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Dave Zweifel's Plain Talk: Byline a day not the measure of a good reporter

Dave Zweifel  —  6/27/2008 5:26 am

Ever since the hopelessly right-wing Col. McCormick died, the Chicago Tribune has been one of my favorite newspapers.

Sometimes you have to hold your nose on the editorial pages -- it still is one of the most doctrinaire conservative voices around -- but the rest of the paper does a fantastic job of covering national issues and its investigative journalism is among the best in the country.

On top of that, it has a lively and edgy sports section and its business pages include one of the best media business columnists in the country, UW School of Journalism grad Phil Rosenthal.

Like so many newspapers these days, though, the Trib, or at least the Trib we know and love, is endangered. The Internet and the bad economy have combined to make life miserable for newspaper companies across the land and, from all appearances, doubly so in Chicago.

That's because a real estate tycoon named Sam Zell is now in control. And from the sound of things, he apparently thinks the work of a newspaper staff is something akin to a real estate agent's sales results. While Col. Robert McCormick used his newspaper to repeatedly call Franklin D. Roosevelt a communist, he did value good news coverage and routinely freed his reporters to investigate government shenanigans.

On the other hand, Zell, faced with the big debt that came with his highly leveraged buyout of the Tribune Co., wants to wring out savings by doing less of the journalism that has made the Tribune worth reading.

He understandably needs to make economies. Even his edict to reduce the Tribune's daily news hole to a ratio of 50-50 news vs. ads from its traditional 60-40 is inevitable to keep the paper in the black. But he insists that the paper's reporters aren't working hard enough and offers as proof the number of their bylines and the column inches they produce. Some staffers, particularly those at the Tribune Co.'s other newspapers in smaller cities, have several bylines a week. So, Zell believes, those with fewer bylines aren't working hard enough. Perhaps, he implies, the company could do without them.

That's a laughable notion to anyone with experience in the business. The worth of a reporter is judged not by the number of bylines or the length of stories, but by the quality of his or her reporting.

A reporter may go months without a byline because he or she is deep into an investigation that might just right some injustice or expose a violation of the public trust. Reporters who cover baseball games every day obviously get a byline every day. But the reporters who are ferreting out wrongdoing or incompetence in government won't get a byline until their story is complete and ready for publication.

Now if all Sam Zell wants his paper to do is cover games, meetings and police reports, he'll see all those bylines every day. But if he wants his newspaper to also fulfill its role as the public's watchdog, to fight for its readers and hold government accountable, he'll need to understand the business better.

If a newspaper, in print or online, doesn't do both, it ceases to be a newspaper -- and abdicates its important role in the health and future of our democracy.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times.

Dave Zweifel  —  6/27/2008 5:26 am