Ayers: Our unbiased panel is now going to have these devilish people take them on for awhile. Responding, I gather, to some of the things you've said and from the looks of the notes that have been taken, you've been very provocative. So let the games begin.

Miriam Pepper: [S]everal of you talk about, not wanting to read certain news that you consider non-news or fluff or, you know, lighter news. You want just the facts. And a lot of editors worry about what the appropriate balance is on page one. We also hear from some of the panelists that you'd like more positive news about the community and community building. So in your opinion, what is is that editors ought to be providing you on your front page? Is it straight, hard news and nothing else or should there be some kind of mix there on the front page for you?

Windsor: I think the question is the kind of society we're creating here, and it seems to me that many times you look at stories that are the most sensational regardless of where they come from to.You know, somebody murdered two people in so-and-so and chopped them up in a little pieces and so forth. The same thing on television and particularly on television, and all parents should monitor what's going on but many don't, [and] children are believing that we're in an essentially very violent, fearful world. And perhaps in some areas that's true, but I think, you know, I have no problem with walking anywhere in Columbia, Missouri, at least during the day so the reality is that what is presented in the newspaper is really a small part of the reality of our world. More so, the nice stories that may not sell newspapers are the reality; that's what's going on in the world most of the time. And we can continue to slide towards a violent, fearful society or we can take steps to change that. And I think that part of that is you all's responsibility and what you're putting out there for the public to read. And it doesn't have to be an itinerary of what happened at the 4H meeting last night, but it can be related to what types of positive things are going on in the community that are of much more interest. Or in the world or in the United States as a whole. Those are still hard news stories; it is just a different perspective on what that news is.

Macmillan: I think I like to see a mix of international, local, national, and sports myself. Some of the papers I've seen have like a sidebar where they just have little blurbs about what's what and where to go. I think that helps a lot, but sometimes I don't necessarily want to read about what somebody in Israel's doing, I'm more interested in the 4H Club, and it's nice to know I can go find it. But the problem is you'll never make everybody happy all the time. And that's the tough part of your job.

Rooney: I would stay with the front page being the hard news, but the hard news doesn't always have to be about violence and death and destruction. The fact that the ACT scores went up in Kansas last year could have been a front page story because for years we've been told it's going down the toilet.

When I lived in the Sedgewick County area, the Wichita Eagle always had a local section and then once a week a neighborhood section which covered many of the smaller stories. that maybe, you know, wouldn't get published on a Tuesday afternoon but may be published in that special Thursday section, whether it be 4H or softball or whatever it happens to be. It died and now they're resurrecting it I understand from one of their reporters.

Campbell:. . . I think we journalists see ourselves as intermediaries. And in the current way we do journalism, I think we see ourselves as intermediaries between newsmakers and news consumers. So a lot of our decision making is about who are newsmakers? Who are newsmakers worthy of focusing on, and what you've told us today is we could obsess with some newsmakers, whether it's Monica Lewinsky or Bill Clinton or Kenneth Starr as a group. So I think the current way we think of ourselves is, what are the newsmakers doing that we should tell the news consumers about? And there's some question that you've raised about whether we truly understand the news consumers and whether we truly understand the newsmakers or we have valid methodologies for understanding them.

I'm going to posit a radical alternative. I think we should be intermediaries, but between citizens and the problems in their lives, the problems that we're all facing as parents, as wage earners, as salary earners. And the things that we ought to be paying attention to, which is an entirely different formulation of what journalism is I think. And in the end what I think we should deliver to the people who turn to us are kind of three levels of knowledge. At the easiest level, I think we should provide the citizens and communities we serve with literacy, a kind of conversational level of familiarity, that if you hear something being discussed, you'll say, "Oh, I saw something about that in the newspaper," and you can enter the conversation to learn more from what your fellow citizens are making of the news. At a different level, I think we should provide utility .Give people information on how they can get involved. Maybe just enough information so you can feel comfortable starting a conversation, not merely joining one. Or so that you feel like you could write a Congressman or a state representative. Or you could go to a city council meeting and feel informed enough to participate. Or you could be galvanized to join some movement or start a movement, association with your neighbors on an issue. And the third level, and the deepest level, is mastery. I think we ought to collectively, together, help you master a full understanding of your own stake in an issue. But not just your own stake, but also an understanding of the stake of others, whether you agree with them ideologically or not.

So, for example, in the case of urban sprawl, perhaps in your view the Post Dispatch failed that because we didn't write about urban sprawl in a way in which you saw your own stake in the issue fully reported and at the same time, we didn't give you enough understanding of the stake of others in the issue so that in the end you can decide which stake you want to speak to or defend. So I think that journalism needs to reinvent itself and be much more oriented toward your life as citizens, and not your life as news consumers .

Windsor: Well, I certainly agree. I think you've got a major problem in the sense that you are businesses and that whether you believe your objective or not, you have the responsibility as a business you have boundaries that you are not going to cross over in the sense of what you report on, how it's reported on.[On] the continuum of left and right in the political spectrum, you want to be off to the side....I would certainly like to see that. I would like to see journalism step back and look at that continuum and report it as something unassociated with you as a business. I don't think it's going to happen.

Thompson: I would agree with your three levels of knowledge the literacy and utility, I think, would be heavier than the mastery. I don't think there are enough people out there that are literate enough to enter the conversation, so maybe there needs to be a little more of that and the utility and less of the mastery. I think there's more of the mastery and less of the other two.

Rathburn: It's nice to say we want certain things in our newspapers and other media, but practically speaking what do we actually spend our money for? If you look at the stories that sell newspapers, there may be a little disconnect between what we say we want and what we actually feed on. I think your model is an interesting idea, but I would caution, you know, against trying to assume what some people might view as an elitist role of leadership in the community, to lead us all out of the darkness to a new age of understanding.

You proposed the question before the break about whether there are biases built into the, into the readership as opposed to the biases some of the readers assume are built into the authorship and editorship. There is, and if you look at some of the studies that have been done with regard to political affiliation, for instance, you'll find that there is a substantial difference between much of the people out here who read and view the media and those who contribute to it. So there's a built-in disconnect between the two groups right there.

Campbell: It's really refreshing for me to be called a right-winger.

Rathburn: Yeah, I was going to comment on that. I haven't heard anybody say that that way in a long time.

Campbell: If I could speak to the business phenomenon just for a second. As an editor I'm very careful not to spend a lot of time asking what readers want because I think that takes you the wrong path. You get the idealized response, you get, "I want more of everything". But what I am interested in is what readers value. And sometimes that value is expressed by purchasing decisions. But often that value is expressed in terms of, "These are the problems in my life. These are the issues that I'm wrangling with."

[T]here are four or five core things that people truly value as citizens. One of them is the education of the next generation and its preparation for taking on responsibilities in the community. One is the whole notion of economic opportunity and economic security. One is the prudent use of shared governmental resources. That gets translated into lower taxes, but in fact, if you really look at a lot of research, people are just as interested in what the money is getting for them as they are in the tax rate itself. So I think there are some common things that we can begin to build a better journalism around. Most people say, "Yes, I value an informed discussion about that." Where money comes from in the newspaper business is not the sensational story. The sensational story will spike circulation, so an O.J. Simpson verdict story will spike circulation for a couple of days. What sustains circulation over time is a relationship between the reader and the newspaper. Not simply saying, "Hey, look, O.J.!" Or in the case of the past two weeks of the Post Dispatch, "Hey, look, Mark McGwire." Mark McGwire is definitely sparking and spiking our readership upward, but my guess is that will not turn in sustained readership with the Post Dispatch if people's relationship with the paper continues to deteriorate. So I think that's why having a value-based relationship is what we need to do to save newspapers.

Lee: Well, newspapers are for the most part doing a lot of things right, most things right, which is why we're assembled here to tell you what you're doing wrong. Because if we were disinterested we just wouldn't buy the darn newspaper. And on occasion I go down to the library to do historical research and I always like to look at old newspapers, and I think the Star opened in 1880. And I can pull the microfilm for an old Kansas City Star and look at the headlines for a year, it's no different than what it is today. You could superimpose 1998 on the headlines, you wouldn't tell the difference. People behaved then just as badly as they do now or just as well as they do now. We are not at the crossroads of some moral decay. We're not discovering anything new about human nature.

How do you know when a reporter is doing a good job? How do you know whether your readers like the work that a reporter does or likes something in your cartoon strips? What kind of feedback do you get from the public? They may say, "Well, I don't like this person, never going to read them again." How do you know that? How does it get back to you?

Pepper: Well, I would say that newspapers know a lot less about readers than we should. Most of what we get is anecdotal, things that really impress readers or really aggravate readers and they call up and tell us or they write us. And then there are some market research, you know, formal studies done, too, every year to determine which sections people are looking at, but you know, just from my end anecdotally, some of what readers really value has to do with hard, investigative reporting. [W]e did a series recently in Kansas City on judges and their financial investments. And we got a lot of feedback on that from readers saying, "That's information I can't get any other way that you dug out and presented in a fairly straight format." A lot of people commented on the lack of bias in the writing of that. Here's the facts, here's the disclosure forms, you form your opinion.

And we get the most reaction to those stories and we get quite a bit of reaction when it's a personal story of [an] individual overcoming great odds.There's quite a bit of reaction to that, too. But those are more unusual than the day-in day-out situation about what readers are commenting on. So my one question about newspapers focusing on certain core issues is how the newspapers come up with these core issues that they're covering. And are we looking outside ourselves to come up with those issues. One public journalism project done at the Star had to do with values in the next generation and the paper pulled in a panel of experts from a variety of fields and had them come up with the issues and then took off from there in a series of stories rather than us internally sitting around saying, "What are the values important to raising children for the next generation?" And I think that's an appropriate way to go.

Campbell: Let me speak to both of those. One thing we're just beginning to talk about at the Post Dispatch and it's only a few people in this conversation so it's not, I'm not promising this is going to be done anytime soon we're, we're talking about the possibility of starting news user groups in which we go out and we either find existing associations of people that meet already, Rotary Club, 4H, or going out and pulling together more in a salon fashion people who care about their communities and have issues in their own lives. And having some sort of systematic way of holding conversations between these news user groups and frontline journalists who cover the news. The biggest disproportionate experience reporters have is they spend 90 percent of their time talking to news sources, not to news users, not to news consumers.

So the way we now sort what's important and what should be paid attention to, is from the reference points of the professionals whom we cover. They'll tell us, "Site-based management is the issue of the day in education." So that's how we decide that site-based management is important. It's not because we talk to parents, teachers, and students about what's happening in their lives and what they would like to see so that can become the path which in the end may result in saying site-based management's the answer what we need to do is develop a way we'll run constant communication with the people who rely on us, which is not the sources or the objects or the subjects as we now construe them in our stories, but rather the people who value our work. And that's the people who buy the paper everyday.

Meeks: May I jump in here a minute? I find the most important thing to do in a newspaper for me, personally, is to read the editorial to find out where does the editor stand on certain subjects. This is not something that you do once and say, "Aha! I've got you." No. You've got to keep reading and find out and pretty soon that editor's personality will come through in his writing. Therefore, he is the head of it. He is the one who says, "Okay, reporters, we'll follow this line or that line," or "No, we won't follow this line or that line," because he has the final word on it. And so the stories, in my way of thinking are slanted by the way the editor thinks. So an editor has, to my way of thinking, a very heavy burden as far as news stories are concerned and how they're slanted and how they're written and how they're published...

Campbell: Our paper's so large I can't pay attention to probably 90 percent of what goes into it every day, including sometimes the editorial page. So the larger the newspaper, the less that's true on a sort of story-by-story basis. It is true that my job as the editor of the paper is to sort of set the overall standards and the overall direction of where we're going. But frontline journalists are a lot like police officers on the beat. There's huge amounts of discretion that they have in what they treat as a crime and not a crime, or a story and not a story.

Meeks: Then what you're saying is you have to know your reporter; is that correct? You have to have trust in your reporters? Then we have a question that was asked down the table, how do we know these people are good? How do we know that they're really giving out what they need to give out?

Pepper: There is a difference in Kansas City from St. Louis in that there's a separate editor in charge of the editorial page from the editor who's in charge of the news side. So we keep a kind of an invisible firewall between the editorial and the opinion section and the news side so that the opinion shouldn't be influencing how the news is gathered or presented. And the staffs meet separately and that's how it's operated at the Star for many, many years. I think this is very confusing for readers. I don't think many readers recognize that there is this division, but it exists.

Thompson: [O]n the news users groups, would that be a part of the paper? Would that be a separate paper? How would you go about doing it?

Campbell: The ideal model for me, frankly, has already come up, which is the volunteer fire department model. I would love to see us have citizens in each community who are volunteer journalists. Who come to the fire station on a regular basis and sort of check in and say, "Here's what's going on in our community, here are the issues we are wrestling with. Here is the information that we need help in securing, you guys know how to use the Freedom of Information Act. You guys know how to use computer-assisted reporting, you journalists. So here's some stuff that we would really like to see a good, robust discussion of in our communities." So the model I have in my mind is regular, sustained, systematic conversations between people and communities and the journalists who do have some skills in finding out information and that it become a collaboration and that kind of model...

Thompson: And it would be a section of your paper or --

Campbell: It would, it would inform all sections of the paper.

Thompson: I like that idea.

Campbell: One thing that I find fascinating in both the discussion earlier and in your letters and in the comments we heard last night is the notion that all we want are the facts. Because I was playing with that. I'm thinking, "Okay, here are the facts about Mark McGwire's last home run, and you can just cite them." But there were two home runs yesterday, one in one early inning, one in one middle inning. So we could tell you the inning, we could tell you the distance. In fact, we do tell you exact what seat gets hit by the ball, the section, the seat number. We could give you lots of facts.

But my sense is the reason why people have been buying the Post Dispatch in huge numbers during this is not because they are buying a set of facts. They are buying a memorialized experienced. They're buying a story. The story of someone that they perceive to be a heroic figure among one of many dimensions: athletic heroism; a guy who likes his ex-wife and hugs his kid; a person who salutes his chief competitor, Sammy Sosa. There are lots of things about Mark McGwire that people like. And what they're particularly responding to about the Post Dispatch coverage about this is we've clearly communicated in our coverage that we like it, too. That we're kind of caught up in the enthusiasm that Mark McGwire has generated. And so in a sense, it's the farthest thing from objectivity. But what it is is a great, resonant connection between the journalists of the community and the citizens of the community who are together celebrating a kind of rare phenomenon.

So, I'm offering that sort of as challenge to this notion that all you want is the facts, because the facts by themselves make absolutely no sense. And in my fairly wide-ranging reading, what people, not journalists, but people in political science and people in business and people in physics, quantum physics in particular, keep coming back to is that in the information explosion, what people don't need is more facts. What they need are more effective models for understanding the world. More effective tools to think with. More effective ways to authenticate the facts and sort through the facts. And so I guess my counter-provocation would be, it's probably not the facts and just the facts that people need.

But it's really a better way of understanding current phenomena. And my sense is most of your complaints about journalism, listening to your particularities, is because of the compression that goes on. So the headline is a form of compression and it can miss the essence of the story. A story is a compression of a survey report. And that sometimes we're clumsy in our act of compression. But it's not because we are, therefore, deleting facts. The compression is in fact the leading meaning and interpretation and context, thus leaving it unclear what our intent is. Or unclear what you ought to make of "Call Him Dollar Bill."

Ayers: Cole, let me use this opportunity, use the word "complaint" as a segue into getting into the larger jury in on this discussion. The adjunct faculty who are out there straining to throw their bouquets at the panel and particular at, at the news people up here .So if you have a question, would please step up to one of the mikes? Here's a real authority here. Former reporter for the Anniston Star.

Audience 1: I think that the lady at the end brought up a really important point and that's the perception of this cohesion between the editorial page and the news side. No matter how much we insist that they are divisible, that they are separate sides, people do, I think, have that perception. And they always will they read the editorials and it's only two pages away from the front page, you know. It's hard for them to say, "Well, this is different and just because there's a different title at the top." Is there a way to combat this perception besides just saying, "Well, they're different and, you know, you guys are just going to have realize it and deal with it." I mean is there a way to really work with that?

Ayers: Were you told or did you have a sense of, of what I wanted you to do because of my particular biases when you were interning with us?

Audience 1: No, I didn't. And John Fleming, the editorial page editor at the Star, I really thought was a real distinct part of the newsroom in Anniston as well. I didn't feel influenced at all by the opinions of the editors though I'm sure I was to a certain extent. I mean, like you've all said, there is a direction that all editors give. But it seems to me that there's a way to work these two together somehow, to be honest with the public and to say, "Yes, you know, our editorial staff does influence what we do at this paper." You know, though, "No, our editorials don't mean that we're going at every story with a slant."

Campbell: You know, it's really interesting. I find this very liberating. We're never going to persuade people that the editorial page's position doesn't influence news coverage, so let's take down the firewall and let's give the editorial writers a chance to learn from their newsroom colleagues. So I see it the other way around, frankly. I see that the firewall, in fact, isolates and insulates editorial writers and reinforces a kind of closed circle of what is our opinion. And by taking down the firewalls what you can actually do is have the, the editorial writer who covers education, for example, meet on a regular basis with your educational reporters and learn a lot.

And that one person is not going to influence the educational reporters on what to cover because they don't particularly care about his or her opinion. They're not in the opinion business, what they're interested in is fully understanding what's going on in the lives of students, teachers, faculty.

Ayers: And how does the panel feel about that?

Campbell: They already believe the editorial page gives them direction..

Macmillan: Can I ask you --Can you guarantee the editors from each section never go out and eat lunch together?

Pepper: Oh, no. They do.

Macmillan: Then, in fact, there is then influence back and forth and communication back and forth. So there, a firewall doesn't insure that there is an influence and therefore, I believe that there is influence. I've seen it in the Star and I'll continue to believe there is, so having a firewall is a farce basically.

Campbell: Apparently there are buses that take journalists to the polls to vote in the blocks, too, according to the research.

Pepper: I think one way for newspapers to address this is through columns from editors and on editorial pages explaining the procedure. How do they come up with endorsements, how do they form their opinions and bring readers into the process. You know, if Cole wrote that in a column, explaining that really his education writers don't care what his opinion writers have to say and they're off on their own thing, I think that would influence people. The other thing we do is invite readers into the news meeting in the afternoon. And once readers get a copy of the budget of news stories we have, I think they walk away feeling that one person really doesn't write and decide everything that goes in the paper and they see the overwhelming nature of what comes in from all the different departments and it hits home that it's not quite so orchestrated as many readers believe it is. In fact, it's called the daily miracle because it's basically chaos until it gets in the paper.

Ayers: That device might help Kenneth, too, in his wondering, "Why should I pay the slightest bit of attention to this person?" Maybe there would be a little biography in this dialogue with the readers.

Pepper: Yeah, I like Kenneth's idea.

Audience 2 (Committee of Concerned Journalists Vice Chairman Tom Rosenstiel): I wanted to ask the faculty to follow up on something Cole said. I can't resist, however, first interjecting that Cole thinks we need more synthesis because we have more facts. Actually the research suggests that readers of newspapers don't know any more basic facts than they did before the information revolution, so I caution that it's too much synthesis and leaving people behind again. I think you said too much mastery and not enough literacy. My question is: comment, if you would, on Cole's separation between being an intermediary for elites, between elites and news consumers, and his other model. How much do you want the news media to be an intermediary that keeps an eye on elites in society and tells the rest of us what they're doing. How important is that? If you were to give us a kind of a balance, where would you put that balance?

Thompson: What type of measuring tool are we using?

Rosenstiel: Whatever you want. Just tell me how important that is. How much of that should we be doing?

Thompson: I rely on the newspaper I should say, to be a watchdog. I don't rely on television to do that for me and I don't rely on radio to do that for me. You were talking about the facts. On Mark McGwire, I consider that just an achievement. There's only so many facts you can put to it That's not a hard story to me school desegregation, that's a hard story. Those are the facts that I want to know, not the interpretation of the reporters of the mastery part of it, because I do feel like the literacy is more important. When you're talking about a subject such as desegregation, clearly there's already boundaries drawn and there's not a lot of mastery you can perform there. I don't feel like the paper can change the opinions of the people out there unless they're literate, if that makes sense. It's very valuable to me that the paper can provide that watchdog to me and provide that information that I can form my own mastery opinion on.

Ellzey: Yeah, you know, you guys have a really unique position 'cause you're the only business that's constitutionally protected from government intervention. And from my knothole it's really important, stuff like the Star did on these judges, I think we ought to boot every last one of them out. And I'm just amazed that there hasn't been more of a hue and cry. But that article that Miriam talked about was incredibly well done"This judge did this. We verified this." And it was probably some of the best stuff I've ever read. I like to see a lot of that because I look to the media, specifically the newspaper, as a watchdog. You know, "This senator is getting bribes from this corporation and here are the facts" and let me make my own decision and then take action from there.

Windsor: I'd quibble about a word, and words to me are extremely important. I'm sure they are to everybody who does this for a living. I don't. Rather than "elite," I'd like to change it to "decision-makers," or "decision-influencers," and those possibly are what you're referring to. I want to know as much as I can about those people because they may have an impact on my life. That's the group that in particular I can't research myself I rely on the media whether it's newspaper, television, or radio. But I think newspaper has the best record of keeping their eye on some of those people who either are the decision-makers themselves or the influencers of decisions, and those tend to be people closely connected with those decision-makers.

Macmillan: To answer your question briefly, I'd say about 30 percent watchdog function, and the other 70 percent more news we can use and development of our function as citizens.

Lee: I'd support the reverse of that. I'm keyed in very much on the press' role as a watchdog-government-at-all-levels simply because as time goes on that certainly has occurred in my lifetime. Government has, at all levels again, has more and more influence over all of us and much more impact everyday in our daily lives. And so I depend on the press, particularly the printed press, to go after this stuff, to keep an eye on, to be there for the meetings, to make the notes, to have sense enough to smell a dead fish and find out where it is.I think that's a primary responsibility, and as I said in my letter, I think that's the principle reason why you have so much almost unfettered freedom to do anything you damn well please.

Rooney: To sort of talk about that in a different dimension, when you take an issue like school desegregation which has been a big issue in both Kansas City and St. Louis, a watchdog model might lead you to spend all of your time covering Jay Nixon's position on desegregation. Or it might be to show how Cleveland Hammons, the superintendent of the St. Louis School System, is either effectively or ineffectively using the resources available to him as a superintendent. And my model is not in any way not paying attention to elites or decision-makers or influencers. The question is, where do you start your coverage? Do you start your coverage with, "We're going to cover desegregation through a Jay Nixon lens or a Cleveland Hammons lens or are we going to cover desegregation from a third grader's lens? What will it take to educate St. Louis or Kansas City's third graders effectively? What will it take to sustain some other goals we may have as a society toward integrating our full society and then use the watchdog function to make sure that resources are not being inadequately used or that political positioning is not being used manipulatively?" It's a question of, to use some journalism jargon, what's the main bar and what's the sidebar? What's the brunt of your focus and what's the rounding out to keep people honest focus?

Ellzey: I think if you're going to be honest you need to look at it from all of those perspectives. I look to the press, and if I want to know what you think, I'll turn to the opinion page realizing that I'm going to get your opinion personally as a editor It's when the opinion crosses over and is represented as fact is when you lose your credibility and I think that's what a lot of folks feel happens too much.

Audience 3: [Teenagers are ] not reflected on either the panel or the audience today. And I wonder, since they're an important part of any media audience, what you think they would say and what they would have to offer and add to this discussion.

Rooney: I don't know what the answer is. I think that really kids are used to instantaneous gratification of their intellect and other things. And I think that the media that they refer to is really far more television and the Internet than a printed newspaper. I am pleased the [Kansas City] Star has a section that's being written by high school students on a regular basis, and I think that probably will tease in some interest for the printed media for some students. And I applaud that effort.

Audience 4: Last night Dean Thorson mentioned some letters in which readers suggested that newspaper stories were just too long and that they wanted the facts really quickly. I guess my question is, would you rather see longer, more in-depth stories with fewer stories covered but more information being given out about those stories. Or many more stories but shorter in length with just the hard facts. And I guess my concern is is that if you have many stories with just the hard facts, then you lose that connection like Cole was talking about with the Mark McGwire story. I mean you can summarize the facts quickly but you lose a lot of that, synthesis I think you said, in that connection.

Lee: I think USA Today is based on that premise. Very short, crisp stories and I personally don't like it because you don't get the whole meat of the story. So for me it's not interesting. Even when I traveled and they were free I didn't read them.

Macmillan: I'll definitely second that because I greatly prefer in-depth stories if we're going to educate the public and so forth. You can't do that in sound bites and short stories. I'll read it if it's relevant no matter how long it is.

Ellzey: Yeah, I think that it's a function of the venue on printed media. I like it short with just main points and facts. If I'm in a web site or on a hypertext document, then I like to be able to drill down through live links and get more and more detail. I have to read so much to stay current and get ahead in network engineering and in business, that it's just, it's just a time factor. And so I deselect a lot of publications because they don't get me the information I need quickly. And what I've found with my colleagues who have to read all of these magazines and stuff and journals, is that the ones who keep it short with just the really important, hard-hitting points, and then provide us enough information so we know where to go to get more depth are the ones we tend to read. And the ones who ramble on, we just throw them in the garbage.

Rathburn: Yeah, I'd like to go back in response to that just very briefly. Go back to something you were talking about, Mr. Campbell, about the difference between the McGwire story and us just wanting facts and some of the other stuff that you publish. The McGwire story is unique and I think that's, the difference I would see is that it was unique in the sense that there was near-unanimity across every cultural line with regard to the impact of that story. Everybody could support your cheerleading, everybody could support however many columns you wanted to devote to it. When you get into an area like the difficulty that the school system faces, when you get into an area like changing the welfare system in this country, you now go from running full steam on hard field to stepping on eggs as far as the people are concerned. And it's at that point that you need to start making those very discriminatory decisions with regard to facts versus trying to impose your sense of values and leadership on the community.

Campbell: I would agree. The one sort of challenging response I'll make to that is that if journalists try to…second-guess the values of our readers on any particular issue, we'll never write anything effectively. The question becomes what do you need to know irrespective of where you are on the political ideology spectrum. What do you need to know about welfare reform? What do you need to know about desegregation? What do you need to know about school reform or campaign finance reform that will help you engage in a discussion from whatever point on the ideological spectrum that you're on. And it's interesting to me because whatever the critique is of newspapers or television or news reports, my sense is that America actually has the core set of facts it needs to debate and discuss these issues. Where we struggle is, what do we make of these facts? And I think the critique you make of newspapers is part of that same struggle. It's not that the facts themselves are obscure to anyone, it's that we don't yet have a good public dialogue or discourse on how to reach consensus about what the facts say, what solution is appropriate to the problem, and that's where the real tensions animate discussion.

Audience 5 (Rob Logan): [C]ircumstances emerged in the last 90 years or so where the news media has shown a lot of leadership, [and] has made a major decision very quietly. I want to see whether or not you think that decision was appropriate or not. Every day you see coverage of science and medicine and particularly of health in newspapers. You see the latest discovery that someone has made about strokes or cancer. You also see a lot of coverage about the attempt to try to intervene in the human genetic [code] and in animals and also plants. It's routinely covered everyday. There are complaints about that coverage for millions of Americans. They find that coverage offensive. They find it insensitive. They find it probably inaccurate. They find it enormously biased and very partial because, they argue, it presumes that the biological explanation of evolution is accurate. And they also say that reporting also presumes in many respects that disease can be controlled by medical intervention and health can be controlled by medical intervention. When you go globally, you see even how more dramatic that is. There are many nations in the world, I'm not talking about North America or Europe now, where you couldn't even put that in a newspaper. You couldn't broadcast that kind of information on television because there's so much cultural sensitivity that it offends.

My question for you is, again, there was nobody in a room that decided 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 years ago that we should cover those stories on a routine basis without inserting in them the religious objections and objections that some people make towards those things. I'd be very curious in your view. Was that decision that's been made slowly over time appropriate?

Thompson: I'd just like to comment. I think that goes back to the literacy of the readers. I don't think that very many readers -- well, maybe the readers are, but I don't think there's very many people out there that are literate. I run across people all the time that don't even read the paper at all and it aggravates me. I'm all for coverage of those type of stories on a literal basis of informing us of what's going on; how can we get more people to read it, I don't know. They rely so heavily on TV that they can't join in the conversation. I know people that vote for the president but never vote for their congress people. You know, that's just total foolishness. [P]eople need to be informed more about what's going on and can newspapers do that? Can they provide that? I think they can if they get away from what they're being accused of, the bias. I like the opinion page. I know it's an opinion. It's not necessarily the facts. I know it's an opinion. It doesn't matter to me. I like to read it just for my own entertainment. But those types of stories, I think we need those type of stories to, to help inform the public and to make more people literate.

Rathburn: Let me comment on that if I could. What you're really talking about is the fact that you made an unconscious decision to go totally secular in your discussion of dealing with the events, however complex, technological, or mundane they may be. I don't personally have a problem with that as long as I don't get the impression that you're denigrating the value systems of those people who do, in fact, have strong beliefs in a particular area. But the path you took, while it may have been unconscious, was probably pretty logical. This country has gone from being overwhelmingly Christian to being simply predominantly Christian. We get more and more diverse every day, both through simple internal population growth as well as immigration. The shortest, easiest path to follow is to not try to incorporate every one of those value systems in every article you write. That's a good reason for being secular in your approach. But you cross over the line when you imply that your view, the secular view of how things occurred or how they ought to be viewed is the only correct view of the issue. How you manage to acknowledge all those other views and still maintain that sort of secular neutrality, I'm not paid to figure out.

Ellzey: I think that trend of full reporting on science and technology is absolutely a good one. And I agree with him. [I]f you denigrate the evolutionists versus the creationists or vice versa, that's when you really cross the line and folks get mad at you. As a scientist, and as someone who works with scientists day in and day out, if I want to find more information, I'll go to the journals and dig it out. But I like the fact that in my newspaper it says that, "Galileo made this really great discovery on the moons of Jupiter." Well, then I'll go to NASA's web site and go find out some more information. And I think that's pretty good, so I think that's a positive trend.

Windsor: I wanted to say that I think that I agree with them. I don't think you have necessarily insulted the beliefs of other people. And I think you're going to do that regardless of what you do. But I have another criticism of that whole area, and I think that your ignorance in being led along by scientists and not asking the questions that need to be asked of, what does this mean? A friend of mine who works in what's called organic farming, rather than traditional farming -- although when I was growing up we went around and picked weeds out of the fields and didn't spray chemicals on them, so I guess the tradition started in another area.

But, say it says that Monsanto is developing a genetic seed that essentially makes the seeds that come from that plant sterile. Now to me the question that should be asked by you all, is what does that mean to the world? To Third World countries that maybe these things are being pushed to? My point being that because of your lack of knowledge in science and technology, that what is put forward as a good idea doesn't have the in-depth analysis that's necessary for those of us that don't have science and technology backgrounds perhaps, to provide input on the whole process. And that many times you are essentially repeating the information that's given to you by the multinational corporations. And yes, I do have a bias. I support capitalism but only to a certain level, and beyond that is I think it is very dangerous. I mean the whole issue with global warming, when you present a balanced story, if 80 percent of, of scientists say this and 20 percent say this, it is presented as if there is total disagreement on it. So I would challenge you all to look especially in those areas because technology is changing so quickly of how are you going to address these issues, whether they're ethical, whether they're the impact on our environment, on workers or whatever, how do you address those issues because of the enormity of the information and the technology involved?

Ayers: Now the lady in the back.

Audience 6 (Loes Nas): Thank you. My name is Loes Nas. I'm an outsider here and I'm from South Africa. I'm here to look at [the] School of Journalism and see what we can do with it at the university that I teach. Now yesterday the point was raised that newspaper coverage [can't] be representative of the population. There was a gentleman there that also raised that point again. Yesterday they said 40 percent of the population is Hispanic, then the news coverage should also be representative of that. Now my question is about this issue. Is there a relationship in the paper between the readers or rather the buyers of the newspaper and the composition of the population? In other words, 40 percent of the population is, let's say, Hispanic -- is that also reflective in the people that actually read the newspaper? If the minority groups [are] not covered in a newspaper, is it because they're not interested in the paper?

Pepper: Well, the intent is to cover the minority communities and that they be reflected representative to the population of the community you're covering and that also applies to the staff. You want your staff to reflect the community, too The studies I'm shown show that we are fairly representative in our readership.

Campbell: That's also true of the Post Dispatch. Our readership tracks roughly with demographic breakdowns in the population. We're not strong enough in any of those areas, so we'd like to strengthen them. But also I don't know the economic structure of South African newspapers, but the subscriptions to our newspapers are relatively cheap because advertisers pay so much of the freight. So it's, it's pretty cheap to buy American newspapers, so cost is not a huge barrier.

I don't know. But we distribute through lower income census tracks, for example rough measures suggest that we're, the penetration is about comparable. I mean penetration's not good enough anywhere we have trouble with all apartment complexes and my guess is we have even more trouble with public housing apartment complexes.

Audience 7: I'm from the School of Journalism faculty. I have a question for the panelists, some of whom endorse the concept of newspaper or media as watchdog, and there were also one or two complaints about use of anonymous sources. And so I'd like to pose to you the quandary that journalists find themselves in and since you're a consumer of whether you're going to get this information or not, how you'd handle it. A lot of times journalists say they can't get the information into print or on the, on the air waves if they don't give protection to the sources. We have a gentleman who's retired military, and that's certainly true when you're covering the military command structure. I've worked with a lot of military journalists and I say things like, "Why is this inane quote from this colonel running this base here when you really needed to go talk to the service people who are using the PX and see what they think about the service." And they said, "Well, we can't because we have to go to the boss." And nobody would criticize the PX service or whatever it is for fear of retribution from the command structure. Or I could go to the gentleman who worked for the City of Columbia and say, "There's a lot of people in the city government who would not criticize, with their name being used, city services being offered here or the way the mayor or the city manager maybe runs things." Same thing could be true of Sprint. You have a command structure and you probably at many levels are now allowed to speak to the press without permission from up the line. And certainly I suspect that there are teachers and principals in the superintendent's district who would not want their name used in criticism of your policies. Without that information that they would give us, we have very difficult time performing that watchdog role. Do you think we can get the information other ways? Do you not want the information at the price of anonymous sources? Do you have another solution for us?

Lee: Well, I think there's a difference between a whistle-blower who's trying to right a wrong and someone who's just trying to float a news story. And I think if someone is trying to float something for their own purpose, or the purpose of the party or for someone they work for, then that's one thing and I would simply say no, we're not going to do it unless we can quote you. If, on the other hand, a low-level of employee of some company finds out that people are swindling the government or the city or the state or some such function and says, and says, "Here's the information that I have. Can you investigate it further?" Then I think it's up to the reporter to dig a little deeper and see if what that individual is saying is truthful. And then run with the story. And then without ever having to say, "This was given to us by an anonymous source."

Ellzey: I think as somebody who trains journalists, I rely a lot on the journalist to filter out the biased trial balloons. And it's a matter of trust and a matter of judgment. I know in my profession there's a lot of hype about do this on the internet, do that on the internet, and when you get down to it and you realize that's all it is and you just ignore it. So you're going to have to have anonymous sources. But the judgment in the reporter, okay, they need to have that discernment to be able to tell, "Well, you know, I'm being used here. I'm not going to print this or I'm going to force this person, if they really want me to do this to say, 'I'm so-and-so with so-and-so and I said this.'" And that's what your challenge is, is to train folks to do that and it's, it gets easier the longer they've been in the profession.

Meeks: As a Mirror reader and not in any bones to chew on around here, when it says it's an anonymous source, I take it for what it's worth, add a lot of salt, and keep right on moving. Because you can take it and say, "Gosh, that really happened?" Or you can say, "Well, somebody's talking but they're not brave enough to say their names." I do know that you need anonymous sources; I know that. If you don't, you get nothing. I understand this. [But] if I see it says anonymous source, well, it's worth anonymous comments.

Audience 8 (University of Missouri facutly member and retired newspaperman John Merrill): We were talking about 40 percent Hispanics in a particular community and that they weren't properly represented. I think that's sort of juvenile to think that various population percentages have to be appropriately represented in the press. In fact, that knocks out the whole concept of news worthiness. What is this 40 percent doing to manufacture or make news? That's the big question. [Y]ou get all this attention to Mark McGwire, that's okay, but what about the other players on that team? They're not being appropriately represented, according to that kind of theory. It's because Mark McGwire's making news is the reason that he is singled out disproportionate to the other members of the team. The same way backfield players in football get far more attention than the others do. I mean, it seems to me that we can't edit newspaper statistically like that.

Another thing, too, you were saying was this idea it seems to me, all newspapers should be doing more or less the same thing. In other words there are some newspapers that are like restaurants: they serve gourmet meals and T-bone steaks, there are others that serve hamburgers and French fries and so forth. All newspapers are not the same. We have a great variety and I think the editor of the newspaper has to decide what they're going to put in it just like the owner of the restaurant does, decides what he's going to serve at his restaurant and he doesn't try to go out and take polls and surveys and find out what everybody wants to have in the restaurant. He produces the kind of food that he wants in that particular restaurant.

Audience 9 (Kent Ford): I would like to thank all the panelists for coming today. It's wonderful to have such dedicated news consumers to come down here and actually talk to us about these issues. I have three questions. My name is Kent Ford. I'm the editor over at the Missouri Press Association. Why is media-bashing so popular? And is media-bashing an excuse for ignoring our obligations as citizens? And how can newspapers, radio and television stations get more people to read, listen, and watch them?

Thompson: Well, it's media bashing 'cause you asked. And I don't know how to get more people to read. I wish I could.

Windsor: Well, I have a comment. First, first I guess I better have a disclaimer. I do work for the City of Columbia but this is not meant to represent their positions. Yeah, this is totally off the record. It's fun. You know, I think that actually your second question has a lot to do with it. It's a lot easier for us to blame the media, to blame government, to blame anybody else than to take the responsibility for ourselves. And I think unfortunately that permeates our society today and that is one of the things that we have been talking about is, how we rebuild the community or rebuild the sense of citizenship in this country? Because quite frankly, I think it's being lost. And until we do that, we are always going to be looking for somebody else to blame no matter what the problem is. And, rather than being a group of victims, we need to decide where we're going. And that doesn't necessarily mean the sense of everybody has to have the same view, but that means that we recognize that we are a community whether that be a small community or the whole country or the whole world for that matter. That we are going forward, rather than spiraling down into some kind of destructive situation.

Rooney: Cole mentioned value earlier. And I would rather say that this is not bashing, at least what occurred this morning I would hope. It certainly wasn't intended that way so much as fine tuning something that's already pretty darn good but we'd like it to better. And we should do that in our own lives on a regular basis anyway in everything we do, both personally and professionally. In answer to your question why the media is being bashed is because maybe people got tired of bashing schools, teachers, and El Nino. Actually I heard teachers were responsible for El Nino, too...

Ellzey: I think part of why the media is taking a lot of bashing is because they've engaged in a lot of it and most of it on a partisan nature. I think that's why you're getting a lot of heat. How can we get folks to read more? I think there's two facets to that. One, those of us who have kids need to encourage literacy and reading rather than watching some talking head on the TV which I don't even consider journalism. And then there's the school systems. This guy's working together with the parents to get kids interested in learning more about the world they live in, to learning more about how this country was founded and why it was founded, and taking accountability and responsibility for their own actions and making their own decisions.

Rathburn: We like shooting the messenger. That's what it boils down to. We don't like the message, we don't like the way it's delivered, and I'll tell you, it's been going on for 200 and some odd years in this country and it's not going to change. The original revolutionaries and Tories that were left over were at each other's throats the first time the paper hit the streets in Philadelphia. And it's going to keep right on going that way.

But the danger for you folks is becoming so insensitive, so proud of your ability to develop the calluses and to absorb the punishment, that you forget the fact that once in awhile there's a real message in that criticism. What got your attention this time are flat sales, declining market share. It's a good wake up call. That one will definitely get your attention.

Lee: When you say the media, it's so all-encompassing that it gathers in those people who take extreme positions which generates a feeling that they should be bashed. Rush Limbaugh, for example, says he's not a member of the media. He's not a journalist. He's an entertainer, but it's hard to follow that distinction. Linda Bowes is a writer, opinion person, she generates a lot of opposition because she takes extreme positions. So you get so many different people taking such extreme positions that they generate an equal and opposite reaction. There's an article in Time by Charles Krauthammer that got me pretty upset. And he finishes his article by saying that Bill Clinton will not be remembered for his involvement with Monica. On the other hand, he compares him with other presidents. He said, "John F.Kennedy will be remembered for his inaugural address. Carter will be remembered for the Panama Canal treaties, and Nixon will be remembered for the Shanghai communiqué." Well, that's absolute nonsense. John F. Kennedy will be remembered because he was the young, handsome swinger who was shot down by an assassin. Carter will be remembered because he screwed up the Iran hostage situation. And Nixon will be remembered because he was the first, and hopefully only, president who had to resign. So this journalist is taking what I think is not only an extreme position but a wrong position. An inaccurate position. So it generates an equal and opposite feeling that this is not correct. This is not right. I don't think we particularly bash ordinary news writers. For that matter, we don't even know who they are.

Windsor: So how come they're not in these chairs?

Ayers: Have we had the last word? Let me say that we love to hear you talk about us. And we like it especially when you're honest, informed, and insightful as you have been. It's impressive. The whole situation you all, us all journalists, coming together, puts me in mind of a story from my small town parliament, the court house barbershop. One of the parliamentarians was holding forth on all of the sins of the Anniston Star and most of the folks in there knew who I was. And they followed the discussion as I egged him on, sort of like a tennis match. Finally he said, "You Mr. Ayers, ain't you?" And I said, "Guilty." And he said, "Well, Mr. Ayers, you know, in a small town like this we already know what the news is. The only reason we read the old newspaper is to find out if you got it right." I think these kinds of conversations need to increase and multiply. But with great respect and a lot of enjoyment and entertainment, listening to you, I want to lead off in a rousing applause for you guys.

Loory: If you don't mind, I'm going to steal the opportunity to have the last word. And first of all, I would like to continue the rousing applause for Brandy Ayers, for Miriam Pepper and for Cole Campbell. Secondly, I would like to thank three organizations, without which it would not have been possible to be here today. And they are: The Kansas City Star, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and the Missouri Publishers' Association for their support of this meeting.

Before we go to lunch, I would just like to give you some idea of what I think I got out of this meeting this morning. As I was sitting here listening I was just flooded with memories about what a newspaper really is. I recalled my earliest days as a reporter many, many years ago for the, as we say, now defunct New York Evening News in New Jersey, sitting in a suburban bureau as the reporter and everybody else was out to lunch and the telephone rang one day. And there was a lady at the other end saying, "You didn't have the stars in the newspaper today." And I said, "Huh?" And she said, "You didn't have the stars in the newspaper." And as we talked what she was talking about was that we'd left out the astrology column that day. Because the astrology column was left out, she said she could not get out of bed because she could not deal with the day until she find out what message the stars had for her. And we talked about that. I hung up and I realized it was 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon when we were talking and I called the main office and said we were missing the astrology column. And that threw everybody into a tizzy. And that taught me something about what newspapers are all about. Newspapers are not just the news. Newspapers are not just the watchdogs. Newspapers are not just the intermediaries. But newspapers have a lot of information of great value to individuals. Many years later I was involved, unfortunately, in creating another defunct newspaper and that was the marvelous Chicago Daily News, which we merged into the Chicago Sun Times and as a result of that, we did not have space for all of the comic strips…. And we had to drop three comic strips. And it became part of my job to make part of that decision. I cannot say that I am an informed comic strip reader. So I went hope and spoke to my 14-year-old daughter. And I said, "Miriam, we have to drop three comic strips from the paper. What comic strips should we drop?" And my daughter gave me the name of three comic strips, one of them being Garfield the cat. My daughter was a cat lover but she was not a Garfield lover when you had to compare Garfield with all of the other possibilities. We dropped Garfield the cat. You cannot imagine the uproar in the Chicago metropolitan area. We put Garfield the cat back in the paper in about two days. And once again, it was a lesson about what it is that makes a good newspaper.

I think that what we have learned here today from this wonderful panel and what we have learned from Cole and Miriam and a lot of the questions here is that to be successful and to be of value, not only financially successful but journalistically valuable, a newspaper must be, not necessarily to everybody, but it must be everything for each individual reader. And then it will be successful. And that's what we have heard today again. And I thank you all for reinforcing that message for us.