57th Street

Once upon a time, rich people used to give back to the public. A lot. There once was a noble breed of the wealthy that believed in a role of the elite as servants of society, using money to improve the world, even when there was no clear profit in the investment. It was the gratification that mattered.

Not all of this was selflessness. The donors got to one up their fellow richie riches and also often got their name stamped on something big (the Shedd Aquarium, Marshall Field’s, Pritzker School of Medicine). But over all it was a win win. The City of Chicago was practically built on philanthropy.

Sometimes the wealthy bought newspapers because of the potential for profit and back in the day newspapers and journalism in general was indeed profitable. Four wealthy families were regarded as the stewards of quality journalism: the Chandlers of The Los Angeles Times, the Sulzbergers of The New York Times, the Grahams of The Washington Post, and the Bancrofts of The Wall Street Journal. Today there are half as many Stewards —the Sulzbergers and the Grahams and there are early hints of another halving possibly. But there’s still hope.

Herb and Marion Sandler are backing an audacious media venture called Pro Publica. According to an article in The New York Times Magazine,

the venture would employ around 25 reporters and editors and would conduct the kind of ambitious investigations that only a handful of the country’s most prominent news organizations do as a matter of course.

The Sandlers are the old style kind of wealthy. According to the article,

they want their money to go to organizations they feel are well run and led by people they can count on to keep them that way.

It’s the most pure kind of philanthropy.

What the Sandlers want, clearly, is investigative journalism that leads to change in public policy or finds, as Herb put it to me, “the next Enron.”

What’s replaces this era of admirable returns to the public are a tiny group of media owners hungry for more money. Today Samuel Zell, Rupert Murdoch, and James L. Dolan are descending on the Long Island paper Newsday. I think the very name Newsday hints at the aspirations of what it could become: a quality tabloid serving an area larger than just Long Island. For a while in the 80s and 90s, the paper was going that way. It had an undeniably excellent New York edition. Since then the paper has fallen a bit in quality but it’s still respectable. I don’t know who will take it but it can’t be good. The bidder with the best record is Rupert Murdoch who hasn’t lowered the quality of The Wall Street Journal “yet” as an editor told me recently. I think all of them are more likely to do something bad to the paper. The New York Times article on the Newsday sale said

The News and The Post are fierce competitors for readers and advertisers in New York City, and the pursuit of Newsday could become a high-stakes battle between Mr. Zuckerman and Mr. Murdoch. Thus, the jockeying for control of Newsday could decide the fates of three of the nation’s largest newspapers, and dominance in Long Island, with nearly three million people.

Basically making Newsday into the usual kind of tabloid: full of yellow journalism and sensational gossipyness. It’s the kind of journalism that really hurts everything. Here’s what a lot of people don’t understand about the media. People like me aren’t fogeys who don’t like change —well I am that but not in this respect; rather, we understand that the information chosen for certain platforms really does impact people. Think about it. How much of your political stance is fueled by the information you get in news outlets be it tv, radio, online, or print? Now consider that some of these news outlets feel your political view should consider that Barack Obama’s middle name is Hussein making him unfit to be president which has nothing to do with any indication of what kind of Commander-in-Chief he would be. It’s all out there.

The goal of many successful and some not so successful media outlets has been turning a profit. None of it is really educational or informative. But informativeness is more important than ever right now. In Michael Miner’s Hot Type column this week he interviews Richard Longworth, author of Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism. Longworth, a journalist himself, attributes the economic problems in the Midwest partially to a general ignorance by the public thanks to the decline in quality informativeness and relevance of newspapers. Longworth says that

Newspapers are failing” at their task, Longworth writes, and one reason is a report issued by the “once responsible journalism school at Northwestern University, urging papers to draw readers by stressing local news. . . . All over the Midwest, local news, no matter how trivial, is squeezing out the global coverage that readers need to make sense of their world.

“Increasingly,” Longworth told me, “decision-makers get their news from elite sources and too many voters don’t get any news at all.”

Longworth goes on to explain that Midwesterners need to understand the world globally and how that is relevent to them if they are to survive in an age of outsourcing. He proposes for Chicago a new kind of newspaper that would also serve the Midwest.

So in Caught in the Middle, Longworth makes a proposal: “If the Midwest is to act as a region, it needs a trusted publication to set the regional agenda.”

The Tribune could launch a Midwestern newspaper, a sort of regional [Financial Times] that covers both the Midwest and the globe with true quality journalism, and would work hard to link the Midwest to the globe. It would be smaller in size, with considerably higher newsstand and subscription prices, less reliant on advertising, devoid of the kind of Dear Abby features that bring in readers now. . . . This would be an elite paper, sure. But it would inject global knowledge into a region that desperately needs it. And who knows, it might be read by local editors and reporters who could be inspired to do some of the same sort of reporting on their own back yards.

But right now there’s the Chicago Sun-Times and the Tribune which don’t really serve this purpose. The Sun-Times, like Newsday to a more extreme degree, has fallen from its past accolades of greatness. At this point, that may not be such a bad thing. Time to end it. A BusinessWeek article remembers the days when the family of Marshall Field III was at the helm, the Sun-Times flourished.

Under the Fields, the paper spent freely to give readers a lively, liberal, and hard-hitting alternative to the stodgy, Republican Trib. In 1977, for instance, the Sun-Times shelled out enough money to open its own tavern—the cheekily named Mirage—for four months so its undercover reporters could snare city officials seeking bribes. The home of columnists Mike Royko and Eppie Lederer, aka Ann Landers, the Sun-Times was “a very serious newspaper,” recalls former managing editor Gregory E. Favre, now a fellow at the Poynter Institute, a Florida journalism school.

So as tabloids vie for dominance in giving us the latest gossip, and as the Sun-Times dies out, there’s really just one proper reaction to this.

Oh Marshall where art thou?