Behind the Handout

After trying some newspaper-readership statistics on his slide rule, Pollster George Gallup promises for fall publication "the most comprehensive study ever undertaken of the American press." For the most part, Gallup's conclusions from interviews with 7,000 readers will only confirm what most editors know about most readers: people like to read about people. But one undeveloped area of reader interest charted in the study is a little-known land to the majority of newsrooms. News of U.S. business, Pollster Gallup's findings suggest, not only deserves more space and prominence than it gets in most dailies, but has a far bigger potential audience than most are exploiting.

The press has greatly expanded coverage of economic issues since World War II, but business news is still skimped and segregated by most dailies in the obdurate belief that it is a specialized concern of a special few. This assumption flies in the face of an unparalleled broadening of popular interest in business. Whether as consumers, taxpayers, stockholders, homeowners, union members, employees or businessmen, newspaper readers are concerned as never before with the economic fronts that affect their pocketbooks. Millions of readers, for example, have a direct stake in blow-by-blow coverage of inflation and its many-faceted causes and effects.

Millions of Americans also quicken to the glamour of business as described in countless TV shows, movies, novels and magazine stories that draw drama from the roar of the blast furnace or the power play in the executive suite. There is room on the bestseller list for a socio-economic study--The Organization Man, Judd Saxon, a comic strip based on business, runs in 160 newspapers. Yet, as Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. Vice President Leland Hazard complained last week: "The daily press just doesn't seem to be set up to look in depth into business problems."

Cubs' Corral. In all but a distinguished handful of papers, daily business sections consist of a raft of market statistics adrift on a pallid sea of wire-service snippets and puffs for advertisers (also known as BOMs or Business Office Musts). In business coverage, editors even overlook readily apparent local trends that often build into stories of national importance. Example: Los Angeles is one of the nation's biggest electronics centers, but most hard news of the industry comes to Los Angeles dailies from wire services and national publications.

Business coverage in most dailies chronically lacks space and manpower. On business developments of major national significance, such as a raise in interest rates or a steel price boost, business editors seldom interpret or supplement a Page One wire story by interviewing the bankers, economists, labor leaders who can give remote decisions local dollars-and-cents impact. One reason is that business news is frequently entrusted to a shaky old hand or an untested new one. "Being assigned to business," sniffs a Phoenix reporter, "is like being made dog editor." City editors too often agree. Thus, on a big local-business story such as a strike or a proxy fight, the cityside reporter who can be trusted to turn in sharp, dramatic copy is almost certain to get the assignment over a specialist familiar with the issues.

Shibboleths & Shenanigans. A more serious flaw in business reporting is the deep-rooted aversion of most business editors to controversy, gloom or criticism--in tacit cahoots with the managerial mentality that believes that the private lives of corporations should be immune from the irreverent scrutiny to which the press routinely subjects politics, government and the boudoir antics of showfolk. "Business too often takes the attitude that the press must cooperate or be guilty of an antibusiness attitude," says the Chicago Sun-Times's deep-digging Financial Editor Austin Wehrwein, who frequently writes columns on the mythical Pfutzer Foundry & Finished Tool Co. (cable address: PFFT) that not only spoof business shenanigans and shibboleths, but satirize the brand of handout punditry that characterizes most business-page stories.

While many businessmen will talk willingly with the rare newspaperman who comes around, they know they do not have to: most business sections will uncritically print all the company handouts that fit (sometimes even tacking on a staffer's byline). Says an Atlanta businessman of his home-town papers: "They print our handouts like gospel. We could send them a monstrous lie, and they'd print it without question."

Busiest gospeleers in the newspaper business are auto "editors," who cover an industry which directly and indirectly provides employment for one of every seven U.S. jobholders. On at least a dozen big-city dailies, auto editors are men who also get paid for selling automobile advertising*--a doubling in brass that is hardly calculated to stimulate penetrating reportage. At the other extreme, the longtime policy of many newspapers, e.g., the Baltimore Sun, against naming companies for fear of sounding "commercial," gives much of their business reporting a no-dimension vacuity.

Four-Word Manual. When newspapers cover business with top reporters and the uninhibited news judgment on which--in every other field--newsmen pride themselves, they are usually rewarded with heavy readership. The Philadelphia Bulletin's Financial Editor J. (for Joseph) A. Livingston, whose syndicated, thrice-weekly column is carried by some 60 other dailies, attracts a broad cross section of readers with straight-from-the-shoulder reporting that acknowledges no sacred cows. Leslie Gould, daily columnist (50 papers) and financial editor for Hearst's New York Journal-American, writes about his subject as if he were covering the police beat, breaks some crockery but also breaks frequent exposes of crooked stock promoters and unscrupulous company raiders, and does a good job as well of more routine business reporting. Many smaller papers have developed one-industry specialists who are read faithfully by executives throughout the country. Among them: the Memphis Commercial Appeal's Cotton Columnist Gerald Bearing, New Orleans Times-Picayune's Oil Editor Jeff Davis, the Salt Lake City Tribune's Mining and Oil Specialist Robert W. Bernick.

Lately a number of newspapers, from the late James Cox chain's Atlanta Constitution (TIME, July 29) to John S. Knight's Detroit Free Press, have set out to add greater depth and range to their business sections. The New York Times, which has the biggest (21 reporters) and most expert business staff of any general-circulation U.S. daily, drills business-side recruits by Financial Editor Jack Forrest's four-word manual: "Get behind the handout." The result is a flow of economic reporting that widens out from the Times's fat business section and nourishes the whole paper. For, as Washington Post and Times Herald readers found during the New York Central proxy fight, when Newshen Malvina Lindsay bought one share of railroad stock and covered the battle from the viewpoint of a woman shareholder, some of the liveliest stories to be had are tucked between the balance sheets.

*A pattern that was varied by the New York Herald Tribune's Business Editor Donald I. Rogers, who was paid by General Motors to introduce its Buick commercial on TV during the Patterson-Jackson fight.

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