The Knoxville News Sentinel's publisher and editorial page editor provided some perspective on the paper last weekend to get the new year presses rolling:
Canady has an intriguing observation that there may be a "trend" toward newspapers not endorsing candidates for office, but that the New Sentinel editorial board plans to keep making endorsements. Sounds like a good project for some journalism grad students:
- Is there really such a trend? Where?
- In other communities with only one daily newspaper, have readers demanded that editorial boards, as Canady puts it, "allow the community to make its own decisions without the newspaper's interference"?
- Do policies about endorsements vary between newspaper chains?
- What kind of track record did papers' endorsements have before they were abandoned?
Now if I only had some grad students handy to point to almost 30 years of mass communication "agenda setting" research...
Back to simpler questions: A lot of newspaper people take it for granted that readers understand the difference between the unsigned editorials and the signed or by-lined columns opposite the editorial page. I'm not sure that's always the case. Readers should appreciate the "look behind the curtain" in Canady's column. Among other things, it mentions that some of the paper's international and national editorials come from the E.W. Scripps Co. chain, owner of the News Sentinel and the Memphis Commercial Appeal, among other print and broadcast media organizations.
(The Nashville Tennessean and the Asheville Citizen-Times are owned by the Gannett chain, best known for USA Today. For interesting leisure browsing through the shrinking mediascape, or to settle bets about media monopolies, see Columbia Journalism Review's Who Owns What.)
Speaking of "who does what,"
I certainly hope readers already know that, as Canady points out, reporters at most daily papers don't write editorials. In fact, I've
known quite a few reporters who didn't even read their own paper's editorials -- either because they couldn't stand them, or as part of their attempts to be objective.
For one reason or another, some reporters also had
a habit of not reading letters to the editor. They probably missed good
stories that way -- something I like to think is changing, thanks to the interactivity of online news and
feedback from weblogs -- raising reporters' awareness that the readers have something to say.
That reminds me of an old Jimmy Stewart
movie, "Call Northside 777," about a skeptical
reporter being drawn into a crusade to release a convict -- by a tiny classified ad. The film's not as much fun as "His Girl Friday" or "The Paper" (no gunplay in the newsroom, or office romances), but it's not a bad newspaper picture. Actually, it does have romance -- in its great opening shots of headlines being set by hand, linotype machines feeding out slugs of type, and the rumbling presses turning it all into a newspaper. Oops. On second thought, that's the opening of the last remake of "The Front Page." Northside's most romantic feature is an opening title that says "This is a true story." The reporter's stories (and the convict's mother's ad) really did get the innocent man released.
(Thanks to the artist formerly known as SouthKnox Bubba for pointing out the News Sentinel columns after I missed the Sunday paper.)
6:20:55 PM 
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