Carol Moseley Braun, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, has been deluged by national media. On Saturday, she was set for queries from a reporter who crossed an ocean to get to the potential first black female senator.
The visitor was Martine Jacot, a top editor-reporter at Le Monde, France`s most authoritative daily newspaper. If one doubts Europeans` greater interest in world affairs than Americans`, one need only understand her duties and the number of her minions.
Jacot, 36, is one of two editors who oversee coverage of ”the Americas,” namely North, Central and South. She helps ride herd over 15 reporters in spots that include Montreal, New York, Washington, Argentina, the Dominican Republic and Chile. By comparison, the Tribune`s entire foreign reporting staff, large by American standards, is 12.
Her paper tends to run 18 columns, or three full pages, of foreign news each day, more during a U.S. election campaign. But internal battling for space among Le Monde editors can be fierce, just as at any paper, and especially now with revolution in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. ”It`s a tough struggle for space every morning,” she said Thursday.
”People will yell, `I need two columns!` You have to bargain.”
She`s always surprised by ”how little the average American knows about what`s going on in Europe. But I do see foreign news on TV and in the papers. There seems to be a gap between what the average person is offered by the media and what he knows.”
Jacot, whose paper regularly lets editors get away from desk-bound tasks to report, spent a fair amount of time in the U.S. during a long tenure as a correspondent in Montreal. When it comes to U.S. journalism, she tends to be struck by its ”standardization.”
”Every anchorman behaves the same way, uses the same tricks. It`s tiring. One looks for character and personality in them, but it`s hard to find.”
She returns to Paris Sunday after a week of reporting on black-related issues as they affect the presidential campaign. She came to Chicago not just because of Braun, but also because she knew it as ”one of the most segregated cities.”
Before arriving here, she was in Washington, where she spent time with Jesse Jackson discussing the campaign, low black voter turnout and his role in the Democratic push to beat President Bush. It prompted a lengthy story that was to run at week`s end.
She came away thinking that, ”Jackson has to make up his mind and maybe bargain on what he`s going to do: support (Bill) Clinton a bit or a lot, and then decide what he`ll do for registration of blacks. Will he work as hard for registration as in 1988?”
It seems a pretty fair analysis, especially for one usually stuck at a desk in Paris.
I was sitting in the St. Louis office of John Rawlings, editor of the Sporting News, last week. Rawlings is so wired to the latest sports journalism poop, he`s a Grand Central Station of gossip: Anything traveling east or west appears to pass through him.
Phone messages came in from the 303 area code. Said Rawlings: ”Something must be up in Denver, maybe with Woody Paige.”
Indeed, Paige, both the sports editor and a columnist at the Denver Post, had an unseemly confrontation with his secretary. It was apparently loud enough to be heard high in the Rockies. He used two words to describe her that can`t be repeated here.
The secretary quickly headed to the personnel department, then the Newspaper Guild, and threatened to file a sexual harassment complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
About four seconds later, the paper reached a financial settlement with the secretary, who left the paper as part of the deal, and began looking for a new sports editor. Paige keeps his column.
Gannett Co. Inc., the largest newspaper chain, is showing rare sensitivity to increasing public criticism of corporate America for executive compensation that`s out of whack when compared with actual corporate performance. Critics also chide many companies` self-servingly byzantine proxy statements that make figuring out what somebody earned very tough.
In Gannett`s just-off-the-presses 1992 statement, covering a 1991 in which it didn`t perform terribly well (like most newspaper-based firms), there`s a section on executive pay whose honesty is welcome, maybe
unprecedented.
”There currently is a great deal of interest in the subject of executive compensation,” it opens. ”Consistent with our Company policy to be open and candid about matters of public concern, we have included the tables and other information set forth below in an attempt to enable our shareholders to better understand the compensation of Gannett`s executives.”
The attempt succeeds. Shareholders may not love Chairman John Curley`s earning $3.04 million last year, including $800,000 in base pay and $462,500 in stock options, while the company`s performance was uninspired. But there`s no mystery as to where his money came from, no rhetorical corporatese to confuse and confound.
In breaking down pay to Curley and four other top executives, the section offers easy-to-understand definitions of terms such as ”stock option,”
”performance unit” and ”stock incentive rights.” It compares the honchos` 1991 pay to what they got in 1990 and 1989. Good for Gannett.
”Tsongas exit clears Clinton`s path”-March 20 Tribune.
” `Rough weeks` ahead for Clinton”-March 26 Tribune, after Jerry Brown`s win in Connecticut`s Democratic primary.
There`s some media hardball playing out in normally pacifist Madison, Wis.
It involves two papers, the Capital Times and the Wisconsin State Journal. They have what amounts to the same ownership via Madison Newspapers Inc., but are separate editorial operations.
Parade magazine, which appears in 337 newspapers with a total circulation of 36.5 million and is the granddaddy of Sunday supplements, appears in the Sunday Wisconsin State Journal. It`s owned by the adroitly run Newhouse media empire, which includes papers and the Conde Nast magazines such as Vanity Fair.
The Capital Times, which doesn`t publish Sundays, wanted to start using USA Weekend on Fridays. USA Weekend is Gannett`s counterpart to Parade, used by 357 papers with combined circulation of 15.6 million.
News of a Capital Times deal with USA Weekend did not enthuse Parade. It insists that its deal with the State Journal covers the Capital Times, given the similar ownership.
Capital Times Editor Dave Zweifel was informed by superiors that Parade threatened to pull out of the State Journal. A deal with USA Weekend was ditched. Many Capital Times readers get the State Journal on Sundays.
Zweifel is chagrined, having learned that Parade and USA Weekend ”really play for keeps, and we backed off.”
”I`ve been in the business 30 years but hadn`t believed that there could be such bull-headed, uncaring people in the business,” he said, alluding to Parade.
An example of a story inexplicably missed by media around the globe is in the March 18 New Buffalo Times, a Michigan weekly:
”A woman suspected of being the `Spandex Bandit` was arrested by Valparaiso (Ind.) Police this week in connection with several thefts at area schools. The suspect is Pleasure Certain, Michigan City.”
Certain was arrested on five counts of larceny in a matter that also saw the arrest of two men. She was identified by a citizen who had seen her at several elementary schools wearing pink Spandex pants.
According to the weekly`s account, Pete Rahm, a Michigan state trooper, declared, ”She knew what she was doing . . . drawing attention away from her face by wearing that outfit.”
Use of aberrant or shocking attire is food for larcenous thought.
I may show up at Tiffany next week wearing my underwear outside my pants; see if I can pilfer some sterling silver key rings; and hope nobody remembers my face.
