Welcome to Adobe GoLive 5

APME National Credibility Roundtables Project

APME Annual Conference, Phoenix, AZ
October 16, 2003

THE APME CREDIBILITY SUMMIT
Transcript of Session

MS. NUNNELLEY: Hello. I'm Carol Nunnelley, and I'm the director of APME's Credibility Roundtables project, and I want to thank you so much for being here today. We are about to have 90 minutes and a series of conversations on what we know is the most fundamental issue in the work that we do, and that is our relationship of trust between the reporters and editors who report the news and the public.

As you also know, there are plenty of reasons for us to be worried about that foundation. We have all sorts of reports that say there are cracks in it. Some of us suspect, not to mention talk radio, there are termites working in it. But in any event, we are not going to blink at the problems today, but in the end we are going to focus on solutions. And that's - the room is set up like this for a purpose. We intend to have a conversation. We hope we are as close to a Town Hall meeting of journalists as we can have, so we are looking forward to your participation.

I will just mention a couple of elements of this that I want you to take special note of, and one of them is the APME editors here who have taken part in the Credibility Roundtables and who have been committed to an ongoing conversation with the public and putting to use what they learned to build stronger journalism. The other thing I'm going to note up front is that we will have the voices of readers here today as well as the journalists, and we think that's important. As we start through our day here, I'm going to mention just some touchstones that we are going to try focus on, touchstones of importance in this conversation. One is the whole issue of our openness and responsiveness with the public, the issues of accuracy and diversity, and the issue of how we carry out our very important obligations under the First Amendment in the atmosphere that we find.

So, now, to begin our first very important conversation, our host is Caesar Andrews, who most of you recognize, the editor of Gannett News Service in Washington and the past president of APME. Our guest Gerald Boyd, whose talent and accomplishment carried him from his hometown of St. Louis to a job that has to be the best in journalism, managing editor of the New York Times. We know there is another chapter, and I'm not going to talk about that. He is going to talk about that. But I am confident -

MS. NUNNELLEY: He promised to talk about it. I know he has made lots of tough calls, but I will have to say that I think among the toughest has to be talking about what happened at the Times, what he learned from it, what he thinks we ought to learn from it, essentially going public. And, as we all know as journalists, being covered is not our favorite thing. So I salute him for making that tough call. I thank him for being with us today, and I look forward to this first of the fascinating conversations. Thank you.

MR. ANDREWS: Thank you, Carol, and thank you Gerald for being here. How are you?

MR. ANDREWS: I want to take full advantage of Gerald's generosity in being here with us today and try to hit a range of different issues. And,in addition to a range of issues, I also want to try to save some time for audience Q and A.

It is probably no surprise that I will want to address the matter of Jayson Blair head-on, but we also want to touch on some other areas, the New York Times in the broader sense, the career of Gerald Boyd, issues of leadership, and management inside news rooms. And, without a doubt, credibility is sort of the thread that runs through all the above. And the only way I know how to do that is to sort of get right to it.

We will begin with the conversation, as I mentioned, and then go to the Q and A. For the Q and A, please make sure that you state your name. And the Q and A portion with the audience is really intended to be for members of the APME only.

I want to start with the comment, Gerald, that you shared in your speech. I think this was back in August in Dallas where you appeared before the National Association of Black Journalists, and for those who were not there, Gerald was received with arousing applause and great enthusiasm, and in some ways it was quite an emotional homecoming in some ways.

Anyway, here is the quote from Gerald and that set of remarks: We have all seen the damage to our industry by what will go down in history as the Jayson Blair scandal. That description has become shorthand in our industry from everything ranging from lack of credibility to mismanagement to diversity run amuck. Now that the internal investigation is complete and we are no longer mired in media hysteria and finger pointing, it is time to take a hard look at why this happened and what lessons we can draw from it. I think that's as good of intro to our conversation today as any.

MR. BOYD: Well, thank you for having me first of all. It's really great to be here. And I will answer your question, but first I want to make a few comments if you can indulge me. When Ed Jones called me several months ago and asked if I want to come to Phoenix and appear before you all, I was hurt, I was hurting deeply. But I really felt that it was important to find a way to come here and find a way to come here in part because I know that many of you in this room have the same love and passion I have for journalism and that many of you care about the future. And so what I want to do in whatever time we have is to talk a little bit about that, and to have a dialogue, as I have always had whenever I have appeared before APME, and I have always found that helpful, useful, important and stimulating.

Now, I grew up, as Carol said, in north St. Louis, and as a teenager I got bitten by the journalism bug, and I read the Kingdom and the Power and it talked about the Tom Wickers and the Scottie Restons, and Abe Rosenthals and Max Franklins. And it took me sort of deep inside the world of the New York Times, which was just a thousand years away from the inner city of north St. Louis. And I never thought I would be managing editor of the New York Times, never.

And I consider it a privilege, I consider it a blessing. I have worked with some of the most talented journalists in the world and some of the best people in the world, so I have been very fortunate. But for me now it's very much about the future.

And I just want to take a minute- I don't want to get upset with this young man, but I want to take a minute and just talk about a few things that I have thought about, and I have thought about a lot since June 5th. And they all relate in some way to credibility, and they go to the future and state of our industry. And I hope we can talk about that today.

There are four things in particular that I have really started to think about. One is leadership. And by leadership, I think what I'm talking about is what John Carroll did last Sunday in the LA Times. I think that is incredibly significant because what he did was to take readers inside the inner thinking of the LA Times newsroom to explain why it had decided to publish this story about Arnold Schwarzenegger. I think this whole- I think this whole need to pull the curtain back and talk about how decisions are made are absolutely critical to where we need to be as journalists, and I think we have really got to take that on and try to deal with it much more effectively. Number two is diversity. I think diversity is very much related to credibility because without diversity, we can't be relevant in my opinion. And I think in recent months I have had my heart absolutely ripped out by young journalists, particularly young journalists of color who come into me and say: Can I have a future in journalism? Will they trust me? Will they value me? Will they look at me as another Jayson Blair?

And the more I have thought about that, I know that APME is devoted to diversity, I know our industry is devoted to diversity, I know ASNE, President Peter sitting over there, is devoted to diversity. But I think we need something more, and that something is for each of us, each of us as individuals, as newsroom leaders to take it on and do everything we can within our sphere of influence to make it a reality, to say that it's essential, it's important, and that we, we as individuals, want to do all we can to help it.

The third thing is credibility and trust. And obviously that's an important issue. I carry around a card that deals with this issue, and I do it in part because when I first read this information, I was absolutely stunned by it. This was even before, long before, the Jayson Blair tragedy. More than a year before this scandal, the Pew Research Center did a study of public attitudes toward the media, and that study found that more than half of the public believed that news and news organizations usually report inaccurately. We are politically biased and try to cover up their mistakes and didn't care about the people they reported on. More than half.

And I'm sure over dinner tables you all have sat around asking yourself, how could Jayson have fabricated for so long and that- and the New York Times didn't know about it? I have asked myself that a lot too, often late at night when I couldn't sleep as I thought about this. And one of the things that strikes me that happened is this traditional policing mechanism of the public picking up the phone or writing a letter or e-mailing us, telling us that we have gotten it wrong broke down there, and I think we have got to ask ourselves as an industry why it broke down.

And I would submit that one of the factors may well have been that the public wasn't surprised, that they think that that's what we do, that we get it wrong and that we don't care and that we don't correct mistakes. And if that's true, then I think we have got a serious problem, and I believe it's true. My final point deals with the challenges brought on by dropping the microphone. Are we okay? My final point deals with- the challenges brought on by the information explosion that's caused by advances in technology. You all know about it as much as I do. And I hope to talk about that a little bit today. But the fact of the matter is, in the piece that John Carroll wrote last Sunday, he talked about journalistic pornography, and I think that's an apt description of what we are now facing: Talk shows, Websites, entertainment shows. People have so many outlets for information that they are apt to get it anywhere, and it's apt to be right or it's apt to be wrong. And we have got to find a way I think as journalists, as news leaders, to make sure people begin to appreciate what we do and how it's different from what they get elsewhere. Our checks and balances, our (inaudible), our (inaudible) of people who are involved in the process, our standards, our core values, all those kinds of things are that we have taken for granted in terms of public understanding, I think we have got to do a lot to make sure that they do a lot more.

MR. ANDREWS: You actually made an interesting reference to John Carroll, whose willingness to go on the record with some details on the issues that surrounded the coverage of the recall and in particular of the stories of Arnold Schwarzenegger and allegations of groping. So in that spirit, talk briefly about why Jayson Blair occurred. And you've actually touched on some of the issues that happened.

MR. BOYD: Fair question. Jayson Blair appeared because we thought we were managing one problem, when actually we were dealing with another. We thought we were managing a situation that involved the performance of a young reporter who was green and occasionally erratic, but who had enormous talent. And that's something that can be managed. What we didn't realize was we were managing someone who didn't share the same values and who didn't believe in honesty and integrity the way all of us I'm sure in this room do. And we didn't realize that until it was too late.

MR. BOYD: I think based on his record at the time, based on everything that I saw and everybody else saw who was involved in the process, the answer is yes. He was hired as a summer intern to work—he was hired basically as a summer intern basically to work for the New York Times. Based on that performance, he was in effect promoted to an extended intern. During that period Jayson Blair wrote about 132 stories for the New York Times over a five-month period. He had one, one correction. So his performance in the beginning when he was hired was terrific.

MR. ANDREWS: There is obviously a lot of apology involved on some of the things that he has said to have done, and we could go on for days. We don't have days. We have just a few minutes. I'd like for you to focus on one slice of the sins as they have been reported on, and that's the matter of the anonymous sources. And many aspects of this case it seems to me involve things that only an individual can control. And if someone is a committed shyster, they can figure out ways to corrupt our systems and to create some of the kinds of problems that we have read about. What is perhaps a mystery and a bit of a riddle is the handling of anonymous sources as it relates to some of the coverage that's been talked about, and I'm thinking specifically of the case involving the sniper incidents in Washington, the press conference by the prosecutor where he went on record as saying this is bogus, it's not true. Now, he was very vague, and I understand he was not the most cooperative official in the world in spelling out the details. But certainly that seems to me a significant flag was raised regarding the issue of anonymous sources. So can you talk about that and talk about the Times general handling of anonymous?

MR. BOYD: First of all, I think the committee that Lou Boccardi worked on made some very strong recommendations in that area and other areas, and I think it's useful for all of us, all of you all, to read the report called the Siegal committee because I think it really begins to grapple with some of the issues. I also hope at some point we can talk about the future, at some point. That's of course up to you. That's why I'm here. Now, in terms of the particular issue you raised, I answer the question by asking a question. We were put in a situation where the prosecutor, a commonwealth attorney in Virginia, went on national TV and said that the New York Times' story was wrong. If you're the managing editor of the New York Times and you're eating your lunch, as I was, and you're watching CNN, a couple things happen after you almost choke, as I did. The first thing that happens is you go to the national editor who is supervising Jayson and say, What the hell is going on here? And the second thing that happens is you say, I want to know and I want to know right away. This was on December 22nd. And our national editor called,

I guess his name was Horan, Mr. Horan, and asked what he was talking about. He couldn't reach him. He called back. Still couldn't reach him. And he told me that at the end of the day that he hadn't been able to reach him. And what would you do? You would say, Keep trying. And that's what I did. And he kept trying. I said, E-mail him. I said, Call his office, said, Fax him a letter. He has attacked the credibility of the New York Times on national TV and I want to know what he is talking about. And so on the 23rd, our reporter tried again.

He e-mailed him, he called him, he faxed him his-a letter saying he really wanted to talk to him. He finally reached him on December 26th. And in that conversation Mr. Horan said, Well, there were parts of the story that were wrong. The editor said, What were they? And he said, I can't tell you, and I can't tell you what's wrong because it's a legal proceeding. And I can't comment on a legal proceeding.

And so the national editor reported that to me. And at that point we are in this situation. I have a reporter who has written a story that we believe is accurate. I have someone, a politician, criticizing that story. What do you do? And what I didn't do and I don't think you all would have done is to automatically assume that what the politician was saying was correct. And what you ask for are specifics of what he is talking about. He said, 60 percent of the story was wrong. So the question was: What? Name me one specific in that story that was wrong. He didn't provide that. He declined, he refused, for reasons that he said were legitimate. And that then became where we were. And based on that, that's where we were.

MR. ANDREWS: What about the general issue of anonymous sources and how they are better than whatever internal process you have for monitoring that?

MR. BOYD: The New York Times, like most newspapers do and needs to be done, I mean, it tries to make sure in most situations you have more than one source on any point that you use. The fact of the matter is we would not be getting some information without anonymous sources, that's true. But we also, as the Times- I have got to stop saying we, folks. I'm trying.

But the Times basically goes through the same rigorous set of standards that most news organizations go through: automatically accept the word of anonymous sources, they understand that many anonymous sources have axes to grind, and they do, time and time again. We try to get more than one source, and you make sure you have some sense of the source's ability to know what it is the issue is saying. Beyond that, the one thing the Times did regularly, and I'm sure it will continue to do that, is wherever possible try to indicate the motivation of an anonymous source. Again, does he or she have an axe to grind? Is this because they want to push an agenda? Is this because his or her views have not been accepted? And all those kinds of things. And I think those are valuable things to do.

MR. ANDREWS: I've got to move on to another issue, but not quite the future yet. We will get there.

MR. ANDREWS: This is I think extremely relevant for people in any newsroom. As you think about and talk about leadership, and that was among the four things that you cited as critical to running a newsroom that produces the kind of coverage you can be proud of, leadership is about a number of different things, including the chemistry and relationship between number one and number two. So can you talk about the relationship between you and Hal Raines and how that worked, especially relevant to both this case, as well as some of the other cases where there was some criticism of at the time and I'll cite one, the sports columns on the Augusta National Golf Club.

MR. BOYD: You know, the fact of the matter is I never would have become managing editor if it were not for Howell Raines. Howell Raines is somebody I have known for 20, 25 years.

The relationship between a managing editor and an executive editor, as many of you know, is like a marriage, and you disagree, but I think you should disagree in private, and Hal and I did disagree, and we disagreed in private and it will stay private.

I wish to some degree I could take off my coat and take off my shirt and show you some of the scars. It's not pretty. It's not pretty. There were scars. What am I going to do there?

The fact of the matter is that Howell and I, leading the New York Times, went through one of the most intense periods, journalism periods I have ever encountered in my lifetime, from the Terrorist attack of 9/11 to two wars, to Enron, to SARS, to the shuttle explosion. And I think we did some outstanding journalism during that period.

Now, I have been in management for more than a decade, and I think if you really look at what I have been about as a manager, three or four things come to mind. First of all, I have always believed in teamwork. And I became Metro editor in 1993 and the New York Times won a Pulitzer prize for the coverage of the first attack on the World Trade Center. That was a hallmark of teamwork, done by the Metro staff. How Race Is Lived in America won a Pulitzer prize. That was the model of teamwork, 25 reporters.

I came to work every day trying to make the New York Times a place that was open, that was inclusive, and that valued and respected its staff. That's how I managed and that's what I'm about.

MR. ANDREWS: Thank you for that. You've made an earlier reference to the report by the committee that looked at the Jayson Blair scandal, as you referred to that. Did you come across anything that you disagreed with, any conclusions that you had, a significant disagreement with?

MR. BOYD: Look, it was very tough to be written about. And I have never found a story that I have been wild about and lately there have been a lot of stories I haven't been wild about. I think the Siegal committee people did a lot of serious work. I think they talked to a lot of people. They reached conclusions, and I think they did a benefit to journalism and a benefit to the New York Times.

MR. ANDREWS: Moving on, Carol in her introduction talked about race. You at least once or twice talked about diversity in race. So let's talk about race. You recorded an AP story in July 2001. That was I imagine around the time your promotion was announced. And this is what you had to say according to the AP: "I'm not about to dwell on the firstness of all this, but if somewhere a kid of color who reads about this can smile tomorrow or dream a little bigger dream, then that makes me very happy."

And then your hometown paper, where you started your career- is that right, St. Louis Post Dispatch? -- carried a story around the same time, and here is a quote from that story along the same lines of race: "Throughout my life I have enjoyed both the blessing and the burden of being a first black this and a first black that, and like many of minorities and women who succeed, I have often felt alone." Elaborate on that.

MR. BOYD: Well, I- one of the things that struck me about our- the Times' work on How Race Is Lived in America is our ability to break down walls as it relates to race and really get people to look at it across racial lines in a serious and an honest way. And when you do, you realize a few things, such as, people of color tend to think about race all the time. I would venture to guess that every editor of color here walked into this room and looked at the number of other editors of color who were in this room. I may be wrong, but I don't think so. I don't think white editors necessarily think in those terms. And I don't think it's good or bad. I'm not judgmental about it at all. I think it's a reality. And I think that happens time and time again.

At the Times I was not the black managing editor. I was the manager editor, and what I found disturbing based on the Siegal committee report was a view from at least one senior editor who felt that he- who said to the committee that he felt that he couldn't talk to me about Jayson Blair concerns he had because I was black, in other words, because our pigmentation was the same. I think anybody who looks at my career over 30 years, anybody who looks at my role as an editor and a manager would say, that's crazy.

MR. ANDREWS: How has being black affected people's perception of your personal and professional credibility?

MR. ANDREWS: As you think about how you define your credibility, what's the role of race?

MR. BOYD: I think the role of race goes back to what I was saying earlier as it relates to diversity. I just believe in my core that diversity makes newsrooms a better place. I have seen that time and time and time again where people who come from different backgrounds and have different experiences have insight that's really important, that's really helpful, that allows us as journalists to engage issues that count. I mean, my examples of that are endless. And so I think it's absolutely essential.

And by diversity I'm not talking just about race or gender or sexual orientation or even age. I'm talking about diversity of thought. I’m talking about having a climate that allows people who have different experiences and different values to come forward and feel that what they have to say is welcome.

A dirty little secret is that the minute you get your first paycheck as a journalist, the minute, then you're probably economically out of touch with 75 percent or maybe more of the American public because you make more money. The minute that you graduate from college, as we do as journalists, then you're out of touch with an awful lot of people.

Now, at the New York Times I used to sit around saying- people got tired of hearing it- but let's go to K Mart and see what real people are thinking, or let's go to Wal-Mart and see what real people are thinking. And people used to look at me and say, Enough of this real people stuff. What are we? You know, but I really feel that one of the problems as it relates to credibility is that we are losing touch with real people, and that-s why I was trying to talk about those issues earlier.

MR. ANDREWS: Well, I'm with you on the real people aspect of what you have to say for a lot of different reasons.

One more thing, at least for now on race, and this does look forward. Everybody wrestles with this issue. It is race is, as you know so well and as was reflected in the How Race Is Lived in America series, it's at the core of what this country has been, is and probably forever will be. Editors like everybody else in society wrestle with that.

What thoughts would you have to say, share with people here today on dealing with this issue of race in a direct way? And I mean both as it relates to staffing inside the newsroom and importantly as it relates to reflecting race or racial issues in coverage?

MR. BOYD: That's a very good question, an important question. I think in terms of dealing with inside a staff room, we have got to make sure that people who have different backgrounds and experiences understand that their views are valued or welcomed and are appreciated. And we have got to find a way to make it clear to people that they don't have to lose their essence to succeed.

When I was managing editor and I sat around a table looking at other senior editors, I always found it useful, I found it important to know that I would get different viewpoints because I thought at the end of the day, that would make me smarter and that would make our journalism better. And if you feel as a person of color that you have to be just like everyone else, then you lose something. And I also think that's true of women as well. The fact of the matter is, there are issues, there are experiences that matter, that should be vital to journalism that people of color or women have. And I don't think they should shy away from those things in terms of the discussion.

As for our coverage, I think our coverage goes to whether or not we are really being real or whether or not we're really connected, and that's not just a problem as it relates to race. It's a far bigger problem. It is a problem that relates to race, and it again goes to our ability to really understand what it is we know and understand what we don't know.

One of the things that I have been most proud of in my career, which is not on my resume and not in my bio sketch, was a series of New York Times I did shortly after I became Metro editor called Children of the Shadow. The series was based on basically profiles, narratives, if you will, of eight inner city kids, and it talked about in 1993 how they saw their lives and how they saw their countries. And one of the reasons I'm so proud of that is, New York Times started with an acknowledgment that said we don't understand these kids; we don't understand what's going on inside their heads. Why? Because we don't live in inner cities and we are not kids. So how can we possibly understand how they feel? We know how to do a series on bureaucratic waste, on mismanagement, or the latest political developments. That's our world. This wasn't our world.

And so what we did before we wrote a word, conceptualized a word, was to brought a group of kids from the inner cities of New York together on a Saturday, and we spent all day talking, just listening to what they had to say about their lives. And what became clear very quickly was they felt every major institution that they came in contact with, schools, police, church, was in some kind of way failing them. And that became the basis for Children of the Shadow. And that's the kind of thing I think we have to do in journalism in general, but it's especially true where race is concerned. That's the only way we are going to get it.

MR. ANDREWS: I want to deal with one more follow up to that set of comments, and then I will go to the audience. For your portions, please state your name and any affiliation that's relevant to the room. Very interesting set of comments, very eloquent. Tell me what you would say to, pick one, a Hispanic student with the aptitude for reporting and writing and the things that journalists would do, but who's also hearing about and reading about some of the concerns that show up as it relates to being inside the newsroom, and that is the intense environment that exist in some cases. Obviously newsrooms are not immune to the same things that face other parts of society, which is to say racism exists not surprise. And then if you look at some of the dreary commentary on the state of this industry, now for the record, I think we're hearing more than dreary out of this conference because this is a positive forward-looking group, though it does deal with reality. But in general there's this cloud-

MR. ANDREWS: Forward looking, absolutely, forward looking in the sense that we think there is a future in journalism. Nonetheless, there is a cloud that hangs over newspapers in particular. And depending on which crowd you're in, it can be an awfully depressing conversation about where we are and who we are.

But here is a kid with the aptitude of some kind of interest in journalism. What do you say to that kid? And I say Hispanic because you have stressed the issue of diversity. It could be black, Caucasian, or Native, or white or whatever.

MR. BOYD: I would say hang in there and I would say tough it out. I would say journalism is the greatest profession in the world and, look, I mean, I was a kid who went from an inner city of St. Louis to the White House. I have known every president in one way or another since Jimmy Carter. I have traveled to every state in this country. I'm not sure I went to North Dakota, but I think I did. I know South Dakota. I know I went to South Dakota. I have gone to just about every continent I want to go to.

The kind of experiences I have had as a journalist are something that I would never forget, so I think it's worth it. But that's why- that's why I come back to our responsibility as news leaders who have arrived, who are comfortable to take up this mantle of trying to reassure in some way that young Hispanic kid that it's worth it, that there is a place for them, that he is going to be valued in some kind of way, and be willing to take some risks.

There is one other thing that you haven't asked, but somebody will ask, so let me get this off the plate now. On the issue of mentoring, the issue of mentoring, which I know AP is doing a lot of, I believe deeply in mentoring. I was one of those who helped found a workshop for high school students when I was a cub reporter in St. Louis, and that workshop which was for minority high school seniors has become the basis of programs throughout the country. And beyond that there have been hundreds of journalists, literally hundreds who have gone through that program and who are now working at news organizations throughout the country.

I believe very strongly in mentoring, but I also believe that the act of mentoring is a two-way street, and that is, if you mentor somebody, then you should expect something in return from somebody. And that's part of the process.

MR. ANDREWS: Thank you, Gerald. Let's go to the audience. There is a hand in back. Actually there is one in the front.

MR. BOB CLARK: I'm Bob Clark from San Antonio, retired member, retired president of this group. I'd like to know if you don't feel that reporters on the New York Times, probably on lots of other papers, are given much more leeway to interpret, to opinion, and that sort of thing in news stories, which hurts our credibility and also probably hurts the evaluation of a reporter's work when it comes to things like Jayson Blair.

MR. BOYD: No. To be honest with you, I don't. I think reporters at the Times and some other places are given leeway. I was given some leeway when I covered the White House, but it's not automatic and it comes after one has proven his or herself in terms of sources, in terms of what it is he or she is writing about. In other words, it comes out to that person having a track record. It's not something that comes the minute you walk into a newsroom, and I think that's the way it is at many newspapers.

MS. MARY HARGROVE: Mary Hargrove with the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. I was wondering, in the introduction you talked about the media mass hysteria, about the events that you were involved with. Can you distinguish what was in your view the worst, the broadcast, print or even the trade publications? Were any of them more egregious in your opinion, and what exactly was the mass hysteria? What was the worst thing that you thought you went through?

MR. BOYD: Well, I had to stop reading Romenesko for awhile. I will tell you two things. The one thing that I responded to, the only thing I responded to throughout all of this was when Newsweek wrote a piece that said part of the reason that Jayson had had the career he had had at the New York Times was because I, ranking black editor, was his mentor.

And I picked up the phone and I called the people at Newsweek. I called Mark Whitaker, who I have known for a long time, and I called a reporter Seth (phon.) Manukem, and I said, I'm not asking for a correction or whatever, but it's wrong, it's just wrong. I have not been Jayson's mentor. And I said, What is that based on? And Seth said, Well, I have talked to some people who said that Jayson said that.

MR. BOYD: So I said, Obviously, you're putting in Newsweek the fact that I was Jayson's mentor based on what Jayson told people? And then to his credit Seth, who is a very sharp journalist, said, Well, well, well, well. And so that was that. But that's the only time I actually kind of felt I needed to call somebody.

The other thing I'll tell you about, when you're talking about media hysteria, when you find camera crews outside of your place watching you come and go, you probably think this is hysteria.

MR. ANDREWS: So once you land in a newsroom again, are there certain things that you would see differently as a result of the way in which you were covered as the subject of that story?

MR. BOYD: I think that's a good question. I appreciate you asking. I really have gotten passionate now, absolutely passionate about the things I'm talking about. I think journalism is evolving, and I'm not pessimistic on anything related to journalism. I think the state of journalism is sound, but I also think we are facing incredible challenges because I keep seeing them time and time again.

The fact of the matter is the LA Times wrote a world class scoop that was well reported, well researched, five days before the election when it was ready, and yet the LA Times became the target of an attack, and that attack was all over the place. To me that's the state of journalism today. And I think editors have to become much more conscious of that reality. I'm not saying they are not, but I think they have to be more. And I think as much as we can we have got to explain what we are all about, what our values are, how we do business. We have got to engage the public. And, you know, I just- I think now there is a disconnect, which is not new. I think that disconnect is growing, and I think there is special challenges that we face. Let me give you one other example.

Ten years ago, 15 years ago, Jayson Blair could not have happened. He could not have fabricated stories for the New York Times. You know why? Because if he was a national reporter traveling, he would have had to leave whereabouts, and those whereabouts would have been his hotel room. He couldn't have said, well, my whereabouts is a couch on the fourth floor of the New York Times where he was sometimes. He would have had to do that.

Well, the fact of the matter is because of cell phones, the number he left was his cell phone number. The fact of the matter is he was using e-mails, he was using pagers, and I'm just saying that that one step as it relates to technology is something that we have got to find a way to be able to address. That's one of the issues that the Segal committee focused on.

But I think the kinds of issues and the challenges we face today are great, and I think they are getting greater.

MR. ANDREWS: I have got one more question here, but before I do that I don't want to assume anything, Gerald. Do you intend to land a newsroom again at some point?

MR. BOYD: Well, I intend to spend a lot of my time pursuing my passion, and my passion is what I have talked about. It's issues of leadership, issues of- diversity issues of credibility and the impact on technology in terms of information. Whether I do that in the newsrooms, whether I do that in writing, whether I do that in teaching, stay tuned.

MR. DAVID ERDMAN: David Erdman, Allentown, Pennsylvania. Just to combine two threads here, one of some press reports on this and then what you would do differently. The Wall Street Journal reported one anecdote about a news meeting where, you know, you had a disagreement with an editor and who disagreed with you publicly in a meeting, and you basically told him to call his friend at the newspaper out in LA, Dean Baquet, I guess and take a hike, I guess or- now, I don't know if that's true as reported, but could you comment on that? And I mean, how does it square with what we try to do as managing editors, listen to people and not retaliating, et cetera? Did it even happen?

MR. BOYD: I'm not here to defend myself, but I will say a couple things about that. Editing question was Doug France. When Doug France left the New York Times to go to Time magazine, I told Doug France that we would get him back to the New York Times some day, and I was going to do everything I could to make that happen and that the door was always open if he wanted to return, and he did return.

When Doug France became investigative editor, I had a lot to do with making him investigative editor. Doug France is one of the best friends in the world of Dean Baquet. Dean Baquet is a very good friend of mine. We have a bantering, and what I did to Doug- with Doug was to take a quarter and give it to him, which is a take-off of what was the movie about Harvard where the professor gives-

MR. BOYD: Paper Chase. And gives the student a quarter and says, Call home because I don't think you're going to make it here. It was a joke. That's all I'm saying. It's a joke. If you thought for a second I wanted to lose Doug France to Dean Baquet, it doesn't work that way. Every time it was a matter of losing somebody to the LA Times, I fought like hell.

MR. ANDREWS: Gerald has been generous with his time. He flew in for this event and will be leaving at this time, but I do want to thank him for spending time with us today.

MR. BOYD: I'm sorry I had my back to you all, and I'm sorry you had to look at my bald spot for the last 25 minutes, but that's life.

MR. ANDREWS: I now have the pleasure of introducing the next discussion leader. It is Ken Paulson, who is the senior vice president of Freedom Forum and executive director of the First Amendment Center. More to the point, he is someone I've worked with and worked for and have a great appreciation for his track record over the years as editor and as a creative force in this industry. He is a familiar face to those who attend APME conferences with some of our best sessions over the years. Please welcome Ken Paulson.

MR. PAULSON: Thank you. Did you see how many people are fleeing the room? Apparently those weren't such productive sessions after all, Caesar.

We're delighted to join you here today. We spent some time exploring the credibility of the New York Times and now it's your turn. Want to take a look at the rest of America's newspapers. As you know, there have been very productive sessions in communities all over this country, roundtable discussions, about how to fix the credibility of Americas papers and some have been more successful than others. We want to have here is a conversation with all of you about the path of the industry, are we winning back the trust of our readers and what works, and we want this truly to be a Town Hall meeting. So at any time during the discussion if you have a point you'd like to make, please raise your hand, make some noise. We have got microphones that will be moving across the room and we welcome your thoughts and ideas. We have also invited a good number of people we have told already that we're going to put them on the spot, so we should have a terrific exchange of ideas.

To begin though today I thought we might want to take a quick look at how America perceives the press. This is a sampling of surveys taken very recently. This if from the 2003 state of the First Amendment, conducted by the First Amendment Center. Next screen, please. Overall do you think the press in America has too much freedom, too little freedom, or is it about right? That number is 46 percent of Americans believe today there is too much freedom in the press. That number is incidentally not the highest level. It got to 53 percent during the height of the Clinton and Lewinsky matter.

Next screen, please. Some people believe the media have too much freedom to publish, others believe there is too much government censorship. Which of these, beliefs lies closest to your own? Too much media freedom, 43 percent. More people are concerned about media freedom than they are about the government keeping things from them.

Let's go to another survey. It's actually the same survey. In your opinion to what extent do corporate owners influence news organizations decisions about which stories to cover or emphasize? A couple of interesting things there. I'm a little surprised that 44 percent believe that the content of your publications are affected a great deal by who owns the newspaper or media company. I'm particularly surprised though that just one in 25, just four percent of Americans believe that the news coverage is not tainted in any way by who owns the media.

Next screen, please. The Gallup poll from September, very recently. In general do you think the news media is too liberal, just about right, or too conservative? 45 percent too liberal, 39 percent about right, and too conservative, 14 percent. Again only four in 10 believe our news coverage is not tainted in some way by political inclinations.

Next screen, please. Pew Research Center for the people and the press. In general do you think news organizations get the facts straight or do you think their stories and reports are often inaccurate? Gerald Boyd alluded to this. Look at this. 56 percent, often inaccurate.

And one more, this is the one I find particularly disheartening. Which of the following two statements about the news media do you agree with more, the news media helps society solve its problems or the news media gets in the way of society solving its problems? 58 percent believe that you get in the way of solving Americas problems. That's quite an indictment. Kind of ugly stats.

Bob Haiman, you are a scholar on this topic. You've written the definitive book on best practices for journalists and fairness. Is it really that bad out there.

MR. HAIMAN: I regret to tell you that the bad news is that, yes, it is that bad. I traveled two years around the country for the Freedom Forum, just asking Americans two questions: Do you ever think the press is unfair? And does the press ever do anything that makes you think it's unfair and if so, what that is? I've got a long of complaints, but here is just a quick six to get us started.

First, the press- the readers say they feel your papers are full of errors. They say they see errors every day in your paper that make them absolutely crazy, wrong names, wrong ages, wrong addresses, wrong job titles, wrong starting times for social events and sporting events. The single answer we got the most all over the country when we asked, Does the press ever do anything that seems unfair, they asked, Why does the press get so much so wrong so often?

Number two, they think you're very arrogant and uncaring about the mistakes you make and care very little about getting them fixed. They said they want to- seeing as many mistakes as they do in the paper, they wonder why it's so hard in so many towns to get a correction, to get to talk to a real human being at the paper who cares about corrections and get those corrections into the paper.

Three, despite what you may think you've done about a diversity, they think you're way behind the curve. The majority of them said irrespective of race or gender, they think your staff and content are too white, too male, too straight, too rich and too elite.

Four, they don't think you do a very good job of keeping editorial opinion or more specifically the personal opinions of reporters out of news stories.

Five, they don't like the fact that you use too many anonymous sources, particularly to let people make attacks and charges on other people. They think you seem- they wonder why you reporters and photographers always seem so heartless or often seem so heartless when they are interviewing people who are the victims of violence and tragedy.

Six, they think too often you assign reporters to tough, complicated deeds, reporters who simply don't know enough to cover that deed, with expertise. And then finally the list goes on, but I will stop here. They find what you do mysterious, almost like black magic. They have no idea how you go about reporting and writing a paper, and they think you ought to do a much better job of explaining to the public what you do, how you do, and why you do it. Is that good enough for a start?

MR. PAULSON: That's a good starter and kind of depressing, Bob. That's quite an indictment, and as you can all relate to that, some of those things are reality. Some of those things newspapers just don't do a good job on. In other areas it's a matter of perception. And so all of that has to be battled.

Michelle McLellan has actually been a pioneer in this work. She is the author of a Newspaper Credibility Handbook, and she is the director of the Knight Journalism Initiative at Medill, and I'm curious about something. If I ran—the dairy industry for example is a classic example. They are trying to sell milk and milk isn't sexy, and they have got to find a way to address it and they don't go to individual farmers to got hold roundtable discussions in the community to discuss how milk could be sexier. They have a got milk campaign, a national milk campaign. Why is that not a solution for Americas newspaper industry?

MS. McLELLAN: Actually I think we do that every day. We publish papers that show what we are every day, and that’s what people are using to draw their conclusions about our credibility. I think you could make it worse and somehow suddenly market that we are, oh, so credible when people are seeing otherwise. You have to show readers.

MS. McLELLAN: Yeah, I think it is community by community and newspaper by newspaper, and often different methods are going to work in different places. The key ingredient, though, I think is the engagement with the public and with the readers because what they are looking for in defining as fairness may be something different than what we are talking about as we sit in our news meetings. So that opening-up process I think is significant.

MR. PAULSON: Peter Bhatia is here, president of ASNE, and he was also heavily involved in the credibility effort back in 2001 when he was ASNE Ethics and Values chairman.

I’m curious, the new kind of feedback is about that liberal/conservative stuff. We've seen these best selling books, Ann Coulter, the bias book. People are selling a lot of books saying that we are biased, and yet, I don't know if you're aware of this, back in 1960, if you tested for political bias, a majority of Americans would have said newspapers tend to be conservative and would have said television tends to be liberal. It wasn't until Spiro Agnew gave his classic speeches about the press misleading Americans about Vietnam and elitist behavior and all that kind of thing. But that tilted, and by November of 1970, according to a Newsweek poll, Americans perceived America's newspapers and America's broadcast media as being equally liberal. Somehow we got tied to the television industry. I would say it's probably continued. Can we escape the image of television or is our fate forever tied to newspapers- or newspapers and television?

MR. BHATIA: Well, I think it's a really important question, and I think the point about we began to see this conversation way back when Spiro was around, we think how long ago that was, and we have never really fully engaged in it.

I don't think there is any question as to the validity of what the public dings us for on some of these credibility issues, but I think one of the fundamental weaknesses that all of us in our industry are guilty of is that we haven't fully engaged with people on these issues. Gerald talked about it, Bob talked about it, and it's only gotten worse. It's only gotten worse. You mentioned those authors. I have spoken on panels with McGowan. That's a very scary experience. You know, the fact of the matter is we have ceded the debate to others. We have not engaged in the debate, and as a result we are losing the debate.

If we are not willing to talk about ourselves, if we are not willing to open up to the public about what we stand for, why we do what we do- I agree with what Gerald said, what John Carroll did last weekend was a very brave and important act, and he laid it out in a way that I think reasonable people can understand why the Los Angeles Times published what they published. But until we as an industry really engage on these issues, we're letting talk radio set the agenda for us around the country right now. We are letting talk radio paint us in the corner as being left wing, as being noncredible, as being carrying around some agenda with us. We all know that that's not necessarily the case. We know that our intentions are the right intentions, and we are trying to cover the news and we are trying to give people useful information. But until we start talking about that, you know, whether it's through public editors, whether it's through editors' columns, whether it's putting Ed Jones on a milk carton with a mustache on him, whatever it takes, we have got to engage the public on these issues in an affirmative way. Our journalism isn't enough to stand for us anymore.

MR. PAULSON: Well said. Anybody else have an opinion in the room about how we are being painted by one political spectrum or another? If not, I'll turn to the most- Michelle, go ahead.

MS. McLELLAN: I just wanted to add quickly to put the liberal/conservative debate in context. Some of the research for the credibility project showed that that is indeed an issue, but fewer people in the credibility setting were concerned about that than about the lack of racial inclusion in newspapers, about the lack of economic inclusion and the people who are featured and quoted in newspapers. I think it's really important not to get so tied up in the liberal/conservative argument that we don't look at these other significant problems.

MR. PAULSON: I think that's probably true. I think the talk radio thing stings the most, and we pay a disproportionate amount of time focusing on it. Let's go to the most courageous person in the room and the only civilian here. This is Lea Marquez-Peterson, who has joined us to represent readers all over America. (Applause.)

MR. PAULSON: She is the president of American Retail Corporation in Tucson, and she is here for several reasons, because she is someone who runs a series of stores, retail establishments with gas and food and other things, and so she is a seller, a retailer of newspapers. She is also here because she has been involved in community activities, high visibility, things in the community and has been a source, and she is here also because she is of course an avid reader of the newspaper.

Let me go to the source question first because that seems to be one of the issues involving credibility. When you've been interviewed by the newspaper, to what extent does the newspaper get it right?

MS. MARQUEZ-PETERSON: Let's see, I was interviewed recently by the gas line issue, the pipeline issue down in Tucson, and I'd say about 80 percent of the time.

MS. MARQUEZ-PETERSON: Some of the small details, a lot of times, as you mentioned, I have been on both sides approaching the media. So whether I'm pursuing them to promote my own business or an event or community activity or they are pursuing me, oftentimes when I'm pursuing them, I make sure I do the follow-up phone calls to the reporter, and in this case I think there was maybe a short time line and I didn't get the follow-up phone calls that might have taken care of that other 20 percent.

MR. PAULSON: So when you saw that 20 percent was wrong, inaccurate or somehow a little fuzzy, did you pick up the phone and call?

MS. MARQUEZ-PETERSON: Depending on what it was. I didn't call on this case. One particular item around gasoline and it's obviously very sensitive is price gouging and pricing and so on. There was a particular quote about me there saying that gasoline prices would definitely go down. That's not exactly how I said it, and that's certainly- I received several e-mails from people in my own industry. So that was an issue, and I didn't follow up but I probably could have.

I want to show you some clips from one conversation held in Dallas and another in South Carolina, kind of representative of what people are saying about accuracy and responsiveness.

NEW SPEAKER: I like a skeptical press. I like a press that goes in expecting the worse and hoping for the best, but a skeptical public is really healthy is well. We're the ones in my opinion that are supposed to keep the press on their toes. I'm sure there is a time when they have looked at a story and said there is no way our readers are going to buy this. That's one thing.

Another thing that I think has created some of the concerns is we have gone from getting it right to get it first, and that's gotten way too common. The 2000 presidential election was a blaring example of that how everyone was having to announce and retract, announce and retract. That's the biggest concern I see in the news media today.

NEW SPEAKER: I am not a journalist. My career has been in computer consulting, but in every project for which I was responsible, they came in on time, on budget and exceeded expectations because I live by seven little words: People do what's inspected, not what's expected. Now, we are all supposed to be adults, we are all supposed to be responsible, we are all supposed to be professionals, but things slide, and editors and whatnot, I think we are getting too much of the couching and the touchy feely stuff. I think editors need to get the black hat on, take a skeptical pill every morning, and when the Jayson Blairs come along, say, prove it, show me your sources.

NEW SPEAKER: Why did it take the New York Times so long to find out that this guy was a floor pusher? Now, you can't answer for the New York Times. I'm answering this for anybody. What bothers me about this is I won't know as a reader whether or not Gottlieb, Brownfield, Jonefield and Smith is spelled right in the paper or not or whether such and such a manufacturing company makes gidgets or gadgets, but I do know when a predicate doesn't agree with the subject. And I think that what begins to undermine my confidence in a newspaper. If they can't make a predicate and a subject agree, if they can't have a story continue where they said it's going to be, and if they have a caption that doesn't agree with the picture, I don't see how they can expect me to believe the background of the story I'm reading.

NEW SPEAKER: How can you possibly police every story, check every source? And I don't know the answer to that, but I know that you have to somehow because in this day of being able to manipulate images, if we didn't know better we'd think Forest Gump had met John Kennedy. You have to be able to trust in the credibility of the paper or the television station because that's all we have got.

MR. PAULSON: Of course credibility, responsiveness, accuracy are all tied together. If Lea had a little more faith in her newspaper, she might have called and gotten that 20 percent fixed, but she didn't want to press the issue. One of the things I see so often in roundtables is that people just want to know that you care, that you're listening, that it's not arrogance, that we all make mistakes, but that you're listening, you're trying hard to turn it around. Those roundtables can be fascinating.

If there were a Pulitzer prize for a courageous roundtable, it would have to go to Jane Amari, who in Tucson had a roundtable discussion on gun control, which she assured me the reason it's courageous is everyone there was packing. Can you talk a little bit about what that experience was like and what that led you to?

MS. AMARI: Just as a general rule, I think you don't often learn very much talking to people that like you. So having a roundtable with people who are in favor of guns is going to teach us something. The reason we had it was because I removed private party classified ads selling guns from the paper shortly after I arrived in Tucson, and that met with rage from both the local gun people and the NRA nationally. And this was a way of building a bridge and finding out what things in coverage there were that we were missing as a newspaper because we are not part of that ambiance. We really don't know the vocabulary. We don't understand the feelings.

So we had several people who are local gun advocates, some people who are devoutly anti-gun and anti-violence and some people who were just sort of in the middle and got them together in a room, and the result was that we learned some things. We learned that our reporters do not know the difference between a semi-automatic and an automatic weapon. They had never actually been around guns or seen guns.

There were some words that we used regularly in the newspaper for a gun as weapon, which are flash words for people who are in that milieu. So we learned some things. They learned that we could listen, and I think, although we still don't have private party gun ads in the classifieds, we do have a little less acrimony back and forth with that group.

MR. PAULSON: Is that awareness of technology, gun technology, is that throughout the newsroom now? Is it shared with everyone?

MS. AMARI: We did have a little- we had a little star university class on guns, and we had several guns brought to a building near the plant, and we had reporters go and they got instruction into what a gun was and how you handle it and what a bullet is and what a magazine is, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, there were a lot of people that learned a lot.

MR. PAULSON: Anybody else have an example of where you reached out to readers and get smarter about an issue that you cover pretty regularly?

Okay, I will pick on John X. Miller here, who is the reader editor. Is that what it's called? Public editor.

MR. MILLER: They call me by the hundreds. Actually I've been public editor for about fours year. They call me actually by the thousands, in addition to getting e-mail. And I think sometimes we forget that people care about the newspaper in the same way that we care about it. So there is a reason that we when we leave out a comment or we give something wrong in the crossword puzzle, that hundreds of people call us, and they call us because they are angry about it, because their expectation is, one, we will get it right no matter where it is in the newspaper.

I find that instructive because when I talk to readers particularly about things like names, we get their church name wrong, their name wrong, the name of their organization, they call us because they care about the newspaper and they expect us to care about it too, and because they see so many errors in the paper, whether it's grammar, whether it's names that are wrong, whether it's a map that has the intersection wrong, they expect us to care enough to get it right the first time. But in our response to readers, I think sometimes we are neglectful in understanding that that passion is connected to their connectivity that the newspaper gives them to their community.

Here is an example. We do a lot of children's stories at the Free Press because we are a newspaper that believes that coverage of children is important not only to the future of the paper and our community but also to the future of our state. And whenever we write stories that are passionate, stories that hold organizations accountable for what they are not or they are doing concerning children, the reporters who write those stories in the newspaper get lots of news, get lots of calls because of the news that we put in the paper. And we try to make sure that that is translated around the newsroom so that the journalists in the newsroom understand that what we do matters to people, and when we get things wrong, it matters just as much as when we get things right.

MR. PAULSON: So you're confident that phone calls to you change the newspaper on a daily basis?

MR. MILLER: Here is an example of why I believe that. And I hope this is something that may be constructive to other news editors. I log every day the calls that come to me over my phone line and by e-mail. So as I'm sitting in my office, I'm updating a file that's available to the newsroom kind of on a real-time basis for what people are calling about, and I oftentimes will get e-mails from people on the staff who are reading those and saying, I didn't know I got that wrong, I will correct it tomorrow, or do you have a phone number for that person who called because I want to call them back and ask them if they have something they may want to add to the paper that's going in tomorrow's paper.

MR. PAULSON: I created a kind of reader's editor job a couple times where I was, and mixed motives to be honest. Part of it was I wanted to know what readers were feeling and thinking, but you also wanted someone else they could call, which was at least half my motivation.

The challenge when you have a reader editor or public editor is to make sure that what you're hearing shows up in the newspaper, that you are in fact responsive. I wonder if we could hand that microphone to Phil Currie here, put him on the spot. Because I read in the E&P this past week that Gannett has a new initiative involving local news and I was curious, Phil, to what extent was that fueled by what you heard from readers.

MR. CURRIE: I think it was fueled both by what we heard, what we knew in general, and what our research was showing us, Ken, which is a different way to get information from readers.

There are two points here that I would make, and then I will try to explain what we did. One is that one of our researchers who has looked at a lot of this did a good job of describing what part of the disconnect is, and his description is that we need to tell our readers about the state of their community at any given time. That's the role of a newspaper. Most of us wouldn't disagree with that. But what he says we miss is that the readers see a different community than we see. We see so many of the things that are wrong with the community. We point out all the issues that aren't working and so forth. And we should, and he says we should. The researchers says the same thing. That's part of our role.

But the reader doesn't see the other side of the community so much at the time, the positive things that happen in the community, and they don't have to be just, quote, soft news, but the positive things that happen. And they don't see the things that are the most important in their own lives.

And if I could describe it this way, if you think about your own personal life, a lot of things that you're involved in are things that involve your children, your family, your friends, your neighbors, your neighbors, your neighborhood, the places where you go to shop. Think about what your real life is like as opposed to your professional life. And what we are trying to do is to- we have just started a program. What we are trying to get a better handle on, that real life, that part of the things that means so much to readers.

And a brainstorming session we had, one of our publishers described it this way. She said, these are the things that as journalists we treat as the footnotes of life, but to the readers these are life. So our aim is to try to get a better sense of what's going on and relate many events in the world and in your community back to the central core of why this is relevant to me and what it means. And one aspect of that that we are going to comment on is called moments of life, and that is that all of us have these kinds of experiences I just described briefly.

And the best example we have been using is in your community, sometime this fall report cards will go home to all of your families. And it will be a very personal experience for you because you'll sit down with your kid and you'll talk about it, and why did you do bad or why did you do well, how did it go, are you proud, or whatever. That's a very personal moment of life, and you can't write about me and my kid when I get my card. But the fact is that's happening all over your community at the same time. And we would not normally cover that kind of an event because it's not a big deal. But as a matter of fact, it is a big deal to all of these people who had that happen on that day.

And so if you begin to think about five days before the report cards come home, the cards are coming home, what are the issues parents want to discuss with their children when that arrives? How is the educational system treating these grades now? How have they been established? Is there something new in the way they have been looking at them? And you can expand this to a lot of other areas.

So I think what we are going to try to go is a better job of capturing the moments in life, the collective moments in life, as well as trying to relate things back to individuals. And I think in the process we will do a better job of reporting on the full state of our community.

MR. PAULSON: Thank you, Phil. The responsiveness is certainly a major component in winning back credibility with readers. Accuracy is a huge deal. And we have got Margaret Holt with us, who is customer service editor at the Tribune and is responsible for a lot of quality control issues at the newspaper, but also I think you describe yourself as an internal affairs of the newspaper in terms of correcting errors. You must be a very popular woman at the Tribune. Can you talk a little about that? You're not on.

MS. HOLT: I think Ann Lepinski, the editor, likes to describe my job, especially post Jayson Blair, as the internal affairs cop. And I think it's important and something that hasn't come up is really the disconnect on the importance of accuracy to staff. It may be that editors sitting around talking to each other all recognize it, but it's really important to make it clear throughout the newsroom. And I think we need to have internal credibility on this issue, and a big part of that is, for us, it's the recognizing that sometimes the most important things can't be measured. And it's about doing better work on behalf of the reader.

For us a key indicator is a question we asked in the error form: How did you learn about this mistake? And one of the things is internal identification. We have found that as the internal identification increases, over time, we get dramatic improvement in all of our error measurements.

Since Jayson Blair- I think this bodes well for all of us and it can be something we can learn from- since Jayson Blair, that number is, for us, off the charts. It's been as low as 20 percent or so of all the errors come from internal identification. Since Jayson Blair it's 44 percent. And I think that this could be a real opportunity for all of us to make that connect with our own staff, to let them know that we really do value this, that it's important to readers.

MR. PAULSON: For those of you have not read about the Tribune's program it's intensive. You make a mistake, there's a report filed in great detail, accountability is established. You've been at it for how long?

MR. PAULSON: Can you tell a difference? More importantly, do your readers tell a difference?

MS. HOLT: We see this-I had a chance to tinker with some research, and some of this is inextricably linked with what we see in customer value research because it's about quality and about our place in the market. I did do some questions because we were interested in whether readers care about corrections. So I had them run some market research just to experiment. And what it said, it was a little inclusive, but it's hopeful because it said that they did care, those who are regular readers, and they read those corrections and it enhanced their view of the paper, which I thought was pretty hopeful. It's not definitive, but it's hopeful.

As for our customer value research, the credibility stuff is pretty much part and parcel of it, that that's with a quality product and choice of the market and they expect that as part of it.

MR. PAULSON: I want to show a few more clips from the same roundtable as these having to do with diversity and perception of bias. Can you get that up, please.

NEW SPEAKER: I'm quite sure that there have been incidents where reporters may have misquoted or misstated. I grew up in Baltimore City, and I grew up in a neighborhood where we didn't put a whole lot of trust in newspapers anywhere because we know they are not going to report everything the way it is supposed to be reported. And the news media have always had an influence, an effect on how people in the community think. For us to sit here and think that everybody is perfect, everybody is going to do everything right all the time, I think you're fooling yourself.

NEW SPEAKER: So Saudi Arabia may have much more governmental influence, I feel America has some pressure from the government as well to report stories in a certain light. So therefore it's just- it's take everything with a grain or a truckload of salt, as you will.

NEW SPEAKER: I think in America not only government influenced, but I think also corporate influenced. So many big media conglomerates are owned by all these major corporations. It kind of makes you wonder whose interests do these news organizations have in mind. Are they really keeping in mind the interests of the American people, or are they trying to propagate their corporate leaders.

NEW SPEAKER: When you get to a media which actually has intentions that it's not supposed to, with Blair, he was trying to get glory for what he was doing, and when that takes over, your responsibility to do your job accurately and just report on the facts, and that's what sometimes upsets me, when I can tell there is something- someone is trying to push a personal or political agenda that actually ends up getting them away from presenting the facts. Yes, there is going to be omissions and stuff like that when people make mistakes, but when it's intentional because you're looking to make yourself look good or whatever, that is now wrong.

MR. PAULSON: We talked a little bit about diversity already today, but I wanted to ask Ricardo Pimentel, who is a columnist with the Arizona Republic and he has been a long-time leader in the Hispanic Journalists Association.

You've done a lot of outreach. This is a diverse community that you work in, and it seems to me that it would cut both ways, that if you emphasize diversity, you are going to build your credibility with a certain segment of the community, but in a town like this, you're going to see some back-lash as a result of that as well. How do you walk that? How do you address that?

MR. PIMENTEL: I don't think you can shy away from it. I think the more windows you open, the more doors you open, the more people you educate, more people will appreciate it than will resent it. There will always be a segment- I know, I hear from them every day, they tell me to go back to Mexico. I'm from California, so it doesn't make any sense. I hear from them every day.

But the problem is that, you know, the community at large thinks we only cover half the story. If you're in a community of color, we don't think you cover the story at all. And we see- we don't see ourselves in the paper as much as we should, although this has gotten better. And when we see ourselves in the paper, we see ourselves mostly as victims or suspects. We don't even get, you know, a quarter of the story told for us. And I think the reason is, is that we don't really believe that diversity is a credibility issue. We don't really believe, I think, that diversity really is an ethical issue, every bit as much as getting the story, the name right, getting your facts right. We just don't believe it as an industry because it's too hard to do.

So you know, I'm heartened by how much improvement there is in the industry, but I am also disheartened by how far we have to go.

MR. PAULSON: Thank you. I think you mentioned earlier that the newspaper had some credibility issues in the community as well that they are coming back from.

MR. PIMENTEL: I think there is a history of newspapers everywhere have baggage with communities of color. I don't think the Arizona Republic is any different. And it's going to take a tougher- it's going to be a tougher job convincing these readers that we are serious because of that past baggage.

MR. PAULSON: I ask that question because all of our newspapers have baggage. Joining us here today is Lenore Beecken Devore, who is a managing editor of the Ledger in Lakeland, Florida. She comes to us from a roundtable last night with the African/American community there and, in part, to address the baggage of the past.

I'm curious about something though, Lenore, how do you go into the black community and not appear to be not of the black community, in other words, a group of white editors? How do you bridge that gap? Did you have black staffers there? How did you handle this?

MS. DEVORE: Very carefully. We put together a committee to actually put the forum together last night, and it came out of the Credibility Roundtable that we did in March. It was one of the things that our people said they wanted, they wanted to get to know us. Yes, it was very awkward being out there with our all-white management staff, and even though we had the Hispanic executive editor, no one cares about that. They want to see themselves. And we did bring our committee members, some of whom were black. But they didn't care about that. They cared about management, the people making the decisions. And the next one we do next month we will probably retool it a little bit because we do have black managers. They are assistants. There are two assistants and one sports writer, though, who for a month or more of a time this year filled in for their bosses and did various wonderful jobs. And they need to be represented too and people need to know that we do care. And maybe we need to invite them into our newsroom to see the other people who are invisible, that they are not the reporters out there that they see every day, and they are not the business editor or the Metro editor, but they do carry a very huge weight in the way things are handled in the newsroom.

MS. DEVORE: I did. Actually I was scared going into this. I really thought we were going to have a lot of back-lash, a lot of negativity. And what we got from most of the people who were there were, thank you was the first words out of their mouth, thank you for coming, thank you for caring to be here, thank you for all being here at one place, because if we came to your place of business and tried to see you all at one time, that wouldn't happen.

So you know, it was very positive, and we have work to do, but we made contact with them, and that's what they wanted. They wanted to know how to get their news in the paper, and we provided them with that information in ways in which we could do better, and we have more follow-up to do.

MR. PAULSON: I like Lenore's story because it really illustrates. Here you've got a group of editors, who are well intended, who are trying to make a difference, who are trying to reach out, and yet they show up with all the senior editors who are white, and that's the immediate first question: Where is your diversity in the newsroom, that you've got to reflect your leadership in the newsroom?

MS. MARQUEZ-PETERSON: I just wanted to bring up, I'm Hispanic and from Tucson, and I believe about 30 percent of Tucson is Hispanic. And what's made a big impact to me from my local paper is there is a columnist who is Hispanic and very active in our community, and though he is not the reporter, I don't believe, going out, doing the stories, he's writing an opinion piece that's not always slanted about Hispanics, but it's about the general community, and that's made a big difference to me.

MR. PAULSON: Thank you very much. We have got -- I want to show you one more clip as time winds down. Do we have that handy- on independence in newspapers.

NEW SPEAKER: The days of our parents or grandparents, they would say, I only watch Walter Cronkite, and that's the only guy I will watch. That's over. You do the variety because you know that certain news agencies are owned by certain corporations. I'm not giving into what I'm saying about the whole- they are not going to mention a story about General Electric. So you just turn to somewhere else.

NEW SPEAKER: It's interesting, though, you have to look into see who is talking about being objective because it's like the saying, you can please some of the people some of the time, but you can never please all the people all of the time. And we are going to have lots of people with lots of different opinions. But I feel like one of the very important jobs of the media is to kind of stir the pot and bring things up that maybe wouldn't be brought up at a normal time and make people think, and even we can learn things about our community because of the paper, because the pot was stirred, and maybe we are going to see some really terrible things, but it's going to bring it out in the open. I think that's a real important job is to raise the awareness of the community about things that are going on.

MR. PAULSON: Rich Rassman, managing editor of the Herald in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

MR. PAULSON: Did you get a sense they wanted you to be a leader in the community?

MR. RASSMAN: Yes, but the entire roundtable is sobering, mainly because they assumed that we think close enough is okay, and details- and that leads into they don't know the process of how we assign stories and how we debate stories, and they are very skeptical of what goes on behind closed doors, even if they are not closed doors. They don't know what we do in our budget meetings, and furthermore, they think we are diabolical and plotting in our budget meetings.

And we invite readers to our budget meetings and gave us an opportunity to tell people that at our roundtable. But what worries me is the people that weren't at our roundtable and this is probably something that more people think that don't attend these roundtables, so we have a tough nut to crack there.

Jay Shelledy is here. He is a former editor of the Salt Lake Tribune. He now teaches at Utah State University. And he has seen the good, the bad and the ugly of coverage about his own life, his own career. Jay, it seems to me that even in the negative articles, articles that talked about that you left the newspaper, they still talked about you being this tough guy, shirt-sleeves editor, crusading, even people who didn't like you said good things about you.

And I was struck that how consistent that description was, so you must be a tough guy who rolls up his shirt sleeves.

MR. PAULSON: There was a time in the popular culture where newspapermen and women were heroic, Lois Lane. After all Superman when he put his clothes on was Clark Kent. Humphrey Bogart was an heroic editor in Deadline USA. That seems to have been a part of the past, that people don't view us as Humphrey Bogart anymore. What happened to the heroic image of editors?

MR. SHELLEDY: A couple of things. First of all, I believe that that image was never there. That was just made up. Everything that's been stated here, stated eloquently, as part of our credibility problem, is- it can be fixed, but there is a couple things that are going to be a lot tougher. And that is that alluded to- in the video and Ricardo about communities of color disconnecting because newspapers are fairly much establishment, establishment means white and it means male by and large. But that extends past that to others out there, the readers. And the bigger we get and the larger our corporations and the more varied our subsidiaries and our pro teams that we own, you're going to disconnect with your readers because you're big, you're not small anymore, you're big. That doesn't mean that you aren't doing better journalism. But you're going to disconnect.

You're also going to disconnect with this convergence, because- not because convergence in and of itself is wrong, it certainly makes good sense from a business standpoint, but you are picking up baggage from other media and media that do not share our scruples, and you're blurring the lines.

And finally, I think that our buildings today are fortresses out of practicality because we have security issues. You can't get to reporters, and you can't- if you try to phone- there is only one agency I know that's tougher than a newspaper to get to somebody, and that's the INS, and you can't get to anybody in authority by the phone, so we are disconnected.

So our image, we have never been better ethically. In spite of all the problems you see out there, we are as ethical as we have ever been, but we are not ethical enough today because we also- our public, our media gets things into perspective in context. There is more pressure for us to put things in context. That means subjectivity and a lot of analysis, and that's going to always create that charge of bias.

MR. PAULSON: Thank you. You know, you are right, Humphrey Bogart probably never existed and Clark Kent certainly didn't exist, but I do think there was a time where we were being perceived as being more crusading than we are now.

I think some of that baggage is what you're talking about. Now it's the question is what they said on the clips. Are we publishing this because we are promoting a subsidiary or because we believe the truth needs to be told? We need to close this out. I want to close out with a guy who to me symbolizes that crusading side of the newspaper.

I've had a chance to work with John Siegenthaler for a few years now. This is a man who worked very hard in a southern newspaper to fight segregation, to look for a racial equality, and who when he decided to take a couple years off didn't write a book, he instead went to work for Bobby Kennedy in the Justice Department and got his head beat in along with the freedom writers, so he is a man who has taken a stand.

I asked John to be here because, you know, it seems to me there is- we live in a different time than when you first walked in the newsroom. In 1949, you didn't have a lot of community roundtables back there in Nashville at the time, not a lot of surveys asking how the American public felt about the American press. Are we, speaking from somebody with a long view, and you've been part of American journalism for more than a half century, are we fretting too much, should we just be doing our jobs? What do you think?

MR. SIEGENTHALER: Well, I guess there is some people in our business who say if it ain't broke, fix it. If it ain't broke, fix it. I don't say that. I look around this room, and I guess maybe Bob Clark, who is the one person I have spotted who goes back- I don't want to date him- a half century or more. Amazing, he and I have been through meetings like this one many times.

The ebb and flow of public support for what we do is a part of our history. There is not a question that's been raised on this floor, nor will be raised in this convention, that we haven't had to address before. It does seem to me that the difference is that those numbers, Bob and Ken, those numbers specifically on some of those questions are higher than I have ever seen them; and questions about our credibility, which are not new by any means, are being asked by more people than I have ever seen before. And when I think about the changes that have taken place, it does seem to me that they have helped make us better than we ever were before. I mean, the technology has made us better. Diversity has made us better.

Look at those numbers on concerns about corporate ownership, and they are not new by any means. They are not new by any means. But the numbers are large enough to give us a good deal of concern, I think. And the whole issue that flows from that is one of monopoly. Most of us now live in monopoly newspaper towns. You know, it should make us better. It gives us more time to be fair, more time to be right. Somehow that's not taking hold. Part of it may be the times. It just may be that we are in another time of crisis when attitudes are strong, when scrutiny is heavier than it's ever been before, but it won't pass unless we once again look at it as we have in the past when our credibility and integrity was questioned, and unless we do something about it.

Jayson Blair and the New York Times, not to blame. Bad blood on American journalism, but in some public mind, the same people who criticized them at the Times, a great newspaper, also criticized John Carroll and the LA Times for doing what they thought they had to do, and indeed what I believe they had to do. So I think that the issue is whether we are addressing the concerns.

You know, I'm 76 years old, moving fast on 77. I'm an old man, and I look around this room. I'm working heavily to try to protect the First Amendment, and I think that if our credibility isn't rebuilt, the amendment becomes more and more in jeopardy. And I look at all of you, and to me you are so young. My only wish for you is that after a half century, you can look back and look back and realize that you did every day with your life what was important, you did with your life what people in the professions couldn't do. Every day you helped keep your community informed on what they needed to know about the community, about themselves, about their country, about their world. What greater blessing could any of us have than the opportunity to do that?

And I believe our credibility is going to come back because people in this room and people like you all across this country recognize that freedom is at risk when our credibility is at risk.

MR. PAULSON: I know a benediction when I hear one. We will close. I want to thank all of you for your participation and your conversation. It's been terrific. (Concluded at 3:43 p.m.)

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