Reporter
The Dallas Morning Blues
It’s been nothing but bad news lately for Belo, the media conglomerate that owns the state’s leading newspaper. But to understand how Texas’s oldest company can survive in the brave new world, you have to read between the lines.
(Page 2 of 2)
It might be easy to dismiss everything that Decherd says as irrational optimism except for the fact that a Greek chorus of Wall Street analysts agrees with him. “They are refocusing on their core business,” says Edward Atorino, of Fulcrum Global Partners, in New York, a leading industry analyst. “They have got top-notch properties. Their balance sheet is in good shape. They are paying down debt, downsizing the workforce, eliminating marginal operations.” In other words, they are putting their mistakes behind them.
NONE OF THIS, of course, addresses the fact that Belo’s two most important assets, the Morning News and WFAA, are visibly struggling, a circumstance that has everyone in the Dallas media world talking. The newspaper was the subject of blistering feature stories in both the Columbia Journalism Review and the Dallas Observer last year. In the CJR story, former Morning News Pulitzer prize winner Craig Flournoy portrayed a management that protected “sacred cows” such as Ross Perot Senior and Junior, American Airlines, and Tom Hicks while determinedly squelching investigative stories by its best reporters. His argument, with which many former staffers agree, is that after winning an unprecedented six Pulitzer prizes from 1986 to 1994 (the paper had not won a single one before that) and putting the rival Times Herald out of business, the paper became fat, happy, and deliberately bland. “A huge, glaring example was coverage of Ross Perot’s bid for the presidency,” says Gayle Reaves, the editor of the Fort Worth Weekly and another Pulitzer prize winner who left the paper, as did all of its other investigative Pulitzer winners. “Nobody wanted near it because they knew what was going to happen. Stories were gone through with a fine-tooth comb.”
That sort of media buzz, plus the paper’s obvious sales and circulation woes, has taken its toll on the employees. “Dozens of newsroom staff, editors and writers alike, say morale has never been so low,” wrote Dallas Observer media critic Eric Celeste, who covers the Morning News more closely than anyone. Says Reaves: “The troops are so beaten down. There isn’t a senior reporter worth his salt who isn’t cynical.” In a radio interview last May, Moroney conceded that the newspaper had not been doing its best work of late: “In the last seven or eight years, I am not confident that we in the Dallas Morning News have done as much as we could and should do to fulfill that important role that falls to us as a major metropolitan newspaper in Dallas,” he told KERA interviewer Marla Crockett. Later, at a November meeting with staff, he told staffers, “I feel like a failing student,” and said that he took full responsibility for the paper’s financial performance.
When I asked Moroney about this, he drew a sharp distinction between the newspaper’s mediocre sales and circulation record and the newspaper’s editorial quality. “We have not hit our financial targets for the last three years,” said Moroney, whose family owns 3 percent of Belo and controls 14 percent of Belo’s voting stock. “And I wanted to let everyone here at this newspaper know that I take responsibility for it. While I give myself a failing grade, I don’t give the newsroom and the stories we are doing a failing grade. We have been doing and will continue to do great journalism. But I think we can also do better. I think our culture needs to change. I don’t believe we have been doing enough around investigative journalism, and one of the places where we did not make any cuts was in our investigative unit.”
The Morning News clearly has its imperfections. It lacks tough-guy city columnists willing to take on Dallas’s entrenched interests and is guilty of a certain amount of uneven journalism. But it is also still a very good newspaper. With more than five hundred editorial staff members, it has an enormous news reach. Its editorial and op-ed pages, edited by recent hire Keven Anne Wiley, are smart and unpredictable. Sports columnist Gerry Fraley is first-rate, as are investigative reporters Lee Hancock, Pete Slover, and Brooks Egerton, and its political coverage is the best in the state. “Their ongoing series of stories about corruption and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is clearly Pulitzer-worthy,” concedes Reaves. Their recent stories on the Wilmer-Hutchins school district and on Child Protective Services are examples of superb urban journalism. “The Morning News is still the best paper in the state and region,” says Robert Rivard, the editor of the San Antonio Express-News. “But the gap has closed considerably between Dallas and the other metro newspapers.”
Its sibling WFAA (Channel 8 in Dallas—Fort Worth) is also the target of withering criticism for failing to be what it once was—arguably the country’s best regional TV news operation. This too is largely a matter of taste and perception, since WFAA’s news division has won a number of the industry’s highest awards, including a 2005 DuPont-Columbia award (one of only two awarded to local stations), both a DuPont and a Peabody for 2002, and Edward R. Murrow awards for three years in a row. Still, critics say Belo management has turned the station into a shadow of what it was in the eighties and nineties. “They believed if they lowered their standards, they would make more money and still get good ratings,” says Robert Riggs, a former WFAA investigative reporter who won three DuPonts and a Peabody. “They were obviously wrong. WFAA lost its core values and lost track of what it was that made them great.”
Like the Morning News, Channel 8 has seen an exodus of most of its prize-winning warhorses in the past few years. This includes anchor Tracy Rowlett, who left after a bitter and quite public contract fight in 1999 to join KTVT (Channel 11). In the February 2004 sweeps, Rowlett’s Channel 11 got a 9.1 rating (200,200 homes), beating Channel 8, which got only an 8.9 (195,800 homes). Robert Philpot, the media reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, recently asked readers why they were tuning WFAA out. One of the most common complaints, he says, was “that Channel 8 has let a lot of good people go.”
Jack Sander, Belo’s president of media operations, dismisses such criticism and insists that WFAA is as good as ever. “It’s a completely different competitive environment,” he says. “The viewer is not the same. Before, there were only three newscasts on. Now you can get news on your Blackberry and cell phone. Is WFAA’s product the same as it was? Absolutely not. Is the commitment to quality journalism still there? I would submit that it is.”
BUT NO MATTER how well Belo manages the television stations and newspapers that it owns, it still faces the prospect of a declining, aging audience that advertisers are going to be more and more reluctant to underwrite. To succeed, it will not only have to make sure that its traditional lines of business are strong, but it will also have to experiment with the kinds of new-media ventures that have gotten it into trouble in the past. In 1999, for example, Belo made disastrous investments in CueCat, a laughably impractical digital newspaper scanner, that ended with a $37.5 million loss. And during the dot-com boom, it lost $20 million on various Internet companies.
“All those investments were made with some uncertainty as to whether they would make it in the marketplace,” says Decherd. “They were good bets to make. We and every legacy media company were making them and will continue to make them.” He says rather than pulling back, Belo will continue to push its “brand extensions”—like the three Spanish-language newspapers it now owns in Dallas—Fort Worth and Riverside, California; the Morning News’ Collin County edition; and Quick—all while avoiding the mistakes of the past few years.
No one thinks that is going to be easy. “Just being a midsized traditional media company puts them in a tough spot,” says Diane Mermigas, who writes an industry newsletter, Mermigas on Media, and a syndicated column. “They had to try these things. It’s the companies who don’t do it that are in trouble.” But, she adds, given Belo’s size, it can afford to try only so much, and to survive, it might one day need to find somebody to merge with.
Decherd disagrees. He insists that Dealeys are going to be running the company for many years to come. “I am fifty-three and more energetic about this job than I have ever been. And if I wasn’t, I certainly became so in the past few months, because I don’t like situations where our company’s reputation is at risk,” he says. “We are very committed to overcoming recent events.” And that, if he succeeds in pulling it off, will give Belo something it has been sorely lacking: a bit of truly good news.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
