Egger Speaks – Likeable but Not Transparent
By Roldo Bartimole
New Plain Dealer Publisher made his debut before the City Club last week and came across as a pleasant kind of guy.
However, if he was supposed to give us insight into what kind of a newspaper he’d give us, the hints were slight and probably misleading.
The speech didn’t have to be given in Cleveland. For the most part, the same speech could have been given in any city about any current newspaper. In fact, I’m sure the speech had been given often. In St. Louis and environs. Before many audiences.
The squishy City Club audience was perfect for this pabulum serving.
Egger spoke extemporaneously but he did not give us even a hint of what kind of newspaper he wants editorially.
You got the idea that he was a businessman. He saw the business side as a amalgamation of the Plain Dealer, Sun Newspapers (also owned by the Newhouse family, which owns the PD) and Cleveland.com, the PD’s web site.
With PD newspaper sales down, Egger tried to put a good face on the fact that people go to Cleveland.com, claiming the combination of readers to both give the paper its largest audience ever. Try selling that to advertisers.
Editorially, he was rather mum, or you might say very purposely vague. Well, three months here isn’t much time but he wasn’t born three months ago.
He seemed to imply a hands-off editorial attitude as in “not his department.” That’s up, he said, to Doug Clifton, Brent Larkin and Tom O’Hara - the editor, editor page editor, and managing editor, respectively. That’s pretty safe.
There was also a muted signal that he would not be the publicly powerful publisher on this community board and that community board as was his predecessor. That, if true, would be good.
The results of his last tenure as publisher suggest public caution.
I don’t expect a forceful newspaper under Egger. I expect carefulness in its approach to the community’s leaders.
He’s here as a known quantity.
I don’t think it’s any secret that the Newhouse family, owners of the Plain Dealer and Sun Newspapers, saw in Robert Woodworth, key to the sale of the Pulitzer family paper in St. Louis, and Terrance “Call me Terry” Egger, a combination that would help rectify the reportedly weak bottom line at the Plain Dealer. The two were compensation for the St. Louis deal “in the tens of millions of dollars,” a reporter in St. Louis writes.
Egger’s hiring was a business decision.
The two worked – or might we say engineered – the preparation and then sale of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to a chain, dooming that historically progressive paper to a dismal fate. The Post-Dispatch, for example, was the first newspaper as early as 1954 to editorialize against the Vietnam War with a series of strong editorials opposing U. S. involvement.
The Newhouses watched the recent sale of the Post-Dispatch because they had to make a deal to facilitate the sale. Because of a prior deal, the Newhouses were receiving 50 percent of the Post-Dispatch’s profits. The Newhouse family had closed its newspaper in St. Louis to give Joe Pulitzer a monopoly, as we have here. Therefore, the Newhouses had to be bought out if the Post-Dispatch were to be sold.
Thereafter, the Newhouses hired Woodworth to seek a replacement for the dumped Alex Machaskee. Woodworth came up with Egger who was publisher in St. Louis. He didn’t look too far.
Woodworth came away with millions of dollars and so did Egger. The St. Louis Journalism Review reported that Egger got $3.2 million in cash for stock-based compensation because of the sale and had stock worth $11.4 million more.
Egger had warm things to say about Cleveland and its residents, patronizing but pleasing words to the City Club’s audience, made up of mostly conventionally liberal people.
Egger, wrote Roy Malone, a retired Post-Dispatch long-time reporter, describe the new Plain Dealer publisher as “palatable to conservatives,” and someone “not wanting to offend big shots in the community.”
That seemed to be borne out when Egger name-dropped to the City Club audience that he had talked with Al Ratner, top executive at Forest City Enterprises, about economic conditions here. He might have talked to people who once worked in manufacturing.
That was meant presumably to let Clevelanders know to whom he will be listening when assessing what readers need to know.
Readers certainly will be cheered by the thought that Al Ratner - and not Sam Miller - will be Egger’s chosen listening post in Cleveland.
Egger, of course, loved Cleveland people. He said that he “was blown away by the warmth” of Clevelanders.
There are always hints in what people pronounce because it suggests what they think others want to hear and/or what they feel, too.
I’ll always remember a conversation I had with a newly arrived from New York City top executive at WKYC-TV years ago. He also reveled in the “warmth” of Clevelanders. One of his first insights came from the fact, he said, that Clevelanders waited for the walk sign before crossing the street. That made us likeable.
Ah, obedience. What a great asset for a people.
Egger mentioned the “spectacular” Lake Erie as another of our great assets. I remember coming to Cleveland in the mid-1960s expecting to be oriented to the lake as I was to the Long Island sound beach and park in Bridgeport, Ct., a behest of P. T. Barnum. No such luck here. But I don’t own a yacht.
What was lacking in Egger’s speech was any sense of a promise of an invigorated, robust journalism at his Plain Dealer.
He did talk about the problems of newspapers in an era of competing media.
Newspapers, as politicians, are the victims and benefactors of the moneyed class. As politicians cannot live without generous campaign contributions from wealthy interests, newspapers cannot live without ample advertising from the same affluent class.
It’s hard to be free under those circumstances, hard to bite the hand that feeds you, as few politician or newspapers do.
Without this freedom, newspapers quiver in the face of the open, frisky debate on the internet. Their timidity due to the need to satisfy the elite has to compete with the spirited nature of blogs and other internet reports mostly free of the need for profit, thus far.
He did promise not to interfere, as Machaskee did, in the paper’s editorial blessing in political races. You’ll remember Machaskee censored the editorial board’s choice of John Kerry for President in 2004 by decreeing no editorial blessing be given. It made embarrassing national news.
He seemed to say that he leaves such decisions to “Doug and Brent,” however, he did slip in that he needed to get “up to speed,” suggesting when he did he would weigh in and one expects heavily.
Such an important decision awaits the PD editorial board presently. Whether to go with “Krazy Ken,” (Ken Blackwell, Republican candidate for Governor) as he’s called by some, or Ted Strickland, the Democratic candidate.
I’ll bet the PD breaks down with Strickland and “balances” that choice with Sen. Mike DeWine over Democratic candidate, Rep. Sherrod Brown. That will be the safe and cautious, if not honest, avenue.
Asked a question that called for his philosophy of what the Plain Dealer should be, Egger punted. “I’m not a trained journalist,” he said.
However, we all know that the kind of journalism to be practice at the PD will depend upon how Egger sees the world. Too bad.
From Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole roldo@adelphia.net (:divend:)