This is really a very special opportunity for me to come back here. I left Ann Arbor as a student in 1978, and I think a lot of changes actually at the Michigan Daily in the time that I've been gone probably mirror a lot of the changes we're talking about in the industry at large.

When I came to Michigan and took ten minutes to drop my suitcase off at South Pod, went immediately to Maynard Street and reported to the Michigan Daily where I basically spent the next four years, we didn't really talk about these issues. It was not that it was not a very interested or engaged group of students, but they were not dominating newsrooms the way that they are today. We talked about journalism. We talked about "the story". We talked about getting it right. We talked about being first and being good and being accurate. Sometimes we were some of those things.

Shortly after I left, and for a long time thereafter, I think the equation reversed itself and the things that we spent a lot of time talking about as students were supplanted -- and there was a lot of talk about the issues that we're discussing here today. It was actually a very tortuous time for students at the Daily, and not to go through the details of a long bad period there, but there were... I think the students who were there for a time in the '80s, many of them would tell you that the newspaper was nearly put asunder by some fairly aggressive disagreement within the ranks about what was correct in terms of opinion and what was correct in terms of politics. It was a very nasty time, I think, for both those students and certainly the institution of the Daily and it took a long time for them to recover.

I think now they enjoy a balance. I don't mean to hold up my generation as having had it correctly, or the one after that as having gotten it wrong. I think we probably were each a little blind to what was not before us, and the students there now I think have a fairly healthy attitude about the place or sort of the traditional standards that we require of journalists, and also for a lot of what we're talking about here today which is balance and fairness in terms of diversity.

Listening to Mike talk about his, the question to him, are you an American or a journalist first? When he answered it, I saw a couple of people in the audience shaking their heads. But at the Chicago Tribune where I work, we last year celebrated, or marked, the 150th Anniversary of that newspaper. There was a lot of reflection, both within the newspaper and in the news pages of my newspaper, about the history of the Tribune, a lot of which was colored by the ownership of [Colonel] McCormick for a very long time, and I'm sure a number of you, most of you, are probably familiar with the kind of editor and publisher he was. It was a very, to be polite, idiosyncratic newspaper at the time bordering on bizarre at other times.

I think if you asked the Colonel then which was he, an American or a journalist, I don't know exactly how he would have answered, but the fact is, he was an American first. I think that that showed up in the pages of our newspaper in some rather unsatisfactory ways. He declared war on a lot of people, the President of the United States, to start; England for another; anyone who came from England. And we spent a lot of time, many, many years, and we still spend time living down some of his reputation. Which is not to say that he didn't also do some glorious things at the newspaper, but I think there was then an imbalance in this conversation between kind of classic, journalistic ethics and standards and notions of representing one's politics in the newsroom or in the new pages. Or on air, depending on what your medium is.

So I think for those of us who would shake our heads at answering that one is a reporter before one is an American, I think the example of McCormick is a relevant one.

I have spent a lot of time in the last few months talking to readers of my newspaper. I've been working on a project for the publisher, and I've done maybe 100 and some hours worth of focus groups lately, just listening to readers talk. It's really interesting the things that we obsess about and talk about in this industry are not the things our readers or maybe for those of you in another medium, your listeners are really talking about.

I go to these focus groups and I see people who really mirror a lot of what I see in the newsroom. A range of opinions, a range of religions, women, men, young, old, lots of things. And they still look at us and don't think we're very relevant to them. That's not because they don't see their opinions expressed in the newspaper, I think it's because they don't really see their lives reported on in the newspaper, and I don't think that is necessarily because people unlike them are not in my newsroom.

I don't know that you have to be a Pentecostal to know what the word "slay" means. I don't know that you have to be a born-again Christian to know that a slur in a news story is a slur against born-again Christians. So I wonder whatever happened to some very old-fashioned standards which go to sort of the heart of what I embraced when I first came to this campus in 1974.

It's about good journalism, and if you don't know what the word "slay" is or if you think you might have been confused by it or if the meaning wasn't clear, or even if you think you really understood it perfectly but it sounded like a fairly outrageous thing for somebody to say, you might ask them what they meant. It might become clear.

If you see the term "son of a bitch born-again Christians" or whatever Ashenfelder's reference was, I don't think you need to be a born-again Christian to know that that may not belong in a news report in your newspaper.

So for those of us who might believe that by populating our newsrooms with people who believe a certain thing or believe a range of things we somehow protect ourselves from these kinds of grievances or that we can then pretend to represent the needs and concerns of our readers, I would suggest that that is not necessarily true.

The question was asked of the first panel, I think the question was are diversity and quality mutually exclusive? Of course not, but I would also caution us that they don't necessarily one lead to another.

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