In the second session, journalists inside the newsroom responded to the remarks of the executives. They spoke about how the economic imperatives discussed in session I affect their day to day operations and how they measure success. They agreed with the executives that both elements are important and need to be balanced with each other, but Max King, Phil Balboni and others felt that there was significantly more conflict between the two than the executives suggested and that recently the economic values have seem to prevail.

William Wheatley, Vice President of NBC News, argued that the economic pressures of increased competition and changes in audience structure require news organizations to produce content that appeals to viewers and readers. At his station, this has meant less international and U.S. government content:

"What we [in television] share in common with the world of newspapers and magazines is the fact that we are all competing for an audience that is changing at the very time the number of media outlets is proliferating. ...In the mid 1970s, there were three networks and a few independent stations around the country, and it was not unusual that the NBC Nightly News or the CBS Evening News would have 30 percent [each] of all American homes watching the news, and ABC which at the time wasn't quite as strong as it later became, also a substantial percentage. Now it's down to numbers far below that and there's reason for it. p> "The first [reason] is the incredible proliferation of sources of information. We have all news radio, we have all news television, we have special interest publications, we have general interest publications. We have just the competition of other television outlets doing entertainment, other types of information...

"We have lifestyle changes in this country, really remarkable changes over the last generation in terms of the hours that people work, the fact that particularly in the early evening hours many of our traditional viewers are no longer at home. ...The whole area of competition has changed greatly. And we've all spent a lot of time, I think, thinking about how we react to that. Tightening up your business operation is clearly one way you react to that because of the fact that I don't think there's any secret that journalism at one point did waste a lot of money. I think that's largely not the case anymore. Finances have been tightened up.

"But then there's the question of how do you appeal to your audience. ...I think that's where the greatest debate has gone on, and I think we at NBC News, decided that we have to remain a quality operation, that there is no chance of success if you don't do what you do well.

"...We've had some reexamination of [what we do] in terms of story selection... I think it's fair to say we're doing less politics than we once did. That may be simply a reaction to the reality that much of politics these days is about artifice and really not terribly much about substance. Part of it I suspect is a reaction to the fact that the viewers, the citizens ...have turned thumbs down in a lot of ways on politics.

"We've done somewhat less international reporting, although we do do international reporting when we perceive it to be of great importance. Clearly I think just this past week or so has been interesting in terms of the large amounts of coverage that we've given to the India/Pakistan question and nuclear testing and to Indonesia in terms of the Suharto regime.

"We're all wrestling with these sorts of issues and trying to carve out a future in which we're going to maintain and in some ways even grow our audience in the face of all the new competition."

Maxwell King, former Editor and now Associate Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, thought that there is more of a conflict between business and editorial than Mr. Willies or others suggested. It was important for newsrooms to gain a better understanding of the business side of the operation, but now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. We need to swing it back toward quality journalism:

"What I was struck by during the first panel is what an extraordinary love-in it was. I was just amazed to hear all the business types sitting up here telling us that they're really not that fixated on making money, that they care about quality journalism. Two of the publishers pledged that their stock is going to drop the next time there's a newsprint price increase rather than having quality go down. So maybe we can just all relax and go straight to lunch...

"I don't believe them, of course.

"But what I wanted to mention are two trends that I've seen in the last dozen and a half years in the newspaper business that I think are relevant to this. ...During the 1980s and into the early 1990s, there was a great deal of pressure on newsrooms around the country not just to save money but to understand the goals, the needs, the prerogatives of the business sides of their operations. And frankly, I think that was a very healthy process...

"It was essential that newsrooms understand almost as well as the business side what the proper business goals are, what the market pressures are, what the profit margins are in the business.

"But what I've seen more recently in the last four or five years is something that really alarms me. [It] has gone beyond that pressure on newsrooms to learn about the business side, and I see now pressure in a lot of companies -- not so much the biggest and best newspaper companies, but in a lot of the mid-sized newspaper companies that are also publicly traded -- pressure to define things in those companies solely in market terms, solely in terms of profitability, solely in terms of shareholder value.

"I'm a shareholder. I believe in shareholder value in the company that I work for, but it cannot be the only measure for a newspaper company. It cannot be the only measure for a business that does enjoy the special protections that we talked about earlier this morning. And I've seen the pendulum swing from somewhere way over here in which newsrooms were ignorant of and not participating in the operation of the newspaper companies, to somewhere over here where I see some business side representatives acting as if they want to take the money and run and define things solely in terms of shareholder value.

"It is up to us to bring that pendulum somewhere back in the middle and by us I mean reporters, editors, journalists. I don't mean the people on the business side. What I hope will happen in our profession over the next few years is that we'll stop whining about the businessmen and do a better job of articulating our professional goals and ethics and standards."

Gregory Favre, Executive Editor of the Sacramento Bee, grew up in the news business. He argued for a strong separation between the business and editorial sides. They should respect and understand each other, but beyond that, they must operate separately. This is the only way for both to succeed:

"Having been the son of a weekly newspaper owner ... I did everything from setting type to selling ads to writing stories to running an old flat bed press ... to delivering newspapers and collecting bills and even running a Western Union machine on the weekend so we could increase the bottom line. I learned a lot of things from that experience, and from watching my dad handle all of the potential conflicts that existed from an activist owner/editor who cared deeply for his community, cared deeply for the integrity of his newspaper and needed to produce enough revenue to support ten children. And he did it without ever compromising his values.

"He also taught me that no harm can come from having open, fair, and candid discussions with others... by making sure that we share a common goal and a common good that everyone agrees with. Now does that mean that we operate a wall-less newspaper as we were talking about? I guess I never thought of walls... I always thought of lines of respect and lines of understanding that are not crossed.

"What is needed, I think, is a sense of trust, a sense of understanding, an explicit acknowledgment that there's a church and there is a state, and that the two can coexist for a noble purpose but that one cannot and will not attempt to interfere in the other's business.

"I have the privilege of working for a company that is publicly owned but is essentially owned by a family that has been in this business for 141 years. Throughout their history, [the McClatchey] family has believed ... that a newspaper's more than just machines and technology, more than bottom lines and ever increasing quarterly profits to satisfy Wall Street.

"Now profits are important, certainly. I understand that and I acknowledge that. I've worked for a poor newspaper before in my life and it was no fun. I've also worked for a newspaper that had a 40 percent margin and it was no fun. I was also the last managing editor [of] the Chicago Daily News that died so bruising, so I know that profits are essential.

"...I see a trend emerging in our business of seeking out only those readers in the areas that our advertisers, and too many of our executives in this business, believe to be the best areas of our communities. If we continue to do that, we will be without good, strong newspapers representing the wholeness of our community, and we will be without newspapers that will give voice to all segments of our communities so that we can learn from each other. ...I don't know how else differences are going to be the truth tellers and help people piece together the fragments of modern life than by making sure that all people in all of our communities are represented in our pages. And of course to do this we have to have diversity, true diversity, not only in our news columns but within our newspapers.

"Mr. Lee Hills, with a distinguished career at Knight Ridder once said, "A sound business and a quality newspaper can flourish under the same roof." It can as long as everyone can see the dividing line and clearly understand what that line represents."

David Fanning, Senior Executive Producer of the PBS program Frontline, feels privileged to be able to produce the kind of programing he does, but voiced frustration in the fact that corporations are no longer supporting the kind of hard hitting, quality journalism that his colleagues in for-profit ventures seek to produce:

"In 1980 I produced and wrote a program called Death of A Princess... It [almost] created an international incident with Saudi Arabia, ...and there was a moment when we weren't sure how that battle was going to go in Washington.

"I remember walking in to Henry Becton and some colleagues at WGBH and Henry looked at me and said, "Are we right"? I said yes, we are. At that point, even though Henry Becton was in charge of the account with Mobile Oil and their support for Masterpiece Theater and Mystery, WGBH made a decision to rent space on a satellite in case anybody wavered in Washington, and the program would be broadcast nationally out of Boston...

"...In 1995, Frontline produced a program called The Heartbeat of America about General Motors. After ten months of importuning to General Motors to have their executives talk to us, I suppose with the shadow of Robert and me somewhere in the background, they had decided not to talk to us.

"We did a program that was strong and that was thought, I think, by critics to be fair, although it was in its own way quite critical, acknowledging also GM's refusal to talk to us.

"The day after the broadcast, a statement by a spokesman for General Motors said that General Motors would review its relationship to public television. They quickly withdrew it. It was politically not a very smart thing to do, but it was at a crucial time for public television. At the time, '95, we were in the midst of a battle in Congress of the future of federal funding [which] had been reduced [from 86 percent] to 16 percent of the overall total revenues for public television.

"As it happened, I was not affected in terms of broadcasting the program or the judgments that were made or the editorial decisions, and have never had to be second guessed. But something else was happening out there, and while public television managed to hold firm in that moment, there was a tremendous shift in the landscape. There were enormous numbers of programs being developed that were looking for support. That support came in many ways from the corporate sector.

"The thing that disturbs me and the decisions that I've had to face as I've looked at the lifetime of Frontline is also to see a fixed budget be squeezed so that it's gone from a series of 28 films a year to some 18 in the course of that period; and to feel increasingly lonely as I look out and realize that as my colleagues begin to look for the kinds of programs they want to invent, the new programs that should come up ... the new hard hitting aggressive journalism that this society, especially in the light of the homogenization of television and broadcast journalism, should be doing, I don't see them getting a lot of endorsement from corporate America. That's an erosion, I think, of something of great value in the culture...

"As we get a great diversity of outlets for journalism, we also find this increasing by broadcast television to have to chase its audiences. And chasing audiences is an elusive and slippery game.

"The choice to make programs and to report because of what you want to say but not because of who you think might like to hear it is a tough one, and it means that something in the culture, the opportunity to do complex, literate, investigative broadcast journalism is slipping away. That's the concern from my position."

Like Max King, Phil Balboni, President of New England Cable News Network, asserted that the pendulum has swung much to far toward increasing profits and market shares. In his view, that has become the sole factor in determining content, turning news into a product rather than a public service. Business and editorial lines can be crossed inside a news organization, but only if there is a clear understanding that the principles of high quality journalism will be advocated:

"To me if anything is clear about our current predicament, it is that the business of news in the broadest sense of that term as we're talking about it this morning, is corrupting the body and soul of our profession -- particularly as it's practiced on television.

"Most of us are all too familiar with the signs of this. The de-emphasizing of hard news in favor of features and news you can use. The emphasis on crime, sensationalism, and celebrity. The cult of personality in television news, and the preeminence of quantitative economic measures such as ratings over qualitative ones. But that is not the worst of it.

"The most troubling factor to me is that the news has been turned into an engine of profit. For many at the corporate level, though certainly not for all, that's the only thing the news means to them.

"Take local broadcast stations, for example. As you may know, they are immensely profitable. To the degree at many stations -- including those owned and operated by the major networks -- that more than 50 cents of every dollar of sales drops to the bottom line as profit. There is a relentless focus on these operating margins... News has increasingly become ... just one product if you will, of huge media companies whose management and headquarters are often far removed from both the journalism tradition and from the needs, interests, and concerns of local communities. No surprise then that sentimentality about news and its special dictates is in short supply these days.

"Local television newscasts are a vital contributor to a station's operating profits... It drives the budget process that in turn determines the resources the news department has to do its job. It comes to dominate in time the mentality of the news executives in charge and eventually it begins to drive the whole culture of the organization, influencing the tenor and editorial agenda of the news department.

"In many respects, news has become just another product to be sold. For example, did you see the front page New York Times story of May 11th? It reported on the profound dismay experienced by the presidents of the big four television networks over their declining audience shares.

"We used to think the possibility existed,' said ABC President Bob Iger, Ôthat the erosion was going to stop. We were silly. It's never going to stop. We're at a crossroads. If the economics don't change significantly, it just won't work anymore.' That was a pretty stunning and candid statement.

"...Part of the solution to this financial distress ...is to raid the news division's leverageable assets. CBS is close to doing something that once would have been unthinkable -- the cloning of 60 Minutes. At ABC there are plans to turn 20/20 and Prime Time Live into a four or five night a week franchise. NBC will soon expand its hour long news magazine Dateline from four to five nights a week. ...Sadly, these news magazines actually deliver very little real news. ...Most of the stories are soft features and infotainment.

"Last Wednesday's edition of Dateline, for example, was devoted entirely to NBC's own, much ballyhooed final episode of Seinfeld. That's partly news, but not for a full hour.

"...ABC, NBC, and CBS are expanding the news magazines regardless of the journalistic consequences because these programs are less expensive to produce than sitcoms and dramas, because they have proven at least so far, that they can generate decent ratings and therefore deliver strong profits. That's the reason.

"Whether on the national or the local level, what's fundamentally important is to get good ratings. Period. Not generally to do good journalism.

"Now there's absolutely nothing new or wrong with wanting good ratings -- either from a business or an editorial standpoint. The problem is that the business imperatives have today become so dominant that they drown out virtually all other considerations. They have become the determinant of content and direction, and that is simply wrong for the news.

"Why do you think all the news looks the same? Because everyone is afraid that too much focus on purely journalistic concerns, or for that matter on real innovation in producing news, would hurt ratings, which in turn would hurt revenue and profitability...

"...We must find a way to break free from this pattern, and I think that's what the Committee is trying to accomplish from these forums.

"Now this is the overall context in which we need to examine whether poking a hole in the so-called Chinese wall between the newsroom and the business side of the company is acceptable or moves us farther down the road to journalistic disaster.

"I've been a journalist since 1967. Only in the past ten years have I also been a businessman... I am not at all unsympathetic to cooperative efforts between the newsroom and the business side of a news enterprise, but those efforts must first of all be internal to the organization, not driven by outside corporate interests. And they must take place with the understanding that fundamental journalistic principles can never be sacrificed. If that is understood, I don't believe it's improper for news managers to work closely and cooperatively with general management to assist the enterprise in its financial goals. For television that could take many forms, and in newspapers it takes different ones.

"At New England Cable News we've successfully forged such cooperative relationships, yet we're a small organization where it's easier to foster such a dialogue without suspicion or skepticism...

"What's at stake I think is whether news is practiced as a service to the people of America and its communities, practiced as a vital element in the preservation of a democratic society which I think Professor Carey was indicating in his opening remarks, practiced as an activity that while functioning within a commercial enterprise has a distinct calling that must be afforded at least equal if not superior importance to the dictates of the marketplace. Until we move the pendulum back in the direction of news for its own sake rather than for the profits it can generate, we will sink deeper into this morass."

Jim Amoss, Editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, explained how those on the business side of the line and those on the editorial side can benefit each other, as long as both sides work to create the balance of which Diane Baker spoke:

"I'd like to tell you a story from the daily life of my newspaper.

"Saturday, December 14, 1996 was a beautiful crystalline day in New Orleans... At the city's riverfront mall, the River Walk, the place was teeming with about a thousand shoppers. It was about 2:00 p.m. When suddenly, with scarcely time for even alarms to sound, a heavily laden 735 foot, 69,000 ton freighter barreled down the Mississippi River, crossed under the downtown Mississippi River bridge, lost power, and control, and plowed into the riverbank. It created a 160 foot gash that reduced the wharf to rubble, destroyed a parking garage, undermined adjacent structures, demolished a wing of the Hilton Hotel, and eliminated much of the mall itself. ...It gradually emerged that by some miracle, nobody had been killed. But it was also clear that it was a disaster of major proportions and a story of tremendous magnitude.

"...We suddenly faced the task of expanding the kind of skeletal staffs that newspapers typically have on Saturday afternoon into a major enterprise. One of the tasks that faced us almost immediately was to portray to our readers in graphic terms and in great detail, exactly what had been destroyed and what had not...

"So we scrambled for a blueprint of the River Walk. Nowhere to be found, of course. Newspapers don't carry those things in their city desks...

"Enter Alan Evers, ad rep for the Times Picayune, who knew the River Walk like the back of his hand because he had spent years selling ads at the various stores. Allen Evers lived across Lake Ponchetrain and heard of the disaster and immediately rushed into our suburban Covington Bureau because he knew he could be of help. He was able to identify for us and help us sketch out a comprehensive graphic that showed us what exactly had been destroyed, what had been left standing, and how it fit into the overall picture of the New Orleans river-front."

"I mention this anecdote because it ... says something about this wall that we've been talking about. What I believe is this: That the world is a better place if people who work in the same company talk to each other, and that newspapers are better newspapers if the people in the various departments that comprise them are in communication with each other.

"But having said that, I would also like to harken back to some of the statements by members of the previous panel that I also agree with. Diane Baker spoke of the balancing act, and I thought that Mark Willes very eloquently described this balancing act when he said that high quality journalism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for our enterprise, just as high quality business management is a necessary but not sufficient element. ...What I think is required is not a wall in our organizations, but an etiquette that governs this balancing act.

"...Since the ruckus that Mark Willes says he is in part responsible for arose, I've often thought back to this Saturday and how it would have been if Allen Evers the ad rep, instead of being merely a helpful person who was familiar to the people in the bureau had been somebody who was permanently attached to it and who had the responsibilities of a general manager, and would he perhaps have been tempted to say to the city editor coordinating coverage that afternoon, look, let's make sure that we don't create the impression that this is a dangerous mall. Or perhaps we should put into this paragraph here that the mall will reopen tomorrow at such and such a time, or the kinds of things that a person concerned with the sale of advertising would naturally think of in those situations.

"If that had occurred, if there were such a position, I think that this delicate balancing act that we walk every day would have been upset in a way that would be damaging to our enterprise..."

William Wheatley: "I think it's important to understand your audience. ...It [is] important that all of us in journalism reflect regularly, and I think most of us do, on who it is we're serving, what are their very real interests, what are their very real needs?

"...There are any number of different instruments of journalism, in my case in broadcast, in which you reach out to audiences. Different programs, different concepts.

"...Dateline NBC operates in a prime time environment in which it is competing with entertainment programming for the most part. It has to meet that mission. ...It, by the way, increasingly does deal with news. It does certain popular features and it does some investigative reporting, and in fact Dateline NBC has won more awards in the last few years than any other instrument of broadcast journalism...

"The nightly news is somewhat different and the focus on that tends to be more on events and interpreting those events increasingly as people know more and more as they come to the evening newscast because of this proliferation of other media..."

Phil Balboni: "The point is that ... it's in prime time so now it's competing in a different manner. It's, what is it? Is it news or is it entertainment? What standards must it be measured by? Are those standards that are familiar to those of us who are journalists or are they the standards that are more familiar to the President of NBC Entertainment or to Mr. Wright?

"I think that the lines become blurred and you move relentlessly more and more down that road and until you have real problems..."

William Wheatley: "I absolutely agree that any news program has to be done absolutely in a journalistic context. But that isn't to say that is not important that we find ways to make journalism more interesting to people. I understand that there can be a fine line on that and that you'd better be very careful not to cross over it..."

John Morton: "I'd like to ask our editors ... how have they responded to economic pressures from above, and if it has had, in their opinion, a significant impact on the quality of what they have been doing."

Maxwell King: "I think the way one responds to economic pressure from above is by fighting like hell to hold onto resources. And to justify those resources. Someone on the earlier panel ... said something about circulation being the right measure, and I think it is the right measure. ...The way an editor fights for those resources is by trying to demonstrate that they will help make the paper more relevant to the readership and support the circulation of the newspaper.

"Frankly, when I look at the large newspapers in the country from '88 through '92 maybe, which was the harshest period of the recession... There was some cutting of news holes and some cutting of staffs, but at least the large metropolitan papers sustained most of their resources through that period, and a lot of them have built up since then."

Gregory Favre: "I agree with Max. Most of us have held onto our resources. When we had to lose resources, as we did with the very deep recession in California for not just three years but about six years ...we cut around the edges. We never cut the heart and soul of what we do, bringing news. We were still able to do projects where we could send reporters off to do six months, nine months a year worth of investigation and reporting and come back and bring those kinds of important series to our readers. It is no accident, I don't think, that our newspaper has grown in circulation 13 out of the last 14 years..."

Jim Amoss: "But, John, it is true, I think, as Diane Baker said on the earlier panel, that there is a very severe test coming sometime in the next few years. With advertising revenue at the levels that it is at the major newspapers now ... at some point that's going to tail off and it may well coincide, as it did last time, with a rise of newsprint prices..."

John Morton: It was 20 percent last year.

Jim Amoss: Okay. And lots of newspaper companies have margins over 30 percent.

John Morton: There were two or three companies that bumped 30 percent. Yes.

Jim Amoss: And lots of individual newspapers have margins at 30, some even at 40 percent I think.

John Morton: I've appraised newspapers where the margins approach 50 percent, believe it or not. It wasn't much of a newspaper...

Jim Amoss: "I think it was Phil who said that when news becomes an engine of profit that it requires exceptional courage to swim against the tide, and I think that the job of an editor in those pressured situations is on the one hand to understand these exigencies, and on the other to insulate, to ...allow an environment to flourish in which it is possible to swim against this tide. And that, to me, is the essence of the balancing act that we're required to perform."

John Morton: "One of the interesting things that Phil said was why don't we do news for its own sake, without having to justify it as part of a product that attracts advertising...

"Do any of you newspaper guys have anything to say about the concept of news for its own sake and not because of the potential profits it might generate?"

Max King: "The description of it as a balancing act, again, I think it was Diane Baker who used that expression, is a good one. It is a balancing act in that the news product is part of what is selling the newspaper and it is going to be evaluated that way. I think it's inevitable that the people who run the newspaper companies will evaluate it that way, and I think it's appropriate that there be an awareness of how the newspaper is received in the marketplace.

"The problem comes in, I think, when a newspaper company only evaluates it that way and news judgments end up being made solely on the basis of markets and market responses. That's inappropriate, I think..."

Unable to stay for the afternoon session, Mark Willes, was invited to respond to the opening remarks of this session:

"Frankly, I agree with virtually everything I heard everybody say up there. That will come as a surprise to some people but ought not to. Because if you look at any successful business anywhere, the fundamental premise is that the business has to be based on the ultimate quality of the product or service that it's trying to sell. The product or service that news organizations try to sell is the way they deal with the news. So if we do anything to degrade that product, we're fundamentally degrading the business, and vice versa. If we can do those things that are going to make the product more successful, more compelling, more interesting, we're going to enhance the product.

"So I think that frankly today's been a very hopeful day for me because what I hear you saying I agree with almost 100 percent, and I think it's indicative of the fact that we're getting over some of the knee jerk reactions to the issue and talking about balance, talking about mutual understanding, and also talking about the fact that there is a line that we must both respect. That what goes on in the newsroom is legitimate, and what goes on in the business side of the organization is also legitimate, and the question and the challenge for all of us is how do we enhance what each other does."

Maxwell King: "There's just one thing, ...the issue of short term versus long term got short shrift in the first session and was dismissed to some extent by Diane as not that important. I think it's very important.

"A lot of things have changed in the newspaper business in the last 50 or 60 years, and one of the most consequential is that newspapers almost exclusively now are owned by large, publicly traded corporations ...[which] have to be responsive to the markets.

"Diane herself said that most of the large institutional investors are holding stocks for three to five months. She described long term on Wall Street as a quarter. And I think that is a bigger issue than whether a newsroom gets its budget cut at any particular time. The bigger issue is can the newspaper corporations in this publicly traded environment keep a real long term view, which is five or ten or fifteen years out, and make their decisions based on the strength of the company and the strength of the news product five or ten or fifteen years out. I see a lot of signs that that's much harder to do today than it was a few years ago."

Question: "One of the critical parts of this balancing act has always been the journalists, the reporters, the editors, and the news directors who were almost totally dedicated and almost obsessed with the first amendment principles of what they did. Who really had a zeal for their role in this balancing.

"In the young generation of journalists and journalism students I find them personally ambitious but lacking this fire in the belly. What can we do to carry this on into that generation?"

Voice: "...I agree with you. I think it is sadly lacking. We do have occasional examples of people standing up on principle and saying I quit or I won't do this, but that's what fires the imaginations and the passions of young people. So we need great examples. I know you were at the memorial service for Fred Friendly, as I was, and there was a man who was absolutely uncompromising in his standards, and he could be arrogant and insufferable but loveable as well. But you admired the hell out of him because he stood for something.

"So what do you do for young people? You give them something to believe in by acting courageously and with principle."

Voice: "I'd like to echo that. I think young journalists look to their editors as to how much fire in the belly they're permitted to have, and they know who pays the bills and who butters their bread. They know the hand that feeds them largely is the business side of the paper, and they also know that good journalism occasionally requires you to bite that hand. And with how much vigor they chomp down I think depends on what tone is set from above."

Max King: "A slight difference of opinion. There may be a little bit more to it than the nobility of the editor in charge. I think one of the things that needs to go on in newsrooms today and goes on in very few, is to have ongoing conversations, ...seminars, about professional ethics... Twenty or 30 years ago those were sort of ingrained in the operation of newsrooms. We still conduct them at the Philadelphia Inquirer, but when I go to other meetings I find that an awful lot of other newspapers don't do that anymore..."

Voice: "I agree with Max. We do it every month at our place. We have brown bag ethic seminars every single month for our staff where we recreate cases and then talk about them and post mortem some of the decisions we make.

"I don't agree that all young journalists are coming in without passion. There are a great many of them that still do.

"I was at the Board of Visitors for the Medill School just last week, and one of the things I said was to try to teach them passion. ...We need more of that in our business..."

Question: "...My name is David Wellna. I'm a Nieman Fellow and I'm also a reporter for National Public Radio.

"One of the issues that we haven't talked about a lot this morning is the inherent conflict of interests between the editorial side and the business side of a news organization in that the editorial side is charged with the responsibility of being a watchdog over the businesses that many times are paying for the ads in these organizations. And given the environment of increasing pressure to turn a profit, I wonder if any of you editors have experienced more pressure to back off from your watchdog role over business."

Voice: "No, I haven't. I can cite one case where we had a dispute with one of our advertisers. It was a half million dollar a year advertiser. They came to lunch and our owner said, at that time we were private, said good, we're not going to change our decision, so let's have lunch and enjoy ourselves, and that was the end of that. They kept their $500,000 in their pocket, but that was the decision..."

Voice: "...Please address the effect of the Internet on access for the public to find out information. "

Phil Balboni: "...I think the Internet is one of the most democratizing and exciting developments in communications in my lifetime... Virtually every newspaper of any size has a Web site, both the traditional companies and newcomers.

"What we haven't seen enough of yet, I don't think, is a real challenge in terms of a new form of news and information through the Internet. It seems to be falling out more at the moment into traditional patterns. That's not bad, but it's just a displacement of the same thing that we have. I hope that more young people will choose the Internet and develop companies and develop new journalistic sites..."

Question: "[Mr. Favre] ...noticed that news organizations are seeking out those readers and viewers that are most valuable to advertisers, and I'm curious about the implications of that ...for media organizations of all kinds. The implications of news organizations seeking out those readers who are most valuable to advertisers. What are the implications of that for us as a culture, as a society?"

Voice: "I think one of the implications is that in a society that is increasingly divided between those who are haves and those who are have nots, and the differentiation between the upper and lower demographics in terms of income has grown significantly in the United States since the early 1970s. In such a society what's happening to newspaper companies is they are moving upscale, and they are moving away from coverage of a lot of inner cities, they're moving away from coverage of the kind of diverse audience that Greg was talking about.

"Most newspapers over the last 40 years have lost significant circulation. Every newspaper company has lost a lot of circulation. But at the same time, they've gone upscale. They've gone to a customer that makes their operation more remunerative. And that's why they're still very profitable.

"...What it means for the society is fundamentally alarming in terms of how a democracy functions. A democracy can't function without an informed public..."

Voice: "That's why it's so frightening for me, especially in a state like California which is so diverse... If we don't have newspapers to try to bring those self interest groups together and bring people together, I don't know who's going to do it..."

Question: "...If you took a readership survey of say a month ago about whether there should be more coverage of India and Pakistan, probably very few people would have said yes. But if you took that now, I think you would have great numbers saying yes. I'm just curious about whether you think that, ...it seems like readers' views are often quite volatile and influenced by events, and they don't always know what they think is important. ...Within your news organizations, how important readership surveys are and what you think of them, and focus groups."

Voice: "We do some of that sort of work and we follow the surveys and we do some of our own focus groups from time to time. I think they can be helpful, but in the end I think it still comes down to your own judgment as to what's important, what's relevant, what's interesting, and you have to make those calls."

Voice: "I brought with me, the Pew Center does a survey and the only story last year that was closely followed by more than half of the American people, I don't know if you can guess what it would be, but it was the death of Princess Diana. There have been lots of studies of this sort by Pew and others about what really captures people's attention and you're right. I think it would not have been Indonesia, as important as that is. But we can't make our decisions solely on what would be the most interesting story to follow, but on what we think is the most important thing . That's what a good editor or any good journalist is supposed to do is exercise independent informed judgment..."

Question: "I'm Henry Becton from WGBH. ...Wouldn't the future of journalism be healthier if we had a more diverse ownership structure with more diverse types of economic incentives for the entities that conduct journalism?..."

Voice: "Absolutely. I think one of the problems that we've seen is the increasing consolidation of control over media enterprises, be they print or electronic, and that is squeezing out the uniqueness and the sense of real community and the sense of being willing to take risks and to do things because you care about them. And when you're running a big company you're not allowed to do that. We understand that. We heard enough about shareholder responsibilities and things of that sort. It is the individual entrepreneur, the person who has a passion for something that has created, and we need more of that. The question is, how do we get it? I don't know the answer."

John Morton: "Recall what Mark Willes said. He said we have to accept what is and what we can't do anything about. Unfortunately, there's probably not much anybody can do about this.

"I will point out that there are some very major media companies -- Cox Enterprises for example, Advanced Publications which is the Newhouse family, and others that are still privately held and controlled by families. Although they too have their economic imperatives. They too have to justify getting working capital and everything else."

Voice: "If I could speak as a member of a paper that belongs to the Newhouse group, and I guess an anomaly in this panel, it is very liberating to have only one shareholder, namely this family, which happens to be very passionate about the business and very far sighted about its ups and downs, and gives tremendous autonomy and freedom to its newspapers. I happen to think it's the best model that could exist..."

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