Circulation Surprises Critics : Washington Times Works to Attract Black Readers

Seven months ago, amid much ballyhoo, the Washington Post began publishing a new magazine with its Sunday paper.

Almost before the ink was dry on the very first issue, many in the black community were enraged.

The cover story in that first issue was about a black rap singer accused of murder. The lead column was by the Post’s Richard Cohen--who wrote that he agreed with white merchants who put locked gates in their stores and refused to admit young, black males because they might be robbers or shoplifters.

A coalition of 47 community groups staged a three-month protest against the Post, dumping copies of the Post’s Sunday magazine on the steps of the Post’s main office. Benjamin C. Bradlee, executive editor of the Post, wrote a column apologizing for the first issue of the magazine.

Editors at the rival Washington Times couldn’t have been happier.

Washington has a large black population--69.6% in the District, 28% in the metropolitan area--and many blacks have long seen the Post as either indifferent or insensitive to them. Post editors deny these charges, but the flap over the new Sunday magazine gave new impetus to efforts by the Times to capitalize on one of the Post’s few weaknesses in a market it thoroughly dominates.

A 1985 readership survey conducted for the Washington Times by Decision/Making/Information said 32% of Times readers are black; an independent Scarborough study conducted last year showed an even greater black readership--45.7%--almost half the paper’s total readership; proportionately, the Post’s black readership is only half as great--24% (although the Post, with a total circulation seven times greater than that of the Times, has far more black readers overall than does the Times).

Since most conservatives have traditionally opposed civil rights legislation and court decisions favoring affirmative action and school integration, critics are surprised that the Times--a newspaper with conservative editorial pages and news coverage largely tailored to conservative readers--would have so many black readers.

‘Black Success Stories’

But when Arnaud de Borchgrave became editor-in-chief of the Times two years ago, he gave his subordinates specific instructions to “find black success stories--I’m tired of reading stories only about blacks . . . shooting up.” Since then, Times editors have regularly given prominent, often Page 1 play to stories on such subjects as a black credit union, a black minister who runs a youth development center, a black who won a spelling bee and black triplets who graduated at the top of their junior high school class.

When a 105-year-old black activist died in Washington in March, the Times ran her obituary on Page 1; the Post published the obituary a day later--on its obituary page, the 12th page of the third section. The very next week, the Times also beat the Post by a day on an important story about a study showing that many black students do poorly in school because they’re afraid their peers will think they’re “acting white” if they do well.

The Times published a 10-part “Tribute to Black Excellence” last year and a 10-part series on “Blacks and the American Constitution” this year. The paper also published an eight-page special section on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to coincide with King’s birthday this year.

Frequent Black Coverage

Washington Times coverage of the black community isn’t limited to big stories and special events, though. The paper frequently publishes routine stories on black politics (“House races draw record number of black contenders”), black business problems (“Black radio station owners complain of advertising boycott”) and blacks in the entertainment industry (“Black writers in television: Neglected or unqualified?”).

Cynical critics of the Washington Times attribute the paper’s interest in the black community to anxiety among the Unification Church officials and members whose company owns the paper; the paper, these critics say, wants to defuse the growing hostility of many blacks to the Koreans who increasingly own and manage convenience stores, small groceries and liquor stores in many of Washington’s black neighborhoods.

Other critics--including the Washington magazine Regardie’s--have suggested that the paper covers the black community because the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church, personally told its editors to emphasize brotherhood.

Suggestions Rejected

De Borchgrave laughs off both suggestions. He insists he’s never received a single editorial suggestion from church officials, and--in this instance, at least--it does seem likely that Times editors have just decided on their own to challenge the rival Post in an area where the Post is vulnerable.

The Times is smaller, easier to read and more invitingly designed than the Post, and it uses many color photographs on its news pages--all of which may help explain why the paper appeals to less-educated readers, many blacks among them, says Marc Lerner, former national editor and former business editor of the paper and now about to become one of its foreign correspondents. (The Times figures to be even more accessible and more attractive beginning May 17, its fifth anniversary, when it begins phasing in a redesigned, restructured newspaper uniquely tailored to the specific segments of the market that research shows the paper most likely to appeal to.)

One Post executive hints at a more sinister explanation for the Times’ circulation among blacks; this executive isn’t willing to be quoted by name, but he says that, in an effort to build its circulation numbers--so it can win both acceptability and advertising--the Times is willing to continue delivery to readers delinquent in their subscription payments. (Blacks, many of them low-income, are more likely to be delinquent than whites, according to this theory.)

‘So Ridiculous’

A Los Angeles Times reporter did interview more than a dozen people, at random, who said they’ve continued to receive the Washington Times long after they stopped paying for it. But such stories were told by white subscribers as well as black, and Paul Rothenburg, general manager of the Washington Times, says the charge of inflated circulation in black areas is “absurd . . . so ridiculous I won’t even respond to it.”

The paper’s circulation is audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the nationwide agency that verifies virtually all major newspapers’ circulation, “and we conform fully to their rules,” Rothenburg says.

In fact, an L.A. Times reporter conducting interviews for this story in Washington also heard many stories from people who tried to subscribe to the Washington Times but couldn’t get the paper delivered at all.

Conclusion: The Washington Times circulation department is probably more a victim of its own inefficiency than it is a perpetrator of deliberate fraud.

Three Executives Fired

It’s not surprising that some would suspect the latter, though. In 1984, the paper fired three top executives in its circulation department after an investigation disclosed “certain irregularities” in their procedures.

These irregularities weren’t the only mistake the Washington Times made in its first 30 months or so of operation. Far from it.

An “exclusive” Times story saying that President Reagan had “already decided” not to reappoint Paul A. Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board when his term expired turned out to be untrue. A promotion campaign featuring readers with brown paper bags over their heads brought more scorn than it did subscriptions. Grandiose plans for an international edition never came to fruition. A short-lived national edition folded when deadlines forced the publication of what was essentially day-old news while simultaneously causing enormous production and deadline problems for the paper’s Washington edition.

Magazine Arises

The national edition was not without its compensations, though. Out of its ashes arose the weekly newsmagazine Insight, now distributed separately--free of charge and with almost no advertising--to 1.1 million opinion makers and other well-educated, high-salaried readers.

Insight is in the first stages of trying to convert to paid circulation and to attract far more advertising, and while neither task will be easy, the magazine is experimenting with interestingly conceived, multipart cover stories each week that place events in a broader context than newsmagazines traditionally do.

Insight shares the Washington Times’ concerns about the threat of communism but is generally less noticeably conservative than the paper, and it has drawn praise in several quarters.

It’s “a serious, conservative, issue-oriented publication with no fluff,” says Edward Kosner, editor and publisher of New York magazine.

The magazine is not the only serendipitous byproduct of early disasters at the Washington Times.

Daily Tabloid Section

The paper moved from conception to publication so quickly that it wasn’t until shortly before publication that executives realized they didn’t have sufficient press capacity to handle the size paper they’d planned. Solution: A daily tabloid section (popular with many readers) that’s printed a day ahead of time and carries much of the paper’s arts and life-style feature material--book reviews, fashion, food and entertainment.

The Washington Times has recently hired reporters and editors from such established news organizations as Reuters, Associated Press, the Dallas Times Herald and the London Daily Telegraph, but in the early days, many reputable journalists didn’t want to work for a newspaper owned by members and officials of the Unification Church.

“In the beginning, I think they just . . . went out on New York Avenue (where the paper has its office) and stopped cars and said, ‘How would you like to be a newspaperman?’ ” Wesley Pruden, now the paper’s managing editor, said in a recent interview.

Woody West, acting editor of the Washington Times editorial page, says the paper’s desk editors were “terribly weak” the first few years. Most stories submitted to the paper’s senior editors “aspired to adequacy and didn’t often hit it.”

Former Star Staffers

Some early Times staffers had worked on the Washington Star before it went out of business in 1981, but the best of those journalists had already been hired by other newspapers by the time the Washington Times was conceived. Two former Star staffers were crucial, however, to the paper’s ability to recruit some quality journalists.

One was Smith Hempstone, the paper’s first managing editor, whose family had long owned the Star before it was sold and, ultimately, folded. Several reporters and editors say they joined the Washington Times largely because they knew Hempstone wouldn’t tolerate any interference by officials of the Unification Church. (Hempstone ultimately became editor of the paper before being replaced in 1985 by De Borchgrave.)

The other key early acquisition was longtime Star reporter Jerry O’Leary, who became the White House correspondent for the Times. His presence also reassured many otherwise dubious Times recruits.

But the Times still had to hire many young, inexperienced reporters.

Young staffers were given “great opportunities,” John Podhoretz and others say, and if they were good, they went far, quickly.

“I was 23, features editor, supervising a staff of 32,” says Podhoretz, now (at 26) managing editor/news for Insight.

But many of the new, young employees were not good enough yet to work for a metropolitan daily.

The paper created a foreign staff virtually overnight, for example, staffing nine overseas bureaus, mostly with young reporters; the foreign staff was quickly dubbed “the children’s crusade,” but few journalistic dragons were slain.

The paper has since cut back to six bureaus, all staffed by experienced reporters who draw higher salaries and--generally--do better work.

Many early Times staffers were members of the Unification Church, largely without any real journalistic experience and willing to work for the minimum wage.

‘They Were Incompetent’

“When I came here, I fired or transferred off my desk every member of the Unification Church . . . not . . . because they were members of the Unification Church (but) . . . because they were incompetent,” says Holger Jensen, the paper’s foreign editor.

West estimates that there were about 80 Moonies on the staff when the paper started. Within a year, that figure dropped to 30--all getting “fair pay,” he says. Now there are about 15 or 20 Moonies on the staff, including Deputy Managing Editor Josette Shiner, the No. 3 editor on the paper and one of the four people who helped conceive and plan the Washington Times before it even had a name.

Shiner--who joined the Unification Church in 1975 while looking into the movement to try to understand why her older sister had joined two years earlier--raised some eyebrows among her colleagues when she once gave Moon a tour of the newsroom when he came to town from his estate in Irvington, N.Y.

But, while a few reporters at the paper find Shiner a bit cool personally, virtually every non-church staff member interviewed for this story said she and most of the other Moonies now on the staff are thoroughly competent professionals. Apparently, none of the Moonies has tried to proselytize colleagues to join the church.

Religion Not Questioned

Despite expectations in some quarters that all Moonies would be glassy-eyed zombies, non-church members at the paper say their Moonie colleagues seem so much like reporters anywhere else that asking if they belong to the Unification Church is as irrelevant as “walking into the Atlanta Constitution and saying, ‘OK, which ones are the Baptists?’ ” in the words of Times reporter Thomas Brandt.

“I did more corrupting of Moonies than Moonies did corrupting of people,” says non-Moonie Carlton Sherwood, a former Washington Times reporter. “I went out drinking with these people and I went gambling with them. . . . They act like most Catholics, Jews and Methodists I know. . . .”

Sherwood and several other reporters say one of the most enjoyable aspects of working at the paper, especially in the beginning, was the almost complete freedom they had--the singular lack of direction they received from editors.

That has changed somewhat since De Borchgrave became editor-in-chief two years ago.

Ideal Blend

De Borchgrave was not the owners’ first choice for the editorship; by some counts, he was the sixth or seventh choice. But for this paper, at this time, with its owners and its problems, he has turned out to be the ideal blend of energy and ideology--”the best,” in the words of Bo Hi Pak, Moon’s top aide and the president of News World Communications, the company that owns the Washington Times.

Long controversial for his passionate anti-communism, De Borchgrave triggered controversy anew less than two months after taking over at the Times when he wrote a Page 1 editorial announcing that the paper was starting a $14-million fund-raising campaign to assist the contras in Nicaragua. (The editorial said $100,000 would be contributed to the fund by the paper itself--not by the Unification Church, as was inadvertently and erroneously reported in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday--and the paper then turned the fund raising over to a separate, independent agency.)

Because De Borchgrave was a longtime foreign correspondent for Newsweek, foreign news tends to dominate the paper; the Times generally runs more foreign stories on Page 1 than does the Post, for example, and reporters and editors at the Times say it often seems that foreign news is all De Borchgrave really cares about.

Often Beats Post Locally

But the Times has a good metropolitan editor--John Wilson, formerly of the Miami Herald--and an aggressive metropolitan staff and other editors with more interest in (and knowledge of) local Washington news than De Borchgrave; the paper often beats the Post on local stories--stories ranging from a scandal in the Maryland savings and loan industry to an assault on teachers at a local junior high school to the results of AIDS tests on some of the city’s prostitutes.

“The (Post) staff didn’t take the Washington Times seriously at first,” says Bradlee. “Now they do.”

De Borchgrave is one of the primary reasons to take the Washington Times seriously.

Revitalized Staff

He’s an aggressive, hands-on editor, and when he took over, he immediately revitalized the staff and the paper. He has a bed in his office, sleeps there almost every night (he says he needs only three or four hours’ sleep a night) and is usually up by 5 or 5:30 a.m. so he can begin reading and clipping several morning papers.

De Borchgrave, 60, collapsed at his desk and was rushed to the hospital in February, suffering from low blood pressure and stress he attributed to hard work and an impending divorce (his third). He was back at work four days later, issuing orders, clipping papers and sending subordinates his usual 25 or 30 “Arnaud-grams” a day--clippings attached to 5-by-8-inch yellow cards, each bearing a question or making a suggestion or a complaint about Times coverage, coverage by other papers or the general state of the media (or the world).

With these notes, his telephone and his computer, De Borchgrave is in contact with his editors almost constantly throughout the day on matters large and small. His 25 years as a foreign correspondent and editor for Newsweek left him with strong opinions and an enviable Rolodex, and he is forever badgering his editors about some obscure error of omission or commission that only he would know or has been able to find out about.

As he did so often at Newsweek, De Borchgrave has also conducted several exclusive interviews for the paper with prominent news makers. One produced an international controversy.

Transcript Published

After a private interview with French Premier Jacques Chirac last November, De Borchgrave wrote that Chirac had said two top German officials told him they thought a purported plot to blow up an Israeli airliner had been a fake, engineered with the help of Israeli intelligence. Chirac denied having made such comments--at which point De Borchgrave published the transcript of the taped interview and flew 200 copies of that issue of the paper to London for delivery to a conference of European ministers.

It was just the sort of journalism-cum-drama for which De Borchgrave was known, envied and resented during his years at Newsweek.

De Borchgrave told Esquire in 1981 that he had “the starched combat fatigues of 12 nations” hanging in his closet in Geneva, and he was forever dashing off on the last plane to a war zone or to interview some head of state or revolutionary leader that no one else had access to.

Brushes With Death

Foreign correspondents everywhere have stories about De Borchgrave--about his compulsive name-dropping, about his brushes with death while covering 17 wars, about the sun reflector he carried with him so he could have a perpetual tan, about the confidences he’d exchanged with (and the advice he’d offered to) the high and mighty of the free world.

De Borchgrave was born a Belgian count--he was often derisively referred to by his colleagues as “the short count” because of his small physical stature--and while he can be charming and engagingly flamboyant, there has always been something a bit pompous and imperious about him too. Those qualities--and, more important, what Newsweek editors saw as his growing inability to keep his own views, especially his stridently anti-communist views, out of his stories--ultimately got him fired.

Although many Washington Times staffers--and other Washington journalists--think the paper is better under De Borchgrave than it’s ever been, several past and present Times staffers say De Borchgrave has irreparably damaged the paper by again permitting his anti-communist views to distort news coverage--a charge he vigorously denies.

“He’s just ruined the newspaper,” says one Washington Times reporter who asked not to be identified by name. “He’s destroyed the credibility of the paper as a source of news, at least on foreign news. I wouldn’t believe a thing I read in the paper with a foreign dateline.”

Charge Denied

De Borchgrave denies this charge, and he has many supporters--and fans--at the paper.

“Arnaud is a genius,” says David Brooks, formerly an editorial writer at the Washington Times and now book editor of the Wall Street Journal.

De Borchgrave is “a pain in the ass to work with” because of his self-confidence, his demanding ways and his “prickly personality,” Brooks says, but he’s “exactly what the paper needed.”

When the Washington Times began publication on May 17, 1982, it was billed as “an alternative, conservative voice in the nation’s capital.” De Borchgrave makes sure it’s both alternative and conservative.

Alternative?

Since mid-March, the Times and the Washington Post have disagreed on the most important story of the day 65% of the time. Only four times in that period have they put as many as three of the same stories on their respective front pages. Eight times, their front pages haven’t had a single story in common.

Conservative?

The Times unabashedly tries to tailor its news presentation to appeal to conservative readers. Its editorial page takes a conservative position on most issues. It publishes three full pages of conservative commentary every day, Monday through Friday (the paper has no weekend editions).

‘Gets Tedious’

Times commentary is so resolutely conservative, in fact, that even the conservatively oriented “1987 Media Guide,” written by former Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski, says the paper’s commentary section “gets tedious and . . . lacks the tension that puts snap into the WSJ (Wall Street Journal) and Washington Post opinion sections.”

Unfortunately for the Washington Times, all the big-name conservative columnists--George F. Will, William F. Buckley Jr., Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, James J. Kilpatrick, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick--appear in the Post; their conservatism notwithstanding, none of these has been willing to abandon the prestigious platform of the 730,000-circulation Post for the ideological purity of the 104,000-circulation Times.

Fierce Competitor

But De Borchgrave is a fierce competitor, and he clearly relishes the opportunity to do battle with the Post, all the more so since it’s a corporate stablemate of Newsweek.

De Borchgrave tried--unsuccessfully--to persuade Kirkpatrick to write for the Times instead of the Post, and he even tried, also unsuccessfully, to hire Lally Weymouth, daughter of Katharine Graham, chairman of the board of the Washington Post Co. When Weymouth went to work for the Post instead, the Times published a column about the negotiations.

On another occasion, when the Post published a humorous spoof on the fictitious “return” of major league baseball to Washington (without specifically labeling the story as fiction), the Times published a Page 1 story recalling another piece of unidentified fiction run by the Post--the 1981 story of an 8-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy, who turned out to be a figment of reporter Janet Cooke’s imagination. (The Post won a Pulitzer Prize for that story, then returned the prize when the hoax was disclosed.)

Don Kowet, who wrote the Times’ story on the baseball spoof, didn’t mention the Cooke affair in his story, but Managing Editor Wesley Pruden rewrote the story and put Cooke in the very first sentence--to give the story “a little life,” he said in an interview.

Like most No. 2 newspapers, the Washington Times has often twitted its larger rival, even before De Borchgrave’s arrival. In 1984, for example, Pak, the News World president, bought one share of stock in the Washington Post Co.; the Times then ran an amusing Page 1 story on the purchase, speculating that “some . . . might refer to the Post as ‘a Moonie paper’ since some of its stock is owned by a member of the Unification Church.”

Post Probably Delighted

Such needling notwithstanding, Post executives are probably delighted to have the Washington Times around; indeed, they might even be disappointed if, when Moon dies (he’s 67), the other Unification Church officials and members whose businesses now subsidize the Times decide they no longer wish to provide that subsidy.

At present, the Times is not a serious rival for the Post, either commercially or journalistically, but its very presence both defuses criticism that the Post is a monopoly newspaper and discourages any other, potentially stronger competitor from entering the market.

“I’d be lying to you if I denied to you that that wasn’t true,” concedes Nick Cannistraro, director of advertising for the Post.

Susanna Shuster and Barclay Walsh of The Times’ editorial library assisted with the research for this story.