Powered by Google
Home
New This Week
Listings
8 days
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Art
Astrology
Books
Dance
Food
Hot links
Movies
Music
News + Features
Television
Theater
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Classifieds
Adult
Personals
Adult Personals
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Archives
Work for us
RSS
   

AS THE PROJO TURNS
CJR article elicits concern from publisher Sutton
BY IAN DONNIS

When Providence Journal publisher Howard G. Sutton learned that former reporter Morgan McVicar was penning a piece about the ProJo for the Columbia Journalism Review, he wasn’t pleased. The prospect of an unflattering account by McVicar, a 15-year veteran who left in 2001 rather than accepting a punitive assignment to the night police beat, was so disconcerting that Sutton and Mark Ryan, the Journal’s executive vice president and general manager, called the magazine to register their concern.

Mike Hoyt, CJR’s executive editor, says Sutton and Ryan called the magazine "to find out what we were doing, and once they confirmed that we intended to run McVicar’s piece, to express some disappointment." Although the duo did not try to dissuade CJR from publishing the story, Hoyt says, "[they] were, I guess, not happy that we were considering it, because it was from someone they consider a disgruntled employee who had quit."

The piece by the ex-ProJo scribe, describing his view of the change in newsroom culture that accelerated after the Dallas-based Belo Corporation bought the Journal in 1997, is scheduled for the July issue of CJR, due to be mailed to subscribers June 30. Says Hoyt, "It’s from his perspective, what he thinks an unfortunate trend," in which the paper lost its grand journalistic ambition and placed more emphasis on profits than reporting after shedding its local ownership.

McVicar’s abrupt fall 2001 departure seems emblematic of the hard feelings that marked the ProJo during a four-year contract dispute between management and the Providence Newspaper Guild. He left after being assigned to night cops — a move that followed McVicar’s drafting of a newsroom petition on behalf of reporter Karen Lee Ziner, who had been questionably pulled from a domestic violence story that summer (and got the night police beat after his exit). In a stinging April 2003 decision, William G. Kocol, a National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge, wrote that it could not be "a mere coincidence" that management selected for night cops "first the leader of the petition drive and then the subject of the petition."

Sutton, Ryan, and Joel P. Rawson, the ProJo’s executive editor, didn’t return calls seeking comment.

McVicar, who spent a year in a fellowship at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government after leaving the Journal, declined to discuss his CJR story before publication. He called his time at the ProJo the most rewarding years of his life, and says he looks back "mostly with great memories."

The Journal got wind of the piece, Hoyt says, when McVicar, acting on a request from CJR, called Rawson for comment. Although no comment from Rawson appears in McVicar’s piece, the Journal editor agreed to be interviewed by Hoyt for a companion story. Since Rawson has steadily declined to talk with the Phoenix, the CJR package promises to be the first occasion in which the editor and one of the paper’s critics have publicly squared off in recent years.

For his part, Rawson cites the exigencies of a slumping economy, competition from other media, and a desire to reorient coverage toward local news, in rebutting McVicar’s claims of a journalistic slide at the Journal. "It’s an interesting pair of pieces," says Hoyt, noting that the debate mirrors no small amount of industry-wide discussion in recent years. "It’s just fascinating to see the two points of view side by side."


Issue Date: June 25 - July 1, 2004
Back to the Features table of contents








home | feedback | masthead | about the phoenix | find the phoenix | advertising info | privacy policy | work for us

 © 2000 - 2009 Phoenix Media Communications Group