Storied journalist, Dan Rottenberg, sits down with True Thirty

What is a newspaper’s mission?

I couldn’t help but wonder as I interviewed Dan Rottenberg, who has cut a mouthful of teeth in his decades as a journalist in Philadelphia and elsewhere. There aren’t many folks who could subtitle a memoir My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech as Rottenberg did earlier this year when he published his 12th book, The Education of a Journalist. 

Rottenberg and I spoke recently in his office which is nestled inside a legacy office building in Center City Philadelphia. We were discussing The Philadelphia Inquirer, which both of us have written for. 

That’s where the similarity ends. My apple comprises a year spent reporting and writing in a suburban Inquirer bureau in 1989-90. Rottenberg’s orange is his two decades as an op-ed columnist from around 1978-97. 

Rottenberg was also executive editor of Philadelphia Magazine, managing editor of Chicago Journalism Review, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and, over the stretch of his career the chief editor of seven publications including Philadelphia’s Broad Street Review, an online arts and culture salon he created in 2005. 

Among those dozen books was Finding Our Fathers which launched the modern Jewish genealogy movement in 1977. 

Rottenberg feels the Inquirer has, in ways, forgotten its mission, which is to its readers. He remembered the paper’s former mission statement, printed proudly on the masthead, stating confidently that “It could make your day.” 

This was the Inquirer’s heyday. Buoyed by the arrival in the early 1970s of Executive Editor Eugene Roberts, the former National Editor of the New York Times, the Inquirer evolved from a timid, ineffectual broadsheet to a powerhouse that from 1975 to 1990 won 17 Pulitzer Prizes earning it a lot of “pound for pound the best newspaper you can buy” approbations. 

While I was devouring the paper in the 1980s, the Inquirer had 15 bureaus around the country and the world. Dispatches from Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, London and Paris were provided by Inquirer staffers. Today, those stories are either provided by deep pocketed legacy papers like the Washington Post or from the Associated Press. The paper, nowadays, has a lot less personality and substance. There are still marvelous reporters and writers but it is threadbare compared to the glory days. This is of course true of many newspapers in 2022. 

“I got to Philly in ’72, the same time as Roberts,” Rottenberg shared. “Roberts had hopes of turning around the Inquirer and offered me a couple of jobs.” That didn’t pan out and, instead, Rottenberg started submitting columns.

“He (Roberts) persuaded the staff and readers that the work we were doing was important.” And it was. Inquirer investigations were as dogged as anything being produced at the time in American journalism.

Then? Corporate interference. 

According to Rottenberg, “Roberts came under pressure to cut expenses. Wall Street was putting pressure on them (Roberts and Publisher Sam McKeel). They no longer had a monopoly hold on the public.” 

“Nothing lasts forever,” Rottenberg said of the halcyon days. “It was a rare moment in time.” He sounded wistful, not bitter. It had been a long time. 

Of the Inquirer today, Rottenberg could offer only faint praise: “It’s better than nothing. It has lost a lot of the fire.” 

He remembered the words of a former editor at the Daily News, the feisty Philadelphia tabloid which carved its own identity back in the day: “Our job is to kick ass.” More the credo of a tabloid than a fabled broadsheet, but the Inquirer kicked plenty of ass back in the day. There are still investigations and award-eligible series, but the asses get more of a pass than they did in the 1970s and 1980s. There simply are not as many resources and plenty of places where readers can go to witness ass kicking. 

At the Commercial Review, the daily he worked for in Portland, Indiana, the masthead plea was more urgent, a manifesto: “You can’t afford to miss a single issue.” I have often felt that way about various newspapers and news magazines. There are just not as many papers in 2022 for which that is an accurate manifesto. 

From 1981-93, Rottenberg edited the Welcomat, a weekly that had started a decade earlier. In this position, he found himself at times criticizing the Inquirer for which he was still a contributor. Criticizing is something that is not in short supply in today’s news maelstrom. 

The legacy news media – especially if in large cities or coastal areas or, heavens forbid, both – is too far left. The citizen media is too far right.

“The news now serves mostly to reinforce people’s prejudices,” Rottenberg lamented. 

He implied that in a perfect newsroom world, the criticism is taking place in the bubble. 

“You don’t want a publication where everyone gets along,” he said, remembering the chemistry that was built in the early 1970s Inquirer. “How do you get to be a great news outlet now? You hire a Gene Roberts who knows how to attract an audience. It’s better when you have a yin and yang between a publisher and an editor.”

Rottenberg remembers the Philadelphia Bulletin, which ruled the newspaper roost for much of its history before its demise in 1982 – a demise hastened by the ascendance of the Inquirer. “The Bulletin’s philosophy was that they were guests in their readers’ homes and had to act accordingly.”

In other words, no ass kicking allowed.

And there is indeed a lot of hand wringing – including in this publication – about the current media and its perceived faults, shortcomings and biases. Especially biases. News coverage prioritized by potential clicks. Legacy papers, led by the most August of them all, the New York Times, have been battered much in frequent years.

Rottenberg will have none of it.

“The New York Times is better than ever before,” he claimed. “In the old days, it didn’t serve its readers. You should be an expert at what you’re covering.” 

And as a full-time reader of the Times, I can say unequivocally that I find their range astonishing. Resources borne of deep pockets? No doubt. But there are a lot of organizations in this world who have deep pockets and don’t know what on earth to do with their resources. 

This past Sunday there was of course coverage of news of the day – not exhaustive perhaps, but hardly skimpy – on Trump, Putin, crypto and migrants. Dig deeper and there was a story about a beauty cream maker aligned with nature, the complicated fame of a virally popular C.E.O, a megasculpture in a Nevada valley and a magazine story on the potentially final act of Willie Nelson. And of course, so much more. If the Times is slanted, it doesn’t come across as something I can see or feel. I pick up the paper, read what I want to read and avoid the rest. 

What I can’t necessarily stomach is folks who have agendas accusing others of having agendas. I don’t know, I’m stealing cliches here, but do two agendas make a right?

“The (Washington) Post is also better than prior,” Rottenberg added and that’s saying a lot for a paper hardly lacking in credentials. I know not every moment is Robert Redford screaming at Deep Throat in an underground garage, but the Post has held down the weighty responsibility of covering the most fraught U.S. beat with aplomb for much of its recent history. 

As far as another heavyweight, Rottenberg also complimented the Wall Street Journal for having expanded its sections/offerings and the lack of meddling by current owner Rupert Murdoch. 

Rottenberg called the accusations of bias in large newspapers “bogus. The issue is raised by people who don’t like what’s written about them. They’re more biased than the media.” 

He also lamented newspapers and reporters that are “afraid to report things in case they’ll be criticized for bias.” He wondered aloud if the Wall St. Journal’s perceived conservative editorial bent was, if anything, a bulwark, to provide balance against accusations of left leaning news coverage.

He decried such recent series as the Inquirer’s Black City White Paper, a purported reckoning of its racist past and the New York Times much-discussed 1619 series and books which, while called comprehensive by many, was called pandering by others.

“The Inquirer was a pioneer on integration,” he argued. 

Woke culture again running amok?

As far as the future of journalism? 

“I am an incurable optimist,” Rottenberg exclaimed. “There are many different models.” He decried the day where “the job wasn’t to bring news to the readers, it was to bring readers to the advertisers.” 

A Faustian bargain? Back in the day, there was more news coverage. There was also enough advertising to support a six-month shopping spree. Strange bedfellows to be sure. Of course today, you can listen to your Spotify ad-free, but only if you pay. I listen for free and simply turn down the audio during the commercials. We do what we have to do. 

Regarding doom and gloom predictions for the media and its place in our lives, Rottenberg said “we are not at the end, but at the beginning. It’s like the invention of the printable type. You look at newspapers the way you look at your friends.”

How to fix today’s problems?

“I have no idea,” he admitted. “But people need information and they need journalism.”