Faith
and the Media
My most recent post was to help to restore to health the Hamilton Spectator,
which is the oldest newspaper in the Southam chain and was perhaps its
most distressed. It was no longer, as Neil Reynolds put it, the journal
of moral conduct. It no longer told stories as parables and it had greatly
lost its way. Back in the mid 1980s it began to take its community for
granted and lost touch with it.
When it fell into some financial trouble, it strayed from its character,
it panicked, as newspapers often do when economic cycles crest and wane.
It began to harvest rather ruthlessly. It took content away from its readership
, it weakened its coverage of the things that mattered most, the coverage
of our local neighbourhoods and our local way of life, and it whittled
down its coverage to pretty much only hard news, hard news of the day.
And then it also raised its price and at first it got away with it and,
frankly, if it had succeeded, I think there would be now international
delegations coming to Hamilton from business schools to study the Spectator
method. But there was, as they say, many days of reckoning and the thing
that happened very quickly was that the paper began to lose its circulation,
began to go into a bit of a free fall, and by the time it was apparent
that redemption was necessary, it was almost a lost cause.
There were a number of people here when I was in Ottawa at Southam News
who were, in fact, counseling me: "Don't go to Hamilton. You know you'll
never get out of there." And I happen to love the city, I think it's a
fabulous city and it's a great franchise and a wonderful newsroom with
a terrific outlook, but truth was that all of the economic indices were
not all that inspiring to go down there.
But the paper understood, the publisher understood and I certainly understood
that the paper's path to its salvation lay in a greater connection to its
community, more room for stories, more stories about the values and norms
of our community. It is true in our business that we really tend to examine
things that are broken. We don't cover plane landings; we cover plane crashes.
And that in and of itself sets a rather harsh line over what constitutes
news in our business. But what we needed to do in our paper was to create
a more fundamental commitment to all dimensions of our life and I would
say that three elements actually helped us re-establish the newspaper and
it helped us build a new contract with our community.
First of all, we created a feature every day on our second page. We
called it "Vignettes" and it had nothing to do with news of the day. It
was, frankly, just anecdotes and tales and things that people had seen
and slices of life, and they told those stories in that space as they would
to a friend . And what we tried to do in that was to reveal that there
was another side, that there was some sensitivity among our writers, some
sense of humour, some enjoyment of living in the community. And these stories,
in fact, were the things that people talked about when they talked about
the paper later in the day, that they'd seen a really neat vignette about
someone stuck in traffic and going ballistic, or someone at the supermarket
seeing something odd. And in and of itself, these stories would never get
into the paper, but they got onto page 2 every day and they changed the
contour and even the pattern of reading the paper, that after you got past
the very tough front page you had a stretch there where you could breathe
a little bit and enjoy some of the past-time of the community.
Secondly, we took a more serious approach to writing obituaries. In
a newsroom, obituaries generally are regarded as a punishment. When you
don't have a good story, you get assigned an obit and that's a horrible
way to chronicle someone's life. And we took the very serious view that,
in fact, obituaries were to be celebratory, that they were, in fact, there
to chronicle someone's life and not simply to look at the moment that person
died and look at that rather narrow slice of someone's existence. And so
we went from obituaries that were six and eight inches in length to obituaries
that were 30 and 35 inches in length; we ran fewer of them but we ran them
really well. We wrote them in the way that inspired a new belief in our
community, that we were serious about the people who lived there and that
we were prepared to examine all of their contributions and achievements
and not just simply look at whether they passed away by having a violent
heart attack or in an auto accident. And as mercenary as that seems, that
actually changed again the appreciation and the attitude of our community
toward the paper.
We put God and his or her counterparts
back on the front page.
And then thirdly we put God and his or her counterparts back on the front
page. We, like the Citizen and like some of the other papers in
our chain, determined that many of our more interesting debates, and in
fact some of our most compelling conflicts and passions, were taking place
either in organized religion or among walks of life where people were beginning
to explore their spiritual beliefs, and that some of the most interesting
non-work experiences involved a pursuit of faith and spirituality in society.
Not all that pursuit, we believe, is sound. Some of it still has the feeling
of one of those flab-reducing machines that you seen in infomercials on
television; some of it is extremely gimmicky and we are chronicling that,
too, to the best of our effort. But in a lot of ways, there's clearly something
happening in our society that we needed to chronicle and media have never
been, I think, at the leading edge of finding trends. In a lot of ways,
things like the environmental movement sprung up well ahead of the media's
understanding that it was a phenomenon in society; and I happen to think
that this [faith and spirituality] is exactly one of these areas.
Our paper, the Spectator, had placed this kind of coverage in
exactly the kind of ghetto that we wouldn't dare place other important
information of the day. We did a couple of pages on Saturday and then we
almost were signaling to people that, you know, you're going to start thinking
about your faith Saturday morning when you read our paper and because we
won't have it for the rest of the week, we then infer, of course, that
you stopped thinking about it perhaps by Sunday afternoon. So we need never
give you this again until next Saturday. And, of course, that was blasphemous
and in a lot of ways it was a high insult to the distinguished readership.
So we ended up unlike the Citizen, which blew up that ghetto
and now really majestically moved material all around the paper. We still
kept that presence on Saturday–we actually moved it to Friday later in
the year–but we then created other pockets of development . Yes, we had
that religious ghetto, but we also had other developments in other parts
of the paper, including the key waterfront property, which was the front
page. And so we used our fine writer, Casey Korstanje, we used people like
Bob Harvey at the Citizen and other writers in our chain. We used
some of the best material that we could get around the world through sources
like the Daily Telegraph, the Christian Science Monitor and
many of the wire services. We began to look at the religion news service
and other services that we could find and get our hands on, to try to bring
into the paper some of the best debates and ideas that were emanating.
And we asked Casey in particular to look at issues of the day through a
spiritual lens, and not just material that had to do with news of the faith,
so to speak, but actually some of the more ethical dilemmas in society.
And so I'd say that along with other measures at the paper, including
we were doing every day a full-page treatment on one story that, too, changed
the contour of it and we put more family life and health and other coverage
in the paper. But we went from being in what I consider to be red-line
territory, very serious trouble as a newspaper, to in fact getting out
of a nose dive. By last July we had our first circulation increase in 60
months, and then we followed it with a second one right away, and they
had been the first consecutive months of increased circulation since early
1988. And we followed that with six more and we've now had I think 10 of
the last 11 months. I think that our coverage in those areas have been
phenomenally important to the regeneration of the paper.
The kinds of letters that have come through from our readers is that
there is now a new belief that the Spectator is actually serious
about its community.
So–is this a good approach as a business? There is no question in my
mind that one of the largest gulfs between the media and our audiences
today is our failure to understand quickly enough the regeneration of interest
in faith and spirituality and the phenomenal growth in the quest for personal
growth through a commitment to higher values. The best seller list right
now (the non-fiction best seller list), is still generally treated as a
technical fluke by the mainstream media, rather than an object lesson and
an important economic and social indicator. We do not understand our demography
all that well or its needs, its recent drive for antidotes or counterweights
to the harsh climate of work and the more difficult balance of work and
family. The media that goes the greatest distance to narrowing that gulf
will prove to be the most successful in the next decade.
I don't say this lightly and I don't sort of just say that we just have
to go forth and write about these subjects, because I think the same critical
skills that have been applied to our coverage of institutions and stories
in other fields have to be brought to bear on issues of faith. It is true–and
we don't like to admit this–that some people who have written or who have
broadcasted in this field in the past were often soft, were often put out
to pasture, were often not our most vital journalists and that, in fact,
we editors left them alone. They took care of a little portion, a corner
of the paper, and I think–I hope, anyway–that we've all stopped that, that
we're now taking seriously these issues and that we're demonstrating leadership
by applying the same critical faculties to this aspect of reporting that
we would to any other part of the paper.
But leadership is very important in all of this. Editors and executives
have to encourage rock solid news and feature writing, analysis, investigative
work into all of these areas, and they have to be up to the same standards
expected elsewhere in your newspaper. They cannot be soft, they cannot
fail to entertain, they cannot fail to be engaging. But I believe that
if they do encourage more faith and spirituality reporting, we're going
to build a greater bond and certainly a much more durable one with our
audiences and, yes, we will make a lot of money doing this. You know, it's
often awkward to talk about this as somebody who's supposed to be in the
business of pursuing stories, but the fact is that a newspaper's first
role in a lot of respects is to survive, and it only survives by making
an extremely healthy profit or else it can't compete, doesn't have the
war chest to go to battle with its other newspaper rivals. But a newspaper
is unlike many other businesses in some respects and one of the reasons
that I love being in it is that it has a soul. And I ask: what better way
to display that soul?
Kirk Lapointe is now the executive editor of Conrad Black's
as-yet-unnamed new daily newspaper.
Return to top
