It’s a pleasure to be in Panama and to speak to the Inter¬ American Press Association. Your gracious invitation has provided my wife, Gail, and me with a great opportunity to tour this magnificent country. Our first time visiting the canal and the rain forest was as delightful as it was memorable. So, too, was Saturday night’s dinner.

On a personal note, I was honored to receive the medal from President Martin Torrijos. More than that, I believe I speak for all of us when I applaud him for his actions yesterday. And not only his decision to remove Panama’s gag laws, but the eloquence with which he spoke of this issue. “To repress freedom of expression can never be the answer,” he said. Indeed, it cannot. And that’s a lesson governments and societies learn over and over again.

Gail and I have made some wonderful new friends here, chief among them Juan Luis Correa, the chairman of the Host Committee. Thank you, Juan Luis, for your generosity and your friendship. And thank you for putting me on Page One of La Prensa without my having committed a crime.

And to my colleagues here from The New York Times — Christian Edwards, Lad Paul, Gloria Anderson, Tom Carley, Isabel Simone — thank you for what you’re doing to extend the Times brand and build relationships so critical to our collective future.
While it has been a lot of fun being here, it did feel as though I was having the same conversation over and over again. While we come from many different countries, cultures, traditions and experiences, it is perfectly obvious that, as journalists, we share a common narrative about what is happening in and to our profession.

The starting point for this story is particularly distressing: From a United States perspective, at least, it is apparent that we are not very popular these days. And this growing unpopularity has had an adverse effect on our circulation, our advertising and, in too many cases, on the quality of our journalism.

So why have the news media come under such a dark cloud?

Most of the usual suspects are well-known: ideological warfare, news organizations failing to check out their big stories with sufficient rigor, an increasingly intense conflict between the press and the political establishment, reporters committing plagiarism, and an age-¬old tendency to hate the bearer of bad news. But understanding the problem only gets you so far. Solving it is the real challenge.

My remarks today are rooted in a reasonably conservative premise. Despite having a dazzling array of new tools and options at our disposal, our salvation as independent news organizations lies in a return to the first principles of journalism.

As Jack just pointed out, I wear two hats. As publisher of The New York Times, I have day-to-day responsibility for our company’s flagship brand.

As chairman of The New York Times Company, I deeply care about the quality of content at all our print, broadcast and online properties, whether it is The International Herald Tribune, NYTimes.com, or the Discovery Times Channel.

I want every one of our brands to be firmly rooted in our company’s Core Purpose, which is “to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.”

That’s a lofty goal for a human institution. Achieving it at the best of times would be daunting enough. Doing so in a period of dramatic technological change, political upheaval, economic uncertainty and demographic transition is all but overwhelming. And all of us, regardless of our nationality, are feeling these pressures.

We are all grappling with news and information consumers who have an amazing menu of options: free newspapers, all-but-free newspapers, cable channels by the hundreds and websites by the millions, bloggers by the hundreds of thousands — 35,000 new ones a day, it’s been reported — satellite radio, and more and more magazines.
Admittedly, this level of change is disorienting and confusing as competitors bob and weave looking for a technological or market advantage.

Orville Schell, dean of Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, recently said that we are witnessing the fracturing of the Roman Empire that was mass media “into a near-feudal period where centers of power and influence are more diffuse.” While this is a great hyperbolic sound bite, there is truth to it.

In 1968, during the Tet Offensive, Walter Cronkite questioned the Vietnam War and it had a profound effect on public opinion. “If I’ve lost Cronkite,” President Lyndon Johnson said, “I’ve lost middle America.” A little over a month later, Johnson announced he would not run for re-election.

It is hard to imagine anyone journalist having this effect in 2005. Granted, a major story running in The New York Times, Washington Post, La Prensa, Reforma or CNN will change perceptions and attitudes, and we’re glad for it.

Yet, one study after another demonstrates that there is much less confidence in what the news media does. According to a recent survey of U.S. consumers by the Pew Research Center, a majority of citizens “don’t trust what news organizations are saying.” And almost half of the U.S. audience “also expresses the opinion ‘that people who decide what to put on TV news or in the newspapers are out of touch with people like me.’” And I wonder if your own research mirrors this.

Clearly we must learn to manage our new technologies with intelligence and wisdom if we want to rebuild and strengthen our relationship with our audiences.
So today I will talk about how our industry is evolving into something that is international, diffuse, immediate and personal. As we move forward into this new era, we must be very clear as to what we must do differently, while firmly embracing traditional journalistic values such as social decorum, civic engagement, and trustworthiness.

While my point of view will come from my experience as a U.S. publisher, hopefully what I say has wider application. Because the World Wide Web allows us to read each other’s publications with great ease, journalism is becoming a more global and transparent profession, as our triumphs and failures are available for everyone to see.
That being said, I believe we should all be focusing on eight particular areas:

First and foremost, we must be about news. We must seek to educate, inform and illuminate. Our very existence depends on our ability to convince our audiences that what they read, view and hear is credible, valuable and trustworthy.

This seems like a simple thought, and it is. It was true in the late 18th century when Isaiah Thomas, the publisher of the famed newspaper Massachusetts Spy courageously printed essays criticizing British rule and provided an exciting eyewitness account of the early revolutionary battle of Lexington and Concord.

And it is just as true almost 230 years later as courageous reporters risk life and limb to cover the conflict in Iraq, the horrors of the Sudan, the desperate plight of Haiti, or the drug trade in this hemisphere.

According to the World Association of Newspapers, 71 journalists and other media workers were killed in 2004 — the highest number since 1994 — as they pursued their stories; battled powerful public and private sectors forces; and cast a bright light on the major issues of the day.

We can honor the dedication and commitment of our fallen colleagues and strengthen our ties with audiences around the world by staying focused on our primary mission. If we respond to what is happening to our industry by devaluing our purpose and cheapening our products, we risk suffering dire consequences.

Second, we must address the inherent conflict between the demand for immediate information and the news industry’s ability to provide it. Now let me talk about something called “the Titanic fallacy.” This is a phrase coined by Dr. Peter Smith, who in July will be the new Assistant Director-General for Education at UNESCO. In a recent guest column in The Times, he said:

“What was the Titanic’s single greatest problem? An arrogant captain? The iceberg? No. Even if the Titanic had survived her maiden voyage, she was doomed. The iceberg, the captain and the disaster only confused the situation The real problem facing the greatest cruise ship ever built was the airplane. The seeds of destruction for the ocean travel industry were sown a decade earlier in Kitty Hawk.”

His point is that the faulty design of the Titanic was an overreaction to a perceived competitive threat. The news media is in danger of making that same intellectual error.

Our relentless focus on ratings, readership, and pageviews has become so intense that it is easy to forget that reporting and editing are serious tasks with profound social and political ramifications. Too often, we respond to competitive pressures by making less of ourselves — by offering our readers the perception of vitality instead of hard reporting and thoughtful analysis.

A perfect example of this problem was when the networks looked at their polling data on the night of the 2000 U.S. presidential election and announced that Vice President Gore had both won and lost the state of Florida. We soon found out that it was much too close to call.

The news media frequently loses its way when it attempts to compete in a marketplace with an almost unlimited number of options. Being first with the big story will always motivate and inspire us, but being the best is what our ultimate goal should and must be.

Third, if we want achieve these high standards, we need to address the issue of ideological bias in news reporting. While there will always be a role for editorial comment, people still need access to unbiased information if they are going to make thoughtful decisions about candidates and issues, and thereby participate fully in our nations’ political processes.

And this goes to the use of ideology in the reporting of the news, which, according to numerous surveys, is increasingly alienating our audiences.

Now, more than a few of you may be thinking: The publisher of The New York Times obviously has a system of beliefs that affect the opinions and endorsements that appear in the paper daily.

Of course, I have a system of beliefs — just as you do. It is, in fact, one generally reflected on the editorial page of The Times. Just pick a position, whether it is abortion, farm subsidies, immigration, gun control, Iraq or Cuban trade policy, and our paper’s Editorial Board will have something meaningful to say about it. You may not agree, but that’s okay. It is debate that keeps a democracy alive and vibrant.

At The Times, as at other serious newspapers, we have built rigorous safeguards to confine such debates to the editorial and Op¬-Ed pages and to keep our reporting impartial and fair. The news and opinion pages at The Times operate under separate editors.

United States news anchors and others whose core job is to be impartial are too frequently joining the fray as ideological cheerleaders. In fact, the producers of the cable news channels know full well that perceived bias is attracting particular segments of viewers.

For example, during the Republican National Convention, FOX News was dominant while CNN did much better during the Democratic National Convention. I am not suggesting the two have the same journalistic values — FOX is more overtly partisan. But both, along with much of cable TV, blur the distinction between reporting and advocacy.

As this perception spreads, news consumers are becoming much more skeptical and cynical about what they see, hear and read, and have a greater tendency to believe that all reporting is distorted by political bias and larger commercial interests — and the constant infighting reinforces this perception.

And this brings me to my fourth area of concern: we must stop attacking each other because it is undermining our industry. The use and abuse of ideology has contributed to the internecine battles between news organizations that have become more and more commonplace, and they hurt us all. If we care about re-establishing credibility with our audiences, we must stop tearing each other apart.

Of course, there is plenty of room for a robust exchange about the issues of the day. This is an important part of what we do for a living, and it is what our readers, viewers and listeners want and deserve. What they, or at least most people, don’t want — and here is an interesting comparison to the political sphere — is to personalize and sensationalize policy discussions.

What also should concern us is that these inter-media dust-ups are not only alienating our audiences, they are confusing them. As the exchanges become increasingly heated, it appears that news reporting is just another entertainment option, and this can’t be good for anyone.

My fifth area of concern may seem particular to the United States, but I suspect it has wider application. As we work to reduce inter-media hostility, we must also find a way to lower the temperature of our national dialogues.

In the United States, it is absolutely terrifying to listen to those individuals who call talk shows and fill the airwaves with anger, venom and outright hate (I know this isn’t a problem you share). The very idea of our societies coming together and honorably dealing with pressing national issues seem to be an antiquated notion.

And just for the record, the left may not seem quite as rhetorically incendiary as the right, but it is certainly doing everything it can to catch up. As our public editor, Dan Okrent, has mentioned, his letters from liberals seem far more vitriolic than those from conservatives.

Sixth, we absolutely must upgrade the ethical standards of our profession. The public has, rightly, been greatly distressed by the shameful behavior of journalists like Jack Kelley of USA Today and, of course, our own Jason Blair. These reporters failed to adhere to a very basic social contract, the first clause being: “my first responsibility is to the truth.” By either fabricating or plagiarizing stories, each of these individuals harmed themselves, harmed their publications and harmed their profession.

What these incidents did was dramatically reinforce the misperception that the news media doesn't give a damn about accuracy. One of the things that I found most upsetting about the Jayson Blair ordeal was that we received so few phone calls from those individuals who were mistreated in his deeply flawed stories. They just generally assumed that newspapers operated that way. They expected that the editors wouldn't care.

These problems make it much more difficult for the news media to establish a sense of connection with our audiences. We must do whatever we can to embrace the highest values in our own properties and work together to ensure that our industry becomes a model for strong ethical behavior.

At The New York Times, we are rising to this challenge in a number of ways. One of the most important was the appointment of Al Siegal, one of the most respected members of our profession, to a newly created position, standards editor.

Over the past eighteen months, Al and a group of colleagues has:
• Conducted an exhaustive examination of our newsroom processes.
• Issued a series of thoughtful recommendations, all of which we made public.
• Helped turn these proposals into a comprehensive plan of action that is now being used to strengthen The Times's newsroom's management practices, reinvigorate our culture and provide our audiences with more transparent and accessible journalism.

For instance, you can see from reading The Times, we have overhauled our bylining and crediting practices. You now know exactly who contributed to every article, and where that reporting physically took place.

And this is only the beginning. Soon we hope to unveil a series of initiatives that will allow us to develop an even stronger relationship of trust with our worldwide audiences. We want to find a way to discuss our views on important journalistic topics such as our use of anonymous sources, our corrections mechanisms and the difference, as we see it, between reporting and editorial opinion.

Our bottom line is that the more readers, viewers and listeners understand what motivates and drives us, the better they will appreciate the intrinsic and overarching value of high-quality journalism.

Seventh, strong ethical values must be adopted across all media.

Now, let's talk about the Internet.
My company has made a serious investment in new media with NYTimes.com, the world's most popular newspaper-owned Web site; IHT.com, which has experienced over a 200% growth in unique readers over the past 3 years, and Boston.com, a leading regional Web site. I know what I said earlier about fixating on Web traffic, but we're still businesses and we want our audiences to grow.

This new technology has dramatically expanded the reach of newspapers and their ability to meet the needs of our audiences. It used to be that you had to come to work everyday -or at least leave your bedroom- to know what is going on. Now all you have to do is turn on your computer - and the world is yours.

With the cyber-battle for customers in full swing, we see numerous examples of reputations and values being sacrificed in the pursuit of a larger share of eyeballs. Online news sites recognize that one of their competitive advantages is speed, and traditional rules and practices of journalism are now being ignored with greater regularity.

And then we have the ever-growing bloggosphere, which is attracting a growing worldwide audience. While these individuals are making contributions in innumerable areas, we have to be wary what we are getting. This is an immense group of writers, and they adhere to a wide spectrum of standards. Some take journalistic protocols seriously; others don't. In this new environment, it is not always easy to ascertain the value of what one gets.

While the Internet and all its manifestations requiere inovative analysis and creative applications, we must still find a way to instill their core journalistic values into their online activities, especially given how important this medium is for teenagers and young adults.

Someone who knows a lot about this subject isn Joan Walsh, the news editor-in-chief of Salon. Last week, she wrote:
"At their best, news and politics bloggers fuse jornalism with activism and passion like the late L F. Stone who, with guts and determination, and armed with facts, exposed layers of corruptions in politicians and institution,“

But then she points out that:

“What the mainstream media can still offer its audience is a commitment to some version of the truth and an organization and an infrastructure that goes out and finds it…some bloggers today only play journalists on the Web, without the commitment to fairness and acuracy the still distinguishes the best of the mainstream media.”

While the Internet and all its manifestations requiere inovative analysis and creative applications, we must still find a way to instill their core journalistic values into their online activities, especially given how important this medium is for teenagers and young adults.
And now to my final area of concern: that the news media speak effectively to new generations of readers, listeners and viewers. This may well be our most important goal over the next decade.

This new generation is growing up in a world where fundamental changes are taking place in how opinions are formed and acted upon —from politics to shopping to buying. Do we understand their needs and wants well enough? And, are our newspapers designed to meet these new demands?

If we want young people to read newspapers and watch the news, we need to find ways to encourage them to think about larger issues and become involved in their communities. As they become more civically minded, they will want to be better informed.

Seemingly, this shouldn't be too hard, given the increasing intensity of the global news cycle since September 11th, but high school, college and graduate age students are falling into old patterns of disengagement.

This is why over the past few years The New York Times has been partnering with the American Democracy Project, made up of 197 State Colleges and Universities, to foster academic strategies for greater student civic involvement. This initiative is helping to foster academic strategies that will, to quote this program's statement of goals: "Increase the number of undergraduate students who understand and are commited to engaging in meaningful civic actions."

And these efforts have been yielding good results. According to a semi-annual study of college and university reading habits, The Times, in print, reaches nearly one in four US. college students during a typical week, a much larger percentage than any other newspaper.

If we are able to focus on these eight areas in a thoughtful fashion, then we will be on the road to re-establishing authority, trust and respect as our industry evolves into a new stage of development. This will, in turn, lead to higher circulation, better ratings and more online visitors, which we all know will have a beneficial effect on our earning and profits.

And it will also be helpful in mobilizing public opinion when our profession needs some help. And this brings us to a recent United States Court of Appeals case that decided that The New York Times's Judy Miller and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper must reveal their confidential sources to a grand jury investigating the leak of a name of a woman who works for the CIA, or go to jail for 18 months.

The consequences of this landmark case are almost impossible to overestimate. When we consider the many complex issues we face throughout the world, it is hard to imagine a more inopportune moment to restrain the free flow of information. Given all that is at stake, each of us needs to know much more —not a lot less— about the major issues of the day.
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It is, therefore, essential that the press be allowed to perform our historic role. That is why we support a Federal Shield Law. And I know full well from talking with you over the last few days how passionate you are about the issue of press freedom. Many of you have spent your lives fighting for the privilege of expressing your viewpoint in the pages of your newspapers, magazines and on television and radio broadcasts. Some here have been to prison because you refused to be silenced. Your courage and determination are applauded throughout the world.

My congratulations my thanks to all of you and to IAPA for the ongoing and relentless work you are doing to insure the future of that essential cornerstone of Democracy – a Free Press.

I want everyone in this room to know that The New York Times is with you in this fight wherever you are, whether it is in Cuba, Venezuela or anywhere else in Latin America. We will speak loudly and clearly for laws that protect your ability to practice your profession. It is absolutely imperative that, as journalists, you be permitted to tell the truth to your millions of readers, viewers and listeners. This is a fundamental human right and we must work together to safeguard it.

When newspapers, televisión, radio stations and Web sites are able to aggressively, and dispassionately, disemínate the news, they help rebuild respect for our profession and for our industry, and ultimately contribute to the social cohesion and stability of our countries.

After spending this time with all of you, I am more confident than ever that we can follow a course that will substantially enhance the reputation of journalism by providing our readers with outstanding coverage, breathtaking images and exceptional analysis.
And I am equally confident that we have the resilience, the creativity and the wisdom to make a successful transition into a new era, reestablish authority, and make the most of the many opportunities that we will undoubtedly encounter in the years ahead.
Thank you for inviting me.

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