The late Bob Reid: Are modern management techniques killing newspapers?

A-KEY ESSAYS
The late Bob Reid: Are modern management techniques killing newspapers?
By MGP Staff
Feb 15, 2005, 22:04

A year after retiring from 20 years teaching journalism at the University of Illinois, Bob Reid died Dec. 14, 2004 of a heart attack at his Champaign-Urbana home. One thing which survives him is a Jan. 2000 essay he wrote for the student-edited online journal, "Spike".

The piece reccounted his years as an editor at small Illlinois dailies, with an admiring description of the late John Gardner, editor-publisher of the Carbondale, Ill., Southern Illinoisan.

Reid also wrote that during the previous 20 years, American newspapers had joined other profit-minded businesses in adopting a laundry list of moneysaving management techniques. The results, while indeed profitable, have undercut the credibility of newspapers and jeopardized First Amendment rights.

For example, he wrote, serious (read: "expensive") reporting had become less frequent, and cheaper fluff and sensationalism more prevalent. And cost-cutting has led to more than a few ethical lapses. The result, Reid predicted, was that powerful politicians and business leaders would seek to reduce press freedoms for their own benefit.

"Unfortunately," Reid wrote, "That has been the fate of freedom of
the press in other areas, historically and currently, and it could happen
in the United States." He added: "It's time for newspaper publishers to rethink the prudence of using these thoroughly modern management practices so single-mindedly." There are alternatives, he wrote, that have proven successful in both reasonable profits and credible, high-quality journalism.

The entire essay remains posted at: http://www.comm.uiuc.edu/spike/index.pl?story=reid-column

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