Surburban Journals had no-blacks-on-front-page policy
By Ed Bishop
Former employees of the Suburban Journals say that in late 1997 word came down from top management not to run photographs of African Americans above the fold on the front pages of the South County Journal and the West County Journal..
Gail Stobaugh, the long-time layout editor for the West County Journal, says she was told that people in her area wouldn't take the newspaper off their lawns if they saw a black on the front page.
"I was told that we had to take into consideration the community we serve," Stobaugh says.
Stobaugh says she tried to argue against the policy but management was firm.
"That's ridiculous," says Dan Barger, editorial director of the Journals. "In fact, we just had one on the cover last week.
"Of course, we have a policy to have only local people on the front pages of our papers. We don't want someone from, say, Florissant on the front of South County," Barger added.
When SJR told Barger that Stobaugh specifically said she was told not to run photographs of blacks, he answered, "Not by me."
Stobaugh agrees. She says Tom Rice, president of the Suburban Journals of Greater St. Louis, told her not to run the photographs. She also says the policy was a major factor in ending her 14-year career at the Journals.
Rice did not return calls from SJR.
Both Shawn Fusco, former sports editor for the West County Journal, and Scott Hickey, a former editor at the South County Journal, confirm that the no-blacks policy was in effect at their newspapers. Both also say the policy was not evenly enforced, mainly because low-level staffers refused to go along.
"(The policy) kinda just went away," says Fusco. "I think it was really a stupid policy and they couldn't really hold us to it. I mean, what were they going to do-fire us for putting blacks above the fold?"
At the time of the policy, Fusco and Hickey say no African Americans worked at either the West County Journal or the South County Journal. No members of the Greater St. Louis Association of Black Journalists worked at any of the Suburban Journals in 1998.
Fusco and Hickey recently moved to small dailies. Stobaugh now works for a major publishing company in the area.
Windfall for Pulitzer bosses
(Editors note: This article was written by a local journalist who does not want a byline.)
The restructuring of Pulitzer Publishing Co. produced a $52 million windfall for the company's top executives and managers. Pulitzer became a newspaper-only company on March 18, when it merged its broadcast operations into Hearst-Argyle Television Inc. The deal was worth $1.85 billion with a sizable portion going to corporate bosses.
Pulitzer promised six- and seven-figure bonuses to key managers at its newspaper and broadcast divisions to keep them from leaving and to keep the deal on track. Those bonuses, along with money spent to cash out executive stock options, caused the "new" Pulitzer to report a $30 million loss for the first three months of 1999.
Ken J. Elkins, who was senior vice president in charge of the broadcast division, left with more than $12 million in bonus, severance and stock-option money. Nick G. Penniman IV, his counterpart at the newspaper division, walked away with $5.6 million, plus a consulting contract worth $500,000 or more. Both would have left the company as millionaires anyway because of the options, which shot up in value in 1997 and early 1998 because of word of the Hearst-Argyle deal.
Pulitzer Publishing announced last May that it would merge its broadcast operations into Hearst-Argyle and spin off its newspaper and news media operations to shareholders. The spin-off company, which owns the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is called Pulitzer Inc. Michael E. Pulitzer, the grandson of founder Joseph Pulitzer and the company's second-biggest shareholder, relinquished his role as chief executive officer in preparation for the new era. He recruited Robert Woodworth, a former executive with the Knight-Ridder chain, to run the new company. That appointment left little room at the top for Penniman, whose emphasis on cost control did not fit with the new mandate for growth-although that growth is yet to be realized. Michael Pulitzer, 69, remains chairman of Pulitzer Inc.
According to the company's proxy statement, Pulitzer received $980,000 in base pay last year, plus a bonus of $548,800. He also got a $900,000 "retention award" to stay with the company during the restructuring, as well as a $2.1 million "completion award" when the Hearst-Argyle deal went through. Michael Pulitzer owns 3.7 million shares of Pulitzer stock, a stake worth more than $160 million. But the company's board of directors apparently decided he needed even more incentive to keep the presses rolling and the profits coming in. Pulitzer Inc. has given him the right to buy 139,800 shares of stock at a price of $39.875 a share. The options were granted April 7 and gained $550,000 in value before the month was out.
Woodworth, who early in his career sold advertising for the Belleville News-Democrat, got the same option package. His employment agreement with Pulitzer Inc. also called for 25,080 shares of restricted stock, with an initial value of $1 million. Those shares will vest to Woodworth over a three-year period. Woodworth also got a $200,000 signing bonus and a $200,000 payment to compensate him for lost bonus opportunities at Knight-Ridder. Woodworth's contract calls for a base salary of $575,000, and also sets his annual bonus target at $575,000.
According to the proxy statement, the six highest-paid executives at the old Pulitzer got $36.2 million of the $52 million the company paid out in the restructuring. Elkins led the way, followed by Ronald H. Ridgway, senior vice president for finance, Penniman and C. Wayne Godsey, one of two executive vice presidents in the broadcast division.
Here is a breakdown of the money the top five collected:
Elkins -$8.76 million from stock options, $1.8 million separation payment, $600,000 retention award $1 million completion award. Total: $12.15 million.
Ridgway-$9.26 million from stock options, $450,000 retention payment and $675.000 completion payment. Total: $10.4 million
Penniman-$5.08 million from stock options, $150,000 retention payment and $225,000 completion payment. Total: $5.45 million.
Godsey-$1.68 million from stock options, $907,000 separation payment, $250,000 retention payment, $375,0000 completion payment. Total: $3.21 million.
Pulitzer-$900,000 retention payment, $2.09 million completion payment. Total: $2.99 million.
John C. Kueneke, executive vice president of the broadcasting division-$151,000 from stock options, $696,000 separation payment, $250,000 retention award, $375,000 completion award. Total: $1.47 million.
Stock options accounted for about two-thirds of the money that went to the executives; restructuring bonuses and severance payments to Elkins, Godsey and Kueneke accounted for the rest.
Elkins, Godsey and Kueneke worked out of Pulitzer Broadcasting Co.'s headquarters in Clayton. Elkins retired, but sits on Hearst-Argyle's board of directors as one of two Pulitzer-appointed representatives. Michael Pulitzer has the other spot. Godsey was not out of work for long, popping up as president and general manager of KMBC-TV, a Hearst-Argyle station in Kansas City. Kueneke's status is unknown. Ridgway remains at the new Pulitzer with the same job and title. He helped fashion the Hearst-Argyle deal in such a way that newspaper business wound up with no debt and roughly $550 million in cash.
Woodworth says he plans to use the money to buy other newspapers or finance internal growth. Terrence C.Z. Egger, vice president of Pulitzer Inc. and general manager of the Post, got a $200,000 completion award when the Hearst-Argyle deal closed. The company said in its proxy statement that other officers and executives whose identities it did not disclose got retention and completion bonuses totaling $4.5 million.
That pool presumably covered key personnel at the broadcast division's nine television stations and five radio stations, plus managers at the Post and other properties. Lower-level workers will get their chance through the company's employee-stock purchase program, which offers a 15 percent discount for the market price, although Guild workers will receive no raises this year nor any year until the end of the current contract.
The old program was put on hold, then canceled, as the sale of the broadcast operations and the spinoff of the newspaper operations approached. Pulitzer Inc. said in its proxy it has allocated 300,000 shares for the stock purchase program. It plans to issue as many as 500,000 shares to key managers through its restricted stock program, and as many as three million through its stock-option program.
Imagine a Newspaper
Post-Dispatch kills news analysis section in favor of public-journalism project
By Don Corrigan
Imagine a war against illiteracy. Imagine a new bridge spanning the Mississippi River. Imagine a new, regional love for arts and culture.
Imagine the news in a newspaper.
St. Louis residents more and more have to imagine the news in the Sunday St. Louis Post-Dispatch, as the paper downsizes its newshole, decimates the number of local bylined stories and redefines what constitutes legitimate editorial product in a once-major metropolitan daily.
The new twist on an increasingly convoluted editorial product is the Sunday paper's "Imagine St. Louis," which was unveiled for area readers on April 11.
Change agent Cole Campbell, the editor who replaced William Woo at the end of 1996, has been coy up to now about his intentions to remake the Post in his own image of the public journalism philosophy. But the revised, "Sundays-are-different Post," makes it all too evident that Campbell is determined to use the paper as a big-city guinea pig in the movement of public journalism experimentation in America.
Campbell's "Imagine St. Louis," constituting the new Section B of the Sunday Post, is classic public journalism. It draws on a still-to-be-proven formula that has driven similar experiments in a host of mid-size and small dailies across the United States. Among the ingredients of this public journalism formula: plenty of hype and circumstance, plenty of civic-friendly explanations using a cult-like language, the promotion of so-called "deliberative conversations" and a commitment to benign subject matter at the expense of real news.
Hype & self-promotion
Some publishers of declining dailies have been attracted to public journalism as a marketing tool. It gives newspapers a chance to trumpet a new concern for "readers as citizens" and to liken the paper's new journalism as a "civic catalyst" to reinvigorate democracy.
The Post hyped "Imagine St. Louis" no less than four times in the April 11 edition, including a front-page ode just below the paper's flag. The paper advertised "Imagine St. Louis" as a new section. But, in fact, discerning readers can see that the new section is simply a further cannibalization of what was a Pulitzer-prize-winning "News Analysis" section that once carried editorial weight nationwide.
In addition to the column inches promoting "Imagine St. Louis" in the Sunday, April 11 edition, the Post has run a number of in-house ads for the section, including a display ad that used the word "different" copiously. Sundays are different and the new section is different: "It's something we've never done before, but we think it's going to turn into something great," proclaimed the deliciously different in-house puffery.
Jettisoning news fare for civic fluff is certainly a different approach for a major daily, as Ray Hartmann observed in his weekly Riverfront Times. In his commentary after the debut of "Imagine St. Louis," Hartmann also took aim at the paper's inclusion of Monsanto's John L. Mason as a new editorial fellow on the Post section. Quite different. A compromising concept that up to now has been left untried "throughout the rest of the Western Hemisphere," noted Hartmann.
Cult language
The introduction of the "Imagine St. Louis" section has drawn deep from the well of what former Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) executive director Rosemary Armao refers to as the "cult-like language of public journalism."
Among key phrases in the public journalism lexicon are "working through problems," "atmosphere of public life," "conversations about public life," "issue-driven conversations" and "continuing conversations." Such terminology was found in abundance in the section introductions penned by Cole Campbell and Robert Duffy, the new and revised cultural news editor.
Duffy's total indoctrination and surrender to the "fluffspeak" of public journalism is at once profound and pathetic. In his section introduction, "One Kind of Conversation," Duffy employed the term "conversation" in maddening fashion. He did, however, soften all this conversation with a new term for the public journalism choir-"charrettes"-which in the end turns out to be another word for a "conversation" consisting of readers' feedback in the paper.
Duffy told us that "Imagine St. Louis" is all about charrettes. The section provides public space for charrettes. Duffy said the Post had previously experimented with two charrettes: One charrette on the fate of a neighborhood in the Central West End, one charrette on the Arena. The Arena was, however, blown up before that charrette could really work its magic.
Duffy packed his introductory piece, titled with the kicker head "Imagining St. Louis Intensely," with at least a dozen "charrettes" and "conversations." There was a time when metropolitan cultural editors might have strained for originality and "le mot juste," but not in the new age of public journalism. What suffices for the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Va. and the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph can work for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as well.
Deliberative conversation
The professed goal of "Imagine St. Louis" is to spark the kind of discussion that the high priests of public journalism define as deliberative. Arthur Charity in his book, "Doing Public Journalism," insists that the newspapers of tomorrow must invest in deliberation pages such as the Post is attempting to develop with its "Imagine St. Louis."
Charity cautions us that these new pages should not be confused with op-ed and letters pages, which are often filled with rancor from readers on the controversial issues. Deliberation pages encourage discussion which can lead to new possibilities and solutions. "Possibilities Don't Get Enough Press" proclaims an in-house ad for "Imagine St. Louis."
The Post's deliberation pages for Section B have been decidedly, if not deliberately, boring except for those letters which have been filled with rancor. For example, in response to Issue No. 2 of Imagine: "Building A New Bridge That Works For All," the most readable letters were those that chastised the Post for its transparent double standard: Opposing the Page Avenue bridge because it will prompt urban sprawl, while seeming to favor a new downtown bridge in the Post's own backyard.
Perhaps the most insightful piece in the Post's much-vaunted charrette came from John J. Perulfi in response to the Post's Issue No. 1 of Imagine: "Teaching All Our Citizens To Read."
"It's a shame that perfectly good trees had to die for your new twist of shallow journalism. You have dumbed down this paper so much already, the literacy of the market area shouldn't matter," declared Perulfi. "Just wait a few years and you can put out a comic book instead of a newspaper."
Charrettes at what cost?
Post defenders argue that the critics of "Imagine St. Louis" are reactionaries who resist any kind of change. Metro dailies are facing reader loss and declining circulations. What's wrong with trying something new?
Besides, what is so bad about promoting public discussion on the area's literacy problems, or the need for a new bridge, or the need to make St. Louis a community that embraces arts and culture? Is that so bad?
Perhaps if the Post had truly invented a new newspaper section for "Imagine St. Louis," there would be less to criticize. After all the topics covered thus far have been fairly benign, and the letters and discussion have, at times, approached the level of entertainment.
The problem, as some contributors to the charrette have pointed out, is that the Post has sacrificed the substance, commentary and fine writing that once characterized its News Analysis pages. With "Imagine St. Louis," the Pulitzer Company has put the final nails in the coffin containing an important part of what once made the flagship publication a newspaper to reckon with.
As long ago as last century, the Pulitzer news products were praised for their erudite analysis pages, even if the front pages took it on the chin for being overly sensational. The pages devoted to opinion and analysis were hard-hitting and echoed the Pulitzer mission of providing a bright light of wisdom, of fighting all fraud and sham.
Earlier in this century, the news analysis pages of the Post were filled with some of the best commentary of this nation with pieces bylined by sages such as Charles Ross, Marquis Childs, Raymond Brandt, Edward Harris, Thomas Ottenad and Richard Dudman. These were writers who deserved, and sometimes earned, Pulitzer Prizes.
Childs wrote best-selling books on national policy and won a Pulitzer for distinguished commentary in 1969. Ottenad was recognized for his analysis of national problems and foreign affairs well into the 1980s. Dudman's insightful prose on America's involvement in Southeast Asia and on the Watergate story in the 1970s is legendary.
And what has actually replaced the columns of these sages and wordsmiths in the new "Imagine St. Louis" on our different Sundays?
Try a few infographics on the five levels of literacy. Try 18 inches of column space on "How To Join The Cultural Conversation." Try a column by Robert Duffy entitled, "Directing Our Imagination Toward A New Bridge."
Duffy's April 18 bridge column assures us: "The conversations have begun, and the talk is rich." By all means, let us dig in.
On a Sunday when readers might have been provided with a better understanding of a spreading war in the Balkans, the Post offered one man's progress toward a literate life. On a Sunday when readers might have been provided with a study of today's troubled youth culture and the massacre in a Colorado school, the Post lectured that all too many Americans don't appreciate art.
Critics of both conservative and liberal persuasion have taken aim at public journalism projects appearing in newspapers across the country. Many of their grievances are germane to an examination of the Post experiment, "Imagine St. Louis."
Conservative critics argue that public (sometimes called civic) journalism represents a "dumbing down" of the newspaper. It's part of a trend of deteriorating intellectual standards that parallels what is happening in secondary education and at our universities.
Conservative critics argue that public journalism wastes space with reader-friendly graphic devices and the "spoon-feeding" of stories. They also contend that this story approach inevitably leads readers by the hand to a conclusion about how they should think on a given issue.
Many conservative critics already have a distrust of the mainstream news media for what they perceive as a left-leaning bias in reporting. They argue that public journalism's new emphasis on "solution-oriented" journalism spells the end to any even-handedness in reporting issues.
For these critics, public journalism is simply an admission that the news media have an elitist, left-wing agenda and are finally prepared to drop any pretense of objectivity. After all, if a newspaper is convinced it has the solutions to problems such as urban sprawl, health insurance, illiteracy or the environment, what obligation does it have to fairly report all sides on problematic issues?
"My principal concern is this: What you have is journalists increasingly becoming this unitary, enclosed elite," observes Ted Smith, a journalism professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. "This elite is increasingly telling itself that it needs to take control of the political system and a situation that's in decline.
"The thing that's very crucial with public journalism is that it gives journalists a very activist role, and even though they say they're going to consult with the public about what is the public agenda, the crucial thing is the new activist role," said Smith. "There's a real problem with a small, self-selected elite determining what's in the best interests of the public and taking on an activist role."
Professor Smith's words may well hit home with conservatives in St. Louis, who've always been pained by the Post's elitist liberalism. That anguish has only intensified with the arrival of Cole Campbell, who is no longer confining "solution-oriented" copy back in the editorial pages, but is bringing it to the forefront of the paper.
While conservatives complain that public journalism is too activist and crusading, critics from the left insist that all this talk of journalistic activism, reform and solution-oriented reporting is mere sham. They argue that public journalism projects involve "warm and fuzzy United Way" kinds of activities that do nothing to address the root causes of inequities and wrongs in society.
Critics on the left are wont to emphasize public journalism guru Jay Rosen's admission of journalism's great weakness as "a public practice housed within a media industry devoted to private gain." This inherent weakness prevents public journalists from demonstrating any real awareness about the ideological implications of their approach.
The new crusading movement's "focus on community resources leaves established structures of political power and economic interest as unexamined as do the mainstream narratives of strategy and conflict," declares Peter Parisi, a professor of communication at Hunter College in New York.
Thus, the new public journalists at the Post take on only "safe" crusades such as opposing illiteracy, finding the right place for a bridge and encouraging arts and culture for the middle class. As Parisi notes, the established structures of political power and economic interest remain unexamined.
The bottom line
Both liberal and conservative commentators have made important contributions to the critique of the public journalism movement in American media. Both, at times, express a concern about where "solution-oriented" reporting may take us as traditional loyalties to the concept of objectivity are jettisoned.
While conservatives worry that public journalism is just another intersection on the road to the "dumbing down" of America, liberals worry that it is a marketing ploy that removes real substantive-and costly-reporting from the pages of the daily paper.
After all, it is much easier-and cheaper-to fill those former News Analysis pages with opinion letters from Tom, Dick and Mary giving their take on a new bridge over the Mississippi. Certainly it's much cheaper than filling the paper with reportage from the likes of a Richard Dudman providing an account of America's role in Southeast Asia from Phnom Penh.
In the final analysis, the public journalism offered by the St. Louis daily, and by other experimenters in the provinces, will not collapse from weighty critiques by either the left or the right. Public journalism will only be heaped on the ash pit of media history when those in the corporate towers conclude that it is not the solution to hemorrhaging readership and declining circulations.
Given the quality and inevitable outcomes of public journalism experiments such as "Imagine St. Louis," that realization in the corporate towers is likely to come sooner rather than later. In the current highly competitive media environment, the moguls in the corporate towers are unlikely to be very patient with simply "imagining more readers."
(Editor's note: Professor Corrigan's new book, "The Public Journalism Movement In America: Evangelists In The Newsroom," will be published by Greenwood/Praeger in July.)
LETTERS
Review leaves much to the imagination
SJR: The following letter was mailed to The New York Times.
To the Editor: In this get-it-while-you-can era, it is hardly surprising that Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff has written a book. It is nothing short of distressing that his reviewer (The New York Times, April 9) Tom Goldstein, the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, finds it "hard to render an absolute verdict on the propriety of his actions." It's not hard at all. Isikoff was in clear violation of what was once a journalistic given: A public figure's private life is private unless public responsibilities are affected.
The true focus of journalism is the government, public policy-not private lives. Isikoff's investigative talents could have better been directed at some aspect of government, like, say, Medicare fraud or Pentagon bidding.
"This was not Watergate," Isikoff wrote. Indeed it wasn't. Watergate involved excesses by government, not a focus on the President's sex life.
Though his book is titled "Uncovering Clinton," what it showed, as can be divined from the review, was the centrality of Lucianne Goldberg and Linda Tripp to Isikoff's enterprise. It was Tripp's surreptitiously recorded tapes of Monica Lewinsky that informed Isikoff and those he was reporting on-lawyers for Paula Jones and investigators for Ken Starr's Office of Independent Counsel. All were focused on the President's private life.
It was only fitting that Internet gossip Matt Drudge "scooped" Isikoff, because the peephole journalism he pursued was more suited for the supermarket tabloids than a major magazine like Newsweek.
Drudge, Isikoff has said, is "a menace to honest, responsible journalism." Actually, Isikoff is-and deans of leading journalism schools that find it hard to pass judgment on the "journalism" of Isikoff and others who gave the nation a year of Monica.
Peter Donhowe,
former editorial writer,
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Champaign, Ill.
Latin 101 anyone?
SJR: As much as I appreciate E.F. Porter's colorful writing, and as pleased as I am to bash the St. Louis Post-Dispatch when-as it often does-it deserves it, SJR and Magister Porter seem to have flunked Latin 101 themselves in their criticisms of the supposed Planetarium motto. If memory serves, it's Ad Astrum Per Aspera-"To the stars through hard work"-which is actually also the motto of the State of Kansas, but not of the RAF.
Ave et vale,
Josephus Bonwich
Mistaken identity
SJR: Regarding your story headlined "NRA money influences police on concealed weapons." I thought I was reading the St. Louis Journalism Review not the St. Louis Police Review.
Emmett McAuliffe
Affton, Mo.
In SJR
10 Years Ago:
Ed Bishop was appointed assistant editor of the St. Louis Journalism Review, replacing Staci Kramer.
An announcement was expected soon on the identity of the new general manager at KWMU-FM. Rainer Steinhoff had resigned suddenly from the position after nine years with the station.
Peter O'Sullivan was named managing editor of the newly announced St. Louis Sun. He promised "tight writing and fast-paced pages." Chairman and Editor-in-Chief Ralph Ingersoll said, "We're thinking about editing a newspaper in which you will see stories and ideas as opposed to reading them."
5 Years Ago:
"Outreach St. Louis" was formed by Karen Carroll, general manager of KYKY and KSD-AM & FM. The charitable foundation was organized to provide a conduit for the stations to give money to local non-profit groups.
Metro Traffic announced it would establish offices in St. Louis to compete with Brad Hildebrand's Computraffic.
KMOX General Manager Rod Zimmerman sent a six-page memo to all staffers instructing them what to say to irate callers who complained about the station's addition of Rush Limbaugh to its broadcast schedule.
Local SPJ chapter plans comeback
By Krista Gruenimger
Local members of the Society of Professional Journalists have been wondering about the chapter's state for quite some time, questioning whether the group will meet again.
While activity of the St. Louis Professional Chapter of SPJ goes almost unnoticed, a few of the chapter's core members have been meeting national requirements and suggest that a positive change may be just around the corner.
The St. Louis chapter, which won a national award for its programming in 1996, has met a handful of times in the past couple of years. The chapter began breaking down when key members moved out of the St. Louis area. President Stacy Lonati accepted a job at the Belleville News Democrat and was unable to seek another term in office. Dave Nicklaus, former chapter president and regional director, agreed to take over as president for the 1996-97 term while looking for new members to lead the chapter. Fewer meetings and programs took place and no potential leaders emerged.
Nicklaus agreed to continue to serve as president for the following term, and SPJ co-sponsored two or three programs that year with the Press Club of Metropolitan St. Louis. An election for officers did not take place for the 1998-99 term, and no programs or meetings have been organized recently.
"It's hard to believe that a chapter that once had nine or 10 meetings a year could totally disintegrate," longtime member Al Toroian said.
While activity is low, membership remains at about 100, and Staci Kramer, director-at-large for the national organization, has plans to use each member's talents to turn the chapter around.
In the past, the brunt of the work fell on the chapter's officers. Kramer is in the initial stages of a plan that would spread out responsibilities and get the chapter back on track. Kramer has proposed a plan that includes an individual to act as delegator, an individual to look over the chapter's financial matters, a group of good communicators to tap into members and a number of people to take on specific tasks, with small areas of responsibility given to each.
"It takes all of us to make it work, and it also can take all of us to make it not work," Kramer said.
The chapter's leadership recruitment problems stem from a tradition of a few people doing most of the work.
"It's volunteer power and when you get a core group doing it all, they get burned out and I fully understand," associate member Judy Taylor said. "I wouldn't criticize for one second."
The core group behind the chapter's survival includes Kramer, Nicklaus and Adam Goodman, who was the chapter's last elected treasurer. Goodman said he is maintaining the chapter's financial affairs, which are sound, and Nicklaus said they are trying to keep up with annual obligations such as the Connie Rosenbaum Award, which honors a reporter or writer for work related to an area of social injustice.
Kramer said she would like to call all members and ask them what they can do for the chapter. Service to the chapter could range from serving as an officer or organizing a program to appearing on a panel or informing members about upcoming events.
The need to spread out responsibility within the organization is apparent to officers and general members alike, and altering the leadership layout is not a new suggestion. Toroian credits himself with leading the chapter for about 15 years but, during that time, the chapter began requiring that the president be a professional journalist, as opposed to someone in the public relations field. Toroian now wants to step around this requirement a bit.
"Because they ran out of executives at the journalism level, I suggested we change our rules a little bit and we nominate a person to be president and appoint a person to be executive director of the chapter," Toroian said.
The president would continue to be a professional journalist and would reside over meetings and give insight on programming. The executive director, however, would be from the public relations field and would beresponsible for setting up meetings and organizing programs. Toroian said a couple of people expressed interest in the suggestion, but the concept has not evolved.
Regardless of the structure through which it is done, chapter activity and membership involvement must improve in the coming year. Kramer attended a meeting of the SPJ Board of Directors in mid-April in Minneapolis and brought back some news for the St. Louis chapter. Representatives of regions Five and Seven, which includes St. Louis, are working on a joint regional and are eyeing St. Louis as a prime location for the event. Kramer said SPJ has moved toward a new format for regionals, and while St. Louis would be the host city, the St. Louis chapter would not be solely responsible for organizing the event. Members from a number of chapters would be involved in planning.
The St. Louis chapter has a long way to go from its current state of existence to an organization able to play honorary host to a number of other chapters. Kramer is working on a program to take place in the next six or eight weeks to get the chapter headed in the right direction. From there, she foresees working back to six or nine programs a year with events such as brown bag lunch lectures scattered in between that would be geared toward smaller groups of people.
General members and past officers agree that chapters go through cycles of gaining momentum and losing speed, and they cannot survive by relying on a few devoted individuals for a long period of time.
"From my experience at the national level, there's always an ebb and flow of chapters," Nicklaus said. "This chapter was very strong for a long time and right now it's not. I've seen others go through the cycle. Sometimes they come out of it and sometimes they don't."
Krista Gruenimger is a St. Louis free-lance writer.
MEDIA ON MEDIA
By Frank Absher
Ageism
Still more criticism is being aimed at the unrealistic portrayal of life on television. The Screen Actors Guild says there aren't enough actors over the age of 40 on TV programs. Women under 40 are picking up about 75 percent of the female character gigs, and men under 40 get 59 percent of the male roles. (Electronic Media, April 26)
Name game
Here we go again with the all-too-obvious program names on NBC. The network is canceling "NBC News at Sunrise" after a six-year run and replacing it with "Early Today." The show will precede "Today," which will be followed by "Later Today." (Broadcasting & Cable, April 19)
Upsizing
The "help wanted" ad shows you just how much employers want nowadays. A Midwestern liberal arts college wants a broadcast journalism/production professor who will manage the school's radio station and cable access TV operation and teach 15 hours per semester. Candidate qualifications: radio and television experience, master's degree (Ph.D preferred), and print experience. In addition, the school wants knowledge of specific audio and video editing software. The ad doesn't say if the candidate must also wear a Superman outfit to the interview. (Broadcasting & Cable, April 28)
That's billion
Last year was a very good year for Chancellor Media. The radio giant topped all other broadcasters in gross revenues with $1.9 billion. CBS Radio was in second place at $1.7 billion. (Electronic Media, April 5)
Junk TV
Television clutter is rearing its ugly head in even higher numbers. Last year the amount of non-programming content like promotional announcements and commercials reached an all-time high, according to the latest edition of The Commercial Monitoring Report. On the top four networks, there was a total of 15 minutes 44 seconds of clutter during each prime time hour. Daytime hours were worse with an average of 20 minutes one second per hour. (The New York Times, April 12)
Time out
Now they're blaming the loss of TV viewers on the advent of Daylight Savings Time. Figures indicate viewership of syndicated shows in daytime and access dropped the week ending April 14. (Broadcasting & Cable, April 26)
No biggies
We may have seen the last of TV's "water cooler" shows, those series which average a 20 rating for the entire season. Since the 1990-91 season there have been only two such programs: "ER" and "Seinfeld." This year, "ER" has dropped to an 18.6. (Electronic Media, April 5)
More news
Among all the announcements of cutbacks in local news programs on television (including the CBS-owned station in Chicago) comes news of a station adding news broadcasts. WFLD-TV in Chicago will be broadcasting 90 more minutes of news each day beginning this summer. The station's manager says it's an effort to more effectively use its news operation. (Broadcasting & Cable, April 26)
No sleep
If you're a "Monday Night Football" fan, you're going to have to adjust your personal schedule next season. ABC is bumping the games back to 8:00 p.m. local time because the network says the early hour experiment last season didn't pan out. (Electronic Media, April 5)
Downsizing
ABC News says it's time to slash staff because the network is hemorrhaging money. It's reported eight to 10 of the network's 75 on-air news reporters will be laid off. (Electronic Media, April 12)
Senior discount
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission wants to see cable rate discounts for senior citizens. Bill Kennard says he's worried because there's no longer any government regulation of rates, so cable operators can jack up their prices without federal challenge. (Electronic Media, April 12)
Good news
Television network executives have something to celebrate for a change. Nielsen Media Research has found that viewers are more loyal to network programs than they are to cable shows. Among the desirable 18-to-49 viewers, the highest loyalty is to "The X-Files' on Fox. (Electronic Media, April 12)
HERE
By Ed Bishop
Imagine a newspaper where an award-winning sportswriter who has covered nine Olympics, 20 Final Four basketball tournaments and brought national acclaim to his paper has to reapply for his job. Imagine a newspaper where one of the best features writer in the midwest, if not the country, is forced to submit samples of his work to a consulting firm that knows nothing about journalism in order to keep his job. Imagine a long-time executive editor of the Business Section being kicked out of his position and wandering around the newsroom trying to find something to do. Imagine a newspaper where the publisher was paid $5.6 million to go away.
Imagine a newspaper where the managing editor has never edited hard news before. Imagine a newspaper where the editorial-page editor has never been an editor nor worked on an editorial page.
Imagine a newspaper where there is no city editor, no news editor, no features desk and nobody to cover breaking news. Imagine a newspaper where typically there is only one news story on the front page of the Sunday edition. Imagine a newspaper where during a major war in Europe the Sunday News Analysis section is eliminated and replaced with a section that asks readers to "imagine a stadium."
Imagine a newspaper where the staff will not get another raise for four years. Imagine a newspaper where the editor is asked how he intends to build consensus among his staff and he answers that he has no plans to do so.
Imagine a newspaper that has almost no news in it.
Well, actually you don't have to imagine any of this stuff.
A newspaper like the one described above already exists. It's called the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Sounds too screwy to be true, right? Unfortunately, it is true. The circulation of the once-proud flagship of the Pulitzer Publishing Company has been dropping like a rock for eight years now and management will try anything to stop it. Besides nobody at the top of the new Pultizer company has any interest whatsoever in local news anyway. Basically they're all advertising-sales people and bean counters.
This giving up on real newspapering should have been apparent in September 1996 when Michael Pulitzer hand-picked Cole C. Campbell to be the editor of the Post. Campbell came from a relatively small daily in Norfolk, Virginia. He knew nothing about the inner workings of a big city in the Rust Belt, nothing about the region's politics, its culture, its inner dynamics. Apparently Pulitzer didn't think he had to.
Already back then, Campbell was known to be an advocate of public journalism, or what at least one wag has called "Chamber-of-Commerce journalism." That did raise red flags but nobody really took it seriously. After all, who would've believed that any serious newspaperman really wanted his newspaper to have charrettes?
Campbell was also known to be the architect of a highly controversial reorganization at his old paper that eliminated the traditional newsroom structure and replaced it with teams. SJR got a lot of calls back then saying the man loved to create chaos.
We can't say we weren't warned.
Still, it's hard to dislike Campbell. He's a charming, big bear of a man, expansive, decisive and intelligent. When you talk to him, you get the sense that he's focused and listening. Everything he says sounds good in a vague sort of way. "Maybe that might work," you say to yourself. But it has not. The Post is a mess.
Part of the problem is that Campbell is not a natural-born newspaperman. For one thing, he's a terrible writer. For another, he seems more interested in academic theory and management systems than news. Giving lectures with his famous flipcharts seems more natural for him than making news judgments. He could easily have been everybody's favorite psychology professor.
But Campbell isn't the whole problem. In fact, he's only a small part of the problem. It's difficult to image the Post being the way it is today if the St. Louis Globe-Democrat were still around digging for news and writing analysis. The competition would be too stiff and Campbell wouldn't be able to dismantle the entire newsroom operation like he has. The real problem is that back in the early 1980s the Pulitzers began paying the Newhouses a lot of money to fold the Globe-more than $70 million so far. Some of us on the left cheered the death of Globe's right-wing editorials. "Ding dong, the witch is dead," we laughed. But we were shortsighted. Without journalistic competition, the latent arrogance and laziness of the Post have fully flowered.
The people of the metropolitan area ought to join in an anti-trust suit against the Pulitzers and Newhouses and force them to start up a new daily. Believe me, if another newspaper were around, the Post wouldn't have time for all the goofiness that's going on in its newsroom.
And there would be news on your front lawn on Sunday mornings for a change. And a lot of good journalists wouldn't be being treated like pieces in an Alice-in-Wonderland jigsaw puzzle.
THERE
By Charles L. Klotzer
It was not my intention to write about the St. Louis-Post Dispatch again, but after perusing the company's various documents published for the May 12 Annual Meeting at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, a few random items stood out. They might be of interest to voyeurs of Post's doings and undoings.
In writing the Pulitzer, Inc. 1998 Annual Report every word, one must assume, was carefully checked by corporate management, by financial consultants, by key owners, and by top editorial management. Thus, the two-paragraph section on the company's operating strategy deserves careful attention.
The second paragraph deals primarily with its acquisition strategy of publishing properties which it plans to pursue in small- to medium-sized markets.
The first paragraph is more interesting. It tells us how management sees itself. "The Company's long-term operating strategy is to maximize each property's growth and profitability through maintenance of editorial excellence, leadership in locally-responsive news (italics added), and prudent control of costs. Management believes that editorial excellence and leadership in locally-responsive news (italics added) will, over the long-term, allow the company to maximize its market share in each of its respective markets. Experienced local managers implement the Company's strategy in each market, with centralized management providing oversight and guidance in all areas of planning and operations."
"Locally-responsive news" is mentioned twice. While "locally-responsive" is a mushy term, we take it to mean that the Post's prime responsibility is to local events. There was a time when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was considered one of the 10 best papers not only in the U.S. but throughout the world. Once upon a time ...
Who exactly runs Pulitzer, Inc., the new publishing company formed after the spin-off of the broadcasting properties?
According to the stockholder brochure published for the Annual Meeting, two have been added to the voting trust. They are Robert C. Woodworth, recently appointed president and chief executive, and Cole Campbell, editor. Other members of the Trust, who are the principal stockholders, are Michael E. Pulitzer, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Ronald H. Ridgeway and David E. Moore.
The trust owns 13,573,126 Class B Stock which are each entitled to 10 votes, while the common stock is entitled to one vote each.
Emily Rauh Pulitzer owns 44 percent (6,311,667 shares), Michael E. Pulitzer owns 24.7 percent (3,539.906 shares) and David E. Moore owns 25.8 percent (3,697,035 shares). The remaining trustees plus James M. Snowden, Jr., Ken J. Elkins and two investment funds own 5.5 percent (24,518 shares) of the Class B stock.
The Annual Meeting will elect nine directors. They are Michael E. Pulitzer, chairman, Robert C. Woodworth, president and CEO, Ronald H. Ridgeway, senior vice president-finance, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, James M. Snowden, William Bush, Ken J. Elkins, Alice B. Hayes and David E. Moore.
Other executive officers are Terrance C.Z. Eggers, vice president and general manager of the Post, and James V. Maloney, secretary.
While stockholders at large have benefited from the divestiture of the broadcasting properties and the increase in stock prices, key owners and executives received in options and other remuneration more than $50 million. That equals to about 10 percent of the cash on hand (without any debt) of the new Pulitzer, Inc.
Not bad for a small-town "local" publication.
Finally, an anecdotal observation. In March, Glenn J. Snowert, described by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a "longtime supervisor of technical services" retired after 42 years. Snowert's background, going back to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, his career, his contribution to the Post, and compliments by supervisor were summarized in 16 inches. No doubt much more could have been written. But it was a nice story.
In March, Nicholas G. Penniman IV, publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, senior vice president of newspaper operations, president and chief executive of Pulitzer Community Newspapers, also left the Post. Aside from mentioning that he will stay on as a "consultant," the announcement only said that "He had worked in top management of Pulitzer since 1975." If we deduct the 21/2 inches of irrelevant insertion of the divestiture of broadcasting properties, the Penniman announcement totalled four inches.
Whatever the circumstances of the parting of ways (and financially, Penniman has been amply rewarded for his services), it demeans an illustrious career and speaks loudly about the sensitivity of the new Post management.
Somewhat more charitable, Michael E. Pulitzer has this to say in the introduction to the 1998 Annual Report:
"Nick Penniman, who ran our publishing division since 1984, has assumed a new role as a consultant, with a focus on The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson. Nick guided our publishing operations through a period of substantial change and challenge, and in particular, was responsible for many of the company's technological innovations, including our entry into new media. We are grateful to Nick for his many contributions, and we are pleased that we will continue to benefit from his wisdom and experience."
Pulitzer will benefit from Penniman's wisdom-in Tucson. Obviously, the new management team doesn't want his consultations where he gathered his experience, in St. Louis.
EVERYWHERE
Stretching it
It's all right to stretch a little to make a transition or to create a familiar location for television news, but if Jeff Fowler of KSDK (Channel 5) had stretched any farther in the 6 o'clock news on April 8, he'd have fallen right off the set.
Identifying the site of that morning's fatal accident when the van of a St. Louis Post-Dispatch (it's just everywhere, isn't it?) carrier struck two joggers, Fowler mentioned that the accident took place about 5:30 a.m., then said-correctly-that it was at the corner of Hanley Road and Davis Place.
Then he went too far.
In an effort to locate the accident (that's good) and to sensationalize it (that's bad), he pointed out that the site is close to that of Hanley and Clayton Roads, an extremely busy intersection that ranks high in auto accidents. Except that Davis Place is about a half-mile from Clayton Road, and has no connection with the more accident-prone corner, except in the push-that-accident news style of local television.
-Joe Pollack
Looking back
The recent special salute to St. Louis "race radio" on KDHX was the essence of what public radio can be. Producers Charley Taylor and Tony Cabanellas enlisted the help of program hosts John McHenry and Denny Clancy to give listeners an insider's look at the way St. Louis radio used to be. Over a three-hour period we heard from Lou "Fatha" Thimes, Gabriel, Bernie Hayes and Gracie Lowry. Those who missed it missed a great program.
-Frank Absher
The Post struck out
When the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published its short history of baseball in St.Louis April 18 as part of its series The 20th Century, it all but ignored the Negro Leagues. John McGuire's article headlined "St. Louis and Baseball" could more accurately be called "White St. Louis and Baseball."
For example, it refers to St. Louis' days as one of five cities with two teams. However, for much of that period St. Louis had three and four teams, and more than five cities had at least two teams-in addition to the five cities with American and National League teams, several cities had Negro League teams. For example, Pittsburgh had the Crawfords as well as the Pirates. The article mentions all of the Cardinals' and Browns' pennants, but it fails to mention that in 1928, 1930 and 1931, the St. Louis Stars, led by Cool Papa Bell and Willie Wells, won the Negro National League pennant. What great days they must have been for St. Louis baseball, with the Cardinals winning the pennant in the white National League those same years.
There was also a short-lived team called the St. Louis Giants. McGuire mentions the fact that the Browns had a one-armed player and a midget, but he fails to mention that the Browns were the first major league team to have two black players. Hank Thompson and Willie Brown joined the club in 1947. That was the same year Jackie Robinson integrated the National League and Larry Doby integrated the American League. Willie Brown also has the dubious distinction to be the first black player to flop in the majors. Hank Thompson went on to be part of the first all-black outfield in baseball when he played with Willie Mays and Monte Irvin for the New York Giants in the 1951 World Series. In a sidebar, retired Post sports editor Bob Broeg names his top 10 Cardinal players, plus Rogers Hornsby from the Browns and Bell from the Negro Leagues. If you want to name the 10 best players in St. Louis baseball history, if you mention Ozzie Smith, you have to mention Willie Wells.
Buck O'Neil, who knows as much about baseball as anyone, is widely quoted as saying that Wells was Smith's equal in the field, but Wells was a far superior hitter-he hit over .400 once and led the Negro National League in home runs three times. The fact that Ozzie was lucky enough to live at a time when he could play in the same league with white players does not mean he was a better player.
If the Post wants to be inclusive in its history of St. Louis, it should remember that in the days of Jim Crow, black people created parallel institutions that should be treated with the same respect as white institutions. Just as fans of the Cardinals and Browns lived and died with their teams, fans of the Stars lived and died with theirs. Referring to Jim Crow major league baseball-that's what it was for half a century-as baseball, while just keeping references to African-American baseball as mere afterthoughts legitimizes the white experience while relegating the black experience to a mere sideshow.
-Benjamin Israel
Bad news for CJR
Our New York cousin, the Columbia Journalism Review, has more subscribers and slicker paper than we do, but since it tries to be a contemporary publication, it's time for some changes.
Joan Konner, publisher since 1988, steps down July 1, and David Laventhol, former publisher and editor of Newsday, former publisher of the Los Angeles Times and former president of the Times Mirror Corporation, steps into her shoes, according to an announcement from Tom Goldstein, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The university publishes the magazine.
CJR, first published in 1962, has a circulation of about 30,000, but Goldstein, speaking like a publisher-or a consultant from Harvard-made a frightening statement, to whit: "What we have now is an opportunity to really think about what we should be doing, and we can spend the next year trying to do that."
Laventhol said he was not sure how he would specifically change the perspective of the magazine, and that's a comment, to quote a cliche, that is fraught with the seeds of disaster. Just because he's not specific doesn't mean that change is not in the offing. Many changes are good, but not all of them, and if the CJR changes its perspective or style, the results might not be good at all.
Many people out there are happy to attack the press and to limit its freedom and power. CJR, not afraid to level criticism, and guilty of waffling from time to time, as we all are, has been a loyal defender of the rights of newspapers and of reporters.
The New York Times, which printed a story about the change, said, "The Columbia Journalism Review is rethinking its approach." The late Theodore Bernstein, who originated "Winners and Sinners," the best short course in journalism ever designed, would have sneered that magazines don't approach things, nor do they think. People, or horses, or dogs, or elephants. approach things, and people sometimes think.
As a writer for another journalism review, I fear the fact that a former top newspaper executive-a management type, a suit-is in control of what should be a review of the media and a publication that is, at least tacitly, a support of all working journalists. Marshall Loeb, former managing editor of Fortune, also is on the masthead. This makes CJR a little top heavy, in my opinion, and makes me wonder about the direction it is taking, perhaps toward public journalism or the primrose path, or the influence of big business and big government.
SJR, let me say, has no people like that in positions of authority, or even in advice-giving capacities. We are about to have more color on our pages, but that's another story.
-Joe Pollack
Map madness
Not since the Congress of Vienna has the map of the Balkan peninsula been so drastically redrawn as it was on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch April 14.
Intended, presumably, to show the theater of conflict in Kosovo, the map grafted a panhandle on Macedonia, gave Romania jurisdiction over a third of Serbia, pushed Kosovo southward into northern Greece and grained half the water from the Adriatic leaving the Montenegrin coast high and dry, 50 miles inland. Ten million years of continental drift could hardly have accomplished more.
Anthony Lazorko, chief of the department that prepares the paper's maps, charts and diagrams, told SJR the day after the fiasco that he was still trying to figure out what happened. His preliminary hypothesis: One of the editors in charge of laying out page one tinkered with the map on the computer screen, possibly in an attempt to trim it to fit. The program governing graphic material, including maps, is tricky and unforgiving, Lazorko said, and in the hands of an operator unfamiliar with its idiosyncrasies can produce catastrophic results.
While Lazorko didn't name him, other staffers said the finger of suspicion points to Wade Wilson, a recently hired reputed computer graphics whiz who by dint of his control over the front-page layout has risen to an estate of enormous power. Known to the staff as Zonker Harris, whom he rather resembles, Wilson was brought aboard by Rosemary Goudreau, a one time protege of editor Cole Campbell who brought her with him from the Norfolk Virginian Pilot when he joined the Post. Goudreau is now gone, allegedly because of her friendship with Campbell's now-estranged wife, but Wilson, who is one of several people known as Rosemary's Babies, remains.
-E.F. Porter
Imagine that- news in a newspaper
The chairman of Intel echoed the editor of the Baltimore Sun recently, though they spoke a continent apart. John Carroll of the Sun accepted an award from the National Press Foundation in Washington, D.C., and told an audience how the Sun was different-no meetings, no teams, no fiction (or imagination), just a concentration on news and analysis and the things newspapers did best.
At the American Society of Newspaper Editors meeting, in San Francisco last month, Andrew S. Grove of Intel told the audience that he got breaking news from Reuters online and high-tech news in the same manner. But when he goes home, he opens real newspapers, The San Jose Mercury News and the Wall Street Journal, because he needs background and interpretation, what newspapers do best.
Grove advised editors to play to newspapers' built-in advantage, bringing perspective. He also advised them to convince their bosses, the publishers, to increase starting salaries so as to add more young reporters and newsroom budgets so as to cover more news.
The ASNE meeting also showed that newspapers are lagging in their long-time promise to increase the hiring of minorities, a group that now includes women for the first time, at least in the newspapers' figuring. Minorities-black, Asian, Hispanic and American Indian of both sexes-total 55,100 people working in American newsrooms. A total of 20,325 are women, and 14 percent of them are members of minority groups.
But even as the total grew a little, minorities among first-time hires for full-time jobs dropped from 21 percent to 18.7 percent in the past year, and minority interns fell from 33.3 percent to 31.3 percent.
In terms of individual newspapers, well, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch brought up the rear in of larger newspapers. ASNE figures showed only 7.9 percent of Post employees were minorities. The Boston Herald was second-worst at 8.5 percent and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, last home of the Post's current managing editor, was 11.5 percent. The top of the scale went to the Oakland Tribune, 47.8, and the Miami Herald, 46.8, a figure that includes the paper's Spanish language edition.
-Joe Pollack
KMOX kudos
KMOX has an outstanding talent developing in Megan Lynch. She's been used recently to fill in as a news reader, but she shows serious promise, with ability to fit into any slot, including morning drive. Afternoon drive host Carol Daniel has also done well filling in as a call-in host. Compliments should also go to host Charles Jaco, who showed why he's the best talk show host around with his coverage of the crisis in Yugoslavia. His Rolodex is teeming with great contacts, and the listeners were the beneficiaries of his top-notch work.
-Frank Absher
Bias revealed
The Suburban Journals seem to have found their front-page graphics an acceptable place to expound their editorial positions, even when the graphics are part of "news" stories. The above-the-fold graphic on the March 10 cover of the Webster-Kirkwood Journal was a map of the U.S., color-coded by states that have passed laws to allow some citizens to carry concealed weapons in public. However, the key to the map makes their position clear: 31 states are marked "Right to Carry", 12 "Right Restricted-Limited Issue" and seven "Right Infringed-non-issue."
Though what they never explain what they mean by limited issue and non-issue, it is abundantly clear that the editors of the Suburban Journals want their readers to think that carrying concealed weapons is their given right. (We won't be blasphemous and blame God.) "Right infringed?"
It is unfortunate that the Suburban Journals disguised this editorial comment as front-page news.
-Bill Barrett
AM/FM
Steve and D.C. leveraged big contract
By Larry Hoffman
In a climate where radio jobs are becoming ever more scarce, it's a tremendous vote of confidence for Emmis Broadcasting to renew WKKX-FM (106.5) morning duo Steve and D.C. for four more years with reportedly substantially higher salaries plus a signing bonus. The team re-ups as their show holds a steady No. 1 spot in their target demo of listeners 18 to 34. Recent rumors had the pair seeking to displace the Tampa-based MJ & BJ Show on KSLZ-FM (107.7) and it's possible they leveraged their contracts with this prospect.
The Steve and D.C. Show is syndicated to a handful of smaller markets, mostly in the south, and represents the No. 1 morning show in the Emmis corral in St. Louis. Emmis' KSHE-FM (94.7) has slipped to a historic low and sister WXTM-FM (104.1) only shows up well in morning drive with Howard Stern in the No. 3 position 18 to 34.
Calls to Emmis VP and market manager John Beck were not returned by press time.
In the recently released Winter Arbitron ratings measuring St. Louis radio listening from Jan. 7 through March 31, KMOX-AM (1120) captures the 12-plus flag moving to an 11.1 share. The stations' growth came from increases in mornings, middays and evenings. KEZK-FM (102.5) moves up to second place with a 7.1 share, followed by WIL-FM (92.3), KMJM-FM (104.9) and KSLZ-FM (107.7).
Six stations vying in the various rock formats have further fragmented the rock audience. KXOK-FM (97.1) has the largest piece, moving ahead in the rock wars with its new harder-edged classic rock format to 7th place overall. Local observers say the spike is due in part to a more aggressive approach to the format as compared with KSD's take on classic rock. It will take another measurement period or two to see how long the excitement over KXOK lasts. Listeners will recall that KIHT-FM (96.3) first hit the air with the '70s format and had a tremendous book or two before falling off precipitously.
Hard times have hit the market's other rockers during the past year. Heritage rocker KSHE has dropped from 5th to 13th place with listeners 12-plus. WVRV-FM (101.1 The River) is in 14th place, while sister station KPNT-FM (105.7 The Point) has dropped from 6th to 15th place-tied with classic hits KIHT. KSD-FM (93.7 The Mix) has been steadily at the bottom in 18th place following its format change to a more adult, male-oriented music mix.
Morning drive winners: KMOX showed significant growth since Doug McElvein was paired with Nan Wyatt. KMOX now has a 13.8 share with listeners 12-plus, 6.7 shares ahead of the No. 2 morning show on WIL-FM. WKKX-FM took top honors with 25 to 54. As noted above, WKKX-FM was No. 1, 18 to 34, followed by KMJM-FM, WXTM-FM, KXOK-FM and KSHE-FM.
The relatively new trio of Dan Dierdorf, Donn Johnson and Wendy Wiese has not lifted KTRS' morning drive numbers. The station remains in 7th place 12-plus and is mired in 15th place with listeners 25 to 54.
Among the market's urban stations, KMJM-FM held steady as the leader in 5th place 12-plus. Sister stations KATZ-FM (100.3) and KATZ-AM (1600) showed some notable increases.
Overall, with 25-to 54-year-old listeners, CBS-owned KEZK-FM was the leader, while WIL-FM, KMOX-AM, KXOK-FM and KYKY-FM (98.1) rounded out the top 5.
In the aftermath of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Co., local radio coverage ran from excellent to infuriating. KMOX was once again the best place for the most-up-to-the-minute information as details of the tragedy became known that afternoon and evening. Management wisely decided to pick up CBS audio of local coverage from a Denver radio and television station, running only vitally necessary cut-ins such as traffic, national news and station IDs. This is exactly what KMOX did to provide listeners with the best coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake in California in 1989 after the disaster interrupted the World Series broadcast.
Meanwhile, despite access to national feeds of breaking news from NPR, KWMU-FM (90.7), usually my primary station-of-choice during a given day, continued to run its annoying but abbreviated pledge drive, instead of suspending it for one day in the interest of covering the events from Littleton. Needless to say it was one of the more massive tuneouts in recent memory.
Punching around the radio dial yielded little else, except a Denver-based movie reviewer for Frank O. Pinion's show in the afternoon on KTRS-AM (550) who gave a riveting portrayal of local reaction following the calamity. Later on, KTRS' George Noory also covered the story well, with the exception of a guest psychologist from Idaho who tailed off into annoying babbling about some unnamed product she sells. Noory moved on from there and salvaged the first hour of his long shift.
KMOX has announced the addition of Carol Daniel to Charlie Brennan's time slot which is from just after 8:30 a.m. to 11 a.m. Sources close to the station told SJR that adding the popular and bright Daniel will help the show move away from the "NPR sound" that has hurt Brennan's ratings for some time. I expect this change will synergize the time period on KMOX and result in better numbers. Daniel has hosted that slot with John Carney during Brennan's vacations and sounded ready to make the switch even then. She will continue on afternoon drive with Steve Jankowski.
Look for content and pacing changes to occur in the perenially restrained afternoon drive time slot on KMOX. No word on exactly what will be done this time to boost listener interest.
Spill-over sports has found a new home on the FM band with the addition of KZMM-FM (100.7), Troy, Mo. The station, which was country-formatted, is now owned by the same investors who bought KFNS-AM (590 AM). The rationale for better signal coverage of the western reaches of the St. Louis region seems sound. "Spill over" refers to play-by-play of sporting events such as hockey that would normally be carried by KMOX but are displaced by Cardinal baseball to competitors due to inevitable scheduling conflicts.
Jim White's retirement show on KMOX April 9 was worth the entire four hour time commitment. White told one classic Robert Hyland story which occurred six months after White joined "The Voice of St. Louis" in 1969. White said he went in to ask the boss for a raise and Hyland promply got a shopping bag out from under his desk and asked White if he knew what it was. White said that he didn't and Hyland went on to say it contains around 300 tapes and resumes of applicants for White's job and to get the hell out of his office. No doubt the bag was an oft-used prop for similar encounters with other unsuspecting seekers of pay increases.
Another moment of hilarity occurred when Bob Costas called from his cell phone to say he couldn't find the entrance to the restaurant, though he was within a block of the door. An escort was sent out to guide Costas to the venue and he arrived with several bags of "belly bombers" for those remaining at the party at that late hour (11:30 p.m.), including and especially the "Big Bumper" himself.
White continues to file reports from his "circle tour" of the waterways of the southeastern US and will do so through October.
Sources close to Sinclair Broadcasting told SJR that KIHT-FM has voted in AFTRA. This would seem to go against the local trend, especially considering that Jacor is moving to eliminate the union from KLOU-FM within a year. Other AFTRA radio stations locally are WIL-FM and KMOX-AM.
It's always been fascinating to me to scan the classified ads while in other cities on business to see if there are unfilled positions in radio-keeping in mind that most such jobs are found via trade publications.
This past week I opened the Sunday New York Times help wanted ads to find the following position at a well-known radio station in midtown Manhattan: Part time news desk assistant ...entry level opportunities available for P/T news desk assistants at WOR Radio. Responsibilities include assisting anchors by gathering news, editing tape & research. Some journalism or broadcasting experience required. $5.35/hr. There was no mention of room and board being included in that rate of pay.
There were high-energy levels at the KLOU oldies concert earlier last month at Kiel Center. Memorable performances were turned in by legends Lou Christie, Chris Montez, The Tokens, Percy Sledge, the Turtles and headliners The Four Tops.
It was, however, an unusually disorganized and bizarre concert from the perspective of continuity. There was virtually none throughout the evening. Unlike the very successful Riverport Summer Spectacular series which has been running for several years, this show had many uncomfortable moments of the concert equivalent of "dead air." Nobody even had the presence of mind to throw a spotlight on the KLOU banner during these breaks and with few exceptions, the song sets moved from artist to artist without station representatives doing promotions and giving introductions. One source close to the show told SJR that most of the performers weren't in town for the sound checks and essentially showed up "cold" or unrehearsed. As it turned out, the crowd didn't seem to care, especially with the surge of emotion evoked by the Tokens' a capella performance and the slow dancing in an open area on the floor corresponding to "center ice," during Percy Sledge's "When A Man Loves A Woman."
An odd factual error turned up on the AllAccess Web site with a call for ads on an upcoming 30th anniversary edition of "American Top 40." Truth is, the show doesn't turn 30 until July 4, 2000. The show was featured in the May 2 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch with the headline: "After almost 29 years, Casey Kasem is still counting down the hits."
The show first aired on July 4, 1970, originating from a small free-standing building on La Cienega Blvd. in Los Angeles, home of original owner Watermark, Inc. According to the piece in the Post, "AT 40" is now housed in a building on Cahuenga Blvd. near Universal Studios, just off the Hollywood Freeway. The show is now owned by Dallas-based AMFM Networks.
One of the first members of the "AT 40" engineering staff in the early days was former KADI Original Oldies Show jock and on-air partner to Blueberry Hill's Joe Edwards, Peter Dworsky (Skye).
RADIO HISTORY
By Frank Absher
In 1955 downtown St. Louis was teeming with activity, and the Arcade Building was filled with business tenants, including a new one that began operating Jan. 3 of that year. St. Louis Broadcasting signed on with KATZ on that date, and its studios and offices were on the southwest corner of the second floor.
At least one first-hand account notes that the frequency, 1600 kHz, was obtained after it was relinquished by the St. Louis Police Department.
Station manager William Garrett moved to St. Louis from Cape Girardeau, where he had worked in the radio business for the previous 11 years. He reported to Bernice Schwartz, the owner of St. Louis Broadcasting Co. She lived in Chicago.
There was little fanfare in the mainstream press when KATZ went on the air. Daily newspapers printed versions of the official press release: "Aimed at Negro listeners, KATZ will employ Negroes as announcers and as entertainers." Sales manager Robert Hetherington, who came over from WIL, was quoted as saying the station would specialize in "spirituals, rhythm and the blues."
By all accounts, Mrs. Schwartz's operation was a minor success. She sold KATZ two years later for $110,000. The buyer was a national radio chain, Rollins Broadcasting, based in Wilmington, Delaware. Wayne Rollins' company specialized in broadcast properties aimed at the Black community. It was at this time that the KATZ Educational Assistance Fund was established. Made up of educators and social workers from the Black community, the fund raised money and allocated grants to grade and high school students. Subsequent owner Laclede Radio, Inc. continued the effort.
That transfer came in 1960. Just three years after it had bought KATZ, Rollins sold the station for $600,000. During its short ownership, Rollins had managed to increase the station's power from 1000 to 5000 watts.
Laclede held the station until 1986, and the years were rocky. The Arcade Building fell into severe disrepair, forcing the owners to relocate to the Missouri State Bank Building. Lawsuits were traded with other Black format stations in St. Louis over charges of misleading listeners. The local Black Nationalist Movement set up pickets charging all the stations with "directly exploiting black people." (The group demanded three hours of airtime a week devoted to black nationalism programs free from white censorship.)
In 1986, Inter Urban Broadcasting of St. Louis purchased KATZ and its sister FM station, finally bringing them under the ownership umbrella of a local minority-owned company. Today, with KATZ owned by Jacor, only one St. Louis area station is owned by a local minority group: WESL in East St. Louis.
(Last month's article about contained an error. KACO was at 107.5 mHz, which later became the frequency for KKSS. The KKSS frequency was changed to 107.7 in about 1969.)
CHANNELS
Local anchors had no business in Colorado
By Tripp Frohlichstein
There is no debate about the tragic and significant nature of the story of the massacre of students at Columbine High School near Denver, Co. What can be questioned is the need to send local anchors to the scene.
At noon on April 21, the day after the shooting, KMOV (Channel 4)'s Larry Conners reported by phone from the scene. The station then ran a generic report that appeared to be supplied to many stations with a reporter live on camera. A viewer might well wonder why they couldn't get a live picture of Conners.
KSDK (Channel 5) had Deanne Lane live at the scene (on camera).
But, this was not a St. Louis story. Sure, we are all influenced by the horrifying events. But if television stations in St. Louis think it makes a difference sending anchors to the scene, they are mistaken.
I talked to several viewers about this. All felt the stations were trying to exploit the situation. No one felt the local faces could add one iota of information not already supplied via CNN, the networks and the local Colorado stations. One viewer even said it made him angry and claimed he would not watch Channel 4 for a while. When there is a true and significant local connection, it is good to see local talent dispatched to locations outside St. Louis. It brings viewers new perspectives on stories. From what I saw and heard, the local anchors did not contribute local viewers' understanding of the situation any more than any national reporter did ... and arguably, perhaps much less than the longtime Denver reporters.
One of the more fascinating aspects of the media coverage of the shootings in Littleton, Co., was watching how quickly the various outlets began playing the blame game. Within a very few hours, so-called experts were telling us why the massacre might have happened. Among other reasons, we were told the shootings might have spawned from violent movies, violent music, computer games, society in general, violence on the news, bad parents, being hurt by peers, lack of adequate gun control, no guards with guns at the high school (that from Charleton Heston of the NRA-later, USA Today reported it turned out there was a guard with a gun at the high school), WWF wrestling (specifically "The Undertaker" who sometimes wears a long black trenchcoat-type outfit), the school administration for missing "obvious" clues, the Internet, etc.
Perhaps one or more of these theories is correct. But there is so much to choose from.
The difficulty here is how quickly the media trotted out the theorists. The bodies hadn't been removed, the background of the boys was unknown, the hints of the trouble the killers would cause (from diaries and Web sites to a girlfriend allegedly buying firearms) were not yet revealed. What we ended up with in many cases were "network time fillers." These "fillers" were interesting and often engaging, yet provided little concrete evidence. It often seemed like people were using the tragedy to exploit their causes, much as the local stations who sent anchors appeared to use the story to promote themselves, not the story.
Despite the problems, the Denver stations are to be commended. Providing coverage effectively picked up by CNN (the cable news network monitored all of the Denver stations, cutting back and forth depending on what each station was reporting at the time), four stations gave the rest of the country an idea what was happening. Sure, a few mistakes were made-one potentially deadly as an anchor revealed the location of a room in which a student (who called the station) was hiding. Given that televisions were located throughout the school, that was extraordinarily dumb on the part of the anchor. Fortunately, nothing came of it.
Still, overall, the local stations showed a lot of class in covering the event. At one point, a station was airing live pictures as a bloodied student broke a second story window and appeared to be about to fall out in an effort to escape. The station cut away from what might have been tragic video (fortunately, the student was caught by rescuers when he fell and is recovering). Let's hope no such tragedy ever befalls us again. If it does, and it's in our region, I hope (and believe) the local stations can cover the event with the style and grace the Denver stations showed. No sensationalism, minimal speculation. It was, from where we sat in front of our televisions, a job (usually) well done.
In KDNL (Channel 30)'s 10 p.m. news on March 31, Allison Seymour left out an important fact. She told us St. Louis University students were upset over an increase in parking fees. Seymour told viewers the price would go up $90 for most spots but up to $500 for some. What she didn't tell us is was that per day, per week, per month, per semester or per year? It might have helped put the story in context as to why they were so upset. In addition, going up $90 compared to what? If it already cost $2,000, a $90 increase is no big deal. If it cost $80 and is going up to $170, for whatever period of time, that's a big deal.
Channel 30 was unfair to viewers on March 31 as well when Andy Banker reported the story of Norm Stewart's ouster as Mizzou basketball coach after 32 years. He had plenty of reaction but never told us why Missouri was getting rid of Stewart. Only at the end of the story did he promise the "why" later in sports. His story ran high up in the show and should have included that very basic fact. Making people stay tuned smacks of pure promotionalism instead of solid reporting. Of course, the next day, Stewart announced he was not ousted but decided it was time to retire.
"And you see we have some youngsters here who have been making a lot of noise this evening" was the quote from a man hosting a Passover Seder on KTVI (Channel 2) at 10 p.m. on March 31. He pointed out they have been doing it for years as well. So what relevance did that quote have (we never saw any noisy kids in the pictures shown)? None. Another job of either lazy or sloppy editing. Why, instead, didn't they have him talk more about the significance of the celebration to the family or the Jewish community?
Channel 30 weathercaster Susan Hyland didn't explain the concept of the rarity of the second Blue Moon in March very well. A blue moon is the name given to the moon the second time it is full within a month (this year, we had blue moons in January and March). She told viewers the last time this occurred, referring to a blue moon, was 1915. What she meant to say, but didn't, was that was the first time we have had two months with blue moons in one calendar year since 1915. Blue moon months occur once in a year far more frequently. Dave Murray, though, had a different story. He said the last year with two blue moons was much more recent than 1915. Murray did not return a phone call.
Finally, a programming note. You know it's time for "Mad About You" to end its run when the episode description in the April 26, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reads, "Paul takes Jamie's favorite dress to the drycleaner." Wow. Perhaps in the final few weeks, we'll see episodes in which Jamie changes a light bulb and another in which Paul walks into the kitchen to get a beer.
Pioneering women journalists announce retirement from Post
By Joe Pollack
If you lump the years together, I've known Joan Foster Dames and Sue Ann Wood for more than a century, and their retirements from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch will leave a major void in St. Louis newspaper history, and even a larger space in its lore and legend.
Two more different people have never existed, Joan, excitable and impetuous, an excellent editor though she sometimes tended to go off in all directions at once, Sue Ann, calm and deliberate and always clearly focused, with the ability to deliver incisive, delightful one-liners. I have been pleased to know them through the years, to watch them carve special niches and to be true pioneers in a business that did not always take kindly to women.
I knew them on different bases. Joan Dames, a co-worker at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, was features editor and my immediate superior when I went to the Post in July 1972, and she remained so until 1979, when she was succeeded by Harper Barnes. Joan then became travel editor and a columnist, shedding the travel editor's chores in 1992.
Sue Ann, on the other hand, was the first person with whom I had a real conversation in the town of Columbia, in the state of Missouri. Oh, I had spoken with my landlady, but that didn't count. I lived at the very edge of Columbia in those dim days of 1947, with a plant nursery and then farms across the street stretching westward all the way to the dragons lurking at the edge of the earth.
On the warm September morning after I arrived, I went to the campus to register and to go through freshman orientation, to take some placement tests and things, and to learn about being a college student. At the end of the line-"P to Z" said the sign above it-was a young woman.
It was Sue Ann Wood, a freshman from Jefferson City and, like me, 16-years-old and a pre-journalism student. Over the next few years, we were in a great many classes together, in both the Arts and Sciences curriculum and in the School of Journalism. Sue Ann was a sorority girl, a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma, which I discovered was an extremely prestigious organization on campus. I shied away from that routine, but hardly a day went by when our paths didn't cross.
We both went south for jobs after graduation, she to St. Petersburg, Fla., I to Jackson, Miss. Small Southern cities in those days-maybe still today -were the minor leagues of journalism, where young journalists had the chance to gain a large amount of experience and very little money before striking out for larger cities and greener pastures. Interestingly, our starting salaries were the same $50 a week, at the Jackson Daily News in 1952, at the St. Petersburg Times two years later.
In 1955, however, we both wound up at the Globe, where she remained for almost 30 years, climbing from reporter and rewrite person to managing editor, the second woman to earn that title at a major metropolitan newspaper. The first was the late Carol Sutton, a St. Louisan, whom we both knew at Mizzou and who became managing editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1974.
Sue Ann was an elegant rewrite artist, from the days when reporters called in their notes and people like Sue Ann and Peter Goldman made sense-and often golden prose-of the words of Ralph Wagner, John Kinsella, Ed James, John Hines and many others. She was more than just a fine rewrite person; she was equally good as a reporter, feature writer and editor, and excellent company for conversation-serious or frivolous-over a drink.
Joan was Joan Foster when I joined the Globe, and she was selling advertising. Soon she took a pay cut to became a writer in what was known as the women's department. It may have been work that was considered second-rate by some, but it was a place to learn about the movers and shakers of the city, to find out where the bodies were buried and which ones could be exhumed. She learned, but after she married Urban Dames in 1959, an event that presaged the tornado that ripped through Gaslight Square and the American Newspaper Guild strike against the Globe, she interrupted her newspaper career to rear four children (she now has three grandchildren, too). When I next caught up with her, she was at the Post as women's editor, then features editor, where she was the first woman in the newspaper's history to hold the title.
We disagreed on a number of things-my thinking on many issues was considerably left of hers, and we also had the usual arguments that crop up between editor and reporter. She could be convinced, however, of another point of view, and so could I, and that helped. On the only occasion that the disagreement hardened to granite, we agreed to let then-Managing Editor Evarts Graham decide and to abide by his decision. He decided, we abided and the subject never was mentioned again.
As far as I recall, she only killed two of my stories, one before the event was covered, much less written about. She assigned me to the VP Ball in my rookie year with the Post (it was a task all rookies got), but when I announced the lead I was preparing, she decided to send Gary Ronberg (also a rookie) instead. It was my loss, because that was the year Gena Scott unmasked the VP and provided Ronberg with a number of good stories, though the Post never did identify Tom K. Smith as the Mighty Potentate with the red dancing slippers. The other involved a lunchtime interview with Miss Nude America. Joan originally approved the assignment, but changed her mind after I wrote the story. The pictures are still around, and before the world changed, were occasionally shown off to cheer the newsroom on a bleak day.
But don't call me-I don't have them.
Anyone who worked for Joan remembered her good qualities and bad, and remembered them well. She had a habit of considering the story in her hand (we wrote on paper then) as the best she'd ever seen, a consideration that lasted until she put it down and picked up the next one.
Best of all, however, was her habit of fighting like a mother hen for her staff if anyone outside the Post, or even outside the department, got cranky and complained. As a young restaurant critic, I created a lot of cranky people. After Graham retired, things changed. Joan and other department heads got the message that it was not a good thing to fight for your troops, or even to speak loudly in their defense. I may be
wrong, but I think that attitude was the beginning of schisms among the Post staff, and also the first small step in the slow, but inexorable downward slide that grips the newspaper today.
Joan and Sue Ann were not only good people, but also people of great loyalty, and through the years, they showed that elegant quality to employees who honored them and to employers who often did not reply in kind. Newspapers are poorer for their departure.
Post's Washington bureau finds new niche
By Kathy Bratkowski
A few years ago, the future of the Washington D.C. bureau of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch seemed in question as talk circulated of trimming staff or closing the doors altogether. Then the paper's Washington reporters found-or were granted-a new niche in the Pulitzer Corporation as on-air correspondents for the company's television stations.
At the time, editors convinced management that there was justification for the bureau's existence because of the ability to supply TV feeds from the nation's capital to stations then owned by Pulitzer. Now that Hearst-Argyle has bought those broadcast stations, that justification for the bureau's existence seems to have disappeared into thin air.
But don't assume the Washington Bureau is on the endangered list. The bureau has found a new niche, which makes use of the broadcast equipment still intact at the Washington office-providing live feeds and remotes to local station KMOV (Channel 4).
Arnie Robbins, managing editor of the Post, says that the paper's management is pleased with the work of the reporters at the Washington bureau. "There is no interest in reducing the number of people in the Washington bureau. Our mission is to have their reports on page 1A of the paper instead of 9A," says Robbins.
In the past several weeks, Channel 4 has aired at least one pre-taped phone interview with Washington bureau reporter Phil Dine in Albania. Meanwhile, the bureau has a new hire, Dierdre Shesgreen, replacing Tim Poor, who has returned to St. Louis to become the paper's Nation/World team leader. Shesgreen, a former reporter for Legal Times, will cover Congress and Missouri and Illinois cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The 10 p.m. Channel 4 reports are ultimately more useful because they are seen by potential subscribers and current readers of the Post, according to Washington correspondent Jon Sawyer. "It's a great way to let an audience that doesn't read bylines know that there is a Washington Bureau," says Sawyer. "It's simply a way of parlaying our experience of doing broadcasts into something closer to home." And the newspaper version of the story can be promoted as viewers are urged to read more in the next morning's edition of the Post.
Robbins essentially agrees. "I'm not sure if there's more value or less," says Robbins. "But this helps the Post increase its portfolio of print and television and other products."
Although the future of the bureau seems secure, there are no plans to provide feeds to any other television stations. The Channel 4 reports "evolved" from a strategy formed before the sale of the nine television stations and five radio stations to Hearst-Argyle-to take advantage of links to the then-broader Pulitzer organization, according to Sawyer. So, at the moment, there does not seem to be a formal management strategy designed to make use of the bureau's TV equipment or the reporters' on-air experience.
Nevertheless, the Washington bureau still has a stationary camera, a set backdrop, and a satellite link begging to be used. The reports for Channel 4 have been less frequent than the feeds to Pulitzer stations, averaging one every week or two. In contrast, Sawyer estimates that over the past two years, Washington reporters provided as many as 800 live feeds to the former Pulitzer stations, at a rate of two to three per week.
Those reports trailed off gradually during October and November as the sale of the TV and radio stations appeared imminent and then stopped completely when the $1.85 billion sale was finalized in March. Joan Hellyer, former broadcast coordinator for the Washington bureau, resigned in October and has not been replaced.
So while the Channel 4 broadcasts are giving the reporters at the Washington bureau a fair amount of local exposure and a chance to promote themselves to a St. Louis audience, the nationwide stint seems to be over. That is, unless management plans change at the Post, and in these days of massive restructuring at the paper, most anything is possible.
Kathy Bratkowski is a St. Louis free-lance writer.
SPORTS/MEDIA
Mike Smith out as sports editor
By Joe Pollack
Mike Smith is not the sports editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch any more, but as far as the newspaper's sports department, and other members of the local sports media establishment are concerned, well, it's probably time to start printing World Series and Super Bowl tickets, and maybe Stanley Cup finals tickets, too, though given sports logistics, the latter probably are already printed, and just awaiting distribution.
The Cardinals' lengthy trip was a success, and their 8-3 record deserves praise. Kent Bottenfield, 4-0 in the early going, is a joy to watch. He looks like a pitcher for the neighborhood tavern's slow-pitch softball team, and his own pitches don't travel much faster. I hope his collection of junk gets him around the league a couple of more times because he's a hero object to people like me.
At the same time, I don't think we can hope that Bottenfield, Kent Mercker, Jose Jimenez, Darren Oliver and Donovan Osborne can be a pennant-winning group. If they do it, however, just think of the mileage we have received from a pitching staff of two Kents, a Darren, a Donovan and Jose Jimenez, probably still better known as a Bill Dana comedy routine.
In terms of offense, well, I worry about Mike Shannon adding Joe McEwing to his all-star team of players who hustle but who are otherwise not quite good enough. People like Rex Hudler and McEwing are joke fodder for Shannon, who seems to make fun of them in the midst of his extravagant praise. At the same time, Shannon is busy polishing the Hall of Fame plaque for J.D. Drew. Drew may turn out to be an excellent baseball player, maybe even of Hall of Fame caliber, but let's give him a break. The media here are putting almost as much pressure for stardom on him as they do for Mark McGwire, and McGwire can handle that sort of pressure. Don't know about Drew, but right now he seems to be over-eager, making mental mistakes on defense, swinging at too many bad pitches.
For the moment, Tony La Russa's map for victory is a picture of five struggling innings from a starter and a committee of bullpen pitchers providing an inning or so. That may win games, but it removes one of the great game-watching qualities of baseball, the pitchers' duel with two supreme starters battling one another down the stretch. The relief parade can be boring, but less so if the Cardinals win.
On the football field, get ready to be fooled again, but this time we have a first-round draft choice, Torry Holt, who is good to the memory of his mother and a happy selection for writers like Bernie Miklasz and Jim Thomas, who love stories about athletes taking menial jobs, and who really love tear-jerking sentences like, "Mom, I'm going to play in the NFL." (Thomas' italics). Whether Marshall Faulk ever signs, is another story.
With all the help the Rams need, it seems strange to me to use a top choice on a wide receiver. Of all the positions on a pro football team, wide receiver is the easiest in terms of going from college to the pros. There's less to learn at that spot than anywhere else on the team, a reason free agents and low draft choices often excel as pass-catching rookies.
I was slightly surprised when the Rams passed on Champ Bailey to take Holt. because the Rams certainly need some corner-backs, but I was astonished when Dick Vermeil, or maybe it was Charley Armey, noted that Bailey was a little small to be an NFL corner. That rationale is okay, but if you want me to buy into it, don't then draft a 5-9 player like Rich Coady on the third round.
Given the dilution of sports pennant races by extra divisions, more wild cards and the like, the Cardinals might make it to some sort of post-season play, but only if Ray Lankford, Fernando Tatis and McGwire stay healthy. Best deal of La Russa's career, by the way, was acquiring Shawon Dunston, who has played shortstop, first base and the outfield, and hit with power, too.
No reason was announced, of course, for Smith's departure, but he apparently came up crosswise against new Editor Cole Campbell, and that was that. Smith had been in the job more than a decade as an administrator, schedule-maker and operations manager. The inside guy, like Smith, is different from the outside guy, or Bernie Miklasz. At the moment, it seems that Marsha Sanguinette and Don Reed will share the sports editor post, both of them answering to Margaret Freivogel, who is the captain of the Post's new sports-and-culture team.
By the way, we're getting ready to assign colors and names and mascots, for all the Post's new teams, and will take suggestions-jocks and smocks, maybe, or spit and polish, or anything you can think of. Send the suggestions. We'll print the best-and the worst, too.
The saddest sports story of recent time is the tale of women's professional basketball, with the American Basketball League players tossed into the gutter the way a pimp would discard a prostitute when she can no longer bring in the tricks-and the cash.
This may sound harsh, but it certainly seems true. The ABL, which banked on good talent (and good salaries) to make its league a success, lost the war to the Women's National Basketball Association, which had the money, and the television connections, and the NBA's giant advertising budget and marketing skills, and the larger cities, and the glitz. But the WNBA owners got their pound of flesh, and then some, as the reward for victory. A WNBA team may sign only two former ABL players, though some loosening of the restriction may come later. That means a lot of the one-time ABL stars will be playing in Europe, or not playing at all, even though they're better than their WNBA counterparts. The WNBA is even holding open tryouts in the flesh market for the new season. It's as if the National League folded and Mark McGwire had to go into open tryouts for a job in the American League.
The ABL players are being punished for having the audacity to sign where they did. I'm looking forward to the first lawsuit. When the ABL was bludgeoned to death by the NBA and its girls' league, the WNBA, 90 good basketball players were tossed summarily out of work. A maximum of 40, no matter how good they are, will be hired by the WNBA under the new arrangement, and you can bet they'll be treated like stepchildren and probably be made to beg for their jobs.
At the same time, the WNBA owners used the victory to hold down salaries and available jobs for women coming out of college this year. There will not be as many places open. The NBA Players' Association now is representing the women as well as the men, and I only hope it does a better job, though you can bet it won't. The NBA players talked tough when they were locked out, but when the owners threatened to use replacement players (read scabs), the players folded like a pair of treys in a no-limit poker game. With this additional leverage, and a lot more players seeking jobs, the owners are fighting against a raise in the WNBA minimum salary, which last year was a disgraceful $25,000 a year. The figure is not disgraceful by itself-many people live on it and rear children, too-but when you realize that kind of money is not enough to buy shoeshines for the men in the league, we have a pretty sorry situation.
The NBA owners, using all their weapons, have "informally" indicated to the players that they may think about replacement players (read former ABL players) in the WNBA and apparently are driving a wedge between different groups of players. Some of the more elite stars, with guaranteed contracts and some endorsement opportunities, are more aligned with the owners than they are with their fellow-players.
Boy, is that a sure way to kill the golden goose!
And ain't sports wonderful!
Untimely death of Mark Peterson touches Post staff
By Joe Pollack
Mark Peterson, a solid, dependable reporter and editor for three St. Louis news organizations for more than 15 years, died suddenly April 9 of an apparent heart attack. The 44-year-old Peterson collapsed after taking part in a hockey game with colleagues and some former Blues players at Kiel Center; a Blues trainer and paramedics applied CPR, but he was pronounced dead at St. Louis University Hospital.
Peterson, whose wife, Deborah, is a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, was a native of Des Plaines, Ill., and a graduate of Southern Illinois University. He also attended the University of Wisconsin where he was a varsity hockey player. In recent years he also was active as a coach of youth hockey and basketball teams.
The Petersons met in Springfield, Ill., when she was working for the AP and he was an intern at UPI while working on a master's degree at Sangamon State University, now the University of Illinois at Springfield. They married in 1981 and moved to Kansas City, he with the AP and she with the Kansas City Star. They moved to St. Louis in 1984 when he was assigned to the AP bureau here, and she went to work for the Post, serving as a reporter, feature writer and assistant city editor.
Peterson joined the St. Louis Sun as a news editor when the paper began publication in 1989, and was assistant managing editor when it folded. He then moved to the Post, working as a reporter and as Illinois editor. Most recently, he was assistant business editor. In addition to his wife, two sons and a daughter survive.
The family requested memorial donations to the Kirkwood Athletic Association, 2377 Marshall Road, Kirkwood, Mo. 63122; the Kirkwood Youth Hockey Association, Kirkwood Recreation Center, 111 South Geyer Road, Kirkwood, Mo. 63122; or the American Heart Association, 4643 Lindell Boulevard, St. Louis, Mo. 63108.
Maybe housing shouldn't be priority in redeveloping downtown St. Louis
By Joe Frank and Dennis Judd
While civic boosters call downtown St. Louis "the heart of the region," few residents of the metropolitan area view it that way. Instead, they see downtown as the place where sports teams play and where the Gateway Arch looms up as a symbol of the region. Despite its status as one of the most striking urban monuments in the world, the city that it signifies has a downtown that has long ceased to be a vibrant center.
Retailing has dispersed to suburban malls. The development of the St. Louis Centre shopping mall in the 1980s obliterated many street-level business locations that had contributed to the unique character of downtown. St. Louis Centre's trajectory-early success, now failing-shows how hard it is for a traditional mall in the downtown to compete with the suburbs. The St. Louis Galleria has free parking, more stores than St. Louis Centre, and is strategically located at the junction of two interstate highways. It's near the county seat and very near the areas of highest median income and highest property values in the metropolitan St. Louis area. The one kind of retailing succeeding in downtown is Union Station, a festival mall that brings activities indoors, off the streets.
Although St. Louis's city hall is located downtown, the local government center serving the largest part of the metropolitan population, St. Louis County, is six miles west in Clayton, integrated into a major satellite business district. Corporate headquarters have been marching steadily west along highway 40, forming a corridor with two anchors, Clayton on the east and Chesterfield on the west. Cultural institutions are essential to St. Louis's vitality, but except for the shuttered Kiel Opera House, whose renovation is curiously opposed by civic leaders, the major ones are not located in the downtown either, with the science, history and art museums located in and near Forest Park. St. Louis University and the Grand Center are closer, but not within walking distance.
In many cities a major campus or two contribute to downtown street life, but in St. Louis even the two public urban universities are miles away.
If downtown St. Louis is going to experience a renaissance, an urban culture will have to be created out of whole cloth, without the supporting cluster of institutions that, in many cities, nurture a lively street life and cultural milieu.
The task is daunting because the infrastructure of St. Louis' downtown is not ideal for a revived urban culture. Downtown St. Louis is dominated by stadiums, office towers and indoor shopping malls which turn away from the street, creating a magnificent skyline view for passing motorists and airline passengers, but providing little stimulation to the pedestrian on a downtown sidewalk. According to Roberta Gratz and Norman Mintz, St. Louis is a city "where so much of the one-time urban fabric is gone ... a city that believes real progress is defined by demolishing old and building new, St. Louis continues to let much of what is left of its notable older commercial buildings crumble away." They add, in St. Louis, "A corporate center exists, for sure, rebuilt, clean and dull. Business districts, like downtown St. Louis, lack a steady flow of people on the street to give them life."
Most downtown evening activity occurs in isolated nodes, inside the Union Station shopping center, the America's Center complex, the Kiel Center, Busch Stadium and the Trans World Dome. These large facilities are connected to each other and to outlying park ride lots by MetroLink. However, all of these facilities, like the Gateway Arch, have separate parking, are near interstate highway ramps and provide little incentive for walking downtown. The little late-night activity that there is in downtown St. Louis occurs in the club district along Washington Avenue and in Laclede's Landing.
Some intersections downtown do not have crosswalk signals, and the walk from the Arch grounds or Laclede's Landing to the downtown core is especially treacherous because of I-70 and its access ramps which separate the riverfront area from the downtown core. Many other downtown streets, particularly Market street, Olive street and Tucker Blvd., are too wide to encourage street life. Because pedestrian traffic is so light, businesses outside the major nodes cannot stay open after 6 p.m., so that after dark the downtown has the desolate and ominous feel of a noir movie.
It is commonly thought that the only way to turn this situation around is to bring housing to downtown. The St. Louis 2004 organization has placed high on its list for downtown revitalization plans "developing 2,004 units of market-rate housing and resident amenities." Likewise, the major goal of downtown St. Louis redevelopment planners since 1993 has been to "expand significantly the amount of housing in and adjacent to downtown." Living downtown is being actively promoted by the Downtown Now! team, a group of consultants hired by the St. Louis Development Corporation. The strategy of Downtown Now!, sometimes called the Mayor's Downtown Development Action Plan, focuses on a market-driven program to make downtown St. Louis "a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week urban center, a sustainable community where people live, work, shop and enjoy a full range of recreational activities in a safe, pedestrian-friendly environment."
The idea that housing may drive the revival of the downtown has some plausibility. In 1998, the Brookings Institution reported "a population boom happening in many downtowns across the country," ranging from projected downtown population increases of one percent for Los Angeles to over 300 percent in Houston between 1998 and 2010. Comparisons among cities using the Brookings' figures are hazardous because they were not based on a standardized definition of downtown; each city was free to use its own. This does not undermine the basic point, however-housing seems to be coming back into downtown areas, and it may be an essential ingredient in reviving the urban core for some cities.
And there is, in principle, a market in St. Louis. Living downtown is convenient for people who work downtown. Former warehouses remade into loft apartments in downtown St. Louis provide a more stimulating living environment than conventional apartments. The unique forms and vast expanses of natural light made possible by the spaces inside historical warehouses such as those along Washington Avenue in St. Louis are attractive to artists. Because artists are considered an avant-garde group, often the areas where artists settle become attractive to young professionals because they are interesting, exciting districts of intense activity.
Current housing in downtown
To determine how many people now live in downtown St. Louis, it is, of course, necessary to define just what amounts to the downtown. The Downtown Now! planning team in 1997 defined downtown St. Louis as "bounded by Cass Avenue, Chouteau Avenue, the Mississippi River and Jefferson Avenue." These boundaries form a rectangle of about four square miles. Using these boundaries, Downtown Now! found that 8,226 people were living in downtown. The 1998 Brookings Institution report used almost identical boundaries, but came up with a somewhat lower figure of 7,860. Brookings also projected that the downtown population by 2010 would rise to 10,360.
The citywide neighborhoods' planning map was developed in 1989 by the St. Louis Community Development Agency (CDA). CDA defines Downtown, or the Central Business District, as the area west of the Mississippi River, north of Chouteau Avenue, east of Tucker Boulevard and south of Cole St., Interstate 70 and Carr Street. The CDA's definition of downtown also includes the Downtown West neighborhood, which is the area south of Cole Street, west of Tucker Blvd., east of Jefferson Ave. and north of Chouteau Ave. This is a far more defensible definition of downtown than the more expansive one employed by Downtown Now! and by Brookings. Carr Square, Columbus Square and Old North St. Louis, all north of the America's Center but south of Carr Street, are spatially, socially and economically isolated from the downtown core. They consist primarily of historical two- and four-family residential buildings, public housing complexes and market-rate, low-rise apartment complexes. They are mostly African-American, and mostly low-income. Cole Street forms a formidable barrier in that sense.
As of the 1990 census, 3,687 people lived in the CBD and Downtown West, as defined by the CDA. This is less than one percent of the 1990 population of the City of St. Louis (396,685), and about one-tenth of one percent of the St. Louis Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) 1990 population of 2,492,525.
Most of these residents were single and childless. Ordinarily, such as profile in a downtown would lead to the guess that they were Yuppies, but not so in St. Louis. Median incomes were substantially lower than the metropolitan average, indicating that downtown St. Louis was not a prestigious address. The population was also older than the average; the 55-to 64-age range dominated, particularly west of Tucker where there were several age 50-plus apartment buildings. Seventy-one percent of downtown residents east of Tucker and 93.5 percent west of Tucker lived in buildings of 50 residential units or more. There were fewer than 10 owner-occupied houses in both neighborhoods.
The problems
St. Louis faces a classic chicken-or-egg dilemma if it wants to use housing as a strategy for downtown development. Downtown St. Louis's core area suffers from a lack of the retail services and amenities needed to attract and retain residents. How do you entice people to live downtown in the absence of services and amenities? How do you attract service businesses and build amenities without a resident population to use them?
To be successful, downtown residential developments need retailers willing to serve them. The current residents of the Loft District "are just very strong people," according to Tim Tucker, a downtown St. Louis property developer. They are willing to endure the lack of convenient services in return for reasonably priced housing which is in "a location unique in the St. Louis metropolitan area."
According to Blake Brokaw, a Washington Avenue Loft District club owner quoted in the Riverfront Times, "We call ourselves a loft district, but there's not that many lofts. Unless you're an artist or want to drive to the ghetto Schnucks, why would you come downtown to live? There's no shopping, very little place to park, no laundromat, nothing like that. We need to make it more of a neighborhood. Make it a little more livable." The 1994 Development Strategies downtown worker survey mentioned that "a convenient supermarket must be developed in or very near downtown in order to assure the success of future (and, perhaps, present) downtown housing developments."
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported in 1998 that "John Coines has shuttered his Upper Crust restaurant [in the Central West End] ... He plans to reopen as an outdoor cafe and 'semi-organic food' market at 16th and Washington in the loft district 'as soon as the plumbers are finished,' sometime in early '99." This is the type of retail establishment that will be important to downtown housing. If businesses other than lunchtime-only restaurants and nightclubs do not open downtown, it will be impossible to attract any significant residential population to downtown St. Louis. Although a dozen or so clubs are located on the Washington Avenue and Locust Street corridor, there are only a few restaurants, Erlich's dry cleaners, Amitin's Books, Levine Hat, the Mossa Center furniture and gifts, several clothing and shoe stores, the Elephant Walk African gift shop and a beauty salon. There is retail on Washington Avenue, but it is not clear whether it is the remainder of a once-vital district, or the beginning of a revitalized district. It is unlikely the retail district on Washington Avenue will develop rapidly enough to support a significant influx of resident population.
John Boul, of the St. Louis Mayor's Office, has expressed the view that housing will not be built downtown as a result of market processes alone. "I don't know of a formula or mechanism for starting businesses in an area where the owner doesn't think they'll survive ... Once we see the convention hotel completed, things around the [old] post office coming around, it will attract those ancillary businesses. I don't see any way that they could grow but naturally. As the residential base grows, so will the amenities." Indeed, this assumption underlies all the recent studies supporting a housing strategy for revival.
The studies
Three major studies were completed regarding downtown St. Louis housing during the mid-1990s. These included a 1994 survey of downtown workers by Development Strategies, a February 1998 market potential study based on census data and Internal Revenue Service mobility data supplied by Zimmerman/Volk Associates, and a July 1998 phase-two market potential study by ZHA, Inc.
The 1994 survey by Development Strategies was conducted on behalf of Downtown St. Louis, Inc. (which has now given way to Downtown Now!). It indicated a market of "at least 8.0 percent of the 92,000 downtown employees ... interested in living downtown, or about 7,360 people. This is a substantial number on which to base a further planning and financing program." In that survey, an area north of Union Station and just west of Plaza Square was the most preferred location for living downtown. Interestingly, this is the area that was residential until the urban renewal era. The study was vague on the precise mix of public effort and private financing that might be necessary.
A February 1998 study by Zimmerman/Volk Associates suggested four target areas for housing development downtown: the Laclede's Landing/ Riverside North area, Washington Ave. Loft District, Cupples Station and the area around the Eugene Field House south of Busch Stadium. This study, based on mobility data for a draw area composed of St. Louis City and County, Jefferson County, St. Charles County in Missouri and St. Clair County in Illinois, determined that "approximately 9,300 of the [530,000] qualified draw area households represent the potential market for new housing units" in downtown St. Louis. Of those draw area households, "approximately 4,200 comprise the pool of potential renters/purchasers of new housing units at the proposed Laclede's Landing [and Riverside North] neighborhood; nearly 2,000 for rental and for-sale lofts and apartments in the Washington Ave. Loft District; 1,900, the potential market for rental apartments at Cupples Station; and more than 6,300 households for various housing types at the Eugene Field House neighborhood." In total, then, 14,400 "draw area" households were identified. Downtown would have to entice an extraordinary proportion of them to move to make a downtown housing strategy work.
A study conducted in July 1998 by ZHA, Inc. delved deeper into the potential Zimmerman/Volk claims about the market. ZHA concluded, "None of the downtown market-rate housing development projects evaluated are feasible without public and/or private subsidies and incentives." Of those subsidies, "only the Historic Preservation Tax Credits appear to offer returns that meet the feasibility requirements for all projects eligible for the incentive, but few projects are eligible for this incentive." Thus ZHA determined bundling various types of incentives would be necessary for downtown housing developments to be feasible, and that a clearinghouse organization should be established to coordinate such funding plan.
On Laclede's Landing and Riverside North, a variety of "incentive bundles" could be used depending "in which specific area the cohesive Laclede's Landing neighborhood should be developed." In the Washington Avenue Loft District, "currently available Historic Preservation Tax Credits alone can dramatically improve the projected feasibility for the adaptive reuse rental and for-sale loft development projects." New construction in the Loft District, though, would need "tax abatement, patient equity and zero-interest construction loans." Cupples Station adaptive reuse, too, "appear[s] to achieve feasibility through the use of Historic Preservation Tax Credits alone," although other incentives may be necessary there.
ZHA recommended that the Eugene Field House area "should be strongly considered for residential development only after the downtown housing market has matured." Since "market conditions do not currently support residential development in this area without extraordinary incentives," ZHA recommended the Eugene Field House area development be held back "until such time as reasonable incentives can produce sufficient housing development." ZHA effectively eliminated from consideration the market of 6,300 households proposed by Zimmerman/Volk, taking the estimated potential for downtown St. Louis housing, in three concentrated districts, to be 3,000 new households.
Downtown Now! planners insist the downtown action plan must be market-driven. According to Downtown Now!, the first phase of new downtown residents will be risk-tolerant households, primarily SINKs (single income no kids) and DINKs (double income no kids), mostly in their 20s and 30s, interested in the urban lifestyle and employed in professional occupations. Artists will continue to be part of the Loft District population, although some may choose to move farther west along the Washington and Locust corridors, to cheaper studio spaces in smaller industrial buildings. Some 50-plus empty-nesters will probably be attracted too, since many already live downtown.
The Downtown Now! public workshops revealed an overall downtown plan focused on five districts: Laclede's Landing, Riverside North, the Washington Ave. Loft District, the Old Post Office Square or CBD Core and the Gateway Mall. At the July 1998 public workshop, a total of 3,386 housing units was proposed for these focus areas downtown:
100 loft apartments and 144 new apartments on Laclede's Landing;
480 new apartments, 150 new condominiums and 190 new townhouses on Riverside North;
700 rental lofts, 300 for-sale lofts, 200 new apartments, and 100 new condominiums in the Washington Avenue Loft District;
390 lofts and 560 new apartments (in phase II of the downtown plan) for the Old Post Office Square/CBD Core; and
72 luxury high-rise condominiums overlooking the Gateway Mall.
Most of these 1,742 housing units would be constructed in phase I of the plan, over a five-year period from 1999 to 2004.
The Downtown Now! plan would substantially speed up the current pace of housing construction downtown. According to a Post inventory of September 1998, 377 apartment units were being constructed downtown, plus an unknown number in a renovated Cupples Station and some extended-stay hotel rooms. These included the Mark Twain Hotel at 9th and Pine Streets, which was renovating space for 238 low-cost, single rooms for extended stays; the renovation of the Marquette Building at 314 N. Broadway at Olive, for 130 apartments and 10 penthouse apartments, the renovation of the Edison Brothers warehouse at 400 South 14th Street for 80 condominiums and some hotel suites.
Apartment renovations were also being undertaken by McCormack and Baron at Cupples Station and 9th and Spruce Streets. Along the Washington Avenue corridor, several developments were in various stages of work, including the Sporting News building (originally the Emerson Electric Co. factory) at 2018 Washington Avenue, which would have 84 rental lofts, the Merchandise Mart Annex at 10th Street south of Washington Avenue, with 34 rental lofts, a renovation of 1627 Washington Ave., which would produce 16 rental lofts for graduates of Washington University's fine arts programs and 10 other rental lofts, and a renovation of 1224 Washington Avenue, to have 13 rental lofts. These projects are important test cases for the market for housing in downtown St. Louis; they do show that there is interest in development, at least during a period of nationwide economic prosperity.
It seems unlikely that the market alone will bring much housing into downtown St. Louis. Even public financing is not likely to turn the corner. Although it is hard to get specific financial figures, it appears the cost of "gap financing" necessary for enticing developers may be too high to be practical. Gap financing may not result in substantial ultimate local economic benefit (i.e., increased retail sales downtown), because housing downtown is unlikely to attract enough residents. The economic benefit and general feasibility studies for housing downtown have yet to be completed by the various consultants charged with that task. The numerical data are very weak supporting downtown housing development. The Zimmerman/Volk study from February 1998 uses mobility data for metropolitan St. Louis to infer that people would be willing to move to downtown St. Louis. The United States is a highly mobile culture. The fact that people in the St. Louis metropolitan area move frequently is not surprising. It is a non sequitur to claim a particular level of mobility means downtown St. Louis can attract certain percentages of that mobile market. Yet that appears to be a key part of the Z/V "proprietary target market methodology."
Downtown housing does not even benefit from a coordinated marketing campaign. The St. Louis Development Corporation and the CDA cannot take on the task because they do not have a source of local funds, and they are not allowed to engage in marketing with federal dollars. Instead, a private foundation is being established, called the City Living Foundation, but it is unclear how much this organization will engage in promoting downtown housing. The Downtown St. Louis Partnership, which promotes the general idea of having people live downtown, does not actively engage in marketing campaigns. Metropolis St. Louis, a group that promotes young people living in the city, has sponsored tours of different downtown living options. The St. Louis Core newspaper is an unabashed promoter of living, working and playing in downtown St. Louis. Without more coordinated and better-funded efforts, however, it is hard to see how marketing will reach much of the population targeted by Downtown Now!
Downtown housing may not be as important as strengthening residential neighborhoods in the one to two mile-wide band surrounding the downtown, areas in which there already is or could be some degree of retail and service base. Several of these organizations already have active resident organizations. Lafayette Square, LaSalle Park and Soulard have been successfully restored, rehabilitated and considerably gentrified. Peripheral areas of those neighborhoods, like the Gate District and the Darst-Webbe redevelopment area, are being strengthened with new construction and rehabilitation. The St. Louis Place, Old North St. Louis and JeffVanderLou areas should be considered for new developments. Downtown St. Louis and its surrounding neighborhoods need each other. According to Chris Dornfeld, architect, "Without downtown the neighborhoods become just an older version of [suburban] Chesterfield." Although this may be an exaggeration, it is clear that a stronger downtown St. Louis can help adjacent neighborhoods attract residents.
Rethinking the housing strategy
Housing cannot be the leading strategy for the revival of downtown St. Louis. A large amount of housing is not absolutely essential to the revival of downtown St. Louis. In all but a few U.S. cities, the turnaround of downtown occured when it was made hospitable to tourists and suburban commuters. This was done in two ways. Big investments were made in such big-ticket items as convention centers, sports stadiums, festival malls and renovated waterfronts. Cities also subsidized historic districts, entertainment districts, and cultural districts. Parks, museums, and performance halls constitute the current wave of investment. All these components are necessary to create the elements making up an urban culture than defines the central cities as different from the suburbs, or from anywhere else, for that matter.
It is also essential to create the "connective tissues"-vest-pocket parks, safe pedestrian crossings, street furniture, wide sidewalks, and cleaner streets-that tie the separate pieces together. Where the spaces for urban culture have been knit together, tourists and suburbanites flock into the cities to experience an urban culture as exotica. In St. Louis, as in many other places, downtown housing will follow, not lead, the urban renaissance.
Joe Frank is a graduate student at the University of Missouri St. Louis.
'Imagine St. Louis' reveals editors' bias
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has developed a marketing strategy in recent months with the focus of encouraging a "partnership" with its readers.
Part of this campaign, which some observers describe as "classic public journalism," involves the new Sunday section entitled, "Imagine St. Louis." The self-described series will examine "major regional issues" and attempt to form a "partnership" with readers who will hopefully be inspired to "initiate conversations" in the section's pages.
The editors state in their series introduction that they will thoroughly examine all sides of an issue, present the facts for the readers, and let them decide how they stand. However, an examination of the April 18 section of "Imagine St. Louis" shows that the Post is not as objective, or as even-handed, as it would like readers to imagine and, at least latently, attempts to influence the reader to share the paper's opinion.
The topic of the April 18 "Imagine St. Louis" was a proposed bridge that would connect Illinois and Missouri just north of downtown St. Louis. The section package was previewed on the front page of the Sunday paper (below the fold) with the headline: "Tell us your views on a new bridge over the Mississippi River."
The preview gave a synopsis of what could be found on pages B1 and B3-that traffic over the Mississippi is projected to increase by 80,000 cars daily in 20 years, that a new bridge has been proposed which could ease traffic jams, and that there are concerns over the feasibility and placement of building such a bridge.
The content of the "Imagine" section included two full stories, the front-page grabber, graphics (three maps, a bar graph, two pie charts), two photographs (one of the crowded Poplar Street Bridge), a table feature of the "pros and cons" of varying viewpoints, two lists of additional references for the reader (one about bridges in general, one concerning groups with an interest in the bridge debate), and a sidebar taking one column on page B1 explaining how the reader can voice an opinion on the subject.
The main story purports to inform the reader of differing opinions held by "experts" concerning a new bridge. The Post may have already decided the bridge is necessary, judging by the story content. "Relief could be in sight for weary Illinois commuters..." begins the story. By the end of the article, the reader has seen 14 paragraphs concerning opposition to the bridge and 28 paragraphs speaking in favor of the bridge. The remaining 14 paragraphs were neutral on the subject.
Objectivity is nowhere to be seen in the section's other article, the story of one commuter's difficulty in getting to work due to traffic congestion. This person hasn't a positive thing to say about the drive from her home in Illinois to Missouri each day. It's a traffic congestion nightmare.
If the "objective" main story left any doubt about what the newspaper thought about a proposed new bridge, the sidebar erases that doubt. The story quotes three commuters as saying a new bridge would greatly ease the driving stress in their lives.
The sidebar does not quote anyone who takes the MetroLink mass transit system from Illinois to Missouri, nor does it refer to anyone who feels the St. Louis traffic situation does not warrant a new $500 million bridge. The "Imagine" stories on the bridge are in stark contrast to the paper's coverage of the Page Avenue bridge, which was viewed as a contributor to urban sprawl.
To the Post's credit, the charts, tables and maps were all objective and factual in the information they presented, but the cutlines and the photographs express the angst of increasing numbers of commuters facing hour-long drives to work. These images and cutlines do not convey the possible negative effects of a new bridge.
The story headlines ("Building a bridge that works for all" and "Three ways people can talk about the new Mississippi River bridge") all work to reinforce the idea that the new bridge is not only necessary, but inevitable. St. Charles County residents, who favored the Page Avenue bridge, can only be mystified by the Post's differing approaches to fair coverage depending on the bridge in question.
Vague authority is used on a number of occasions in the main story on the "Imagine" bridge article. For example, "...some environmentalists ... argue the bridge shouldn't be built at all." Does this mean that some environmentalists are in favor of the bridge?
The article also states, "Some traffic relief ... will be little more than a Band-Aid, officials say." Who are these officials? Do they have to make this commute daily? Are these authoritative sources or voices imagined in the writer's mind?
The Post would like readers to believe that the new "Imagine St. Louis" comes from the "we report, you decide" school of journalism. But analysis of these "Imagine" sections demonstrates that the paper would like for the reader to have a certain opinion on the subject by the time the package of information is absorbed.
-Matte Schutte
History Lesson
A look back at some of the low points in the recent history of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
By Ed Bishop
It's difficult to say exactly when bosses at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch lost confidence in traditional journalism. But it's evident they have.
On Sunday, April 11-the day "Imagine St. Louis" was introduced-the front page of the Post contained only two news stories. The rest of the page was given over to three long teases about stories in other sections of the paper. The following Sunday was even worse. One news story made it to the front page. Everything else promoted stories in other parts of the newspaper about such things as a golf guide, a readers' poll on who was the best baseball player in Cardinal history, a pediatric oncologist who the paper called "Dr. Bob" and a sex scandal that was seven years old.
It would be easy to blame the drop in journalistic excellence on Editor Cole Campbell. He has been the newspaper's top journalist for almost three years now. Under his management, staff members at the Post have endured countless meetings, a reorganization that seems endless, and a lot of what former Riverfront Times publisher Ray Harmann has called Campbell's "journo babble." The paper seems more feeble than ever under Campbell's leadership.
But actually the downward slide started years ago.
Many St. Louisans can remember when the Post was one of the top newspapers in the country. Its editorial position was respected. It broke major stories. For example, along with The New York Times, the Post first published the Pentagon Papers. It was a newspaper that was quoted, consulted and feared.
Today, according to industry sources, it doesn't even rank among the top regional papers like the Rocky Mountain News or the Kansas City Star or the Chicago Tribune. The Post hasn't won a Pulitzer Prize for news reporting in more than 40 years. And since 1991, it has lost approximately 20 percent of its daily circulation. Sunday circulation is down even more.
Here is a chronology of events at the Post during the last 13 years that may help explain the decline of the Post.
As you read it, keep one thing in mind: Every year since the early 1980s, the Pulitzer company has given the Newhouse company half of the profits from the Post. That was the deal for Newhouse's role in shutting down the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Over the years, the Pulitzer company has given the Newhouse company more than $70 million. The impact on staff morale, reinvestment in the newspaper and journalistic credibility has been enormous.
March 1986: Joseph Pulitzer Jr. steps down as editor/publisher of the Post. He hands over the editorship to personal friend William F. Woo, the first editor who is not a member of the Pulitzer family. Nicholas G. Penniman IV becomes the publisher. The staff greets the change with enthusiasm. They hope Woo will be an advocate for better journalsim. Pulitzer's involvement with the daily operations of the newspaper has been minimal, leaving Managing Editor David Lipman to run things. Lipman is not liked. Both editors and reporters say Lipman runs the newsroom through intimidation and fear. This could be tolerated, staffers say, if the Post only reflected Lipman's bulldog persona. But it doesn't. Instead, the paper seems to grow more elitist and more dedicated to boosterism with each passing year. Many hope Woo will fire Lipman.
June 1986: Almost immediately after taking over as editor, Woo infuriates his staff by allowing Mayor Vince Schoemehl to write a page-one, unedited rebuttal to a major piece of investigative reporting by the Post. For nearly a year, reporters Bob Koenig, Louis Rose and Michael Sorkin have tracked the mayor's fundraising apparatus. In an outstanding series headlined "The Mayor's Money Machine," the Post publishes some of its finest pieces of journalism of the decade. The mayor and his people have been given ample opportunity to respond and are quoted thoroughly. But bowing to pressure from the mayor's office, Woo decides to allow Schoemehl's rebuttal to be published. Many staffers are discouraged. Woo sends a letter to a dozen or so editors around the country explaining his decision. Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post, tells SJR that publishing the rebuttal was obviously a breach of faith between the editors and their reporters. Many believe this incident marks the end of the Post as a crusading newspaper.
July 1987: The Post uses the entire front page of the Sunday edition to promote the VP Fair.
July 1987: The weekly Riverfront Times scoops the Post with a story headlined "What's $650,000 between friends" about the lack of accountability at the VP Fair. Embarrassed, Post editors assign a reporter to the financial activities surrounding the Fair. "It's about time," a reporter tells SJR.
March 1988: A hiring freeze is in effect. During the next few years, with a brief exception in 1989, the total number of newsroom staff drops.
April 1988: Editors request that reporters provide the names and phone numbers of political candidates to advertising sales people. No one does and the order is rescinded.
May 1988: Frank Peters, the last person to win a Pulitzer Prize at the Post-for criticism, not news reporting-quits in disgust.
September 1988: Lipman spikes a column by Bill McClellan about Billy Busch, the son of August "Gussie" Busch, one of the most powerful men in St. Louis. During a custody battle, Billy Busch has more or less kidnapped his girlfriend's two children, one of whom he fathered. McClellan gets the story, writes a column and is about to break a major scandal when apparently the Busch family lawyer talks Lipman into killing the story. News of the spiked column spreads throughout the paper. Reporters are outraged. Somehow a copy of the column gets to the Riverfront Times, which publishes it. The story is out and Post editors are embarrassed.
September 1989: Ralph Ingersoll launches the St. Louis Sun. For months prior to the launch, Ingersoll and the Post have been engaged in a virtual war. Ingersoll has hired Thomas Tallarico, the former senior vice president and general manager of the Post, and several top Post reporters including Kevin Horrigan. For the first time in years, the Post begins spending money to improve the paper. "We'll beat the pants off them," Joseph Pulitzer tells SJR.
February 1990: The Sun folds.
March 1990: As the old Guild contract expires, Post management refuses to negotiate with representatives of the combined unions working at the newspaper. With Pulitzer picking off the weaker unions and threatening the stronger ones, the Guild, which represents the most workers at the Post, is isolated. Once again a hiring freeze that had been lifted to fight the Sun is back in place.
June 1990: Narrowly averting a strike, the Post finally signs a contract with its Guild employees. But the new contract is good only until the spring of 1993. Staffers are convinced management wants to break their union and the next set of negotiations will be even worse. Woo tells the newsroom that he has warned management not to use similar tactics in the next negotiations or he will resign. Soon afterwards, management hires the law firm of King and Ballow, renowned for its successes with union busting.
Spring 1991: During the Gulf War, the circulation of the Post reaches an all-time high of 392,000 daily and 537,000 Sundays. Those figures have been slipping ever since. Today circulation stands at barely 300,000 daily and 500,000 Sundays.
May 1992: After 14 years as managing editor, David Lipman finally steps down. Many had hoped that Woo would stand up to Lipman's bullying, but he hadn't. Now, even though it appears Woo has engineered Lipman's departure, Woo's credibility with the staff is damaged beyond repair. Within a very short time, however, many will look back fondly on Lipman's regime. The new managing editor, Foster Davis, will be a disaster.
June 1992: A search committee made up of Post staffers recommends Foster Davis, the former features editor of the Charlotte Observer, to be the new managing editor. Davis has Woo's full backing. But Davis turns out to be a weak leader who openly opposes hard news in the paper. Within a year, a revolt is brewing in the newsroom. Eventually Woo and Davis refuse to speak to one another.
March 1993: Using tactics recommended by King and Ballow, Post management refuses to negotiate with the Guild on the expiring contract. The old contract is extended.
May 1993: Eric Mink, the well-respected and long-time television critic of the Post, leaves to go to the New York Daily News.
June 1993: Joseph Pulitzer dies. Michael Pulitzer takes over as head of the Pulitzer company. Michael Pulitzer is more closely associated with the company's television holdings than with its newspapers and many staffers believe he doesn't care much for the Post. Also Woo's relationship with Michael Pulitzer is much cooler than the one he had with Joseph Pulitzer, who Woo says was like a father to him. Soon it will become apparent that Michael Pulitzer will not protect Woo as Joseph Pulitzer did.
July 1994: Rumors circulate that Davis and Woo have had a major falling-out. Staffers complain that Davis is never in St. Louis, that he doesn't like the city and continues to live in Charlotte, N.C. Davis refuses to deny it and Woo won't talk about what he calls "personnel matters."
October 1994: Post management hires a consulting firm called Syntectics to work with bosses on problem solving. One of the techniques the firm uses is to have executives sit on the floor and play with Legos. Woo refuses to do so. The firm also institutes a series of internal meetings to create new ideas to stop the falling circulation. The name "Odyssey" is given to the project.
December 1994: A contract is finally signed with the Guild. Members are disappointed by the tiny wage increases the contract calls for but they also believe it is the best they can do. Staffers will receive no raises in the last four years of the contract.
April 1995: With staff morale at an all-time low and with several excellent young journalists leaving for other newspapers, staffers begin calling SJR in droves to complain of the confusion and lack of news judgment at the Post-many on-the-record. SJR publishes a cover story headlined "Time is running out on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch." In the story, Everette Dennis, the executive director of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at the Columbia University School of Journalism, is quoted as saying what everyone has long suspected, that the Post is no longer a top-notch newspaper.
February 1996: At a retreat held at the Junior League of St. Louis, top editors and Pulitzer corporate bosses discuss the results of a survey by Syntectics about staff morale. At the retreat, editors talk openly about the continuing conflict between Woo and Davis.
March 1996: While Woo is on vacation in Europe, Penniman announces that both Woo and Davis will be replaced.
April 1996: Richard Weil, the man many at the Post believed should have been named managing editor when Davis was appointed, is finally named managing editor. An excellent news man, Weil is respected by the staff. Now they hope he will be named to the top editor's position.
June 1996: Penniman more or less announces that the hiring freeze is over.
September 1996: After taking personal control of the hiring process, Michael Pulitzer names Cole C. Campbell to the top editing position at the Post. Campbell is only the second editor of the Post who is not a member of the Pulitzer family. Weil says he supports the decision and will work hard to help the new editor succeed. Campbell comes from the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., where he was the editor. Circulation at the Virginian-Pilot has been dropping. It levels off after Campbell leaves. Although the Virginian-Pilot is a relatively small daily, Campbell has a national reputation. He is one of the leading advocates of a new trend call "public journalism." This new journalism philosophy says that traditional journalism is dying-and rightfully so. Adherents of public journalism want journalists to suspend their detachment and become involved in solving society's problems. Public journalists rely on polls and survey groups to try to ascertain what readers want. They call this "deliberative conversations." At his old paper, Campbell was also the architect of a new system of organization for newsrooms called "teams." Under this system, which replaces the old "desk" system, editors are replaced by team leaders and teams float around the paper without responsibility for any particular section of the newspaper.
October 1996: A group of African-American leaders form something called Concerned Citizens for Fairness in the Media. The group actually has little to do with the media. It is really the opening salvos in a typical St. Louis political turf war. Only this time the war is being fought by two blacks-Mayor Freeman Bosley Jr. and former police chief Clarence Harmon. Campbell misreads the situtation and calls their primary "a defining moment in the history of St. Louis." Anticipating an outcry from the black community against the Post backing Harmon, Campbell hires Chuck Stone, a professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina and one of the founders of the Association of Black Journalists, to be a temporary Readers' Advocate at the newpaper.
November 1996: In a move to shore up weekend circulation, the Post changes its Saturday edition from a broadsheet to a tabloid format. This is an idea that grew out of the Odyssey project that has been run by consultants.
December 1996: After Stone's first column he receives more than 100 letters. But only three are about the mayor's race. The rest are complaints about the new Saturday tabloid.
December 1996: Ed Higgins, editor of the editorial page, announces he will take early retirement. Some believe he is being forced out.
March 1997: Christine Bertelson is named editor of the editorial page. She has no experience on the editorial page, nor has she ever been an editor.
July 1997: According to Bertelson, it's around this time that she and Campbell begin seeing each other socially. Rumors about the couple are flying around the city. One of them is that Campbell and his wife are getting divorced. That rumor proves true.
August 1997: The first team is formed as a prototype for what will eventually be the model for all editors and reporters at the Post. It's call the "education team" and it is not very successful. Its coverage is soft and fluffy. Still the sense that the Post will be completely reorganized into teams gains momentum.
October 1997: Information about a contract with a consulting firm called the Harwood Group begins to surface at the Post. Harwood is a kind of New Age management-consulting team who proudly say they know nothing about journalism and can therefore help journalists "think outside the box." A few months later, meetings between groups of reporters and Harwood begin. Staff members say the meetings are stupid and a waste of time. Harwood is being paid $250,000 for its consultations.
November 1997: The Post redesigns its front pages. It goes from five-columns wide to six. Editors say the new look makes the paper appear more serious, more newsy. In fact, they say they want more news stories on the section fronts. It seems like a move in the right direction-and away from public journalism. Staffers are beginning to think that perhaps Campbell will reverse himself on public journalism or at least use a more watered-down version at the Post..
December 1997: Campbell fires his old friend Rosemary Goudreau, who he had brought with him from the Virginian-Pilot. Apparently, Goudreau had taken Mrs. Campbell's side in the divorce. Arnie Robbins replaces Goudreau as deputy editor.
January 1998: Public journalism guru Jay Rosen visits the Post. He talks mainly with the editorial-page staff.
February 1998: As SJR prepares a profile on the new editorial-page editor, it receives a threatening letter from Campbell saying, in effect, that he will sue this publication if SJR links Bertelson's promotion to their private relationship. SJR publishes Campbell's letter. Earlier the same monthy, Campbells spikes a satirical column by Bill McClellan about Hillary Clinton. Campbell says the column is demeaning to the First Lady. Weil fights to get the column published but loses in the end.
May 1998: An article in the American Journalism Review (AJR) called "The Change Agents" details the Harwood Group's work at the Post. The article is filled with quotes from Campbell using public-journalism jargon. But amid the flip charts, "reflection breaks," and "authentic discussions," AJR is able to interview some reporters and editors. They all seem confused and uncertain. Campbell responds in typical public-journalism fashion by saying that reporters must learn to feel comfortable with ambivalence. Any hope that Campbell will give up on the controversal philosophy is dashed.
September 1998: Twice in two weeks, the front page of the Post is nothing more than a large photograph of Mark McGwire. There is no news on these front pages other than McGwire hitting home runs. The front pages are literally posters with the Post flag on them .
February 1999: Weil is ousted from the managing editor's position. He is replaced by Arnie Robbins, the fourth managing editor at the Post in seven years. Robbins is a relatively new arrival at the Post. He had been the sports editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. More importantly he had also spent two years as the "change" editor during the massive reorganization at that paper. Staff members see this as a signal that news judgment is less important than organizational skills. Robbins' lack of hard-news experience doesn't really matter, they say, because layout designers are deciding where stories are placed anyway.
March 1999: The sale of the television stations owned by the Pulitzer company to Hearst-Argyle is completed. The stock swap will mean millions in profit for the major Pulitzer stockholders. Meanwhile, Guild members at the Post are entering the last four years of their contract. During this time they will receive no raises.
March 1999: Penniman is out as publisher of the Post. He is the last top manager to serve under Joseph Pulitzer. All of them were still in place only six years ago.
March 1999: Campbell announces that John Mason, a former top executive with Monsanto will join the editorial page as an "editorial fellow." Monsanto is under attack around the United States and Europe by politicians, journalists and environmentalists over the safety of genetically altered crops. But not here in St. Louis. Sources say William Freivogel, deputy editor of the editorial page, and Donna Korando, editor of the op-ed page, are called into Bertelson's office and told they must give their support to Mason or start looking for other jobs at the Post. Soon after the move, the Post editorializes in favor of Monsanto's position. Now staff members are afraid the newspaper will become even more deeply connected to "private, monied, influential individuals and companies."
April 1999: The once-proud News Analysis section of the Post is all but eliminated. It is replaced by "Imagine St. Louis," an insipid piece of mushy public journalism.
May 1999: The total replacement of the traditional structure of the newsroom at the Post by teams is only weeks away. Staff is warned that it will be complete chaos.Some say morale is lower than in the darkest days of the Foster Davis regime.
HMOs and insurance companies are simply dividing profits
By Peter Downs
If HMOs didn't exist, hospital administrators would have to invent them. That is because anything the public doesn't like, they blame on HMOs. So, if a hospital treats someone poorly, administrators can blame it on HMOs. And if the hospital also makes a lot of money, no one notices. They are too busy pointing fingers at HMOs.
HMOs are powerful, but they are not the all-powerful force they often are made out to be. There is a battle going on for control of health care. It is a battle between insurance companies on the one hand, and hospital companies on the other. It is not a battle over managed care, however. Both sides embrace managed care. It is a battle over divvying up the profits.
In many places, and St. Louis is one, hospitals are winning that battle. A variety of experts, local and national, say that over the last several years, hospitals have done better financially than ever before. A report last year by national management consulting firm FMI concluded that hospitals across the country were enjoying record profits. Industry magazine Modern Healthcare labeled St. Louis a "provider's paradise" because of all the money area hospitals were making.
On Medicare, for example, St. Louis hospitals earned a 13-percent rate of return in 1996. Overall, the 39 hospitals in the bi-state area had an average profit margin of over seven percent, while insurance companies had an average loss rate of three percent.
The three big hospital systems all earned a better rate of return than the average for St. Louis. According to the St. Louis Business Health Coalition, SSM Health Care had a 7.6 percent profit rate. Barnes-Jewish-Christian earned 8.5 percent, while Unity racked up a 14 percent profit rate. The only system to show a loss was Tenet, though St. Louis University Hospital had a profit rate of 8.7 percent.
Of the eight biggest insurance companies, only three made a profit. The biggest, United HealthCare, had a profit rate of only 1.1 percent.
Yes, some hospitals did lose money, others made lots of money. St. Louis Children's Hospital, for example, had a profit rate of 11.5 percent. St. Anthony's Hospital made 25 percent profit-and those figures are after they paid their system dues. Those are the results they reported on their tax returns. The big losers were not in the inner city. They were newer hospitals built to serve suburban sprawl in St. Charles County.
Twenty years ago, any profit over five percent was considered excessive for a not-for-profit. If a not-for-profit made more than that, they could be pretty certain the IRS would come calling.
One way hospital systems are able to make such money is by dictating terms to insurance companies. They can do that because they control large chunks of the market. SSM, which may have pioneered system integration in St. Louis, at least its executives think it did, claims it can deliver 1,200 area physicians to an insurance company, if the price is right. Or it can withhold them. SSM began building its system in 1993 with the express goal of getting into a stronger position for negotiating rates with insurers.
BJC claims to control 40 percent of health care revenue in St. Louis. They are the E.F. Hutton of St. Louis health care. When they talk, people listen. That's what BJC did last fall. It told United Healthcare what it wanted. When the insurer balked, it fired a warning shot by barring that company's insurance products from Christian Hospitals. United Healthcare got the message and settled. Next up was Prudential.
BJC threatened in November to stop doing business with Prudential unless the company accepted BJC's rate schedule. In December, the insurer accepted the hospital company's rates.
St. Louis is not unique in having powerful hospital systems, but it does seem to be a trend that started in the Midwest and is moving to the coast.
Modern Healthcare magazine pointed out that similar situations exist in Chicago, Detroit and Indianapolis, and throughout Texas. One Texas hospital executive reportedly said, "The whole reason for creating a system is to get enough market share to do business on your own terms." It certainly seems to be working. The hospital profit rate in Texas was a whopping 11.4 percent in 1996. Even after dipping to 9.4 percent in 1997, it was 30 percent higher than the national average.
These hospital system versus insurer battles arrived in a very public way in California last year. Several hospital systems threatened to stop accepting WellPoint Health Network's Blue Cross of California-essentially threatening to force patients to either pay out of their own pockets or find new doctors and hospitals, or change insurance companies. Each side turned to advertising executives to launch ads currying the public's favor. In the end, the hospitals won, and got their largest rate increases in seven years.
The common thread is that a system big enough to control a large fraction of the market can dictate its own price. Health care analysts across the country are predicting bruising battles this year between hospitals and insurers over how to split the premium check. The big systems will win big increases, they say, and stand-alone hospitals won't.
As obvious as that is, it has to be one of the best kept secrets in health care. How many news reports mention that hospitals are raking in dough, instead of saying they are squeezed by government and the insurers?
When was the last time headlines juxtaposed "Hospital Profits at all-time high" to an article about drive-through deliveries?
Interestingly enough, huge hospital systems were the cornerstone of the Clintons' health care reform plan in 1993. They sought to have big hospital systems counterbalance the power of insurance companies. They looked to hospital corporations to be the good guys holding the bad insurance companies in check. It hasn't happened.
While hospital profits have soared, the quality of health care has suffered. That is the public belief as reported by surveys, and it is evident in countless little ways. Hospital nurses throughout the area report examples of patients who check into the hospital for surgery, but can't actually get it done, because there aren't any gowns to dress them in for the operation; of patients who return to the hospital after surgery, because inferior anesthesia left them so nauseated their vomiting busted open their sutures; and of patients who lay humiliated in their own urine or excrement because no one was available to help them out of bed to the toilet.
Nurses say it is common to see patients writhe in agony for hours, because hospitals no longer stock IV pumps needed to administer painkillers. When a doctor prescribes a metered painkiller, then the hospital orders a pump from an outside vendor.
While hospitals subject their patients to such needless pain and humiliation, hospital executives give each other "quality" awards, and hospital PR departments churn out stories about the importance of a healthy attitude, a good frame of mind, and prayer to proper healing.
The quality of care is declining for almost everybody, but especially for the poor.
At a recent forum on health care sponsored by the American Association of Health Plans, panelists said hospitals, on the average, devote 6.2 percent of revenues to charity care.
Not in St. Louis, where hospitals set the rules. Here the average hospital expense for charity care is only 1.6 percent. Most charity care came from only two hospitals: Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis University. Ten hospitals spent less than one-tenth of one percent on charity.
Hospitals aren't losing money to charity; they are losing money to the market.
In places like St. Peters, Lake St. Louis and Wentzville, hospital systems built gleaming new hospitals that stand three-quarters empty, and they did it in spite of the state's supposedly restrictive regulations. They built the hospitals not to fill a need for health care, but to stake a claim to a future market, and they are subsidizing the losses with urban income.
Similarly, said the Business Health Coalition's Karen Roth, they have invested in excess lithotropsy units and pediatric intensive care units along 270, and further west. Even systems with expensive, underused facilities made expensive investments in identical equipment to place a mile or two closer to a wealthy population cluster.
That is market-driven health care. It is not efficient. It is not designed to serve the whole population. It only follows the money. The result is greater inequities.
OF NOTE
Mr. Amberg goes to Washington
Richard H. Amberg Jr., who grew up in St. Louis while his late father was the long-time publisher of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, is the new vice president and general manager of the Washington Times, owned by the Moonies. Amberg had been general manager of the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va. The elder Amberg had been pUblisher of a Newhouse newspaper in Pennsylvania, but was moved to St. Louis by S.I. Newhouse when he bought the newspaper from the family of E. Lansing Ray.
-Joe Pollack
Newspaper profits rising
When newspapers raise their advertising rates, or their prices, the most common explanation is that the increases are needed to cover rising newsprint costs. And, next to labor, paper is the largest cost. But not to worry this year, because newsprint costs are already close to $100 a ton cheaper than they were a year ago, and are expected to fall even more, maybe not as rapidly as St. Louis Post-Dispatch circulation, but close.
Therefore, three major chains are showing first-quarter profits higher than expected. E.W. Scripps, the Cincinnati-based chain that is the nation's oldest, led the group with a 28 percent gain, Gannett, the largest, had a gain of 12 percent, and Dow Jones advanced four percent.
Gannett, which publishes 74 daily newspapers, including USA Today, and operates 21 television stations, announced that net income rose from $159.2 million a year ago to $178.9 in 1999, according to figures published in The New York Times. Ad sales were up 16 percent at USA Today.
Scripps owns 19 daily newspapers, nine TV stations and a pair of cable networks, the Food Channel and Home and Garden TV. Net income jumped from $25.1 to $32 million, with newspaper and cable advertising setting the pace.
Dow Jones, which publishes The Wall Street Journal and Barron's, boasted first-quarter profit climbing from $39.5 million to over $40 million.
Early expectations were that newspaper profits and income would lag in 1999 and that newsprint prices would remain at 1998 levels, about $590 a ton. Instead, prices already have fallen below $500 a ton. Labor peace and excess supply are blamed, or credited, depending on the speaker's point of view.
-Joe Pollack
New football magazine
It all began when Trigger died-yes, that Trigger, Roy Rogers' horse-and some day I may tell the entire story of how the ghost of Trigger morphed into NFL Enterprises, which became NFL Films and NFL Properties and changed football and the world.
At the moment, however, we can look forward this season to NFL Insider, a new magazine from Petersen Publishing Co., which puts out some 160 magazines touching on almost every subject. I wrote some sports stories for them back in the 1950s and '60s, and Ellen Griesedieck worked there and did some photography for Petersen before she met and married race driver and writer Sam Posey and moved to Connecticut.
The newest football magazine, to come out eight times a year, will begin its career with a circulation of a million copies, which sounds great except that if you subscribe to NFL Sunday Direct, carried over DirecTV at an additional cost of $159 a year, you get a free copy of NFL Insider.
How inside will it be? Hard to tell, but the involvement of the NFL, with long-time NFL Properties writer John Wiebusch as editor-in-chief, would necessarily limit the "inside" factor, even though Wiebusch, once a sports writer with the Minneapolis Star-Trib une, is a first-rate reporter and writer. He told The New York Times that magazine copy would include locker-room visits and interviews with coaches and players. You can bet it all will be tightly controlled by the league, which may not inhibit a free press or access to athletes, but which certainly will put the official league spin on anything that's written.
The stories will undoubtedly be examples of "positive truth," as opposed to the "negative truth" teams often think that sports writers create. Bernie Miklasz of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch often has been accused of that by team officials and fans, and he spoke to the issue in a good post-opening day column, noting that a team official had asked him if he was going to be a meanie again in 1999.
-Joe Pollack
15 more best-censored stories of 1998
The top 10 most-censored stories selected in a nationwide search sponsored by Project Censored of the Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, Calif. were published in the previous issue of SJR. Following are 15 additional stories which were only published in a few of the mainstream news media.
11. Private prison expansion becomes big business. Private prisons are one of the fastest growing sectors of the prison industrial complex. Under contract by the government to run jails and prisons, and paid a fixed sum per prisoner, corporate firms operate as cheaply and efficiently as possible to insure a profit. This means lower wages for staff, no unions, and fewer services for prisoners. Substandard diets, extreme overcrowding, and abuses by poorly trained personnel have all been documented as practices of this private business approach to incarceration.
Source: TURNING THE TIDE, "The Prison Industry and The Global Complex," Summer 1998.
12. Millions of Americans received contaminated polio vaccine between 1955 and 1963. The once hailed 'miracle' vaccine was contaminated by a virus called Simian Virus 40 (SV40) between the years of 1955 and 1963. The virus hid in the renal cells of the monkeys which were used to make the vaccine. SV40 has been linked to rare, incurable cancers such as ependymomas (brain tumors), mesotheliomas (pleural tumors, usually of the lung), and osteosarcomas (bone malignancies).
Sources: CHICAGO LIFE, "Ticking Time Bomb," October 1997 by Vicky Angelos, and http://www.sightings.com/health/salk.htm, "The Forty Year Legacy of Tainted Polio Vaccine," May 14, 1998 by Harold Stearley.
13. China violates human rights in Tibet. Throughout most of history, Tibetan women have enjoyed greater equality with men than have their Asian neighbors. Since China's invasion of Tibet in 1959, they have been at the forefront of the nonviolent struggle for independence-nearly half of the protests staged over the last decade have been led by nuns. During that time, however, thousands of Tibetan women have been arrested, incarcerated, sexually abused, tortured, and publicly executed.
Source: TOWARD FREEDOM, "China's War on Women," March/April 1998 by Natasha Ma.
14. Political contributions compromise American judicial system. America's justice system is being compromised by campaign contributions to judges from special interest groups and Corporate Political Action Committees (PACS).
Source: THE NATION, "The Buying of the Bench," January 26, 1998 by Sheila Kaplan.
15. Swat teams replace civilian police: Target minority communities. In the 25 years since the creation of the first Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams in Los Angeles, police forces across the United States have become increasingly militarized. Paramilitary police teams originally only operated in urban areas, but in recent years the number of special task forces throughout the country, including rural police departments, has dramatically increased.
Source: COVERT ACTION QUARTERLY, "Operation Ghetto Storm: The Rise In Paramilitary Policing," Fall 1997 by Peter Cassidy.
16. Mercenary armies in service to global corporations. In many countries, multinational corporations have paid directly for private policing services from the local army; or have hired outside security companies to harass nationals who protest against the environmental impact of their operations. The firms involved represent a growing number of new corporate security operations around the world, linking former intelligence officers, standing armies, and local death squads.
Sources: CAQ, "Mercenary Armies & Mineral Wealth, Fall 1997, No. 62 by Pratap Chatterjee, and MULTINATIONAL MONITOR, "Guarding the Multinationals," March 1998 by Pratap Chatterjee.
17. U.S. media promotes biased coverage on Bosnia. A visit to the camps of Omarska and Trnopolje by a British team from Independent Television (ITN) on August 5, 1992 gave rise to the image of the Serbs as the new Nazis of the Balkans. A widely published photo taken by ITN pictured an emaciated Muslim behind barbed wire with comrades imprisoned behind him. ITN's photo was not, however, as accurate as it seemed. The men in the photo were not standing behind barbed wire. In fact the Hague Tribunal confirmed that there was no barbed wire surrounding the Belesn 92 at Trnopolje. The emaciated Muslim shown with his shirt off was in fact a very ill man selected to be featured in the photo. Trnopolje was not a concentration camp, it was a refugee and transit center. Many Muslims traveled there for protection and could leave whenever they wished.
Sources: CAQ "Misinformation: TV Coverage of a Bosnian Camp," Fall 1998, No. 65 by Thomas Deichmann, and CAQ "Seeing Yugoslavia Through A Dark Glass," Fall 1998, No. 65 by Diana Johnstone.
18. Manhattan Project covered up effects of fluoride toxicity. Recently declassified government documents have shed new light on the decades-old debate over the fluoridation of drinking water, and have added to a growing body of scientific evidence concerning the health effects of fluoride. Much of the original evidence about fluoride, which suggested it was safe for human consumption in low doses, was actually generated by "Manhattan Project" scientists in the 1940s. New evidence shows that researchers were ordered to cover-up evidence of the dangers of fluoride and it's levels of toxicity to avoid lawsuit by exposed civilians.
Source: WASTE NOT, "Fluoride, Teeth and the Atomic Bomb," September 1997 by Joel Griffiths and Chris Bryson.
19. Clinton's administration lobbied for retention of toxic chemicals in children's toys. The Clinton Administration and the Commerce Department have lobbied on behalf of U.S. toy and chemical manufacturers against proposed new European Union (EU) restrictions which would prevent children's exposure to toxic chemicals released by polyvinyl chloride (PVC) toys such as teething rings.
Source: MULTINATIONAL MONITOR, "Out of the Mouths of Babes," June 1998 by Charlie Gray.
20. Developers build on flood plains at taxpayers' expense. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), some 10 million people in the U.S. currently live on floodplains, and developers are rapidly building more homes in these areas. Of these households at risk of flooding, only one fourth actually carries insurance; the rest will rely on federal disaster relief funds if their homes are flooded. Many of these people face repeated flooding, and the American taxpayer is paying the tab.
Source: MOTHER JONES, "Rain Check," March/April 1998, vol. 23 issue 2 by Marc Herman.
21. Global oil reserves alarmingly overestimated. Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrere, two independent oil-industry consultants, predict that global production of conventional oil will start to decline within the next ten years, and be unable to keep up with demand thereafter. Their analysis contradicts oil-industry reports which suggest we have another 50 years worth of cheap oil to sustain us. As the independent report points out, economic and political motives cause oil-producing companies and countries to publish the inflated figure, and this affects all of us.
Source: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, "The End of Cheap Oil," March 1998 by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrere.
22. Academia at risk as tenured professors vanish. The bedrock of higher education, the tenured full-time faculty, have become an endangered species. According to the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the number of tenured full-time faculty is rapidly decreasing on college campuses. Full-time faculty are being replaced by part-time faculty who are paid two-thirds what tenured professors earn, and receive substandard benefits. At least 43 percent of college instructors nationwide are now part-time faculty. The hiring of part-time lecturers increased by 266 percent between 1979 and 1995.
Source: ON CAMPUS, "The Vanishing Professor," September 1998 by Barbara McKenna.
23. Bureau of land management charged with human rights violations against the Shoshone nation. A decades-old dispute with the Bureau of Land Management has led the Western Shoshone tribe to take the conflict to an international level. The OAS' Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has asked the United States to "stay" all actions pending further investigations; but, according to News From Indian Country (NFIC), the BLM has "not responded" to documents supporting Western Shoshone land rights.
Source: NEWS FROM INDIAN COUNTRY: THE NATION'S NATIVE JOURNAL, "BLM fines Western Shoshone $564,000 Despite OAS Request," May 1998, Vol. 12, No. 9 by pat Calliotte.
24. Coca-Cola fails to meet recycling pledge. In 1990 Coca-Cola made a promise to use its recycled plastic bottles in new production as it has successfully done in Europe and numerous other countries. Eight years later they have yet to follow through with that promise. This failure to act has kept the price of recycled PET bottles low in the market place and discouraged expanded PET recycling programs nationwide.
Source: EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL, "Coca Cola: Recycling Outlaw," Winter 1998 by Marti Matsch.
25. ABC broadcasts slanted report on Mumia Abu-Jamal. On May 7 and 8, 1998, KGO-TV, an ABC affiliate in San Francisco, broadcast a two-part series attacking the international movement to prevent the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia, a black activist, has been on death row in the state of Pennsylvania for 16 years for the killing of a Philadelphia police officer in 1981. KGO claimed to do an objective review of the case. The final broadcast presented a very one-sided story.
Source: REFUSE AND RESIST, "A Case Study in Irresponsible Journalism," by C. Clark Kissinger and Leonard Weinglass.
Global capitalism questioned
In its lead editorial, Christian Century (April 7) finds that the current economic boom actually benefits primarily the already rich and well educated.
"From 1979 to 1994, the wealthiest 5 percent of the population saw their net worth increase by 45 percent. Meanwhile, the lowest 20 percent of wage-earners watched their incomes drop by 13 percent in real terms. The top one-fifth of families now brings home 45 percent of total income in the U.S. The average male worker's income dropped by 13 percent from 1979 to the mid-1990s. The median household income has been stable only because, with the entrance of women into the workforce, many families have two wage-earners. So after two decades of impressive economic expansion, in which the dynamism of the U.S. economy has been the envy of the world, the middle class has been squeezed and the bottom tier of families is actually worse off."
-Charles L. Klotzer
An interim report on Brill's
Brill's Content, the latest experiment in journalism reviews, has made national splashes with their exposes and various features. The color-throughout journal promises to become the dominant media critic in the country-if its resources can manage its start-up costs and marketing expenses, besides its ongoing production and editing costs. Its circulation has reached 225,000, but its advertising ratio has been 25.6 percent (33.8 pages) in February, 27.6 percent in March (36.5 pages) 30.04 percent (392/3 pages) in April and only 23.1 percent (301/2 pages) in May. One drawback is its overdesign. In counting advertising pages it was sometimes difficult to distinguish editorial from advertising matter.
-Charles L. Klotzer
Tangled Web or site for sore eyes?
By Dan Hellinger
On March 1 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch launched its long-promised, revised Web site. Jan Paul, online editor, says the objective is to lure visitors "deeper" into the site.
"Our indications were people liked reading the site to get up-to-date but weren't taking advantage of the features offered on other pages," Paul told SJR.
Paul and Deputy Editor Virgil Tipton have sought to carve out a distinct identity for Postnet as an information portal, not just an electronic version of the Post. But what may be professionally satisfying to electronic journalists may not be what readers want. And where the goal may be to create more traffic to attract advertising revenue, the barrier between editorial decisions and commercial considerations has been somewhat lowered.
Portal or news service?
A thorny issue is raised by the approach to advertising in the redesign. In her message to users, Paul says that button ads below "the Post-Dispatch and yellow pages links ... will be tailored to the content on that page; rest assured, the content will not (emphasis in original) be tailored to the ads."
Hic dragons! Indeed, Post editors and designers have carefully, as claimed, laid out a page where advertising is distinct from content. However, by keying advertising to content the firewall between commercial and journalistic criteria has been weakened. It is not hard to imagine the commercial pressures resulting in reversed priorities-keying content to ads. For proof, gaze at the automobile and real-estate sections of the print edition.
Tipton, writing in the "redesign forum" says: "When we started the redesign, we accepted an obligation to be more than just news. The newspaper online is just the newspaper online, and we think we can give people more than that, such as forums, more entertainment news, a calendar, yellow pages and so on."
Some readers posting comments on the site's "redesign forum" were not convinced that a more "robust" marketing environment was in their interest. Reader Karen Sundfors complained about "annoying (read flashing) ads" and says, "Please don't try to sell this as an improvement. I honestly don't think it is-from a consumer's perspective."
"Yellow pages" is a non-registered trademark name and has no connection to the telephone ad book. It is actually a national business directory service run by Pulitzer Technologies under the commercial name "ZIP2." SJR tested its search capacity by entering "hardware" and selecting "South County" from a roster of areas and received a long list of hardware stores with addresses and phone numbers. The service could be quite useful, but it is not made clear on the home-page menu how "yellow pages" and "marketplace" differ from each other.
The redesign has made room for both advertising and feature content, which can be more easily cued to advertising than news. Before revisions, the first thing that appeared on the home page was an updated news headline. For the first two weeks afterwards, what first appeared was not necessarily news but a feature, often from entertainment or sports. This did not sit well with many commentators in the redesign forum.
Reader Ashley Cook complained, "I like the redesign overall, but I must admit I don't like having to scroll through A&E, sports, communities and marketplace to get to the news." She went on to point out a particularly embarrassing editorial failure. A large headline for a story on "The Grind," a late-night coffee shop, was followed by bullet points underneath with short leads for stories on two rape victims opposed to the concealed handgun initiative.
Paul acknowledged to SJR the problems balancing features with news. "We were trying to serve two purposes: to give scannability but also serve as a portal to the rest of the site. We're hearing from readers that they did not get enough scannability."
Last June, Tipton had told SJR that the redesigned page "will be putting Pulitzer motto up top in the masthead. Our goal continues to be 'serve the many without abandoning the few.'" However, the redesign seems less dedicated to the Pulitzer motto and keyed more more to format and possibilities-commercial, technological and informational-of the Web. Journalistic values are less prominent. The site clearly is seeking to distance itself from the paper.
The words "Post-Dispatch" do not even appear at the top of the home page. They appear only in relatively small script above a button leading to "Today's Post-Dispatch" in the right-hand column. Clicking here leads to a page with everything in that day's issue, plus easy access to stories from each section going back a full week. Once there, the redesign makes surfing the electronic Post easy, but finding the right button to get the newspaper among flashing ads and features on other pages can be a daunting task for inexperienced users.
The crisis in Kosovo shows the potential of online news at its best. At 2:31 p.m., March 24, the lead item on Postnet was "NATO launches air strikes against Yugoslavia." Four links took readers to related stories. Hours before the evening TV broadcasts, electronic newspapers were able to update information and provide readers with contextual information for an important breaking story.
However, even on this day with fast breaking news about an international crisis, the feature content tended to overwhelm news content. Beneath the headlines and a small button to "Other News," the rest of the page was occupied by headlines and teasers for the upcoming season at Riverport, sports, an AP article comparing automobiles and a stock market report. Only one link, a section for local news, was not business or commercial.
Readers could also click on a link to online "communities"-Post lingo for daily updated pages on gardening, pets, military matters, health, religion, etc. SJR hastily, without reading the bullets, clicked on "communities" on the "Go To" menu bar in a quest for stories about neighborhoods and municipalities. What SJR got instead were topics the print edition would call "lifestyle."
Once you figure out that the news buttons are hidden on a pull-down menu, the site takes you to the regional editions of the Post (St. Charles, Illinois, South County, etc.).
The best feature of the new site may be the Arts and Entertainment section, which is easy to navigate and conveniently organized. Take films, for instance. Readers can sort film listings by rating, title or theater. Reviews of films are only a click away. Clicking on "Movie Theaters" in the right-hand column transports one from Postnet to a much less useful and friendly site run by ZIP2, and there is really no reason to include it-except perhaps to mollify Pultizer Technologies.
All the ads that fit?
Heavy feature and advertising content has taken a toll on speed. One reader complained on the redesign forum, "The new format loads too SLOOOOOOW ... is too busy ... is too user-unfriendly ... and is too cluttered with advertising! It seems your design team's objective was to incorporate and use every current HTML, JAVA, etc. 'tool' available ... without regard to content, readability and user friendliness for revenue producing ads." The writer claimed to have yanked his company's planned advertising in protest.
Paul and Postnet designer Bill Keaggy admit early complaints about slow loading were justified somewhat and say they responded with adjustments to increase its speed. This was not good enough for one frustrated user who posted his complaint to the design forum in the form of a lengthy parody of Edgar Allen Poe's Nevermore.
Deep into the screen peering,
Long I sat there wond'ring, fearing,
Doubting, while the ads kept loading
Loading yet to load some more.
"Load!" I cried, "You cursed mother!
Load Postnet as designed before!"
One thing did the Postnet answer,
Only this and nothing more,
"Postnet Loading, Load some More?"
Was this some occult illusion?
Some maniacal intrusion?
These ads were undesired,
Ones I'd never seen before.
Carefully, I weighed my choices
As the disk made monstrous noises.
The PC flashed, insistent, waiting,
Baiting me to wait some more.
Clearly I must press a key,
Choosing one and nothing more,
All while seeing, "Postnet Loading,"
Load some More?
Keaggy responded in kind:
My brain's burnt too, my fingers numb
from clicking the mouse all day.
12 hours, 15, sometimes 20 or more
To fix Postnet's load-time delay.
Loading time wasn't the only design problem addressed after launch. Colors had to be adjusted, fonts and column widths changed. Some needed changes remain undone. Despite numerous complaints, the right-hand column of some pages is almost illegible because black print is placed against a dark background.
The site lacks a contextual "help" facility, not even for searching the archives. In fact, the various "help" buttons on each page all lead to the same place-Paul's "Why did Postnet change?" article, a comprehensive explanation of the site design but not a help page. On the other hand, Postnet forums are extremely useful. The Postnet staff responds patiently and courteously to almost all complaints and questions. In addition, my experience using Postnet as an Internet provider has been positive. There is little "down time," and unlike many providers, Postnet staff are generally available via telephone to help when problems arise.
Some of the "flames" (uncivil criticism) posted by disgruntled users on the redesign forum are quite vitriolic. The medium is infamous for intemperate, shoot from the hip bombast. Paul and Keaggy say e-mail feedback has been positive. Veteran users of the old site like the redesign the least. Keaggy says he expects to keep seeing mostly negative feedback for a year.
Still, the number of different users posting criticism and the persistence of complaints is impressive. To their credit, Tipton, Paul and Keaggy absorb brickbats politely and acknowledge constructive criticism, but too much of the latter seems to have been deposited in the "we're going to get around to this later," Keaggy says needed changes will come eventually. "I can't snap my fingers. I want to push change, but I don't have a time-line to give you," says Keaggy.
"We did testing and didn't get red flags," says Keaggy. However, the page was launched after only two weeks of trials, and more research might have uncovered some of the design and content problems. Paul admits, "I wish we had been able to do more usability studies. If we had been able to use a bigger test group, we would have had more to go on."
Was the launch too soon then? Keaggy says, "We had worked through most of the issues. The decision was not mine. We were ready to launch, but we weren't ready to react." Asked if the Pulitzer company were investing enough to maintain the kind of portal, Paul pondered and replied, "We're producing a hell of a site with a very small staff."
Was it broke?
There is something curmudgeonly in criticism posted on the redesign forum, even in the most intense flames. "I find it endearing," says Paul, "that people who use Postnet take the changes so personally and feel a sense of ownership. It's evident when they say, 'what did you do with my yellow pages or my comics.'"
SJR's suspicion is that most of the critics in the "redesign forum" are reacting out of a general, populist dislike of the Post, or they don't like change. However, forum users tend to be people who know their way around the Web. They have pointed out design flaws and content problems that should be taken seriously. To their credit, Paul and Keaggy want to be responsive, but it is questionable whether the operation is adequately staffed.
Postnet strives to be a portal, not just a newspaper. This is important for Pulitzer as an Internet provider. The company wants its subscribers to keep Postnet as their home page and not replace it out of frustration with slow loading times and difficult navigation options. And it wants advertising. The result in the redesign is a home page and site loaded with features, more cluttered than before with advertising, and closer to erasing some lines between editorial and commercial considerations than it was before.
Postnet's staff wants to carve an information niche distinct from the newspaper, to establish its own identity. To most SJR readers it remains, probably, the online version of the Post more than anything else. The "paper" is still there, with some attractive features, including extraordinary opportunities for "readers" to talk back to journalists in forums and via e-mail. It is a faster way to get the news, and much is posted that does not appear in print. However, the electronic layers between surfers and news are denser than they were before the redesign, and correspondingly the journalistic values seem diluted.
PEOPLE
MEDIA
KMOX-AM
Tracy Tarpley Gilliam was promoted to national sales manager. Gilliam is responsible for working with national clients. She will also manage a staff of salespeople in other cities who represent the station with national clients.
FRIENDS OF KWMU, INC.
Officers elected are: president: Steve Glickman, vice president, marketing, CPI Corporation; vice president: Mark Waldman, president, Laurie's Shoes; first vice president: Dudley McCarter, attorney, Behr, Mantovani, McCarter and Potter; treasurer: Mark Cook, partner for tax, Price Waterhouse Coopers; secretary: Robert Fleet, director of sales, Holiday Inn South County Center. Millard Cohen, president, Nixdorff Krein Industries, Inc. was re-elected to a second three-year term.
Other board members are: Frank Bush, III, vice president, The Daniel and Henry Company; David Gant, vice president, Berger/Nowlin; Robert Green, dean of Business & Social Sciences, St. Charles Community College; James Held, president, Stone Hill Winery; Willie Ray, general manager, CPI Corporation; Cameron Sanders, associate vice president & manager, A.G. Edwards; and C. Susan Taylor, president, The Source.
AD/PR
ADAMSON
Jennifer Dodson and Sheri Gassaway have been promoted to assistant public relations directors. Kathy DeHart has been promoted to media supervisor/planner and Jamie Bedwell to account executive in its advertising division.
CHARTER COMMUNICATIONS
Dotty Ewing has joined the firm as regional vice president, marketing.
CREATIVE PRODUCERS GROUP
Jason Burton has joined the firm as a graphic designer.
D'ARCY ST. LOUIS
Larson A. Stiegemeyer, an account supervisor, has been elected a vice president of the advertising agency.
DIRECT IMPACT
Jan Devine has been appointed vice president.
FINKEL & CO. COMMUNICATIONS
Patricia Burns Binder has been promoted to vice president, and Barbara Langsam Shuman has been promoted to senior account manager.
FLEISHMAN-HILLARD
David Lowey has been named a partner.
Amy Calvin, Jack Farmer and Ellen Rostand have been named managing supervisors.
THE GLENNON CO.
Diane Knowles has been appointed media buyer.
GRIZZELL & CO.
The agency added Peter D. Dycus to the firm. Dycus, an account director, has worked with Ben & Jerry's Homemade, Inc.
THE HUGHES GROUP
Tammy Silver has joined the agency as a computer production artist, and Jaime Jones has joined as an account coordinator.
KOCHAN & COMPANY
Rebecca Taylor has joined the firm's creative department in art production and project coordination.
MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Susan L. Clifton has been named director of public relations. Most recently she served as public relations and marketing coordinator for The Dixon Gallery and Gardens, an art Museum in memphis Tennessee. Prior to that, she was director of marketing and public relations for Cambria Country Area Community college in Pennsylvania.
RODGERS TOWNSEND
The following have joined the agency: Kelly O'Meara, account services; Dawn Sorgea, Dave Birke, Ben Trokey and Marco Howell, creative; and Cheryl Rockwell and Debbie Steppig, production.
SHANDWICK
Margaret Smith has joined the agency as an assistant account executive.
THE VANDIVER GROUP
Terry Marvin has joined the agency as a senior team member.
Mack Bradley has been promoted to senior account team leader.
AWARDS
MO. DEPARTMENT OF
MENTAL HEALTH
Eight Missouri journalists will be honored for stories that have made a significant contribution towards a better understanding of mental health issues and people who experience mental illnesses. They are Francine Orr, a reporter for the Kansas City Star; Alan Bavley, a reporter for the Kansas City Star; Susan Wade, a reporter for The Springfield News Leader; Mark Horvit, projects editor and Brian Kratzer, photographer, for the Columbia Tribune; Jeanette Batz, a reporter for The Riverfront Times; Debra Smith-Shurn, of Marketing Works; and Gerald J. "Jerry" Brown, of KCLC-FM radio.
UNIVERSITY OF
MISSOURI-COLUMBIA
SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM
The school was the overall winner in the annual Hearst Journalism Awards. In the print category, Missouri won the first place prize of $10,000. Missouri also won third place in broadcast news. Rachel Webb of Missouri won the second place spot news writing award, Aamer Medhani of Missouri was third.
SIU-CARBONDALE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM
Todd Eschman, managing editor of the Cahokia-Dupo Herald, took top honors and a $150 prize in the 1999 Polly Robinson Feature Writing Contest sponsored by the school for a story of a man's battle to get his late brother's name engraved on the Vietnam War Memorial.
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Bill Lambrecht won the 55th Raymond Clapper Memorial Award and a $2000 cash prize for his coverage of global debates on the introduction of genetically modified crops and food. Lambrecht is working out of the Post's Washington Bureau. Lambrecht reported on the growing resistance to genetic engineering.
AKA DESIGN, INC.
The agency won for the March 1998 issue of Commerce Magazine, featuring a fantasy cover illustration of the St. Louis skyline. There was a tie in the annual report category between the 1997 Daughters of Charity National Health System Annual Report and the 1997 Salvation Army Annual Report, both designed by the agency.
CREATIVE PRODUCERS GROUP
The agency received three Vision Awards; one each for video modules produced for Mayflower Transit and the Sabre Travel Information Network, and a third for CPG 1998 Capabilities, the company's own self-promotional video. The Sabre video also recently received a Telly Award. The Tellys recognize non-network television commercials and video productions.
The agency was honored at the International CINDY Awards with a Silver Award in the sales and marketing category. The agency also received a gold award from the Summit Creative Awards for its self-promotion video.
JAMIK ASSOCIATES
The agency won three awards in the 1999 St. Louis Gallery of Printing Excellence annual awards competition. The company won first place in both the four-color Annual Reports and the four-color Books and Booklet divisions, along with an award of merit in the one-color Catalog division.
MISSOURI PRESS WOMEN
George L. Stemmler, Jr. of Stemmler Communications, Inc. is a winner in the 1999 National Federation of Press Women - Missouri Affiliate Communications Contest to recognize excellence among Missouri's working journalists. The award was first place in the Trade Paper Category for an advertisment.
AGENCY NEWS
KOCHAN & COMPANY
The St. Louis Regional Commerce & Growth Association (RCGA) has selected the firm as its agency of record. The agency will assist in developing and implementing a national and international marketing campaign focusing on attracting new employers and new investment for the St. Louis metropolitan area.
KUPPER PARKER COMMUNICATIONS
The Suburban Journals of Greater St. Louis has selected the agency to head up its advertising campaigns. Ian Cohen, a senior partner, will be in charge at the agency.
DEADLINE
n "Twilight Tuesdays," a special series of musical evenings, will take place on May 11, 18 and 25 at 6:30 p.m. on the front lawn of the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park (at Lindell and DeBaliviere). Free parking and shuttle service will be available from the parking lot located east of the museum. Admission is free and open to the public. Visitors are invited to bring law chairs.
Tuesday, May 11, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.; vocalist Ruth Latchison-Nichols will perform at an evening of gospel music.
Tuesday, May 18, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.; the Boney Goat Band will perform a variety of folk music and share the obscure and humorous songs of Missouri's backwater towns.
Tuesday, May 25, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.; a Bosnian folk band and a traditional Mexican mariachi band, Mariachi Los Compadres, will present an evening of international music.
n A Mother's Day Rally will be held on Friday, May 7, 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m. at Poelker Park (across from the Municipal Building on 12th and Market) sponsored by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom for mothers in prison and their children. For information call 862-5735.
n National Public Radio news correspondent Brooke Gladstone will deliver the final lecture of the Missouri Historical Society's 1998-1999 Urban Forum Series on Thursday, May 6 at 7 p.m. at the Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center (225 S. Skinker). Admission is free and open to the public.
n Upcoming Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) events: in Columbia, Mo.: May 13-15: A new computer-assisted reporting boot camp for editors and news directors. An intensive three-day workshop tailored to the needs of newsroom managers. May 16-21: Computer-Assisted Reporting. A weeklong seminar designed to train journalists in acquiring electronic information, using spreadsheets and databases to analyze information and translating that information into high-impact stories.
The IRE National Conference will be held in Kansas City, June 3-6, at the Downtown Marriott.
For more information contact IRE (573) 882-2042.
invitations
The calendar has been prepared by the International Writers Center at Washington University. All events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.
Monday, May 10
u Journalist and NPR host Ray Suarez discusses and signs his book The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration: 1966-1999 at 7 p.m. at Crossroads School, 500 DeBaliviere Place. 367-6731
Tuesday, May 11
u Louise Rafkin, author of Different Mothers, Different Daughters and Unholy Alliances, reads and signs her new book Other People's Dirt: A House Cleaner's Curious Adventures at 7 p.m. at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid. 367-6731
u Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno is the topic for the Foreign Literature Discussion Group at 7:30 p.m. at Washington University's West Campus Conference Center, 7425 Forsyth. 727-6118
Wednesday, May 12
u Fran Hamilton gives a "Report on Book Expo America and Publisher's Marketing Association Mini-University" for the meeting of the St. Louis Publisher's Association from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Richmond Heights Library, 7441 Dale, $5 for non-members. 984-9805
Thursday, May 13
u Police Department Corporal Bill Weibel speaks at 7 p.m. for the meeting of Sisters-in-Crime at the Thornhill Branch of the St. Louis County Library, 12863 Wollowyck. 721-0252, ext. 2134
u The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators meets at 7 p.m. in room 1 of the Bridgeton Trails Public Library. 429-0301
u Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking is the topic for the Heebie-Jeebies Book Group at 7:30 p.m. at Borders, 11745 Olive. 432-3575
u Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar is the topic for the Great Books Discussion Group at 8 p.m. at Trinity Presbyterian Church, 6800 Washington. 994-7914
Friday, May 14
u E. Lynn Harris, author of Invisible Life, discusses and signs his new book Abide With Me at 6:30 p.m. at the Cabanne Branch of the St. Louis Public Library, 1106 Union. 367-0717
u Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters, discusses and signs her new book Mother of My Mother: The Intricate Bond Between Generations at 7 p.m. at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid. 367-6731
Saturday, May 15
u E. Lynn Harris, author of Just As I Am, discusses and signs his work at 3 p.m. at Afrocentric Books, 8081 Olive. 991-0097
Sunday, May 16
u Winners of the St. Louis Poetry Center's Poetry Contest read their works at 1:30 p.m. at Washington University's West Campus Conference Center, 7425 Forsyth. 727-4917
u E. Lynn Harris discusses and signs his work Abide With Me at 2 p.m. at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid. 367-6731
Monday, May 17
u Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes is the topic for the Book Discussion Group at the Carpenter branch of the St. Louis Public Library, 3309 S. Grand. 772-6586
u Shirley LeFlore and Kyoko Mori, author of The Dream of Water, present the Arthur Brown Memorial Reading for the River Styx at Duff's Series at 7:30 p.m. at Duff's restaurant, 392 N. Euclid. $5 at door; $4 for members, students and seniors. 533-4541
u Rabbi Robert Jacobs discusses and signs his memoirs By Reason of Strength at 7:30 p.m. at Borders, 11745 Olive. 432-3575
Tuesday, May 18
u Steve Kluger's Last Days of Summer is the topic for the Morning Book Discussion Group at Borders, 15355A Manchester. 230-2992
Wednesday, May 19
u T. C. Boyle's novel Riven Rock is the topic for the Left Bank Books Reading Group at 7:30 p.m. at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid. 367-6731
Friday, May 21
u Poet Nikki Giovanni, author of Love Poems, signs and discusses her new work Blues: For All The Changes: New Poems at 6 p.m. at Afrocentric Books, 8081 Olive. 991-0097
u The Book Club discusses Alan Watts's The Wisdom of Insecurity. Call 451-2988 or email [email protected] for information.
Saturday, May 22
u Joanne Papper signs and discusses her book Easier Said Than Done! at 2 p.m. at Borders, 11745 Olive. 432-3575
Sunday, May 23
u Judy Blume's Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great is the topic for the Mother Daughter Book Club at 10 a.m. at Borders, 11745 Olive. 432-3575
u Christopher Reich's Numbered Account is the topic for the Contemporary Fiction and Non-Fiction Reading Group at 2 p.m. at Washington University's West Campus Conference Center, 7425 Forsyth. 481-0730
Monday, May 24
u Anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of The Sex Contract and Anatomy of Love, reads and signs her new book The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Will Change the World at 7 p.m. at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid. 367-6731
Tuesday, May 25
u Father William Faherty reads and signs his new book The Call of the Pope Octavian: A Novel of the 21st Century at 7 p.m. at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid. 367-6731
u Paula Woods, author of Inner City Blues: A Charlotte Justice Mystery, reads at 7 p.m. for the New Voices New Worlds series at the Vaughn Cultural Center, 3701 Grandel Square (in the Urban League Building). 615-3632
Wednesday, May 26
u The Christian Writers' Workshop meets from 10 a.m. to noon at Rock Hill Baptist Church, 9125 Manchester. 532-7584
u Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman is the topic for the ‘Adelante! Diversity (American Association of University Women) Book Group at 6:30 p.m. at Borders, 11745 Olive. 432-3575
u Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams is the topic for the Green Trails Book Shop Discussion Group at 7:30 p.m., 14270 Ladue. 576-7758
Thursday, May 27
u NPR commentator Bailey White, author of Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Sleeping at the Starlite Motel reads from her new novel Quite a Year for Plums at 7 p.m. at The First Unitarian Church, 5007 Waterman at Kingshighway. Proceeds from the evening's book sales will be donated to KWMU. 367-6731
u Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose is the topic for the Book Discussion Group at Barnes & Noble, 8871 Ladue. 862-6280
Friday, May 28
u An Evening of Performance Art and Poetry will benefit Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends at 8 p.m. at Cummel's Café, 1215 Washington. Donations are accepted at the door.