[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 145 (Friday, October 7, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: October 7, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
THE FORMULA OF PYE
Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, the Star Ledger is our State's
largest paper. It speaks with a powerful voice on issues of concern to
New Jersey. It is a big paper--especially if you pick up the Sunday
edition. It is also a successful one.
Mr. President, the Star Leger's prominent standing in our State can
be largely attributed to its editor, Mort Pye. The news and editorial
comments of his newspaper have informed and entertained. They have
opened the publics' and public officials' eyes to emerging issues and
problems that need attention.
The September issue of New Jersey Monthly ran a profile of this
remarkable man and the mark that he has made and continues to make on
his newspaper and our State.
I ask that the full text of the article be printed in the Record.
The article follows:
[From the New Jersey Monthly, Sept. 1994]
The Formula of Pye
(By Stephen Barr)
In early May, Star-Ledger editor Mort Pye sat in his Newark
office waiting for the arrival of Governor Christine Todd
Whitman. Running New Jersey's largest newspaper had always
assured him of easy access to the state's chief executives.
Tom Kean promptly took his phone calls; Jim Florio
occasionally stopped by the newsroom of a lunchtime sandwich,
and a private chat. But this encounter would be neither
casual nor amiable: Carl Golden, Whitman's press secretary,
had contacted Pye to schedule a meeting so that the governor
could give him an earful.
Seven weeks earlier, in her March 15 budget address,
Whitman had announced that she was dismantling the state
Board of Higher Education. She wanted to give New Jersey's
public colleges and universities more autonomy over their
affairs. There would still be state oversight, she insisted,
but exactly what it would be and how it would work was
uncertain.
With no press leaks before the speech, the governor's
announcement hit Pye particularly hard. At the helm of the
Star-Ledger since 1963, he considers the newspaper's support
for the board's creation in 1967 part of his legacy. ``I had
the idea that higher education could be stronger in New
Jersey if it had its own separate department,'' Pye says.
``We were involved in [the board's] formation. It was one of
the first big things we promoted, so you can understand out
feelings about what's happening now.''
Education editor Robert Braun--who at the time of the
announcement had been working for a month on a multipart
series about the board's achievements over the past 27
years--immediately launched a full-scale assault on the
Whitman plan. Day after day, in news stories and twice-weekly
opinion pieces, he attacked--often viciously--Whitman's move
and anybody who supported it. ``There's no way any governor
can say to a newspaper, `Get with the program,''' complains a
Whitman-administration insider. ``Her only request was for
fairness and balance in the coverage, which was utterly and
totally lacking. The way Braun goes from elucidation to
advocacy and agitprop, it's disgusting.''
Pye talked to the governor and then talked to Braun, but
little changed and the newspaper continued to attack
Whitman's proposal. Pye now disputes the assessment of
Braun's work and makes no apologies for the Ledger's
campaign--albeit an unsuccessful one--to save the higher-
education board. Apologizing is not Mort Pye's style.
For more than three decades, Pye has refused to give in.
When he joined the paper as an associate editor in 1958, the
Ledger was on shaky ground. Since then, he has not only
reversed its fortunes but has built it into the nation's
fifteenth largest daily and eleventh largest Sunday paper.
Two out of every five New Jersey newspaper readers buy the
Ledger. It is the dominant paper even in counties like
Middlesex and Morris, which boast their own local dailies.
Pye has done this while defying conventional wisdom. The
Ledger regularly uses its news pages to launch crusades and
influence policy. And while its competitors have jazzed up
their offerings with vibrant color, zippy graphics, and
snappy writing, this slumbering giant has prospered in spite
of a heavy gray look and a flat writing style. Pye makes no
apologies for that either. ``What you're trying to do is get
people addicted to the paper the way it is,'' he explains.
``If you suddenly make drastic changes, then you're telling
the reader, `What you're used to is no good, and now we're
going to give you something that's really good.' That's an
insult.''
While most contemporary editors might find such an argument
ludicrous, there is no debating the fact that the Ledger has
spent the last decade gobbling up readers while barely
changing its news presentation.
During his dynastic reign, Mort Pye has done as much to
influence state affairs and promote New Jersey's interests as
any other individual. He has watched six governors come and
go, and the 76-year-old editor shows no signs of coasting
toward retirement.
Pye's achievement of building what appears to be an
invincible temple of journalism is rather remarkable when one
considers that few people--particularly in journalism--think
of the Ledger as a world-class newspaper. Editors and
reporters around the sate routinely slam the paper's quality,
although they follow and clip the paper religiously. But even
as they toss insults, Pye is having the last laugh. To him,
it is the readers of the Star-Ledger who count, and in an age
when fewer and fewer people are buying newspapers, it is
clear they are buying Mort Pye's in droves. ``It is the 800-
pound gorilla of New Jersey newspapers,'' says Neil Upmeyer,
president and editor of the public-policy journal New Jersey
Reporter.
Mort Pye brown-bags his lunch, which today consists of a
cheese-and-mustard sandwich on white bread and an apple.
We're eating in the conference room adjacent to his humble
office (which overlooks a Newark side street and lacks any
trappings of power). The surfaces are neat and tidy; the only
sign of clutter is on the walls, which are plastered with
plaques from business and civic groups and the New Jersey
Press Association. Conspicuously missing is journalism's top
award--the Pulitzer prize.
Over the years, Pye has steadfastly remained offstage,
ducking interviews and refusing personal publicity. He rarely
ventures far from his office, except to visit the newspaper's
fifteen bureaus around the state. His idea of a vacation is
to drive the back roads of New Jersey with his wife in search
of hideaways along the Delaware River or in the mountains.
And he shies away from newspaper-industry seminars because,
he says, colleagues always ``try to talk me out of what I'm
doing.''
What he's doing--or, more accurately, what he's done--is to
take a failing property and make it the most lucrative link
in the privately held newspaper chain owned by billionaire
brothers Si and Donald Newhouse. How he's done it is the
stuff of legend in newspaper circles. By opting for sheer
heft--an eleven-person Trenton bureau, a huge sports section,
a cadre of specialty writers--he has fashioned the only New
Jersey newspaper with truly statewide appeal. He has shrewdly
pushed regional and local coverage as suburbs boomed, and
added readers as the state's population migrated south and
west from the Ledger's base in Essex County. By shamelessly
turning his news pages into a soapbox for causes and
crusades, he has made the newspaper a major player behind big
development projects and countless public-policy initiatives.
Pye accomplished all of this by stubbornly and doggedly
shaping the newspaper into a creature of his own making. ``If
there ever was a man dedicated to putting out a newspaper, it
is Mort Pye. He is the Star-Ledger,'' says Joseph Carragher,
a former Trenton bureau chief. ``He built the paper section
by section, as if he had an idea in his head of how he wanted
to make the Ledger number one. His imprint is on every page
of that paper.''
Pye, a small man with a frail, reedy voice, has a manner
that is both gentle and gracious. When he displays anger,
which is rare, staffers say he can manage no more than a
high-pitched squeal. Today at lunch he wears a maroon
cardigan over a robin's-egg-blue shirt, with a striped tie of
mutted browns and blues. As he speaks, he leans back and
curls his fingers around his belt. In such asceric environs,
his angular jaw and the remains of white hair on his bald
head give him a monklike look.
But his low-key appearance belies a certain impish quality.
Below the surface is an intensely competitive man who seems
to revel in the brickbars that come his way: that the
Ledger's advocacy of issues compromises its journalistic
integrity, that the newspaper goes after impersonal
bureaucracies (the Department of Motor Vehicles is a
favorite) and not public officials, that the look of the
paper is woefully out of date, that the writing favors the
assembling of facts and statements over style and
perspective.
Releasing a mirthful, almost devilish chuckle, Pye recalls
the name of a television talk show that featured media
experts dissecting the paper. It was called Pye = Power.
``The approach was to try and show we were up to no good, too
big for our britches,'' he says. He had no desire to be part
of that dressing-down, but jokes that the real reason he
didn't participate was that ``I don't like to go on TV
because I don't have the right voice. And no one's interested
in seeing my sexy bald head.''
When Rutgers University president Francis L. Lawrence gave
Pye an honorary degree in May, he cited the editor's
``disarmingly modest mien'' as he raised ``the quality of
life and caliber of politics'' in the state. Pye hadn't told
his staff that he would be receiving the Rutgers accolade,
but it's no secret he thrives on just that sort of praise.
That is evident from a sampling of favorable letters he's
saved over the years, dating from 1968 to 1993
(interestingly, he throws out all unfavorable letters). One
bunch is from business and community leaders, public figures,
and just plain readers. In its own way, each letter strikes
the same theme--that Pye's newspaper is good for New Jersey.
A 1975 note from Lawrence's predecessor, Edward J. Bloustein,
is particularly apt:
``Dear Mort:
``I have only recently returned from an all too brief
vacation, but I did not want to let too much time slip by
before complimenting the Star-Ledger on the exceptionally
fine August series on higher education written by Bob Braun.
``It was one of the most comprehensive and thoughtful
series that I have seen and I believe that you and Bob and
the Star-Ledger have done a great service for both higher
education in New Jersey and for the people of this state.''
Mort Pye got his first taste of newspapering in 1926 at the
wizened age of eight. Even then, his focus was decidedly
local. A cousin gave him an old typewriter, and he published
several issues of the Sumner Park Gazette--a flyer with news
about the street he grew up on in Rochester, New York.
At the University of Illinois, Pye wrote for the Daily
Illini and sent dispatches about school activities to the New
York Times, which sent back checks for $25 every once in a
while. After his sophomore year, he moved to New York and
began playing the trombone in swing bands while finishing his
degree at City College of New York. He decided to pursue a
career in journalism upon graduation in 1940, sending three
articles to a newspaper called PM. Two of them--one on
efforts to control the weather, the other on suicides in the
military--were accepted at a rate of two cents a word.
At the same time, Pye sent 250 letters to newspapers all
over the country. One response came from the Long Island
Press, which, like Pye, was based in Jamaica, Queens.
Managing editor Ed Gottlieb noticed the local postmark and
offered a few dollars a pop for freelance work. Soon Pye was
making about $35 a week, which was $10 more than staff
reporters, so he was given a job. He continued playing the
trombone at dances and bar mitzvahs, which paid more for a
Saturday night than he earned in a week at the paper. But
after Pye refused one too many weekend assignments, Gottlieb
gave him an ultimatum: journalism or the jive joints. Pye
chose journalism.
One day, Gottlieb asked Pye to drive a woman's-page
reporter to the dentist. Florence Newhouse was a cousin of
the newspaper's owner, S. I. Newhouse, and she had a
toothache. ``I drove her in my beat-up old Chevy,'' says Pye,
``and that's how we got acquainted.'' The romance quickly
blossomed, and the two were inseparable. When Pearl (as she's
known) would get off from the paper at midnight, she'd go to
a deli down the street and kill time by helping to make
coleslaw and potato salad for the couple who ran the store.
When Mort got off two hours later, they'd drive into
Manhattan and chase fire engines or hang out in Greenwich
Village. They wouldn't get back to Queens until after
sunrise.
Professionally, things were starting to gel as well. One
night in 1941, Pye was on the rewrite desk when he got a call
from a reporter with a late-breaking story. A woman's body
had been found in a Rockaway Beach bungalow. The 23-year-old
Pye felt a surge of adrenaline as he scribbled down the
details. This was hot stuff: a nude body in a cottage owned
by a local politician. He wrote up the story with all the
verve and sensation he could muster. ``Blonde Found Dead''
screamed the next day's front page.
That afternoon, Pye was near a newsstand waiting for Pearl
when a well-dressed businessman stopped to look over the rack
of a dozen or so newspapers. As he reached for the New York
World-Telegram, the Long Island Press seemed to catch his
eye. He plunked down his nickel for the Press, and Pye,
excited at the idea that his story had sold a newspaper, went
up to the man and asked him what had changed his mind. ``I
remembered I needed to look for something in the
classifieds,'' the man responded.
Pye relates the tale as an amusing anecdote, but in a way
it poignantly reveals the source of his vision for the Star-
Ledger and one of the secrets of its success. In Pye's view,
the more things there are in the paper, the more readers
there will be. ``Not everybody is interested in everything,
but hopefully everybody is interested in something,'' he
says. ``The percentage of people who read a particular story
is very low. If you cut out everything with less than 15
percent readership, what would you have left? Maybe `Ann
Landers,' the horoscope, and a couple of comics.''
The Star-Ledger was little more than that in 1958, when Pye
was named its associate editor, S. I. Newhouse had owned the
paper since 1934, and it was the wallflower of the
newsstands. ``It was not making a lot of money,'' says
Newhouse's son Donald, whose office today is one floor below
Pye's. ``It was a marginal operation, and it might have been
losing money.''
The Ledger was a scandal sheet that played up crime
stories, carried racing results on the front page, and saw
its readership rise when circulation contests were running
and then fall when the promotions ended. By the mid-fifties,
city editor Arthur Heenan, a staunch supporter of Senator
Joseph McCarthy, avidly pushed reporters to root out Reds in
New Jersey. All along, the Ledger was Newark's second paper--
a poor stepchild to the beloved Newark Evening News, which
had more readers, national recognition, and a reputation as
New Jersey's New York Times.
After Pye arrived, he walked into the newsroom one day
carrying an edition of the Ledger from a year or two before.
Noted gangster Longie Zwillinan had killed himself, and the
paper ran a main story and eighteen sidebars (accompanying
stories) on the suicide. ``Mort said, `This will never happen
again,''' Joseph Carragher recalls. ``The whole attitude of
the place changed: the philosophy, the tone, what was
important and what was not,'' Crime news was relegated to the
back of the newspaper, and Pye began demanding a front-page
education story every Sunday.
Pye decided to stay at the Ledger because he liked the New
York metropolitan area, but progress was slow and the
roadblocks substantial. The newspaper operation was run out
of a converted horse barn on Halsey Street, and antiquated
presses made it impossible to add more news and better
features or build the circulation much beyond what at the
time was about 200,000 daily readers.
The moment of truth came in 1963, when S. I. Newhouse sent
Donald, then the general manager of the Jersey Journal, to
see Pye. It was their first real conversation, and Donald
Newhouse did all the talking. He said the Ledger was in bad
shape and of poor quality; it was time to either spend a lot
of money to build the paper up or shut it down. ``We had
great faith in Mr. Pye's ability as an editor and substantial
belief that a properly edited paper could be a successful
paper,'' Newhouse says. ``Our decision [to continue]
reflected our confidence in him as an individual.''
Newhouse unequivocally displayed his faith. A new plant
with new presses opened in February 1966, and though they
would talk frequently, Newhouse never asked Pye for a formal
plan to turn the Ledger around. Pye never had a budget, and
spent what he wanted to increase news coverage and add staff.
Newhouse never balked when his editor asked if he was
overstepping his bounds, and he often encouraged him to spend
more.
``The rules of the game were changing, and Mort and Donald
saw that,'' says a Ledger insider. The growth of the suburbs
had fostered the building of highways, and the new roads were
free and clear before daybreak for the delivery of a morning
paper like the Ledger. It was a snap to reach once distant
towns and follow readers as they moved into Middlesex,
Morris, and Somerset counties and beyond.
What helped matters was that Richard Scudder, the owner of
the Newark Evening News, apparently wasn't seeing what Pye
and Newhouse were. He had built a new plant in downtown
Newark in the sixties, but delivery of his evening paper
during daytime hours proved increasingly difficult: His
trucks faced clogged roadways and had trouble getting out to
the suburbs. ``The News was never really able to break out of
its urban base,'' says former Ledger political reporter Jim
McQueeny. ``It had news from around the state, but when
people left Newark, they left the News.''
Pye declines to offer specifics about going head-to-head
with the News (``I don't want to talk about them, I want to
talk about us,'' he says), but by the end of the sixties, the
Ledger had as many readers--about 255,000 daily and 400,000
Sunday--as its once seemingly invincible competitor. An
eleven-month strike at the News starting in [97] was the
final blow; on August 31, 1972, the paper folded. That
afternoon, Pye came as close to making a newsroom speech
as anyone could remember. ``We never had staff meetings,
but Mort talked to employees for about fifteen minutes,''
says Fred Hillmann, a former reporter who was there at the
time. ``There was a sense of euphoria, but not so much
because we bear the News. It was for the opportunity that
we now had.''
In Pye's cache of letters is this one he received from
Scudder in 1984;
``Dear Mort:
``I am much indebted to your for your help in securing
clippings about automobile insurance. The articles are
excellent, and so far as I know, are the only thoroughly
competent review of the matter by any New Jersey newspaper.
Indeed, The Star-Ledger under your direction is, in my
opinion, the most powerful force for good in the State today.
Your series on pollution by New York was excellent.
``It makes me feel less sad about there being no Newark
News to see The Star-Ledger do that kind of work so
competently.''
Mort Pye loves New Jersey. For proof, look no farther than
his desk, where he keeps a small framed drawing by Bunny
Hoest, who pens ``The Lockhorns'' syndicated comic strip. A
few years ago, Hoest poked fun at New Jersey in one of his
cartoons, and Pye promptly canceled the strip. He reinstated
it when Hoest personally called to apologize and promised he
wouldn't knock the Garden State again. To seal the deal, the
cartoonist sent a drawing of Mr. And Mrs. Lockhorn standing
in front of an outline of the state and making a toast: ``We
love New Jersey.''
But Pye's fondness for the state is a lot more complex than
that. It exists because he knows that what is good for New
Jersey is good for the Ledger. Construction of Giants Stadium
started seven years after the Ledger floated the idea. (Pye
says he wondered, ``If Green Bay can have a football team,
why can't New Jersey?'') The newspaper was also a force
behind the building of key highways to the suburbs, like
Route 78 and Route 280 (Ledger insiders call the latter the
Pyeway). The Liberty Science Center and Newark's new Center
for the Performing Arts represent more recent projects that
the newspaper has promoted.
There's probably not a bigger newspaper in the country with
a focus so relentlessly local. The Ledger depends primarily
on wire-service copy for national and international news;
unlike other papers its size, it has no reporters in major
cities and foreign capitals. Even the news from its two-
person Washington bureau always carries a hometown view. ``A
reporter in Sussex County at the Ledger is like a New York
Times reporter based in London in terms of importance in
filling the news pages,'' says Nancy Jaffer, who runs the
Morris/Sussex/Warren county bureau.
It's all part of Pye's basic formula: Build circulation by
covering things that interest the largest number of readers--
but don't leave anything out. Clearly, the Ledger's franchise
has been that it offers a lot of stuff for a quarter (75
cents for the Sunday edition, whose telephone-book
weightiness dwarfs other New Jersey newspapers). It doesn't
matter what the stuff is, because there's something for
everybody; and at 25 cents, you know you're getting a good
deal. ``I've always credited their overall growth to the fact
that they've kept the circulation price extremely low,'' says
Frank J. Savino, a former advertising executive at the Home
News and the Record of Hackensack. The Ledger cost 15 cents
as recently as 1990 and remains of the cheapest daily
newspapers in the state. ``People bought the paper,'' adds
Savino, ``and readers mean advertisers.''
But many journalists are quick to point out that a large
readership doesn't necessarily mean the product is top-
quality. ``The Star-Ledger's strength is that no other
newspaper is as thorough in its coverage of the state.
There's no comparable source for the news,'' admits Neil
Upmeyer of the New Jersey Reporter. But he feels the paper's
photographs are a big culprit in its tedious feel. ``Whether
a social event or a legislative event, they're
straightforward stock shots. That, as much as the character
and length of the stories, leads readers to see the Ledger as
a gray, boring paper.''
Trenton was one of the first beats that Pye beefed up in
the midsixties, and one of his first big crusades was against
inflated milk prices. ``Mort came in one Monday morning,''
says managing editor Chick Harrison, who was the paper's
assistant city editor at the time, ``and he asked, ``Why
are they paying less for milk on Long Island than in New
Jersey?'' A reporter was assigned to write a series on the
issue. Soon afterward, the Legislature changed some
regulations and milk prices came down.
Pye added sports coverage--an area where the News was
weak--and also put reporters on the education and legal
beats, because news out of the schools and the courts touched
so many lives across the state. He ran a Monday party page,
with pictures from a dozen or more week-end parties, and he
hit on the idea of the multipart series starting on Sunday--
knowing that readers would be inclined to pick up the daily
paper to see what came next.
Pye also balanced his public-policy crusades with stories
that catered directly to politicians and opinion makers. The
front page, particularly on Sunday, is the space reserved for
New Jersey's elite. Daily stories regularly feature
straightforward, unexciting photographs of the state's
powerful standing around in suits and ties or pearls and
heels, shaking hands, cutting ribbons, or testifying before
legislative committees. The dry stuff of politics is spiced
with people pleasers, such as lots of sports stories,
sometimes two cross-word puzzles, and both ``Ann Landers''
and ``Dear Abby.''
The voice of the Ledger is best defined by its specialty
writers--Bob Braun on education, Herb Jaffe on law, and
Gordon Bishop on the environment, to name a few. Over the
years, these reporters have been given long leashes; they've
mounted their soapboxes, and by dint of the decades spent on
them, they have helped make the Ledger influential. They are
loathed or revered, depending on what advocacy position they
have taken up lately. The specialty reporters are often
behind the Ledger's signature multiday series stories that
fill page after page of the newspaper.
Responding to the charge that the Ledger's stories keep
going and going longer than the Energizer bunny, assistant
managing editor Leonard Fisher says: ``That criticism is
fair. We write too long, and part of that is the luxury of
space. We're conscious of that problem, but making changes is
not easy to do--It can be a battle of egos. Reporters want as
much space as the next person, and they don't want their
words, their pearls of wisdom, cut.''
The crusades themselves have also not gone unnoticed in the
media at large. Ledger reporters have become a lightning rod
for criticism that they hide sometimes virulent opinion
behind the guise of objective reporting. ``There's unanimous
opinion among journalists in the state that the newspaper
often violates journalism standards by editorializing through
news articles,'' says Upmeyer.
Not long after the demise of the Newark Evening News, Pye
began to invest heavily in bureaus around the state, a
strategy that has proved to be very successful. The paper
today has bureaus in 15 out of 21 New Jersey counties, and by
adding local coverage in areas of potential growth, the
Ledger has been able to attain more circulation than the
local daily newspapers.
Was all of this part of some master plan that Pye had been
nurturing for years? Not exactly. The only principle at work
was that he wanted to take things slowly. ``In my mind I had
a plan, and you had to proceed with caution so you didn't
regret what you did,'' Pye says, Former managing editor Andy
Stasiuk, who was Pye's top associate until he retired in
1992, says there was nothing formal about the way the Ledger
worked. ``It's a very informal place,'' he says. ``We don't
have meetings and proposals and so forth. This is a catch-as-
it-flies operation.''
While Pye's style was quietly cautious, he depended on
Stasiuk, a hulking man whose biceps bulged out of his short-
sleeved shirts, for brashness and motivation. ``Andy got
everybody going,'' says Joseph Carragher, ``but Mort was back
there telling Andy what he wanted. They were a great good
cop-bad cop ream; if Mort wanted something, Andy carried it
out, would go the extra mile to please Mort and get the staff
to respond.''
Chick Harrison, Stasiuk's replacement, is a more gentle
spirit. Reporters observe a change in the tone of the
newsroom. It's a bit quieter with a bit less nervous energy.
What hasn't changed is that Mort Pye is in control.
Pye grabs the previous Sunday's front page and throws it on
the table. ``One of the things that pleases me is the play we
give a story like that,'' he says, pointing to the launch of
a series on biotechnology by Kitta MacPherson, his science
editor. ``This is not the kind of thing a tabloid would go
crazy over, but it's a big story.'' Why? ``Because
[biotechnology] is important to the state,'' he answers.
``It's a positive thing, which I like, and it could be
very important to the future of the state in terms of the
economy if we're in the forefront. It should get this kind
of play because it's more important than another car being
hijacked.''
Pye relates the contents of another love letter to the
Ledger, this one from Princeton scientist Joseph Cecchi
effusively praising a series on biotechnology written by
MacPherson in 1987. ``The last line pleased me quite a bit,''
Pye says. ``It said, `You've made a Star-Ledger reader out of
me.'''
It's just before noon on a Saturday in June. As has been
his practice almost every Saturday for more than 30 years,
Pye is in the composing room, taking a last look at the
layout of Sunday's front page. The Sunday Ledger is his pride
and joy. Saturday is a slow news day, so he has always seen
Sunday as a chance to push some big idea or to launch a boffo
series that would carry through the rest of the week. With
728,579 readers--over three times more than its closest
competitor--the Sunday Ledger has the advantage of a front
page that gets noticed.
On this Saturday, however, the end of the an era is
nearing. The composing room is where the copy, headlines, and
pictures are pasted up together on each page, and it used to
be a flurry of activity. But almost the entire operation is
computerized now; millions of dollars have been spent in
recent years to buy state-of-the art presses and the latest
technology to go with them. The Sunday front page is one of
the last pages to be done the old way, and it, too, will be
done electronically in a few months.
Pye scans the page, which is mounted on a drafting table,
and his attention is drawn to the headline of a D day
anniversary story by Bill Gannon. It reads Memories Amid
Headstones in bold type and capital letters. Wondering if
it's too strong, Pye asks a composing-room worker to strip it
off and put in an alternative. Memories Among the Headstones,
in a lighter typeface with uppercase and lowercase
characters. ``That's too weak,'' he says. He asks for the
original back. He studies it approvingly but wants a final
touch: a thin line under the headline that he feels makes it
slightly less overpowering. ``The key to quality is attention
to details,'' Pye says after giving the final okay. ``Folks
at home aren't going to notice what we're fussing over, but
fussy is a good thing. It's the fun part of the business.''
Curiously, despite his obvious, obsessive interest in
tinkering and his willingness to embrace technological
innovations, Pye steadfastly refuses to ape his competitors
by livening up his sleeping giant with loud graphics, lots of
color, and snappy writing. change does occur, but the pace is
as leaden as the Ledger's gray look. Since last year, the
Sunday front page has had color photographs and a few more
varied graphic elements, but that's it.
Even as television and other media threaten to erode
newspaper circulation, Pye, unlike other newspaper editors,
has decided not to try to make his paper as fast-paced as
watching TV. ``People who are interested in a story are
interested in the details,. If you cut a story down to a few
paragraphs, it doesn't tell you more than you already know or
whet your appetite for more. We try to get all the detail,
and that's what brings people to the paper. Apparently
there's something right about it.''
People don't leave the Star-Ledger. Its staff of some 300
reporters and editors includes financial writer Alexander
Milch, who is nearing 90 and covered the depression for the
Newark Evening News, and sports editor Willie Klein, who is
80. The office that houses the newspaper's four main
editorial writers--three of whom are in their seventies--is
fondly called the geriatric ward by some of the younger
journalists. Pye makes it clear that he, too, has no plans to
retire.
I ask one editor why staffers stay at the Ledger for life;
he says it's because many old-timers have no place else to
go. But it's also because the Ledger is a difficult place to
leave. Loyalty is based on the ``golden handcuff'' theory;
reporters are paid better than many of their unionized
counterparts at other newspapers (union is a dirty word at
the Ledger), and everybody's on the honor system when it
comes to expense accounts and overtime. ``They don't play
head games that way,'' one reporter says. When it's time for
a raise, Pye makes the call personally, and year-end bonuses
are doled out bureau by bureau, as reporters and editors are
summoned to Newark for a brief chat with Pye in his office.
For business writer Iris Taylor, her loyalty to the Ledger
was solidified three years ago. During the recession, ad
revenues were down at all New Jersey newspapers. Some were
forced out of business; others laid off workers. But at the
Ledger, a rare memo was circulated. It told staffers that
they would never be laid off for economic reasons--a sure
sign that profitability was never in jeopardy. ``We don't
live with the fear that we won't have a job tomorrow,'' says
Taylor. ``This is a lean-and-mean operation. The pay-checks
are good and the bonuses are good and there are no fancy
anythings.''
``No doubt there's plenty of carping among other
journalists that the Ledger's stories are long and tedious,
that the look is drab and boring, that opinion is passed off
as fact,'' adds Upmeyer, ``But a lot of that may also be
professional jealousy. Reporters aspire to the New York Times
or the Philadelphia Inquirer for the professional prestige,
but they aspire to the Star-Ledger because they will get paid
more and they will write for a paper with a huge circulation.
You wouldn't hear a reporter carp if Mort offered him a
job.''
Some of the Ledger's top editors are bucking the work-till-
you-drop motif, however. The newsroom was stunned two years
ago when Andy Stasiuk, who was 69 at the time, announced he
was retiring to Las Vegas after 38 years with the paper.
Chick Harrison, who moved up from assistant managing editor
when Stasiuk left, told me that he may retire as early as
next year and certainly within two years, even though he just
turned 65.
Former assistant city editor Isabelle Spencer once told me
that she thought Pye, Stasiuk, and Harrison would all leave
at once. But that wouldn't have been Pye's style. No matter
how prepared their replacements might be, that would be quite
a void to fill. If anything is obvious, it is that Pye
believes in gradual change, and with one top editor bowing
out every few years, the organization can better absorb what
is a wrenching but ultimately unavoidable transition in
leadership.
Whether Mort Pye will ever be ready to step down--say on
May 28, 1998, his 80th birthday--may depend on how wise
Christie Whitman's decision to abolish the Board of Higher
Education turns out to be, Pye assures me that even though he
couldn't dissuade the governor from radically changing state
oversight of higher education, the Ledger and its resident
pit bull, Bob Braun, will stay on top of developments under
Whitman's system.
Pye won't say it, but perhaps what's at stake is the one
accolade that has eluded him: the Pulitzer prize. ``Mort has
done something that few in the newspaper business can claim,
but he hasn't been justly rewarded,'' says Joseph Carragher,
who believes that Braun's recent work on the board's
dissolution was Pulitzer-quality.
I mention to Carragher that Braun won't even have a chance
at such an award unless he can expose the flaws in Whitman's
policy and force her to admit that her action was foolhardy.
``It may not happen this year.'' he concedes, ``but maybe
next year or the year after. It would be the crowning touch
if Mort won the Pulitzer for his education coverage.''
In the interim, Mort Pye will just keep selling papers--one
hefty issue at a time.
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