In our efforts to please a diverse array of readers, most of whom are in a hurry, we try to cover so many bases, we may lose all real substance. Television can fascinate with the fleeting image, but now we are in danger of raising a generation of non-readers. Could that mean non-thinkers, too? Newspapers have an obligation to provide more than the fleeting. In-depth reporting, made interesting and vital, can to in-depth reading and thinking on a daily basis. In the future, when the very existence of newspapers may be challenged by the proliferation of information, providing real substance can justify the existence of newspapers. They will be the best vehicle to probe the veracity and value of the information barraging us.

Take, for example, a recent story by the Chicago Tribune which took the trouble to check its own reports of the crowd count during the Pope’s visit to Chicago. Press and television accounts put the crowds at over a million. Analysis of pictures by a crowd expert hired by the Tribune revealed no more than 150,000 have stood in the space occupied.

So, I think the press needs to periodically ask itself: are we publishing substance or surface? Are we constantly willing to probe beyond the apparent. And can we afford to?

Which leads me to the third danger I want to focus on tonight: the economic peril that has the potential to eliminate competitive newspapers in this country. There’s nothing particularly new about this, but it’s a challenge with which i’m intimately familiar. And it gives rise to a question I think worth asking: does true freedom of the press as applied to newspapers mandate a multiplicity of viewpoints? Or do we have a free press where a community is treated to but one view of the world; one brand of editors selecting what stories to cover: one kind of reporter interpreting what happens on the local scene: one publisher vetoing the story he doesn’t like. Is that freedom of the press?

It was A. J. Liebling, I believe, who made the familiar remark that “freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns one.” And I do believe that many of the publishers who do own the only press in a town bend over backwards to be responsible and balanced.

Still, that single press is a fact of life in more and more towns. 88 percent of American cities with newspapers have only one. 380 Cities or 12 percent have more than one newspaper, but of those another 126 cities have two newspapers under a single ownership and 19 have two with separate ownerships but a combined publishing arrangement. That leaves, according to the American Newspaper Publishers Association, only 35 cities or two percent of the cities in the United States that have two or more competing newspapers under separate ownerships. Anchorage is one of these 35. There are also 1,115 newspapers published by chains or newspaper groups — many in single newspaper towns — or 63 percent of the nation’s papers are group owned. Is this alarming? Al Neuhart, president of one of the largest newspaper chains, Gannett, and this year’s president of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, thinks not. He told the ANPA convention last spring that there are more than 28,000 media voices in the United States when you include magazines, television radio stations and daily and weekly newspapers. That’s more than twice the number at the turn of the last century. Neuharth claimed that “the noisemakers who criticize newspapers for lack of diversity are trying hopelessly and in some cases recklessly to relate today’s world of news and information services to the romanticized world of the past,” a worm of penny political journals, personalized journalism and cut-throat local competition which often resulted in cut-rate journalism. “The fact is,” says Neuhart, “very little of that kind of journalism contributed to raising the intellectual level of the people of this land.”

Now I wouldn’t presume to argue with Mr. Neuharth, but I do believe that some of the world’s highest quality newspapers did spring from precisely that climate of intense local competition and many of the best still are in competitive cities. And I would also like to at least suggest that the towns with competitive newspapers are among the liveliest and most progressive. It seems to me the competition that destroys is the purely commercial competition — never the competition of ideas.

Because of the multitude of media voices clamoring for attention, I venture to suggest that it is even more necessary for citizens to know who to believe, who to trust. If the local newspaper is doing its job properly, and especially if it has a competitor to serve as its watchdog, it can be a major stabilizing factor in a confusing society.

This is especially true in an isolated area like Alaska or Hawaii where it isn’t possible to find six or eight Daily Newspapers from neighboring towns on the corner newsstand. So, possibly, the Alaskan experience is not valid for the rest of the country. Yet, in spite of 11 radio stations, 4 television stations, pay television by satellite, and 3 weekly shoppers, there are few citizens in and around Anchorage who would argue that the perceptions of the populace have not been shaped by what has been the dominant Daily Newspaper — at least until quite recently when has become a genuinely competitive newspaper town. And despite all these other media, I submit that the Daily Newspaper, more any other single influence, establishes the climate, the mood, the very thought structure of any community.

This is particularly so when the issues are great and complex and the society dealing with them is in a constant flux as in Alaska. Consider for a moment some issues facing a frontier state: the biggest one is the allocation of land — the federal government is converting more than a hundred million acres into national parks and refugees, yet Alaskans are desperate for new lands on which to build a life; there is another pipeline to build — a natural gas pipeline to be the world’s most expensive private construction project (we already hold that record from the last pipeline). There is the confrontation between environment and development so immediate and so emotional on the last frontier because of the starkness of the issues and the small population; and there are new potentials — from bottom fisheries to feed the world, to energy sources to fuel it. Most recently there is the interesting question of how to handle responsibly a projected 3.4 billion dollar state budget surplus through 1981. These great decisions facing only about 400,000 people require a special commitment from the press: enterprising, courageous, in-depth reporting to fully and fairly inform the people so decisions can be made in a climate of reason. There is a special need too, for the investigative report that brings to light some of the excesses and corner cutting that has grown traditional in some circles of a frontier society. The press has described as the “central nervous system of a community.” Sociologist David Riesman emphasized some years ago that the newspaper plays a particularly crucial role in a community by defining the terms in which political and social dialogue take place. A newspaper has a character, a personality, a presence that just doesn’t apply to the electronic media.

If I might be permitted to quote just once from a very distinguished editor who happens to have been my husband — Larry Fanning described it this way in a speech he gave in the 60s at the University of Indiana: “a great newspaper has integrity, a social conscience, a sense of mission, responsibility, a volatile engagement with the real world, a joyous, vigorous, exciting quality…Such newspapers establish and confirm the tone of a community, one of the central responsibilities of a newspaper.” He went on to say that a newspaper’s functions of responsibility to its readers is essential to a self-governing society, that it is a strategically vital institution and that it is and ever must be more than just a business. Anything that weakens the press, that corrupts the press, teat diverts the press from this central function is a peril to the American system.”

That special sense of mission that applies to the newspaper, must never lie lost. We need to sometimes ask ourselves whether the economic realities, the challenge of ever increasing costs and the preoccupation with the bottom line, has obscured the special sense of mission that justifies first amendment freedoms. It is a question I have been forced to consider.

Of course, the first duty of a newspaper must be to survive. No one has experienced any more dramatically than we have at the Daily News the absolute necessity of making ends meet. Somerset maugham tells us “money is like the sixth sense without which you cannot make full use of the other five.” As the Daily News teetered on the edge of oblivion for over two years, we experienced first-hand that in the business as any other, the exercise of those five senses depends on the availability of Maugham’s sixth. But I think we should remind ourselves that a black figure at the bottom line is the means to a free press, not the end.

Our history at the Anchorage Daily News has been as prone to peaks and valleys as our alaskan landscape. Consider that in one year, 1976, the Daily News won the Pulitzer gold medal for its series of articles on the powerful Alaska teamsters union, and five months later announced on page one that the paper was broke and would have to stop publication if help wasn’t immediately forthcoming.

Let me tell you about it briefly because it illustrates, I think, some of these challenges faced by newspapers.

First the peak:

Picture the Alaska of the summer of 1975 at the height of the pipeline building frenzy. The state was teeming with the boomers who had come north to get their slice of the bonanza. The lucky ones who got the nod for a job from the big unions earned vast sums for 12-hour, seven-day weeks whether they did any work or not. That summer everyone in Alaska was whispering about the power of Alaska teamsters union 959 and its burley boss, Jess L. Carr, who was tucking away over a million dollars a week in the teamster pension fund alone. In a short time the union had grown from 1,500 members to 23,000. There were teamster shopping malls, a teamster hospital, dental clinic, recreation centers, a legal clinic, buildings, jet airplanes — all for the use of teamsters. We called this reporting enterprise, “Empire: the Alaskan Teamster Story.” It described the insidious political and financial tentacles of the teamsters reaching into every facet of Alaskan life, of schemes for personal gain by its leader, of the mysterious giant teamster-controlled warehouse through which all the equipment for the pipeline from paperclips to bulldozers had to pass. We discovered that all the top jobs at the warehouse were held by teamsters with criminal records! We made an effort to tell the positive as well as negative aspects of the teamster organization. When the series was finished, I was disappointed. We had committed three reporters to it for three months, but it seemed there was so much more. In fact, we were meeting to plan a follow up when the news came that the teamster series had won the pulitzer prize. You can imagine that newsroom — champagne corks popping, all twelve telephones ringing, calls coming in from all over the world, television and radio interviews, hundreds of telegrams! And then before we could gear up for the next effort, came the money crunch and we were forced to cut the staff by 40%. The follow-up investigative efforts had to be dropped.

But in our case, the community did care. After the front-page call for help, about 50 citizens formed a group called the Committee for Two Newspapers who rang doorbells to sell subscriptions and cajole advertisers. One of the Alaska native corporations comprised of Eskimos and Indians loaned us money just in time to keep the doors open.