Power play heralds a print coup

By TIM RUTTEN

Oct. 26, 2002 12 AM PT

Among journalists, the International Herald Tribune is one of those names that carries an inescapably romantic set of associations.

The world may have changed in all sorts of laudable and lamentable ways, and the IHT -- as it is crisply known -- may long ago have moved its newsroom from central Paris to one of the city’s sprawling postindustrial suburbs, but somehow the mention of its name still conjures up images of trench coats, Gauloises and cold demi-blonds at Brasserie Lipp.

That was part of the reason the journalistic world took such acute notice this week when the New York Times put a financial gun to the Washington Post’s head and ended the 50-50 partnership under which the IHT has been run for the last 35 years, leaving the New York paper as sole proprietor.

“Among managers at the New York Times and the Washington Post, the IHT has a special emotional place,” said Martin Kaplan, associate dean and director of the Norman Lear Center at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications. “So many of their owners, executives and top-flight people either went through there or read it at a crucial time in their lives that they think of it as a kind of romantic finishing school. Owning it is a big deal to them.”

But there was more than nostalgia at work in the Times’ decision to pay $70 million for a money-losing newspaper that publishes six days a week and sells slightly more than 250,000 copies around the world, about 40% of them as bulk purchases by hotels and airlines.

And those other factors are of genuine interest to readers and viewers of serious news, because they suggest two important realizations about the journalistic future: One is that the Internet has yet to catch on as a way of distributing journalism, even on the international level, where its quick acceptance once was all but assumed. The other is that the globalization of information, like that of capital, is taking place in English and in the style familiar to American readers.

Thus, analysts say, the Times was willing to pay a premium for an “old media” property because it believes its future must involve global expansion, which cannot be achieved electronically.

Kaplan points out that when Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. announced the purchase, “he said they were buying it to extend their brand. A business -- even a newspaper -- has to grow and not just win Pulitzers and stand for excellence. If you’re the New York Times, which already has expanded nationally, at least in the elite market, you have to extend your brand to Europe and Asia, where the Times name may have the cachet of the Chanel logo.”

According to Kaplan, the decision to do that in print “is a kind of acknowledgment of where the business model for new media stands. The theory that the Internet is a way to profitably extend the reach of a publication just hasn’t gone very far. Lots of people have tried it, and nobody has made any money. The purchase of the IHT is further confirmation that an adjustment based on sad experience is underway.”

In fact, according to sources at the IHT and the Times, the latter’s uncharacteristically aggressive approach to the deal may be explained by a little-noticed provision in the partnership agreement. Under its terms, even if the Times elected to publish its own international edition, the number of copies it could distribute was capped.

As the Post’s Donald E. Graham confirmed in a memo about the sale to his editors and foreign correspondents, “If the Post did not sell, the Times said it would start its own international edition anyway, intending to sell as many copies as allowed under the IHT partnership agreement. The Times also said it would block any cash infusion into the IHT, which the partnership agreement would permit it to do.”

The Times, in other words, was willing to lose money for as long as it took to starve the Herald Tribune out of existence in order to win the right to sell as many printed copies as the market will bear.

Playing that hard a ball requires confidence that a game worth winning is underway -- which, analysts say, appears to be true. In fact, the only journalistic media with a viable global future -- CNN International, the IHT, the Wall Street Journal’s international editions, Britain’s Financial Times and the Economist -- publish in English according to the prevailing ethical norms of American journalism.

“Part of it is that English is the Esperanto of our childhood dreams,” USC’s Kaplan said. “It used to look as if the Tower of Babel was our fate, but it turns out everybody speaks English whether they want to or not because it is the lingua franca of commercial success.”

According to Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, cultural factors also have given U.S.-style journalism global traction. Speaking by telephone from a villa outside Sienna, Italy, Schell cited “two things I think are at work here:

“One is the way news is done in American and elite British operations. The other is that our culture is a large imperial force, projecting itself around the world to create new markets for itself.

“Four kilometers from where I’m sitting is a little town where you can buy the IHT at the newsstand. Who is buying it? Americans who don’t speak Italian, like me. It’s a formula that works around the world, in part, because Americans now are everywhere and most of them have no interest in or ability to absorb anybody else’s version of the news. We’ve created a compelling product, and the market for it, by dispersing ourselves throughout the world while maintaining our very provincial tastes and unwillingness to speak other languages.”

That, according to Schell, is “the harsh face of this globalization process. But it isn’t the only one. What is it about American media outlets that allows them to project themselves so widely? I think it’s that the principles behind American journalism highlight balance and objectivity unlike, say, the ideological European press.

“No other country has so clearly a delineated set of journalistic norms,” said Schell, who spent much of his journalistic career as a correspondent in China. “That doesn’t mean we don’t regularly fail to meet them. But if you go to France, nobody can tell you what their canon of ethics is. Because American journalists can do that, it creates a more universal template of news.” As Schell sees it, “Even though Americans criticize our media, people around the world are addicted to it for very good reasons. The best American media is very good because it is a reflection of American universalism, of our striving to be all things to all people. And even though we regularly fail, no other nation has that admirable pretension.”

Fair enough, so long as it’s a pretense that continues to wear a trench coat.

Regarding Media runs Wednesday and Saturday. E-mail [email protected].