Reactions to Harris’ Resignation
Jay Harris's resignation serves as a vivid reminder that journalists ought
be thinking seriously and creatively about alternative models of newsroom ownership
and control.
A couple of related points:
It's still not clear what happened. Harris said he quit in protest, that
he wanted his Knight Ridder bosses to "closely examine the wisdom of corporate
profit targets." But profit targets are nothing new at Knight Ridder
and elsewhere. Why, suddenly, is Harris concerned about them?
Profit targets make sense when they involve no layoffs but somehow make less sense when newsrooms are expected to shrink?
Also, apparently Steve Rossi, president of the KR newspaper division, promised
Harris that there wouldn't be layoffs. Why, then, resign? David
Yarnold reported that KR agreed to reduce the profit targets for the Mercury
News. Was this done before or after Harris resigned? And reduced
from what to what? What difference will it make? Will the quality
of the Mercury News still suffer, as Harris suggested in his resignation e-mail?
That we have no answers to these questions points to the least remarkable aspect
of this story--the inability of the press to cover itself. The weakest
of the stories I've seen have been the ones in the Mercury News.
There's been no statement by Rossi , Jerry Ceppos, or CEO Tony Ridder.
No enterprise reporting at all. And, incredibly, no editorial on
a local issue that's getting national attention. Shame on the Mercury
News for demonstrating that being accountable to the public means saying
as little as possible.
Larry Jinks, former Knight Ridder executive and publisher of the Mercury News
I do think there are serious issues there and I think that Jay wanted to make a very serious statement despite what it meant to him personally. In addition to the core conflict on where the lines would be drawn in the face of declining revenues, there may have been some communication problems.
Jay is a good friend of mine, but there are people on the other side I have a good bit of respect for. I think it would be helpful for the industry if there would be more open discussion of the kind of issues Jay is raising.”
There are ethics that are in conflict. There is a dilemma that all publicly-held and other media companies need to be wrestling with. The struggle has to be with how you draw the lines. There’s the question of how short-term or long-term those judgments are.