THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 26, 1995 TAG: 9503260138
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
SOURCE: Cole C. Campbell, Editor
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
What makes a newspaper great?
We grapple with that question in the newsroom of The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star.
We know the qualities in an abstract way.
A great newspaper is fair, honest, reliable, engaging, caring, courageous, independent.
These are the same attributes most of us look for in our friends and co-workers. These qualities are hard to realize in personal relations, and they are hard to achieve as an institution.
At the heart of our journalism are 10 enduring values identified by newsroom leaders when we began to revamp the paper three years ago.
I shared a list of these values in print on Nov. 14, 1993, the day before we introduced the newspaper's current look.
Acknowledging another newsroom adage - readers don't keep clip files of everything we publish - I decided to republish the list as part of this notebook's mission of explaining who we are, what we do and why we do it.
These are our values:
We must help readers by giving them information they can act on and by outlining choices.
We must reflect the diversity of our community. We will provide a public forum for discussion and potential resolution of issues important in our communities.
We will enlighten and educate readers by explaining complexity, giving context and showing connections between people and events.
We must focus on the news. We will be timely.
We will entertain readers.
We must be accurate, fair, honest and open to criticism in order to warrant readers' trust.
We will monitor power and expose wrongdoing without fear or favor. We will be generous in our coverage of achievement.
We will produce a newspaper that readers perceive as a good value in order to be a financial success.
We will do all we can to promote the newspaper-reading habit.
We will capture the human condition by the quality of our craftsmanship in storytelling.
This list is full of wonderful ideas. But we want to revisit and revise it this year, to make it even stronger, clearer and more meaningful. Maybe to reshape it completely.
It suffers from having been written by too many people.
And by too few.
About 15 folks from all newsroom disciplines - writing, editing, photography, graphics and design - generated this list after reading assorted memos, speeches and other documents from current and former top executives of the newspaper company. Not surprisingly, it reads like the work of a committee, and committees are not known for grace and style.
True, the Declaration of Independence ostensibly was drafted by a committee. But it was mostly from the pen of Thomas Jefferson, which explains its lilt and power.
Because only 15 folks had a direct hand in shaping our list, it doesn't have all the insight and forcefulness it could if we had tapped the entire news staff. So throughout 1995, we will engage in a series of conversations among ourselves to probe more deeply into what excites us as journalists, what makes our work meaningful, what inspires us to do as well as we can.
This process runs against our natural grain. Journalists are mostly people of action, rushing to cover the news, and not too interested in introspection. We hate the idea of seeming self-absorbed.
But we have an obligation to re-examine our work in order to improve it and fulfill our potential as a vital player in a self-governing society.
As we do, we'll keep you posted. by CNB