Putting Emotion Back In

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

Newspaper editors once printed what they thought their readers should know, which subscribers out of their obligation as citizens dutifully read. At least that used to be the theory. It is no longer. Worrying over the declining readership of newspapers, particularly among the young, the American Society of Newspaper Editors has been polling and studying what readers--and non-readers--think of newspapers. The result comes as a shock.

Perhaps the most wounding discovery is how much people dislike the very professionalism that newspapermen pride themselves on most--the ability to transmit facts without bias or feeling, in the best deadpan Dragnet manner of "only the facts, ma'am." People who are used to having Cronkite or Chancellor escort the news into their homes feel no connection with reporters, even those with recognized bylines, who impersonally fill their front pages. That contrast asserts Arnold Rosenfeld, editor of the Dayton Daily News, often favors TV personalities "who we print journalists think do a pretty lame job of news gathering." If Rosenfeld's paper headlines a local story 3 DIE IN FLAMING CRASH, the paper's spare recital of the facts is "seen as a coldhearted attempt to retail death," says Rosenfeld, while the TV viewer sees "the professionally saddened visage of the newscaster, a friendly, likable fellow, as a natural human response to tragedy."

That sharp contrast also impresses Pollster Ruth Clark of Yankelovich, Skelly & White, who conducted readership surveys in twelve cities, and will summarize her findings to newspaper editors at the A.S.N.E.'s annual convention in New York City this week. Clark thinks readers wanted to know not just the grisly facts and exact body counts of the Jonestown cult death in Guyana but also how the reporter felt, so they could "share his experience." Such an attitude violates all the classic instruction of crabby editors to young cub reporters not to "get in front of the story."

But Michael J. O'Neill, editor of the New York Daily News (he is also a chairman of the editors' committee that commissioned the Yankelovich survey), accepts the recent shift to personal journalism. He has introduced "people" and "lifestyle" pages to his paper, and to his staff has added verbosely flamboyant reporter-columnists, 'ILo Jimmy Breslin, whose tough-guy sentimentality is often self-parodying. O'Neill just hopes it will be possible to provide more personal reporting without reviving that curse of the 1960s, opinionated advocacy journalism.

In pollsters' jargon, readers have shifted from "self-improvement" to "self-fulfillment." To follow that trend, editors have been adding all those service features about what to eat and how to cope, which readers may like but newspapermen despair over. Another sign of the reader's "me" emphasis is a decided preference for local news. Yet, oddly enough, even though only a third of the readership follow national and international news closely, most readers seem to want it there on Page One and tend to resent front-page feature stories. Another third of the audience would read hard news more if it were summarized better, compartmentalized like a newsmagazine, and signposted like a supermarket aisle. The remaining third of the population just want escapism; they are part of a growing number who buy papers only on food days, and on Sundays.

To a newspaperman, the touchiest of all charges is bias, since he labors constantly to scrub his story free of it. He must be doing well at this, for people who think newspapers are unfair to labor, business, consumerists or environmentalists amount to less than 15% in each category. That statistic speaks better for impersonal journalism than its critics give it credit for.

But readers, it turns out, mean something else by the bias they criticize: they mean the tendency of newspapers to "emphasize bad news over the good." They are convinced that this is done just to sell papers; they admit to liking to read crime news but feel a little ashamed in doing so. They think their home town is better than the newspaper paints it. Talking to his own readers in Dayton, Editor Rosenfeld found them questioning the editor's self-righteous conviction that he only reports a world he never made: "Readers see us as moral vigilantes . . . the voice of asperity and sterile detachment." One answer to declining newspaper readership, Rosenfeld seems to suggest, is a more human tone, a sense of pity and understanding about the news an editor must report.

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