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Under the rubric of a "special report" on the "dynamics of where we live," staff writer John Boudreau produced a schmaltzy valentine to East Bay life, with a few grains of sadness about a former sales executive who's now homeless thrown in for leavening.
The inside spread was an impressive graphic achievement; a mix of pie charts, bar charts, and black-and-white photos, it could have doubled for Contra Costa Newspapers' marketing plan. In fact, it is part of the marketing plan, Armstrong readily conceded. And finding such naked market analysis in the space traditionally reserved for reporting is journalistically unsettling.
But Knight-Ridder can't merely surf the wave of growth. The firm will have to claim a regional mantle if it is to exploit the East Bay's regional economy. That means promoting the East Bay as a region with its own identity, and encouraging East Bay residents to confer that identity on Knight-Ridder's papers.
This reality raises a central question: How does a daily newspaper bolster a region's identity without acting as one of its boosters?
"It's difficult to sometimes tell who is the dog and who is the tail," says Ed Diokno, an assistant city editor at the Antioch Ledger-Dispatch who has also worked at the Oakland Tribune under two ownership groups. "We write about certain issues because we think they're important to focus on. At the same time, the issues we pick to focus on shape the way readers think."
And the readership of the Times and its five constituent papers is a mix of readers with wildly varying interests.
Many readers, Diokno explains, are from Silicon Valley and the Inner East Bay, and some are even transplants from San Francisco. (Antioch is east of Walnut Creek.) Nearly 90 percent of East Bay residents work in the East Bay. That means they'd rather read business news from Livermore than a community notebook item about a potluck dinner down the street in Antioch, he adds.
But Knight-Ridder is also mindful of the Contra Costa chain's longtime readers, Diokno says.
Editorially, the result of trying to please both groups is mixed. The tone of the writing tends to be cautious, the story selection closely calculated with an eye toward focus group results and market surveys more than any easily discerned editorial philosophy. Exhaustive guides to hiking trails and book readings can make the Contra Costa papers read like a Martha Stewart broadsheet.
The Contra Costa papers will occasionally slam local polluters and politicians. The reporting and writing, however, often sounds one-dimensional or naive. Frequently, the real story is buried in a recitation of facts. And larger stories can lack necessary analyses.
An April 13 cover story in The Sunday Times was headlined, somewhat feyly: "Growth: Eastward ho!/We could become like L.A."
The package that followed, which included a masterful graphics display, was technically a balanced story; it gave growth advocates and critics approximately equal amounts of space. In keeping with the civic-minded tone the paper has adopted, there was even a section for "solutions." However, the only concrete suggestion for addressing the problem of East Bay urban sprawl was an increased gas tax -- with no reference to the political upheaval such a tax hike would cause.
And the package missed a chance at a real story: the actual reason why the East Bay will look like L.A. in 20 years unless current practices change. None of the region's leaders, from the mayors of tiny rural enclaves to the Governor's Office, has had the moxie to make politically risky land use, transportation, and water policy decisions that would limit or control growth. The Sunday Times spread was a perfect opportunity to hold some of those officials to account, but only a handful were quoted, and then just to flesh out the statistics.
On March 27, 39 cultists killed themselves in San Diego. On March 28, Contra Costa Newspapers ran one of the Bay Area's most comprehensive packages of stories on the event, capped by a startlingly bold Page 1.
The entire top half of the page, except for the masthead, was taken up by a blown-up photo of a cultist's corpse. The photo wasn't unique. It was taken from one of the wire services and was used by many media outlets. But the Contra Costa Newspapers editors' decision to run it so large created stunning results. Especially in the Contra Costa Newspapers boxes, where the photo was all that could be seen. It was a truly daring step.
Sadly, the editors backed down from their statement the next day.
On March 29, Editor John Armstrong was back with another letter to the readers. The front page backfired, he wrote contritely, because it caused "revulsion in many of you."
Speaking later, Armstrong denied the note was a retraction or apology of any kind. "You can characterize it any way you want," Armstrong said. "I don't think of it as an apology." He also insisted he never admitted to a mistake.
But the tone was clear. He wrote that "there are lessons to be learned" from the negative response. Among them, "we must never fail to exercise restraint, to doublecheck ourselves."
And, he said, "[w]e come away from the experience ... concluding that we failed to exhibit the degree of respect and restraint that our readers have come to expect from us."
It came off as patronizing, intellectually dishonest mush. The layout was a grabber. It was guaranteed to stir a response.
Why the apology? Why not just let angry readers write letters, and publish as many as possible?
"There's a certain expectation your readers have as to what kind of newspaper you are. Any time you move out of that field of comfort, you need to do it carefully," Armstrong said.
