What my old newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, has been doing in rethinking its editorial page for the Web is juvenile at best and destabilizing at worst. Some smart people have clever ideas, but they are drawing flawed conclusions about the influence of editorials and the role of the newspaper as an institution.
This audience knows better than anyone that a newspaper's pronouncements may not sparkle every day. Many editorials need to be spruced up or made stronger. But that doesn't mean we should bring on the bloggers as consultants, which seems to be the philosophy at the Times, while under Michael Kinsley's restless direction.
In the Times' first experiment with wiki editorials, it was astonishing to watch the Web experts wrestle "live" with distinctions of fact and differing opinion that seasoned editorial page people have lots of experience handling and routing.
The key for online opinion is to find suitable new formats that supplement the printed page, and to transfer the best standards of our discipline to any Web-based "citizen journal ism" initiatives like wiki. In the formulation of public policy, this nation has been served well by one of those fixed stars, what I call the compact between editorial pages and readers. It has to do with being clear about who is talking in the unsigned editorials, the letters that come in response, and the signed op-ed articles that inform and entertain.
That basic understanding is being unraveled in Los Angeles. I don't mean by putting more reader comment online and making more use of the Web for posting documents and having people react. Those things are fine. Some recent changes in the Sunday opinion section are clever and may liven things up.
My concern is the neutering or trivializing of a newspaper's voice by contracting editorials out. Or by allowing readers to do their own scribbling to rewrite editorials. Or by describing a paper's position as a work in progress, as seems to be the philosophy in an editorial called, "Thinking Out Loud."
All of this because people are worried that editorial pages aren't interesting enough. Having boring editorials does not mean that editorials are unimportant. Quite the opposite. Influencing your bottom lines has kept many a political consultant or public relations person in business. What a coup the lobbyists, special interests, and politicians would imagine they had if they could get you to think you were "out of it" and needed to turn the institutional voice over to others.
When I was the editor of the Times' Orange County edition editorial page, we had a precursor to the wikitorial writer. It was the citizen expert, armed with a PC in sprawling new suburbs. These writers were generally knowledgeable and anxious to kill a proposal for an international airport at the closed El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. We ran thousands of their letters, and by the close of the past decade when the airport proposal was voted down in favor of a park, the newspaper was linking to documents and having chats with readers online.
But not all of such blogging is of good quality. Somebody will have to check the veracity of the claims made by advocates on both sides for such things as decibel levels, or pollution impact, and the like. The assumption that your institutional opinion is going to improve by bringing in the online writers is naive. Would that many of their points of view were better reasoned or informed. And ultimately, the newspaper itself should decide.
The good editorial page has attributes worth championing in addition to its clear positions and analysis. It doesn't shoot from the hip; it checks things out; it uses its board meetings and daily appointments with readers to an advantage not available to those spewing out a blog. Its established customs and procedures, its commitment to fair play in commentary, have the effect of shoring up a newspaper's foundation, inoculating it against real damage at the hands of ranting critics.
Editorial pages surely must publish and even stimulate criticism, but a top editor is also a guardian and a trustee who would not expose the mothership to crippling attack. This should go without saying. But in instituting a column called "Outside The Tent" that calls on attacks from people with axes to grind, Kinsley seemed to go beyond innovation. Some people who cherish the Times share my concern about this column, coming as it has at a time when the paper roused reader indignation for cutting back on coverage in the region.
Kinsley also told L.A. Business Journal that newspapers don't do opinion as well as blogs, which simply isn't true. He passed on an opportunity to trumpet an editorial page's second-day ability to do the reporting, check the facts, and take a breath before responding.
My concern is that this overall approach is creating confusion in the minds of readers that later will have to be undone in the interest of clarity and credibility for the newspaper. Kinsley is a wonderful columnist, and his musings would resonate better if that were his only format. It may be that his strengths as celebrity journalist make it difficult to play his hand with a requisite measure of reserve, so that the paper, not the personality, is always put first.
His task as a top opinion editor should have been to recognize that having editorial pages be less chattering than blogs is a plus, not a minus, even with the opportunity to take advantage of online forms. Editorial pages were doing opinion long before the new guys in town, and they know a lot more about where the landmines are. Who's the teacher here, anyway? That is not to say that the editorial page can't use the digital opportunity to full advantage.
The larger challenge for editorial pages is not so much to change their ground rules to somebody else's game. It's to be liberated by publishers to rethink views, to be better written and reported, and to be more relevant to online readers. The difficulty in doing all these things day in and day out, writing and editing thousands of words, is the reason we hear that even the best pages can be dull.
So let's fight dullness, not farm out and erode the clout of the newspapers. They have lots of experience influencing public opinion, something the bloggers are just learning.
Stephen Burgard is director of Northeastern University's School of Journalism and a past editor and writer for editorial pages since the late 1970s. E-mail s.burgard@neu.edu
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