Read All About It: The Corporate Takeover of America's Newspapers.

• Author: Gaillard, Frye

When I came to work at The Charlotte Observer, once one of the finest newspapers in the South, I was assigned to do a story about racial discrimination in apartment complexes. Working with a team of three other reporters, I helped to prove that despite the recent passage of open-housing laws, at least a half dozen of the city's biggest complexes were still unwilling to rent to blacks.

The apartment owners took a dim view of the story and promptly canceled their newspaper advertising. A few days later, Bev Carter, the Observer's business manager, stopped by my desk. "Congratulations, son," he said. "You've been here less than two weeks and you've already cost us $200,000 in revenue." I was casting through my mind for the proper response when Carter smiled down and slapped me on the shoulder. "Good story," he said. "Keep it up."

Carter was a journalist first of all, and he wanted me to know that even on the business side of the company, finances were secondary to the mission of the paper.

All of that happened more than twenty years ago, but I thought of the episode a few weeks back as I was reading two new books on the state of journalism. The books are different in content and tone, but the disturbing picture they paint is the same.

Media Circus, by Howard Kurtz, the respected press critic at The Washington Post, is a chronicle of media shortcomings in the 1990s. Kurtz is not entirely a pessimist, but he believes his industry is in deep trouble.

"The newspaper business," he writes, "battered and bloodied, has come to resemble the steel industry of the late 1970s. Its practitioners, who once felt immune from the shifting economic winds they charted, now find themselves buffeted like so many assembly-line welders."

The result in too many newspapers, he says, has been a timid but dictatorial leadership that has forgotten the ingredients of good journalism. The editors are frightened by an uncertain future and, in their fear, have tried too hard to imitate television - the feel-good fluff of the evening news.

"In the new corporate culture of the newsroom," Kurtz concludes, "editors hold endless meetings and cook up prefabricated story ideas. Prose is squeezed through more and more hands into ever-smaller receptacles. Controversial ideas are pasteurized and homogenized until most of the flavor has been drained. For many, the craft of Hemingway, Mencken, and Reston now has all the romance of a fast-food kitchen stamping out Big Macs."

James D...