June 29–July 6, 1995

cover story

Sunday Bloody Sunday

The Inquirer fights a Sunday circulation drain.

With a loss of almost 70,000 readers over the last five years and staff morale dangerously low, the Inquirer's most important edition is fighting feverishly to get back on track.

By Howard Altman

Walking out of the fourth floor cafeteria in the big newspaper building at 400 N. Broad, I stop to stare at a sheet of numbers that someone has tacked upon a bulletin board.

"You might find these numbers useful," says Marc Duvoisin, an astute, friendly labor reporter who has just spent the last hour or so filling me in on the state of things here at the Ivory Tower of Truth. "They pretty much tell the story of what's going on."

Duvoisin is right. The numbers are telling.

They show that circulation of the Sunday paper, the edition that is supposed to bring in the bulk of the Inky's weekly ad revenue, has plummeted in the last five years; from an average high of 987,000 for the six-month period ending in March, 1991 to an average of 919,000 as of the sixth-month period ending this March. Inky insiders say they expect to be selling fewer than 900,000 Sunday papers in the not-too-distant future, a kind of marketing Maginot line that, once crossed, may see big advertisers asking for a big discount on ad rates. (By comparison, the Monday-through-Friday edition has lost about 46,000 readers during that same period, from 515,000 to 469,000.)

While Duvoisin is telling me the hows and whys of the drop and what will be done to stop it, the always-quotable Inquirer TV critic Gail Shister breezes by. Before rounding the corner, Shister stops and turns to comment on our close examination of the numbers on the bulletin board.

"What are you guys?" she asks mockingly. "Masochists?"

The PhiladelphiaInquirer is not the only paper losing readerson Sunday.

Of the nation's 21 largest Sunday papers, 14 have seen circulation losses.

By far, the worst dropoff is at Newsday, where more than 210,000 customers — better than one in five — have stopped buying the paper since March 1991, when it sold 960,308 copies per Sunday.

But of the 21 largest selling Sunday papers, only Newsday, the Detroit News and Free Press, the LA Times and the Chicago Sun-Times have lost a larger percentage of readers than the Inquirer. And the combined circulation loss of the top 21 Sunday papers is 2.6 percent— far less than the 6.9 percent Sunday circulation fall-off at the Inky

And while the Inky Sunday circ figures are going south, five out the Inquirer's six largest competitors in the all-important Philadelphia suburbs have seen increases in Sunday circulation since 1991.

So, what went wrong at the Inquirer?

Depending on whom you ask, the answer to why the paper sells 68,000 fewer copies per week in the six-month period ending in March 1995 than in the six-month period ending in March of 1991 is that A) The paper is lost in an increasingly suburban and exurban market; B) People have no time for the Inky even if they are interested; C) The Inky is no longer interested in being interesting to readers; D) Cable and satellite TV and the Internet have rendered newspapers obsolete; or E) All of the above.

Columnist-Without-Portfolio Steve Lopez, taking a timeout from finishing his second novel ("I will finish it tonight," he vows), says that the American public is becoming increasingly disinterested in newspapers, and nothing anyone does can change that.

Like all newspapers, the Inquirer is suffering, says Lopez, because of "the stunning ignorance of the American public. People are idiots. They don't want to take five minutes to read something, a newspaper or a magazine or a book. People just turn on the TV and they have the remote control. In case they don't like Jim Gardner, they can switch to Larry Kane."

Lopez begrudgingly admits that the PhiladelphiaInquirer is not as sharp as it was during the Gene Roberts Regime, when the Inky masthead was pre-engraved on the Pulitzer plaques.

But 68,000 people did not stop buying the paper because of that, Lopez says.

"I am not sure the solutions are necessarily editorial," says Lopez. "It would be great if we had the same investigative strength as we used to have. But if we had 10 more reporters, doing investigative stuff that we were known for, are those people who stopped reading the paper going to suddenly go out and get the paper? If Gene Roberts were still here and headquarters in Miami said spend all the money you want on all the stories you want to do, I just don't know if that would put us back over a million readers on Sunday."

If editorial content plays a role in circulation decline, says Lopez, the real culprit is not the Pulitzer drought. The problem, he says, is the perception in the region that the PhiladelphiaInquirer is the handbill of the liberal elite.

"Judging by my mail, people have the opinion that you have to be a member of the ACLU to get a job at the Inquirer," says Lopez. "That is just not true, but people believe what they want to believe. They are amazingly ignorant. There are some pretty scary conservatives working in this building. The place is loaded with them."

People, says Lopez, "have got it in their heads that institutions like so-called liberal newspapers are responsible for abominations like Bill Clinton and welfare and all these other things. That is more of a factor in this circulation decline than, well, gee, we are not winning Pulitzer Prizes for investigative pieces. I'm not sure a large percentage of readers even read those pieces anyway."

Don Barlett, a 25-year Inky vet who has co-authored a couple of Pulitzer Prize winners with partner Jim Steele, has a different take on the Sunday circulation sinkhole.

On the road in Williamsport, where he and partner Steele are researching a story on the effects of the world economy on the local Joes, Barlett takes a break to ruminate on The Inquirer: What Went Wrong.

People are not buying the paper, says Barlett, because "the paper lacks the sharpness that it had in the '70s. It's not that there is a lack of talent, because there is an enormous amount of talent here. It's just that the talent isn't being used right."

Barlett is voicing publicly opinions that many of his colleagues share privately. His comments are not sour grapes: Barlett says that management continues to give him and Steele a blank check in terms of time, money, and most importantly, space, to continue their Pulitzer-winning tradition.

The rest of the paper, however, is not so fortunate. And that is what rankles Barlett, who after three decades blowing the cover off stories remains one of the most passionate newspapermen in the business — a passion, he bemoans, that is in desperately short supply at the Inquirer.

"This is 100 percent managerial," says Barlett. Inquirer editor "Max [King] has established a system where he wants the authority to filter down. But a newspaper has to have a single vision. In the absence of a single vision, nobody knows what that vision is, least of all the readers. What is this paper trying to tell me? That is hard to say when you have 20 or 30 people making independent decisions."

Barlett calls King "one of the two best editors I have ever worked with" (Gene Roberts being the other), and credits King with being one of the most brilliant editors at helping reporters on major projects. King's vision of what a newspaper should be — with an ironclad commitment in terms of personnel and space to strong investigative stories — is as bright as any editor in the country, says Barlett. The problem is that, unlike Roberts', King's management style allows that vision to get lost in a quagmire of middle managers.

"The best papers have always been run by a despot. They may have been benevolent, but they were a despot nonetheless," says Barlett. "Gene Roberts was a benevolent despot. When Roberts said, 'Let's do this,' everyone understood what he meant."

Barlett, repeating what is now an old maxim in the newspaper world about King's misfortune to follow in the footsteps of the nearly beatified Gene Roberts, says King's undoing is that he kept as his middle managers the team created by Roberts.

"That doesn't work," says Barlett, "because what you get set up are two contradictory management philosophies. There isn't a single Max King person. I really do think he feels compelled to continue the Roberts religion, but that is not a good idea. What is especially troubling is that [King] has the ability to take this paper to another level by doing his own thing."

But what does all this mean to the content in the newspaper and to the people who read it?

King's management-by-committee system, says Barlett, has directly caused problems in the way the paper covers the news. And that is turning off readers.

"The clearest example is obviously the New Era Foundation story," says Barlett without any prodding.

The New Era Foundation story is an embarrassing situation in which the Inky, after taking money from the foundation to conduct a study of regional cooperation, ran a glowing puff piece on New Era, only to be scooped by a former staffer now at the Wall Street Journal who reported that the foundation was bilking charities with its now-infamous double-your-money guarantees.

In all fairness, it must be pointed out that the policy of taking money from charitable organizations to fund stories is a creation of Knight-Ridder, the Inky's Miami-based parent company. In the company's 1995 First Quarter Report to shareholders, Knight-Ridder president and CEO Tony Ridder brags that "...the Tallahassee Democrat, the Wichita Eagle and the Charlotte Observer were part of a project with the Pew Charitable Trusts, which provided some support to those papers. Together we are seeking ways of holding governments accountable, to revitalize public life and improve the quality of life in those communities..." Ridder's comments raise a troubling question that exploded in the New Era scandal. Who's watching the charities?

Though the Inquirer was quick to follow up on the Journal's story with scads of pieces detailing the frightening depth of the New Era scandal, the episode left the Inquirer with a journalistic shiner — a shiner, Barlett says, that would have been avoided under the reign of a benevolent despot.

"I want to make it clear that I am not criticizing [Peter Dobrin], the young reporter who wrote the New Era piece. This story is a classic example of what happens when you have group editing. There should have been 100 alarm bells going off. But apparently none of the editors realized there was more to this story than what was there."

Barlett says this management-by-committee style has also resulted in other missed stories, including the paper's failure to break the news about the drowning death of a woman in night stalker Harry J. Katz's hot tub. That story, Barlett says, had all the elements of a great news piece and would have been great for the Sunday paper — especially since the paper had the news in time for that edition. However, the Inky sat on it and allowed the Daily News to get the scoop. Three days later, the Inky was finally shamed into covering the drowning, but its effort was clearly days late and dollars short.

"These stories speak for themselves," says Barlett. "New Era was a managerial breakdown. Period. Harry J. Katz is a complete managerial breakdown. Reporters get the message very quickly that we don't want something, so why pursue a story that is not going to be published and that the editors don't want?"

What do the editors want?

"In the last couple of years, and this is not just my judgment, Jim and I get asked this all the time, why is there such a preponderance of crime news and fire stories in this newspaper? The answer is that there is a managerial breakdown. Crime and fire stories require no thinking on the part of editors. They are totally reactive. If you look at the mix of stories in this paper, there are too many that are reactive and not enough that are creative as a result of a collaboration between reporters and editors."

Barlett says there is another issue that stifles creativity when newspapers like the Inquirer practice the American corporate management mantra of delegate, delegate, delegate.

"Collegial editing has another dark side," says Barlett. "Everyone is turf-hungry, so people can't cross turfs and that is stifling creativity. Everyone is sitting around second-guessing everyone else — it discourages risk-taking."

Barlett points to the paper's handling of Gov. Ridge's school voucher program as an example of how turf squabbles proved a disservice to readers.

"The school voucher business got more coverage early on in the process in other papers in the state because of decided turf issues between [editors in] Harrisburg, Philadelphia and the suburbs."

The problem, says Barlett, was that editors in each bureau viewed the voucher story as theirs and failed to see the larger picture, thus squandering an opportunity to combine talents and push the story to greater prominence earlier in the legislative process.

So, Don, what's the bottom line?

"The really sad thing is that, one day, what's going to happen is that there are going to be a whole lot of jobs eliminated and someone will say, 'Why didn't you tell me?' Put it in this context. Every time the Sunday paper loses another 10,000 readers, that is the equivalent of five reporters or editors. Drop 100,000 readers and that is 50 reporters and editors."

Clark DeLeon is in a particularly talkative mood.

Fresh out of a heated meeting with his editors over the direction of his now year-old column which was moved from the Metro section to features, DeLeon gets off his motorcycle, saunters into Dirty Frank's, orders a shot and a beer for himself and a beer for me, and begins talking about how the Inquirer has lost its soul.

"Our circulation figures speak to the morale and sense of futility," says DeLeon. "A big part of the problem is what [the editors] are doing to the columnists. This newspaper needs someone to make you laugh, make you cry, but they are trying to remove the voices from the paper. They are trying to replace column writing with feature stories."

Frank Sinatra's "Blues In The Night" blasts out of the jukebox — a perfect song for the occasion — as DeLeon tells me that he is speaking from experience when speaking about the paper's treatment of columns.

The editors, DeLeon says, are unhappy with his column.

"I am furious and I'm taking a week off," he says by way of announcing his full-blown feud with his editors. "They need the break and so do I."

That DeLeon is a columnist of the people, or at least of the people who hang out at Dirty Frank's, is evident as he waves hello to the bearded guy with tattoos who is featured prominently in his piece on the Atco raceway story that ran in today's edition.

It used to be that columnists like DeLeon loomed large in the paper's coverage. Now, who knows?

"[Assistant Managing Editor for Features] Lorraine [Branham] is not happy with my column." Branham failed to return three phone calls.

DeLeon, sounding like a guygrousing about his wife, says, "My editors don't understand me. The readers do, though."

As for his colleagues, DeLeon says he hears rumors about the pending demise of management.

"You hear, 'How long [Inky publisher] Bob Hall? How long Max King? I am not sure that it is time for Max to go, but that is the speculation. Look at Max. This whole thing has drained him.'"

Max King says he's not drained at all.

But there is a lot of work to do.

"We have to concentrate on making sure the content of the paper is focused clearly enough on the interests of the readers to make it compelling," says King in answer to the question of what his newspaper is going to do to recapture readers.

What does that mean?

"We have to focus relentlessly on what the readers are telling us that they want from the paper and try to make sure that what we cover and how we cover it is focused in ways that make the paper more essential to readers."

O.K. So how do you accomplish that?

"There are literally hundreds of minor adjustments that need to be made on the paper," says King. Readers in focus groups — which the Inquirer relies on heavily to shape the paper — have been asking for "more useful information, more lifestyle news, more investigative reporting, a wide array of things. We have heard from readers that they think the Inquirer is a very fine paper, but not as relevant as they want it to be."

King says that the key to improving the editorial content of the paper is to do more of what it does best — explanatory, comprehensive journalism.

A good example is the recent series on corporate welfare by Susan Stranahan and Gil Gaul, a series that not only reported which companies are being subsidized by taxpayers, but why that was happening and what it means to the economy.

But as good as that series was, it is not enough, King admits.

"We have been doing more explanatory stories in the past six to eight months," says King. "But we ought to be tougher on ourselves with the stories that we do."

Speaking of being tough on themselves, I ask King what he thinks about the points raised by Barlett, that while King has a vision, his Knights of the Round Table have been about as effectual in pulling it off as Monty Python's search for the holy grail.

King dismisses Barlett's criticism that one of the main reasons circulation is dropping is that the paper is not as sharp, journalistically, as it used to be. And that too many editors are involved in making decisions, leading the paper to miss stories like New Era and the Harry J. Katz hot tub affair.

"I think the share of blame does not lie exclusively with middle managers," says King. "It lies with me, the entire staff, everybody."

You? But aren't the newsroom editors supposed to keep an eye on those things?

"Take New Era, for instance," says Max, shouldering the blame. "Certainly after the first story was published, I should have pushed to get an investigative reporter on the story with Peter Dobrin."

"Donald gives me too much credit and the other editors too little credit. However, that said, I think we need to achieve a tougher, cleaner focus."

But what about his comment that while you, Max, have a clear vision, the middle managers have mucked it up?

"I say what I said earlier," says King, the quintessential gentleman, who is both unfazed and unhurt by the stinging criticisms from one of his most talented reporters.

Besides, editorial is not the only department that needs overhauling, says King.

Critical departments like circulation and marketing, which were devastated by recession-induced budget cutbacks, are being restaffed.

"It is clear that the lack of marketing and promotion over several years has hurt us," says King. "And there were also operational problems in marketing that hurt us as well. Both the home delivery field force and the single copy field force experienced significant reductions in resources over the last several years."

There are more changes in those areas. The paper just hired a new vice president for circulation, Charles Champion, who came over from the Chicago Sun-Times to replace the recently departed Jeff Kohler. Of course, given that the Sun-Times' Sunday circulation problems are even worse than the Inquirer's, it remains to be seen what circulation miracles Champion will champion.

And then there are the substantive design changes in the Sunday paper that are already underway. Last Sunday, the Inquirer unveiled its new TV book, which was revamped to include more information about programming on local cable channels. But reworking the TV book is only the beginning, says King.

The newspaper, he says, is going to give the people what it wants.

"Less Class, More Mass."

That's the buzzword circulating around the Inquirer when people ask, "How are we going to give the readers what they want?"

No more of the elitism perceived by readers in the ubiquitous focus groups.

More sports on Page 1.

More Lopez.

More hard news and the infamous "news you can use."

Huh?

"One example could be that during a labor strike, the news about the union vote would be on Page 1," says Marc Duvoisin as we sit at a lunch table discussing the fate of his newspaper.

For the past several months, Duvoisin has been attending a series of meetings called the Sunday Readership Committee. The committee, says Duvoisin, consists of top managers and three volunteer reporters who meet every month or so to discuss the findings of the focus groups and how management can translate them into action.

The task has been formidable, says Duvoisin.

First of all, city residents are leaving for the suburbs. Suburban residents are moving further away. "And all this goes hand-in-hand with people wanting to disassociate themselves from Philadelphia," says Duvoisin.

Then there is the competition factor.

There about a dozen competing dailies in the Inquirer's circulation area, with, as I mentioned earlier, five out of the six biggest actually gaining readers on Sundays. The combined Sunday circulation of the Bucks CountyCourier-Times, the Burlington County Times, the Delaware County Daily Times, the Doylestown Intelligencer and the Wilmington News Journal has jumped by 26,000 since 1991.

There are other competition concerns as well.

"The[N.Y.] Times and Washington Post are not worried about the Inquirer moving into their territory, but the Inquirer is worried about those papers making circulation inroads into Philadelphia," says Duvoisin.

For a very good reason.

More than 60,000 copies of the Sunday New York Times are sold in the Philadelphia area, according to that paper. And roughly 850 copies of the Sunday Washington Post: "There would be more, but the mail service in Pennsylvania is frightful at times," says Diane Prather, a Post circulation official.

Caught in a pincer betweenlocal and national papers, the Inquirer is being squeezed in a way that is difficult to escape.

"The local papers are getting better," says Duvoisin. "One of the questions in the focus group was 'If you could only buy one paper, which one would you buy?' And you know what? They chose the local paper."

Of course, the Inquirer is still the only local Sunday paper in Philadelphia.

But that doesn't mean as much as it used to, says Duvoisin.

"The people who stay behind in the city are the poor," he says. "Also, there is the economics of the middle-class families who stay. Both spouses are working and there is not enough time to read the paper. I have trouble keeping up with the paper and I am in the business."

So, expectations by those that do read the paper are high.

"They want more stuff. More sports. The market is a moving target that cannot be controlled."

The market may be a moving target, but the people who run the Inquirer have no choice but to hit it.

While sources say the paper is succeeding in reaching the upper income audience, it is failing to attract the less educated, the blue-collar workers and those who have not gone to college. But, most alarming, say the sources, is that the largest circulation loss is in young households, where people in their 20s and early 30s have virtually stopped reading the newspaper.

The next few months will see the unveiling of more changes designed to staunch the circulation hemorrhage.

Ron Patel, assistant managing editor in charge of features, says the biggest change will be in his sphere of influence.

"Two things happened that may seem unrelated, but they are not and are a big part of what we are going to do," says Patel. "First, through all this research work, we heard from readers that there were too many sections on Sunday. They suggested that the paper is kind of hard to get through. We looked at what section might be folded into another."

The second, seemingly unrelated occurrence, says Patel, was that Tom Hine, the architecture writer, decided that, after years of writing for the main paper, he only wanted to appear in the magazine section.

"That lost the underpinning for the Sunday View Section, which consisted of three areas, architecture, art and books and some stuff in the back, puzzles, stuff like that," says Patel. The result, he says, is that View and the Entertainment sections will be eliminated.

Beginning on July 16 (at least that's the plan) entertainment coverage, as well as arts stories that used to be found in View, will be moved into a new section called, surprisingly enough, Arts & Entertainment.

Wrapped inside that section will be a pull-out, eight-to-12-page tabloid book review section.

But that is only part of the changes coming to features.

The other big news, says Patel, is the new Seven Days listings. Patel says that readers were pleased that the Friday Weekend Section has so much information about events taking place between Friday and Sunday, but were dismayed that there was no equivalent for events occurring between Monday and Thursday.

Seven Days, says Patel, will address those concerns.

"We want this section to be useful," he says. "Unlike the news department, where the news dictates what happens, we have the ability to make even greater changes. The staff has moved quickly on this by doing as much as anyone to push for changes."

The Business section is also changing.

"We will have expanded coverage of personal finance and technology — more information on loan rates and credit card rates," says section editor Linda Austin. "We are hoping to introduce a section called the Yield Page — one-stop shopping for the fixed-income investor. The page will contain information on bonds, money markets, CDs all in one place. And one of our writers, Nathan Gorenstein, will be writing a column every other week on bargains."

And there is going to be less agate, that annoying little type they use to make up the charts for the New York Stock Exchange.

Oh, NYSE info will still be there.

It's just that the less active stocks will no longer be listed in the paper. But they will be available free via telephone.

Most important among the changes for the Business section, says Austin, is that there will be more stories every Sunday.

The new-look Business section, she says, will hit the streets some time in August.

The front page is also changing, says King.

"We have significantly broadened the mix of stories on the front page," he says. "What we need to do to add to that is a couple of things. We have got to be more timely. Move on stories more quickly. Be more aggressive. We have to be aggressive in relating the news to the situations of our own readership."

What does that mean?

"To me, that means be more aggressive about moving from breaking news coverage to explanatory coverage. A lot of times, you can do that in the same day. Remember, when you look at the various sources for news in this area, there are a lot of ways to get it faster, but not a lot of places they can turn to to get it explained more clearly and comprehensively. But we have to do it right away, not a week later."

Even as these short-term, substantive changes are taking place, a massive meeting of the minds, known as the Strategic Planning Committee, is gathering to find the best course to navigate the paper over the long haul.

Butch Ward, a former Inky editor who spent time at Knight-Ridder headquarters in Miami, is back in Philadelphia as an assistant to publisher Bob Hall. His job is to steer the committee and come up with a set of goals and methods of reaching those goals.

So, what are those goals, Butch?

"It's too early to say what might come out of this process," says Ward.

The first step, he says, is to give employees from all departments a chance to see how the rest of the paper works. This way — like Max King, who was groomed by Roberts to take over the paper by gaining an intimate knowledge of all operations — employees will have a better sense of what it takes to ensure the Inky's future vitality.

Arlene Morgan, assistant managing editor for personnel, says she is waiting to be taken around the city by the guys driving those blue circulation vans. Advertising people will spend time in the newsroom. And so on and so forth.

"I really don't want to go into this with any preconceived notions," says Ward. "I want to keep an open mind."

Ward may not have any preconceived notions, but the same cannot be said for his newsroom colleagues.

Many who spoke to me as sources say that the changes taking place and being investigated by the Strategic Planning Committee are last-ditch efforts, and that Tony Ridder, notorious for his concern for the bottom line, will tire of the current Inky leadership and make sweeping changes.

Other reporters, like Duvoisin, say that is unlikely. Miami, says Duvoisin, has total confidence in Bob Hall and Max King. And Hall is close personally with Ridder.

Besides, 1994, according to Ridder, "was a record year for Knight-Ridder in revenue, net income and earnings per share. Total company revenue grew to $2.6 billion. Net income was $171 million and earnings per share were $3.15. We are expecting a strong performance in 1995..."

Ridder, through a flack, professes "total confidence" in Hall and King.

"We are very supportive of the management team in Philadelphia," says Frank McComas, Knight-Ridder v.p. for operations.

Is the Inquirer meeting its fiduciary and journalistic goals?

"That's not the kind of thing we talk about publicly," says McComas.

Is Bob Hall worried?

I don't know. He didn't call me back.

Is Max King worried?

"No. I don't think Max King's career or Bob Hall's career is particularly important," King says, adding that the paper increased its revenues in 1994. "What is important is the Inquirer, which is still one of the finest papers in the country."

I agree with King that the Inquirer is one of the best newspapers anywhere.

But, not worried about your job?

"I don't spend any time worrying about that, and that is my honest feeling," says King. "I spend a lot of time worrying about the paper."

I guess he has a point. Given the Inquirer's plummeting circulation figures, King has plenty to worry about.

Especially on Sundays.