Media
Pro vs. Chron
How the new editor of the Houston Chronicle is playing against type.
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On that last point, history is instructive. For most of its first 86 years, the paper was owned by the Houston Endowment, a charitable foundation said to be as concerned with politics and position in the community as with philanthropy. The endowment's founder, Jesse Jones, was Mr. Houston—a builder, banker, and New Deal Secretary of Commerce who was the most important figure in the city's establishment for almost half a century before his death in 1956. And so the Chron became the establishment's house organ. Its take on politics and business, its society coverage, its barbs and bouquets, all were an extension of the endowment's civic leadership role. The result was a paper that was more boosterism than journalism, more Houston than chronicle. In 1987, after Congress passed a law requiring foundations to divest themselves of their profit-making assets, the endowment sold off its hotels, laundries, and other operating companies. The Chron was the last to go, and only then after Senator Lloyd Bentsen tried and failed to secure an exemption for newspapers. Later that year, the endowment sold the Chron to the Hearst Corporation for $415 million—at the time, the most ever paid for a U.S. newspaper.
On one level, the Hearst deal changed the way things were run at the Chronicle, says the editor at the time, Jack Loftis. "That first morning I asked, 'Who are we mad at today?' And I was told, 'No one.' What?!?" But despite Loftis' best efforts—"My biggest challenge was to change it from what it had been," he says—the Chron's reputation as a mouthpiece for the establishment persisted. Part of this Loftis takes the hit for. "We were still a little bit closer to some politicians than we should have been," he admits. But part of it was the conspiracy theorists at work: No matter what he did or didn't do, they saw the lingering legacy of the Houston Endowment. "They had their sacred cows, like the Medical Center and sports stadiums," says Richard Connelly, of the Press, who complains of "press releases showing up in the paper." Even bad journalism was occasionally mistaken for favoritism. Beginning last fall, the Chron was hammered for its slow response to the collapse of Enron. Critics assumed the problem was the paper's ties to Ken Lay and other company executives, but Loftis and Pederson say otherwise. "I wish we had that as an excuse," Pederson says. "We didn't get the story for reasons that had nothing to do with how close we were to the establishment. We didn't connect the dots in the right way."
It was into this swirling sea that Cohen waded when was he tapped this spring to succeed the retiring Loftis. It was, in essence, a homecoming: Although he was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, his family moved to Houston before his first birthday. He lived first around the Medical Center and later in Meyerland, attending public schools and ultimately graduating from Bellaire High. After earning a journalism degree at the University of Texas at Austin, in 1976, he took a job on the sports desk of the Hearst-owned San Antonio Light, working his way up to managing editor by the time the paper folded, in 1993. After a short stint in New York in the new-media department of Hearst's newspaper division, he was named editor of the Hearst-owned Albany Times-Union in upstate New York, where in eight years, by all accounts, he was a star. In three of the past four years, the New York state Associated Press named the Times-Union the best newspaper in its circulation class. In May 2002 Editor and Publisher cited the paper as one of ten across the country that "do it right." Cohen's track record appealed to Chron publisher Jack Sweeney, who diplomatically dismisses suggestions that Pederson, a well-liked 27-year veteran of the paper, was shunted aside so that the Chronicle could be run by an outsider with no establishment ties. "We already have a great team," Sweeney says, "but you always want to add another high-powered superstar to the lineup."
So what is Cohen thinking, now that he has been called up to the majors? For two hours before the eleven o'clock meeting, I tried to pin him down on his impressions of the paper. He was cagey when it came to specifics, particularly whether recent criticisms of the Chron were legitimate—"I wasn't here; I don't know; I'm not looking backward" was his answer whenever I brought up Enron—but he was expansive about his philosophy going forward. "There's a crisis of confidence in America," he said. "We can't trust the FBI or the CIA. We can't trust the church. We can't even trust Martha Stewart. The job of a newspaper is to restore that confidence by shining a light on these problems." The Chron will do that, he told me over and over, through "watchdog journalism," by taking a "populist approach" to reporting the news, by "standing up for the little guy" and "challenging authority." (Jesse Jones, call your office.)
He was only slightly more open about the changes he plans to make. He talked about retooling the business pages so that women, minorities, and small-business owners would read them, "not just CEOs of Fortune 500 companies." He wants the front page of every section to have stories that appeal to "Hispanics, African Americans, Jews, single moms, the elderly—all the people in the community." (And, indeed, recent section fronts have brimmed with big-tentism, with stories about Al Lipscomb, the embattled African American former city councilman from Dallas, and ¡Mucha Lucha!, a new cartoon on the WB network targeted to Hispanics.) He'd like to see more writerly stories in the paper, something along the lines of what Rick Bragg produces for the New York Times, which is why he's encouraging the likes of Freemantle and Mike Tolson, another writer on his radar screen. And the comparisons with competitors don't stop there. While Cohen told me that there's no single model for the kind of paper he wants the Chron to become, there are parts of other papers he admires: the Monday business section of the Times, the Life section of USA Today, the sports section of the New York Post, the gossip pages of the New York Daily News, and the big-story coverage of the Dallas Morning News. "You define your competition in those specialized segments and then figure out how you can be better than they are," he said.
Fair enough, but first things first: Job number one for Cohen is figuring out how the Chronicle can be better than the Chronicle is. I'd say he's off to a pretty good start.
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