All the News That Profits : The Triumph of Market Research : READ ALL ABOUT IT! The Corporate Takeover of America’s Newspapers, By James D. Squires (Times Books: $20; 234 pp.)

James D. Squires used to be the whiz-bang editor of the Chicago Tribune (the paper won seven Pulitzers in the nearly nine years he was there) and was more recently Ross Perot’s press adviser. He believes that traditional U.S. journalism is dying of greed.

You may have heard executives in newspaper boardrooms moaning about the “depression.” Save your sympathy. Brokerage firm analysts will tell you that for most newspapers, “depression” means that instead of being three or four times more profitable than other businesses, they are just one or two times more profitable.

The way in which many of them achieved that profitability, says Squires, is what’s killing journalism. Ah, ‘tis a sordid, sad story our chronicler has to tell, and it goes like this:

Once upon a time most of the great newspapers of America, as well as the not-so-great, were owned and closely run by extremely independent individuals and families whose main objective was not to make money--many were content just to break even--but to influence and shape politics and economics.

Or so says Squires: “For all its imperfections, the ‘press’ traditionally has been a people-oriented, privately owned, public-spirited, politically involved enterprise concerned primarily with the preservation of democracy.”

This lofty (and, let’s admit it, partly mythical) condition continued more or less, he says, until a couple of decades ago, when a serpent, in the form of that crafty dandy Al Neuharth of the Gannett chain, slithered into journalism’s Eden and tempted many other newspaper owners to follow him down the primrose path to Wall Street.

He had become enormously successful on the Street by selling Gannett stock “in a way it had never been presented anywhere to anyone before; he billed it as ‘a dependable profit machine in good times or bad.’ ” In good times, the profits would come naturally; in bad times they would come through layoffs, bureau closings, reductions in space for news and advertising and subscription rate hikes (most of his papers were monopolies).

Wall Street loved Neuharth’s slash-and-burn strategy and supplied him with the kind of predator bankroll that allowed him to build a $3.4-billion media giant that includes America’s largest newspaper chain (among its 93 newspapers is the nation’s most widely circulated, USA Today).

Many traditionalist owners at first “viewed Neuharth the same way sanctimonious churchmen might welcome a whore in the Sanctuary,” Squires tells us, but pretty soon some of these pious owners were “inviting him to slip into their back doors under the cover of darkness” to sell out to him. Many others couldn’t wait to imitate the way he ran his papers.

From then on, “with few exceptions,” says Squires, the culture of newspapering was dominated not by editors but by business managers pushing “whatever will make a buck” to please shareholders. No longer was the goal to compete for readers with better news coverage, but to do “audience profiles” for advertisers and shape the papers’ contents accordingly. In short, newspapers began cross-dressing as TV-in-print. And as profits soared, the newsroom’s share of the operating budget declined radically--down 30% in the last 15 years.

Squires’ attack takes in virtually all the press, but he does seem to offer absolution to the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times because, although they also went to Wall Street for money, they remain family-controlled. That’s a weak point in his argument. There’s no assurance that “family control” will be any more humane or less profit-oriented than any other control, as those recently invited to leave the Los Angeles Times can testify.

Much of Squires’ feisty, anecdote-rich jeremiad against the sins of his profession is quite convincing, all the more so because he admits that as editor first of the Tribune-owned Orlando Sentinel and then of the Chicago Tribune, he was one of the greatest sinners, sometimes even stooping so low as to make sales calls for the advertising department.

Citing himself as an example, he admits that newspaper executives--including top editors--do as much as Wall Street does to feed the culture of greed, since their bonuses and stock options depend on their papers’ profits. Squires got his share, including a $1-million payoff from the Tribune when he was canned. “American business spends 70% of payroll costs on its executives. The American press does the same.”

If the underlying purpose of “Read All About It!” is to get even with the business-side execs who made his life hell at the Tribune, Squires has fully achieved his goal. Most of his examples of bad journalism are from his Chicago experiences.

He describes the Tribune Company as wrapped like a mummy in conflicts of interest. The single most powerful influence inside the company was its general counsel, who, wearing his other hats, was also the lawyer for Chicago’s biggest newsmakers.

The way newspapers are discarding hard news in favor of squishy “lifestyle” features these days would indicate that Squires is right when he says that most press owners see entertainment as the wave of the future. The Tribune Company, which also owns the Cubs (a nightmare conflict of interest for the sports department), showed where its heart lay when it agreed to pay one second baseman $7 million--enough, by Squires’ reckoning, to have hired 117 additional reporters and ad salespeople for its newspapers.

Understandably disgusted with the present, Squires tends to over-romanticize the past. He even takes up for the crooked back-shop unions that helped kill quite a few good newspapers. As for the giants of olden days, he glosses over their megalomania and makes them sound merely charmingly eccentric, as when William Randolph Hearst, mad at Stanford University, ordered his San Francisco Examiner not to mention the school in print, except as “the boys from Palo Alto.”

But if much is wrong with today’s bottom-line-mad management--we encounter one president of a major newspaper chain who can’t even handle simple English--Squires loses points by suggesting the colorful old founders of modern journalism were generally motivated by a higher calling. Surely he would admit that the Los Angeles Times, for one of many examples, operates at a zenith of public service, compared to those days, long ago, when its owners used the newspaper for land and water piracy and to shill for right-wing politicians.

BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “Read All About It!,” see Opinion, Page 3.