued that newspapers and media should be in the community-building business rather than the information business.

“New media technology is a medium for relationships. New media affect how people communicate with each other, how people relate to each other. If you change the medium, you change the relationship. … New technology creates new relationships.”

Schrage said the Information Age never happened and isn’t going to happen, that the real value of a medium is not in the information it carries but in the community it creates, and that designing a newspaper for a faster read is the wrong goal — papers should invite readers to spend more time with them. He dismissed the fax newspaper as “a pure packaging job,” suggesting instead that fax be used for polling or for services like menus and maps tied to a restaurant review.

“Humans are information processors, but anybody who defines them that way would be better off programming a computer instead of editing or publishing a newspaper.”

The second half of the story covers the Gannett Company’s News 2000 project, then being implemented at all Gannett-owned papers, with community at the center of the effort. Betty Liddick, executive editor of the Stockton (Calif.) Record, described arriving in Stockton a year earlier:

“I was stunned by reader reaction. Many folks weren’t indifferent to the paper as many readers have become these days. They bitterly hated us. So much so, staffers said they often were reluctant to tell people outside the paper where they worked.”

Readers complained of too much negative news about their community and home, and didn’t want crime news to be the only thing the paper covered. At a meeting with readers and top editors, one man stood up and said, “Show us our heroes.”

Cover of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau's October 1987 report summarizing the 1987 Newspaper Inventory Survey of U.S. daily newspapers

Daily Newspapers ’87: Taking Stock

An October 1987 report from the Newspaper Advertising Bureau summarizes the findings of NAB’s 1987 Newspaper Inventory Survey — a mail survey of every daily and Sunday/weekend newspaper in the United States and Canada, and the fifth in a series that began in 1967 and continued in 1974, 1979 and 1983. This volume covers local, English-language weekday editions in the U.S. only; a companion volume handled Sunday and weekend editions.

The survey’s original purpose was commercial: give advertisers and agencies a way to find newspapers carrying particular standing features, so an ad could be positioned next to the right kind of content. Later editions added questions about content, graphics and layout, positioning practices, ROP color, zoning, split runs and home delivery. The 1987 weekday inventory counted twelve kinds of sections and fifty-eight kinds of features or columns. (Pretty quaint given how ads are placed today.)

The base for the tables:

The summary tables shown are based on completed questionnaires from 987 daily newspapers representing 59% of all United States dailies and 79% of total circulation.

On content, the report found the churn of the early 1980s hadn’t slowed:

Findings from the 1987 Newspaper Inventory show that the period of rapid change in content, previously noted in the 1979 and 1983 inventories, continues unabated. Since 1983, nearly seven out of ten newspapers (69%) report substantial changes in content.

The most frequently reported changes were increased business coverage (53% of newspapers), increased sports coverage (45%), and a shift in the ratio of state and local to national and international coverage (35%).

The design numbers are the ones I keep coming back to. Eighty-two percent of newspapers — 91% of circulation — reported substantial changes in graphics or layout since 1983. More use of ROP color (61%) and conversion to Standard Advertising Units (SAU) page and column specs (60%) led the list, followed by changed mastheads, changed typefaces, more photographs, and modular front pages. And then this:

There has also been a substantial increase in use of computer graphics. In the 1987 study, 28% of responding dailies (52% of circulation) reported more use of graphics compared to 2% in 1983 (3% of circulation).

The feature tables are a time capsule. Crossword puzzles appeared in 98% of weekday circulation, spectator sports 94%, astrology 92%, TV log 92%, business and finance 89%, weather map 89%. Ninety-five percent of responding papers carried comic strips, and the typical weekday edition had three physically separate sections. Zoning was reported by 30% of dailies but 59% of circulation. The median share of weekday circulation that was home delivered: 85%.

The study was directed by Charles Lehman of NAB’s Research Department, and the report was updated by Dorothy Shea. A computerized list of editions carrying any particular section or feature was available on request — by telephone.

Reading this in 2026, what stands out isn’t just how many of these features have vanished from print (the TV log, the movie timetable, the radio log, the stock tables) but that the inventory itself was a product for advertisers — a printed, mailed, hand-tabulated database of what newspapers contained. That function moved online long ago, along with the advertising it was built to serve. The Newspaper Advertising Bureau no longer exists as a separate organization; its work eventually merged into the industry association that became the Newspaper Association of America.

Typewritten 1974 Chicago Tribune staff report titled Proposals for Improving the Chicago Tribune and Attracting Younger Readers

Attracting Younger Readers: 1974 Tribune Report

This is a staff report from my early days at the Chicago Tribune, titled “Proposals for Improving the Chicago Tribune and Attracting Younger Readers.” It carries the names of nine staffers: Ovie Carter, Gary Deeb, Howard Finberg, Clarence Page, Don Pierson, Bill Plunkett, Schickedanz, Rick Soll and Linda Winer. We were tasked to help the Tribune reach younger readers.  We were the younger staff members; I had been at the Trib for just about 2 years.

The introduction doesn’t ease into the problem. It opens with a description of how the paper was being seen from the outside:

Big, bulky. Impersonal. Stodgy. More concerned with things than people. As much fun as drinking cod liver oil (good for you but not so easy to swallow). Nearly devoid of any flair, flamboyance, or personality.

The committee’s argument was that this was a problem of perception and image more than content, and that the attitudes outside the building were mirrored by the attitudes inside it.

Simply stated, the Chicago Tribune takes itself too seriously. This is not to diminish its role as one of the nation’s best newspapers. Rather, it is a suggestion that the time has come for the Chicago Tribune to slaughter, once and for all, many of its sacred cows.

From there the report goes section by section — main news, editorial page, Perspective, Tempo, sports, business, the picture page, comics, Metro, the Sunday paper, copy editing, promotion. The recommendations are specific and, in places, blunt. A page one index every day. Long stories jumped to a designated jump page. A news-feature editor responsible for Column 1 and other offbeat material. Tempo remade from an old-fashioned women’s section into a daily “magazine-of-life,” preferably as an easy-to-handle tabloid pullout for the bus or train commuter. Entertainment and the arts displayed prominently rather than buried. A pop-culture column three times a week. Business pulled out as its own section. Sports writing tightened, with irreverence and humor encouraged.

The masthead got its own recommendation:

Removal of the flag would not necessarily attract new readership by itself. However, the slogan “World’s Greatest Newspaper” should be dumped. Its hyperbolic nature is unsuitable for the Tribune’s newly acclaimed progressive attitude of fairness and credibility.

The editorial page came in for the harshest treatment — described as the single most offensive part of the paper to young readers, with editorials characterized as “prairie populism” and “jumping jingoism.” The committee acknowledged that asking the paper to moderate its editorial stance might be impractical, then added a line I still like:

Editorial writers are advised that it is not always necessary to stand athwart progress hollering “Halt!”

What holds up best, reading it now, are the sections on people rather than packaging. The report faulted the paper for poor use of staff — writers forced to write formula stories, individual voices absorbed into what the report called “the Grey Blob,” and very little discussion between writers and editors about the quality of work. It also pressed on coverage of women and on Black and Latin communities, noting that most coverage of those communities “still consists of crime news, special series, and Operation PUSH,” and calling for the paper’s shortcomings there to be thoroughly investigated.

The closing borrowed the paper’s own advertising line:

To paraphrase the Trib’s current ad-promo line, “We need a friend in the Tribune.”

Fifty-plus years later, the questions in this report — how does a newspaper reach readers who don’t already have the habit, and how does it let its own staff sound like human beings — have never really gone away. Only the platforms changed.