Newspapers are cutting their editorial boards. This journalist says it’s a ‘chicken’ move

Every week on The Show for years, there have been voices from the editorial board of the Arizona Republic. But, after the latest round of buyouts at the state’s paper of record, the Republic’s current editorial board is nearly gone.

The Show reached out to Gannett about their plans for the future editorial pages of the Arizona Republic. They said the paper maintains an editorial board and sent the following statement: “USA TODAY and the USA TODAY Network’s editorial approach reinforces our commitment to inform and share diverse opinions. We balance our local and national expertise to best inform readers and the communities we serve. Our editorial teams encourage respectful and thoughtful dialogue, as we share civil discourse from opposing points of views to engage constructive conversation.”

Now, you might think losing opinion writers is better than losing people reporting the news. But newspapers were founded on editorials. Their boards have a rich history of writing unsigned columns with an institutional voice endorsing presidential candidates, coming down against immigration policies, encouraging participation in elections.

Their opinion columnists have weighed in on the biggest issues facing their communities — from politics to water to policy fights at the state Legislature — with a keen eye and informed perspectives.

The Show

Mary Jo Pitzl has reported for the Arizona Republic for more than 40 years. Here's what stands out

Mark Brodie

Come Monday, the Arizona Republic will be losing some longtime voices. Among those who recently took Gannett’s buyout is Mary Jo Pitzl, who’s been a reporter at the Republic for more than four decades. She’s covered everything from education to the environment to child safety to the state Capitol, among other beats.

Listen • 9:06

The editorial pages of local newspapers gave readers what Paul Farhi calls “moral clarity” in shaping public opinion.

Farhi is a longtime journalist. He spent 35 years at the Washington Post and now writes about the media for places like Columbia Journalism Review, the Atlantic and Vanity Fair. Last year, he wrote about the long, slow death of the newspaper editorial for Nieman Reports.

The Show spoke with him more about it.

Full conversation

PAUL FARHI: If you go down the list of what the most read parts of a newspaper are, editorials, it turns out, and op ed columns aren't the most read. They’re at the bottom. It depends on the paper, of course. And so if you are looking for the next round of cutbacks, which every newspaper is, that's the one you’re going to start looking at.

But I would argue that that’s the heart and the lungs of a newspaper. It’s what newspapers got started for. They also obviously cover the news, but they also are active institutional voices in their communities. So I find this trend very sad.

LAUREN GILGER: I want to talk about that phrase that you just said, institutional voices in a community. That strikes me as very, I guess, apropos to what's happening today because we’re in an era in which anything to do with an institution of any kind seems to be questioned, mistrusted.

Are we seeing that kind of mistrust in the public?

FARHI: Yes, of course. You have great polarization, which is one of the reasons why editorials are fading, too, is because half the people who read the editorial are gonna disagree with you instantaneously, usually. And newspapers don’t want to court controversy, particularly. They don't want to alienate people particularly, given the situation.

They’re not the powerful institutions they used to be, and they want to be out of the business of making people upset, even though making people upset might be the best thing you could do for a community.

There is less and less of an institutional voice whether it’s a newspaper, the politicians in the community, the, the homeowners association. Whoever it is, there are fewer and fewer institutions to rely on, and newspapers used to be one of the pillars of those communities. They are no longer.

GILGER: Let me ask you about what you think is lost in that. We used to speak to someone at the editorial board of the Republic every week on the show, and they would often be able to talk about and weigh in on — with an opinion — lots of the big issues facing the community, the challenges facing the community, whatever controversy seemed to be happening here right now, they would weigh in on that.

You referred to this as kind of offering moral clarity, especially on big issues for communities.

Paul Farhi

FARHI: Yeah, that’s right. There aren’t many people whose job is to be invested in and aware of and knowledgeable about a community, and it’s all of its issues: the policing issues, education issues, political issues, what have you. That’s what editorial boards did and have done for decades and even centuries.

These are professional people whose job is to pay attention and perhaps to render an opinion about that. And that’s a very valuable thing. When an editorial is really good, it’s not just an opinion, it’s explanatory. Here’s the issue. Let me lay out the sides for you. Let’s weigh the pros and cons, and let's come to conclusions.

And that's what the best editorials have done for a very long time. And it helps galvanize a community. It helps lead a community. It helps a community understand which way it should go, how it should spend its money, who it should elect and what its values might be.

And unfortunately, that’s breaking down. People don’t want to hear it. They’ve got their own opinions, and they’ve got their own sources. And there’s a whole body of literature and research about people living in their own opinion bubbles without wanting to hear from another side. And editorials are declining as a result of that as well.

GILGER: We don't know what will replace the editorial board and the columnists at the Arizona Republic, but a lot of places, a lot of papers have seen this replaced with opinion pieces submitted by a lawmaker or an interest group or whoever it may be who wants to write an opinion about what’s going on in their world.

What’s the difference between having an editorial board and publishing columns from other folks?

FARHI: Yeah. Gannett, the owner of The Republic, is the leader in this — if you want to call it leadership. I’d call it a kind of chicken strategy because basically what they’re doing is saying we don’t want to render an institutional judgment.

We don’t want to have an editorial board that tells you what to think, but we’ll allow the top Republican or the top Democrat or the school board president or the labor union leader to weigh in, and we’ll “convene a conversation.”

But what’s chicken about that is we’ll lay off the opinion mongering to that person. And if you’re mad about what he says, don’t blame us, go and blame him.

So this in some ways is a business strategy. It becomes, let’s take the heat off ourselves. Let’s not be leaders in our community. Let’s let other people do the job that we did for many, many years. And it’s such a disappointment to see that.

This notion of convening conversations is great, but that's actually what newspapers did when they invented the op-ed page. The op-ed page was the, you can be opposite the editorial board with a different opinion.

So you had both. You had the institutional voice, and you had the individual voice side by side. Now you’ve lost the institutional voice and all you’re gonna get is the individual voice through these op-eds.

GILGER: Paul, are there people out there who are thinking about editorials and editorial boards and opinion pages in a new way that you think is worth considering?

FARHI: Well, it’s really not so new, but in the digital world, there’s plenty of publications dedicated to opinion and nothing but opinion. And actually, it’s a flourishing world. It tends to be about national issues.

You don't find out what’s happening down the street from you. You don’t have opinions about your local issues. It’s more about what the president is up to or not up to or should be up to, but there’s a great flowering of opinion that way.

But the reason I say this isn’t particularly new is because if you go back to the beginning of the republic, if you go back to before the beginning of the republic, there were plenty of printed newspapers that were nothing but opinion sheets.

Common Sense, which was Thomas Paine's publication advocating for rebellion against the British, predates the founding of the republic. “These are times that try men’s souls” was the famous line from Thomas Paine's Common Sense.

So we’ve had printed newspapers with opinions for hundreds and hundreds of years, even before we became a country. And it has moved into the digital world. Unfortunately, it has not moved in any substantial way into the local world, and that’s what we’ve lost.