Pilot uses frank words in coverage of its impending likely sale
Over breakfast Sunday, Sharon and I marveled at the frankness in Sunday’s Virginian-Pilot with regards to the impending possible breakup and sale of the Pilot’s parent company, Landmark Communications.
The Pilot crib on Norfolk’s Brambleton Avenue.
Our newsroom is on the second; Landmark
corporate HQ is on the third.
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Sharon’s take: If someone at the corporate level becomes offended at the coverage and decides to clean house, I’ll avoid the bloodbath. Since I’m no longer a newsroom manager.
Does she know how to look at the bright side, or what?
We found four things in Sunday’s report that just stunned us:
1. Fearless reporter Diane Tennant reported in a story in our business section:
“The quality that Landmark and Frank Batten Sr. insisted on in his newspapers will probably be diminished,” John McManus, a San Jose State University journalism lecturer and former Norfolk reporter, said. “He always cared about the quality of the papers. He read them. It mattered to him the way it probably would not matter to a distant owner.”
2. Later in that same story, Tennant writes:
Under the Battens’ ownership, The Pilot was among the papers that aggressively pursued social change and investigative stories, winning two Pulitzer Prizes for its editorial stance against Massive Resistance to school integration and for general news reporting that investigated the spending practices of a Chesapeake public official.
“What likely will happen, I’m sad to say, it’s very likely the newsroom will be stripped of many of its resources,” McManus predicted. “Reporters will be laid off, editors will be let go, especially the more experienced people who are paid more.
3. In her first — and, I sure hope, not her last — column as the Pilot’s new public editor, Old Dominion University professor Joyce Hoffman writes:
Any assessment of how well The Pilot served its readers in telling the story of the proposed sale leads to the doorstep of Landmark’s chairman and chief executive officer, Frank Batten Jr. The decision, as he noted, was his alone. His words and actions colored the initial coverage. To be sure, he faced an irreconcilable conflict between the preservation of his corporation’s private interests - in which he has clear fiduciary obligations - and service to his newspaper’s public responsibilities - which is part of his birthright. The best that can be said is that he protected the corporate interests.As a result, rather than break the story, Pilot reporters were left to chase it. The early reports were unilluminating. The community remains largely in the dark about Landmark’s intentions.
And, later in that same column, Hoffman writes:
From the beginning, the business team had been counseled by Editor Denis Finley to “cover this just as aggressively as we would any similar change at Norfolk Southern or any other big business. It would be hypocrisy to do otherwise.” [Reporter Phil] Walzer said he asked all the obvious questions and kept asking them even as Batten repeatedly deflected those efforts.
As portrayed in the story that followed, Batten left little doubt about whose interests were uppermost. “I’m just trying to do a good job for our shareholders,” he said. In a possible sale, those shareholders’ interests are doubtless best served by revealing less rather than more information. But his fiduciary responsibilities aside, in the absence of any parallel statement of concern for his employees, for The Pilot’s readers or for the community that helped his family build its empire, it all seemed a bit cold-hearted.
From Day One — well, technically, Day Two, but who’s counting? — The Pilot has covered this story with a level of candor that surprises hell out of me, considering how the story broke and given what little the guys at the top of the food chain have shared with the rest of us.
Even a story that ran last week, detailing who owns stock in Landmark? Yep. Our reporter pulled it from a public filing regarding a TV station Landmark owns in Nashville.
I’m really proud of the way Denis has turned folks loose on the story. And I’m proud of the way our newsroom is scratching and clawing to report this story and of the bluntness I’m seeing on our pages.
I have no wish to turn this blog into a Virginian-Pilot sales blog. But I’ve reported on similar stories at other shops, so I don’t want to pull punches in my own. Therefore, you’ll see these little roundups from time to time.
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Stories available online regarding the possible sale of the Pilot:
* Jan. 3: Our first-day story appears to be offline now. Here’s our day-one blog entry, though.
*Jan. 4: CEO Frank Batton Jr. says the decision to sell was his. Here’s our second-day blog coverage.
* Jan. 4: Pilot reporters pose the question: Just what is The Weather Channel worth?
* Jan. 4: The Pilot looks into the value of all the land occupied by various Landmark operations. This is a resort area, y’know.
* Jan. 5: For years, folks have speculated about a merger of The Pilot with the Chicago Tribune-owned Newport News Daily Press. It ain’t gonna happen. Includes an amusing photoillustration by the Pilot’s Stephanie Pittman.
* Jan. 8: The Baltimore Sun Co. — which owns several small papers that compete with small Landmark-owned papers in Maryland and, in turn, is owned by — wait for it — the Chicago Tribune — says it might possibly bid for pieces of Landmark.
* Jan. 10: Ninety percent of Landmark’s voting stock is owned by three trusts overseen by Frank Battens Junior and Senior.
* Jan. 11: TV evangelist and onetime presidential candidate Pat Robertson — who, by the way, is based here in Virginia Beach — says he’s considering a bid to buy The Pilot. We blogged it here.
* Jan. 13: If Landmark — and The Pilot — is sold, what will it really mean to the Pilot’s readers here in Hampton Roads?
* Jan. 13: In her first column, The Pilot’s new Public Editor weighs in on the Pilot’s coverage of the story.