Would You Buy a Paper From This Man?

“You poor bastard.”

Those were the first words I heard from Walker Lundy. I'd sent him an e-mail, proposing to write about him and his first year as editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer-the third top editor in 11 years. Referring to a New Yorker profile that ran in June, I promised I would not dog him as much as Ken Auletta dogged Howell Raines, the new editor of the New York Times. Nor would I write damn near 20,000 words, as Auletta did-but that was the model.”If you can find 20,000 words to say about me,” he wrote back, “you deserve the Pulitzer prize.”

Last November 28th, Lundy arrived on the job from St. Paul, Minnesota, three weeks after Robert Rosenthal abruptly resigned. One reporter actually burst into tears upon hearing about “Rosey,” and because he left over a dispute with upper management, his resignation only stoked the resentment against the paper's corporate parent, Knight Ridder. Most of the Inquirer's 500 newsroom staffers think the paper has fallen a long way from its halcyon days under Gene Roberts in the 1970s and 1980s, when it won 17 Pulitzers. (Since Roberts left in 1990, the paper has won only one.) And they've come to suspect that Lundy was hired to purge the newspaper of the last traces of the Roberts era.

Initially, Lundy disarmed people with his wit and unpretentious manner. But as one reporter recalls, “That lasted about six weeks.” By midsummer, reporters were openly bitching to the City Paper and Philadelphia Weekly. By autumn, one high-level editor summed up the mood in the newsroom this way: “I think the antagonism is as strong as it ever was, and has gotten worse, and has seeped into the marrow of the place.”

Yet there sat Lundy, in the eye of the hurricane, and he was more than unflappable. He was almost jolly. “I'm living my fantasy here,” he told me in August. “What if they made you editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer-wouldn't you think that was pretty cool?”

Oh, cool! His staffers are so sour and contentious that when he says he'll hire two dozen new reporters by laying off 10 part-time clerks, they form a picket line on North Broad Street.

Oh, cool! Because reporters are unionized, he can't fire those who are poisoning office morale.

Oh, cool! Maybe he had so much trouble hiring a managing editor because the Inquirer is no longer a “destination” newspaper, the capstone of a great career, and Knight Ridder now has a horrendous reputation in the business.

Oh, cool! For 20 years, the Inquirer has wobbled in the suburbs, trotting out various zoned editions only to fold them when corporate revenues have a bad hair day. Not only is it Lundy's job to come up with a workable “suburban strategy,” but he has to tell everyone: Honest, folks, this time Tony Ridder won't pull the rug out from under us!

Oh, cool! While Knight Ridder was dithering in the suburbs, a little publishing company in Trenton came along and bought up most of the daily and weekly papers in the suburbs surrounding Philadelphia. The Journal Register Company has amassed a combined regional circulation of 1.2 million-more than three times the Inky's daily circulation.

I'm no psychologist-but do you think Walker Lundy might be projecting his own dilemma onto me?

I mean, who's the poor bastard here?

Let's give Lundy due credit: He understands the Inquirer's central problem. He knows that most days, the paper is a bit of a snoozer.

“The easiest job in the world is to quit reading,” he says. “The biggest enemy of this paper is that we're too boring and we're too predictable. If anything kills us, you know, it won't be the timeliness of the Internet; it will be because we bored people to death.”

Merely acknowledging the threat posed by the Inquirer's grayness of tone sets Lundy apart from his predecessors, Max King and Rosenthal, both of whom came of age during the Roberts era. The key question, of course, is whether Lundy can do anything about it. Is he the right man for the job? Does he have the vision to turn this thing around? Will he push hard enough to deal with the myriad problems that show up as bad coverage and weak writing in every day's pages? Or will he be remembered, essentially, as a steward who did little more than rearrange the Titanic's deck chairs?

For starters, let's acknowledge his recent success. Lundy has actually won a Pulitzer prize. He edited the St. Paul Pioneer Press from 1990 to 2001, and in 1999, one of his sports reporters broke a story about how coaches at the University of Minnesota hired a woman to write term papers for the players on the men's basketball team. Lundy guided that story, and a year's worth of follow-up pieces, that together were awarded a Pulitzer in 2000.

Like a lot of people in the newspaper business, Lundy got started early. He grew up in Tampa, Florida, one of two sons of a sales rep for Gulf Oil, and at Plant High School he was sports editor of the student paper. “It's all I've ever wanted to do,” he says of journalism. He graduated from the University of Florida in 1964 with a B.S. in journalism and got a job doing general assignment reporting at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He also met Saralyn Bone, a medical mycologist (mold specialist) for the Centers for Disease Control. They married in 1967. Thirty-five years later, they're still married, and, he says, “It's starting to look like it's gonna last.”

Also like a lot of people in the newspaper business, he's moved around. In the 1970s, he held down editing jobs at the Detroit Free Press, the Charlotte Observer and the Tallahassee Democrat. In 1983, he took a year off for a fellowship at Stanford, then moved to Fort Worth to become managing editor of the Star Telegram. From there, he became editor of the Arkansas

Gazette in Little Rock. He had falling-outs with publishers at both of those papers, and went to Gannett's headquarters in Washington, D.C., to lick his wounds. He was doing “literally nothing” there, he says, when the top editing job in St. Paul opened up.

In St. Paul, Lundy had to compete with the larger Minneapolis Star Tribune across the river. Nonetheless, he managed a small circulation gain during his 11-year tenure.

“All I knew was, he was the editor of the paper, and it made us move around a lot,” says his daughter, Sarah, 29, of her childhood; she's now a reporter at the Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. “I never thought that was cool until I read All the President's Men in high school.” Her brother, Dan, 32, is an aspiring actor in Hollywood. (His first prime-time role was a self-described “pasty white guy” in a September episode of the Fox series Cedric the Entertainer Presents.) Both children are full of praise for their father-which is not always true of adult children who've moved far away. “He loves what he does,” says Sarah. “He believes papers do a valuable service. I don't think people in Philadelphia truly understand him yet.”

Lundy has a calm, gentlemanly demeanor, a folksy charm, and a dry sense of humor that sometimes sails over people's heads, mine included. He employs that sense of humor to put a room at ease. He uses words like “gaggle.” He utters phrases like “holy cow” and “nobody gives a hoot in hell.” He has a soothing, resonant, perfect-for-radio voice that sounds like it might have hosted the Farm and Home Show in another life. He's tall, with blue eyes, wire-rimmed glasses and thinning hair. He'll wear suits or Tommy Hilfiger shirts and khakis, depending on his schedule. He openly credits Saralyn for the fact that “my tie and my pants match on some days.” Notice that Lundy doesn't mention his suit coat-he works in his shirtsleeves.

Despite that Pulitzer in St. Paul, his goal isn't to win prizes. His goal is to win readers. “His great strength as an editor is that he cares passionately about whether people read the newspaper,” says Mindi Keirnan, who was his managing editor for news in St. Paul from 1990 to 1994.

“He's a national-caliber editor,” says Rich Oppel, the editor of the Austin, Texas, American-Statesman and president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors last year. Oppel and Lundy have known each other since 1962, when they were college kids working at the Tampa Tribune. In the late 1970s, they shared a backyard fence in Tallahassee, where Oppel was executive editor of the Democrat and hired Lundy to be managing editor. He states flatly, “Walker is absolutely equipped to take over the Inquirer.”

That's not what reporters were saying when Lundy was named as the New Guy barely an hour after they were told that Rosey was leaving. Within minutes of the news, the rumor spread that Lundy's nickname in a previous job had been “Walking Blunder.” I can't track down the truth of that, but it's not important; the rumor reflects the insularity of the Inquirer newsroom. And its xenophobia. “He's an outsider,” says one reporter. “He's imported. [Former editor] Max [King] and Rosey grew up in this place; they just knew all this stuff.”

If that wasn't enough of a problem, Lundy-Lucky Lundy!-was walking into a newsroom still shell-shocked from losing every fifth colleague. In 1995, 1999, 2000 and 2001, a series of buyout packages was offered-and in the last two rounds, nearly 80 reporters and editors bolted. A cost-cutting measure, buyouts can easily backfire, because you risk losing the very people you want to keep. Indeed, some of the Inquirer's leading lights said goodbye. Marc Duvoisin and David Zucchino collected their checks, then got jobs at the Los Angeles Times. Managing editor William “Butch” Ward left to be a corporate VP at Independence Blue Cross.

Those who have stayed fondly recall the late-'70s Roberts era as the paper's golden age. It was a time when readers flocked to hard news rather than pop-culture fluff. Trouble is, times have changed-today's Inquirer competes for readers with an ever-widening array of old and new media-but those inside the newsroom have not. On primary night last May, for example, most reporters and editors at the paper were glued to the contest between Ed Rendell and Bob Casey. It's said that Lundy came back to his office after dinner to finish some work-and turned on his TV to Judging Amy. The newsroom was scandalized. And that incident says something else about the insularity of the Inquirer's reporters. Most people just don't care about the horse-race aspect of politics. Like Lundy, they are content to wait for the 11 o'clock news.

Foes of Lundy get no support from Zack Stalberg, editor of the Daily News. “He's an old pro,” he says of Lundy. “He shouldn't be underestimated.” He says he backed Lundy from the beginning. “[pni publisher Robert] Hall said, 'Rosey's leaving, and there are two candidates for the job.' I asked who, and he said, 'You and Walker.' I said, 'Hire Walker.' That was the end of the conversation.”

Stalberg doesn't bemoan the passing of the Roberts era, or its people. He thinks the Inquirer needs to lighten up-and that the problem goes all the way back to the hiring decisions Gene Roberts made more than 20 years ago. “I believe that many of the people who were there were the sons and daughters of very successful people,” says Stalberg. “Mom was a psychologist and Dad was a big-time lawyer. They went to the right schools, they grew up in the late '60s, and they came to journalism almost as if they were going into the Peace Corps. That's the group. You hate to indict a whole newsroom, but in assembling a very smart bunch of traditional journalists, what Gene also accidentally assembled was a group of people who took life too fucking seriously.”

It's 10:30 a.m. on Friday, September 27th, in a glass-walled conference room at the Inquirer. Time for the morning news meeting. The front page of each section of today's paper is taped to one wall. A dozen editors sit around a conference table. First, they'll critique today's paper; then they'll look at the big stories for tomorrow. Presiding over this daily meeting is Walker Lundy; he sits at the center of the table, his 20-ounce paper cup of iced tea close at hand. What you learn, very quickly, in these meetings is that editors are often just as befuddled as you are by what they read in the paper.

Rich Oppel had told me that Lundy was “the master of the dumb question,” and now I get to see him in action. The banner story this morning was the 12-year, $115 million contract given to Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb. Lundy is pressing the assistant sports editor about a line in Phil Sheridan's story: “There's a sentence that says the Eagles can cancel the contract anytime they choose. What kind of contract is that?” Hum-um-um-um. Finally, the editor, Mike Schaffer, says, “I think we need a better explanation” in tomorrow's paper. Lundy suggests that while they're at it, they come up with a “fun graphic” of how many cans of chunky beef soup (which McNabb endorses) that much money can buy.

On the front page of the B section is a story about people who make a living cleaning up after other people's pets. The copy desk came up with the headline: pet waste professionals answer a call to doody. Lundy calls it “the headline of the month.”

After the meeting, we walk back to his office, and I ask: Just what are his intentions for the Inquirer? Less foreign news? More doggy doody? “We're broadening the definition of news,” he says, and illustrates his point by placing his hands 18 inches apart, then moving his left hand another six inches away. “You're not losing the seriousness,” he says, giving his right hand a little shake for emphasis. “You're just adding the beef soup graphic, or the pooper-scooper story.”

Of course, he's still running stories about the President's drumbeat of war against Iraq on the front page, day after day. “I don't want the readers to say, if we're at war six months from now, 'How the hell did this happen?' We are becoming more local-but you don't turn your back on the rest of the world.”

“It's easy to dismiss him as a know-nothing cracker,” Rich Oppel says of his old friend Walker. “But you could have made the same mistake about Gene Roberts 30 years ago. With all due respect, he's better prepared for the job than Max King or Bob Rosenthal. They had the heritage and the legacy. They know the city and the people in the newsroom. But Walker has more experience as an editor. He has worked many more years shoulder-to-shoulder with publishers, corporate vice presidents, and even Tony Ridder,” the chair and ceo of Knight Ridder.

Oppel's no psychologist, either, but he suspects some reporters at 400 North Broad are in denial. “The people who work on the staff have got to come to grips with the fact that there's no internal savior who will protect them from Knight Ridder. It doesn't work that way,” he admonishes. “What you really want is someone who's an articulate advocate, someone who's passionate about journalism and who sees the people at Knight Ridder as his friends and colleagues.”

The “people at Knight Ridder” are located three time zones away, in San Jose, California. Knight Ridder is the nation's second largest newspaper chain, after Gannett. It owns 32 daily papers, including the Detroit Free Press, the Miami Herald, and most of the papers where Walker Lundy has worked.

And this much has to be said: The staff of the Inquirer is not making up the bean-counting parsimony of its corporate parent. At the hometown paper, the San Jose Mercury News, publisher Jay Harris resigned last year rather than implement the latest round of budget cuts. Harris wasn't the editor-he was the publisher. The money guy! Academics, social critics and journalists regard the chain as having sacrificed public service for short-term profit. A just-released report by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, “The Business of News,” nicely summarizes the widespread perception: “The Knight Ridder company has become a kind of poster child for fraying values.”

But Rich Oppel surely is right about one thing. In the grand scheme of things, Knight Ridder is not the enemy. The real enemy is the nation's vanishing interest in newspapers.

Your eyes may glaze over when you read numbers, but I need you to get your mind around one key statistic: In 1983, right after the Bulletin closed, the Philadelphia Inquirer hit a peak daily circulation of 552,000. By September of 2001, that number had sunk to 365,000. That's a 34 percent slide in 18 years!

Imagine the mood around your place of employment if your customers were heading for the exits at that rate. In the past year, the Inquirer's daily (Monday-Saturday) circulation has bounced up a bit, rising to 373,892 as of September 30th. But do we attribute that to Lundy's leadership-or to circulation discounts? I'm paying $2.38 a week for home delivery now, vs. $3.51 a year ago-and $4.39 three years ago.

Nationally, the proportion of the population that reads a newspaper every day has fallen a percentage point a year since the first measurement by the National Opinion Research Center back in 1967-it now stands at less than 40 percent. Fewer Americans are reading newspapers, and there are fewer newspapers to read. The evening newspaper, once the dominant form, is all but extinct. (Are you old enough to remember the Bulletin?) The survival of the Daily News depended in part on its switch to morning distribution in 1990.

Significantly, America's confidence in the press has also been dropping. These declines are both steep and consistent, reports Philip Meyer, a former Knight Ridder editor who's now a professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He summed up the key facts in a recent academic paper titled “Anatomy of a Death Spiral”: fewer readers means less revenue, which leads to budget cuts, which leads to a diminished product, which loses readers.

It's not that newspapers are losing money-oh, far from it. Newspapers are still one of the most lucrative industries. Compared to most businesses, they're filthy rich: The average operating profit among medium-to-large dailies is about 19 percent. Which illustrates what any newsroom scribe has been saying all along: Management has been ruthlessly efficient at trimming costs and raising prices to maintain this amazingly high profitability, even as the product goes the way of the buggy whip.

Tony Ridder is something of a whiz at this. Since he became ceo in March 1995, his newspapers as a group have lost circulation at a rate double the national average. Yet Knight Ridder papers have repeatedly gotten away with raising advertising rates.

But sooner or later, this little song will end. In 1999, Intel co-founder Andy Grove warned a convention of newspaper editors that their business model was about to crash and burn. He implied that they had roughly three years left before online classified ad sites began stealing their lunch money-and from there, it was all over but the shouting.

Okay, so Grove's timing was off. Still, he was telling the newspaper industry what it already knew-the future spelled trouble with a capital T. And much of the pain is being felt by big-city papers like the Inquirer, which are losing readers to TV, the Internet-and the suburbs. “Every major metro daily struggles to compete in the suburbs,” says Carole Leigh Hutton, the executive editor of the Detroit Free Press. “It's a whole different challenge, and it takes a lot of resources to do it.”

Zack Stalberg explains the Inquirer's spotty suburban coverage this way: “They let it go. They focused on the city-and the stories Gene [Roberts] cared about. Until recently, I'd say that the editors of the Inquirer never really understood the fact that 75 percent of their readers live out there, and that they have entirely different interests than the people at 400 North Broad Street. Can they now convince this newsroom of 500 people that it's the suburbs that matter? What they need is a big sign, a James Carville-like sign: it's the suburbs, stupid.”

It would be misleading to say the Inquirer has done nothing about its suburban coverage. The problem is, the coverage has been too little and too erratic. Twenty years ago, the first Neighbors section was launched. Glenn Guzzo was the architect of that early strategy; he eventually launched nine sections, and they were truly papers within a paper. They covered local board meetings, local crime, local real estate-and they were meant for small areas that had cohesive regional identities. In other words, Guzzo didn't automatically use county borders to define his zones. “When you do county zoning,” he says, “there's a pretty good chance that you're doing it for the convenience of the newspaper rather than the needs of its readers.”

Yet that's exactly what the Inquirer went and did. In 1990, in a cost-cutting move, the paper went to county-wide zones. In some metropolitan areas, a newspaper could get away with county zoning-but not in Philadelphia. Our suburbs are balkanized, with school boards and planning boards in every township-as opposed to, say, Maryland, where school districts are structured along county lines. Moreover, we're keenly attuned to what sets us apart. There are more than 300 townships in the seven suburban counties, and they might be Jewish, Catholic, Baptist, inner-ring, outer ring, pro-growth, no-growth, old-money, new-money or no-money. People in Devon, for example, don't think of themselves as part of the Main Line anymore; they're part of the Western Main Line. And they're starting to shy away from the so-called Lower Main Line, which is down there in a different world on the other side of the Blue Route.

All of that makes suburban coverage especially difficult here. And recently, it seemed as if the Inquirer had simply thrown in the towel. I live with more than 30,000 other people in Tredyffrin Township, Chester County; we were getting a weekly Neighbors section that lumped us in with the Main Line and Delaware County-but didn't cover Tredyffrin. On a typical Thursday morning this summer, its front page contained features about: a 92-year-old chaplain, an author of a macrobiotic cookbook, and a little shuttle service that operates miles away from us, in Souderton, at the far edge of Montgomery County. That is just pathetic. It seemed like an empty shell of a section-and as it turned out, that was exactly right. “They did away with the number of people it requires to produce Neighbors, and we continued to produce Neighbors,” Lundy explained.

Oh.

He is quick to acknowledge the erratic history of suburban coverage. “I can make a graphic out of it,” he says, sitting on the couch in his office-and he makes a serpentine motion with his hand. But he has no patience for analyzing what's past. “I haven't spent a lot of time going back inquiring; I've got a lot of other stuff to do, and it sort of doesn't matter,” he says.

He does have a lot of other stuff to do-like fixing those past missteps. The biggest project of his first year, clearly, has been a major shift of staff and money to cover the suburbs more comprehensively. He announced that on page one on Sunday, October 13th, under the headline we're adding local news to serve you. His changes include: