The love-hate relationship between auto makers and business journalists

By Andrew Dunn

Randy Essex has the phone numbers of two Ford Motor Co. public relations personnel programmed into his cell phone. They had originally called him angry about stories the business editor of The Detroit Free-Press had signed off on, and Essex saved their numbers.

Now they sit down for coffee regularly to discuss recent trends in the auto industry.

"I would describe it as more of a professional relationship … It’s better to have a rapport than be adversarial,” Essex said. “It is just as journalists and political handlers have an understanding of ‘this is my job and that’s your job.’”

Detroit is the hub of the American auto industry, and Essex said his job is to make sure his paper extensively covers the car companies for both their employees and the millions of car-driving citizens of the country. Just like sports writers cover more extensively the local teams, so does the Free Press cover auto makers such as Ford and General Motors more so than Toyota and Nissan, he said.

“We certainly try not to be cheerleaders,” he said. “These auto companies are hometown teams, and thousands and thousands of people care what they’re doing every day.”

Essex has a large staff at his disposal. Out of a business desk of 21 reporters, he has an auto editor and seven reporters specifically dedicated to covering car companies.

And with the media’s recent emphasis on local coverage, many auto stories make A1, and many more go on the business front, Essex said. There is also a daily auto page, and a Thursday Motor City section, which contains the more product-oriented stories and reviews that are generally more positive.

Free Press staff writers regularly engage in analytical pieces on car companies. For example, the paper announced findings that “[e]xecutives at the top U.S.-based auto companies received compensation packages worth an average of $4.2 million in 2006, a year in which two-thirds of their companies failed to post profits,” in a May 6 article by Joe Guy Collier. On the same day, he also published a report that “[m]any of the top executives in the auto industry have employee agreements that give them millions of dollars -- sometime tens of millions -- if they're forced to leave the company, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.”

These pieces require working with documents rather than interviews. Though Essex compared automobile writing to covering a political campaign, companies do not have to be as open and forthcoming – not as publicly accountable.

“The information they give us is what they want to give us,” he said. “They’re not particularly open.”

Phone calls to Ford representatives asking for comment on the relationship between their company and the news media were either not returned before press time.

Tom Wilkinson, director of GM News Relations, said that many of his staff members have prior experience working in the news media, and therefore know the position of journalists, but that those outside of the public relations department have felt that coverage has been unfair.

Mutual Respect

He also said he has a professional and mutually respectful relationship with the major newspapers and wire services, but gets frustrated by the editorial writers at smaller outlets, who he said often take swipes at the auto industry without first getting the facts.

“It’s fine to have an opinion, but make it be an informed one,’ Wilkinson said.

But those papers don’t have the resources of the Free Press.

Spartanburg, S.C., is home to a BMW manufacturing plant that employs nearly 5,000 workers. But unlike the 300,000-plus daily circulation Free Press, the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, at about 46,000 daily circulation, has only one reporter and an editor on its business section, said business editor Jim Fair. He said he also relies on a few part-time correspondents usually good for one story per week.

His news hole is also much more limited. Business gets two pages inside another section. One page is wide open, the other is 60 percent stock listings and the rest national briefs.

“Everybody gets the same story – sales, new products,” Fair said. “We treat [the plant] as if it’s a city. Within BMW you have a cafeteria, you have a pharmacy … We try to report on the people involved.”

Fair said his staff also struggles with corporate bureaucracy, but that he tries to be as fair as possible in his coverage. The most recent story about BMW the Herald-Journal created was published May 2 and reported a 26.4 percent drop in sales of Sports Activity Vehicles at the Spartanburg plant.

As a local paper, Fair must also take into account the car companies’ ties to the community. Carlton Motors, a local dealership that sells BMWs, was one of the first to buy section front ads, a recent move to boost revenue.
And BMW sponsors a large golf tournament held in nearby Greenville County. The Nike Pro-Am brings in celebrities like Kevin Costner, with the proceeds going to about 30 local charities, Fair said.

But Fair said he also does not want to fall into boosterism.

“It’s a difficult balance, and that’s where the English language comes in,” he said. “If you use the wrong word, you can really sound like a cheerleader.”

This involves identifying when the company is simply using marketing spin rather than actually making new products; for example, Fair said that in the third or fourth year of a seven-year model run, BMW will tweak the car and market it as completely redesigned.

But Fair still falls a bit into the spin, calling the BMWs adorable cars and collectors’ items. He also identifies the sports utility vehicles the company makes by their name – Sports Activity Vehicle.

“You’ve got to call it what it is,” he said.

The Herald-Journal can be excused for a lack of depth to coverage because of its minimal resources, but to continue the political coverage comparison, it seems the Free Press has not been as critical of its backyard teams as Washington columnists are of the movers and shakers in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

Calling them out

The Free Press has two columnists who regularly comment on the auto industry. While Mark Phelan trends to the lighter, sports car review pieces or seasonal car maintenance issues, Tom Walsh – a former member of the board of governors of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and city desk reporter – has shown he will call car companies out.

As recently as April 25, Walsh criticized Ford and GM’s lack of attention to quality, though he failed to back up the words with facts other than the American companies’ decline coupled with Toyota’s emergence.

But the Free Press has not been a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for work relating to the automotive industry since 1984 in public service for “a series by Stephen Franklin and Marcia Stepanek that exposed the failure of the automobile industry and the federal government to protect the motoring public from defective cars,” and has not won one since Lee Hills received recognition in 1956 in local reporting “for his aggressive, resourceful and comprehensive front page reporting of the United Automobile Workers' negotiations with Ford and General Motors for a guaranteed annual wage,” according to the official Pulitzer Web site.

And while General Motors and Ford rank third and seventh, respectively, in the Fortune 500 listing of America’s largest corporations, no investigative reporting Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded for automotive reporting since the award was begun in 1985. Political or governmental investigations have been rewarded nine times in that span.

The Free Press has not been the only newspaper lacking in such award-winning investigations. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, which also claim to extensively cover the auto industry, have produced no award winning work in that area either.

But judging a paper’s work based on the most prestigious award is unfair. The Wall Street Journal earned fame for reporting on unnecessary deaths caused by Firestone tires used on many Ford SUVs in 2000, and the Free Press investigated the unusually high death rate in Ford Crown Victoria’s in 2003, and The New York Times published stories from Keith Bradsher’s investigation of SUVs, which turned into his expose book “High and Mighty,” according to articles posted to the Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. website.

And the Free Press also won a 2006 first place award for enterprise reporting from the Michigan Press Association for a piece called “Driven away,” by J. Collier, K. Stringer and A. B. Memba, which was, as the judges described it, “a very human look at the plight of the communities which depend on the auto industry – loss of jobs gets all the news coverage – this is insightful look at loss.”

While smaller organizations have conducted small-scale investigations into the automotive industry, most have shied away from such coverage.

The reason might be because of what has happened with the most recent winner of an automotive Pulitzer. Dan Neil won the criticism award in 2004 at The Los Angeles Times “for his one-of-a-kind reviews of automobiles, blending technical expertise with offbeat humor and astute cultural observations.”

After an April 6, 2005, column titled “An American Idle,” which in part called for the firing of several General Motors executives, the company pulled its advertising from the Times, worth an estimated $21 million in 2004, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The Times has kept him on staff, but he has not always had the same support from his editors. GM has since resumed its advertising.

Neil developed his writing style at The (Raleigh) News & Observer, at which he was the automotive section editor for five years beginning in 1991. He was fired in 1996 after refusing to allow his work to be controlled by the classified advertising department.

Advertising revenue at newspapers across the country is stagnant or falling – at $49.4 billion for the year 2006 according to the Newspaper Association of America. Within that, automotive advertising fell 12.8 percent to $4 billion over the past year. And Wall Street Journal reporter Joseph Hallinan wrote that “Auto ads, a major source of newspaper-classified advertising, have been slipping steadily for nearly two years. But the slippage may be turning into a landslide,” in a January 2006 article.

And though every newspaper reader has a vested interest in the automotive industry, more and more are taking The News & Observer’s position.

The automotive section has been under control of the classified advertising department of The News and Observer since the 1980s.

“They run Click & Clack, and they run basically wire stories,” said executive editor Melanie Sill, who said the real estate section is run similarly.

But the N & O benefits from a lack of competition in print media. Sill said their only competition is from the television station WRAL, and the only other major metro daily newspaper, The Charlotte Observer, is now owned by the same company as the N & O.

Like most any newspaper executive, Sill said she feels no pressure from advertising.

“It’s inevitable that every once in awhile a news story upsets an ad customer,” she said. “We want to make sure our coverage is accurate and fair. They have a say. We’re not perfect, and it’s important not to ignore their complaint because they’re an advertiser. We want to make sure our coverage is accurate.”

These advertisers do not usually include car companies, but sometimes does include local dealerships.

But Sill, as managing editor, did run into a similar problem as The Los Angeles Times did with Neil.
The Raleigh area had, at the time, a local airline. A columnist wrote a humorously critical column about an advertising campaign for the airline that showed a picture of airplane seats with the cut line, “Next stop heaven.” The company briefly pulled advertising.

“We never were asked to do anything, apologize or anything like that,” Sill said. “I spoke to a PR person, and I said ‘what about that ad anyway?’”

Papers big and small will continue to struggle with automotive coverage, which will certainly stay in the news as the American industry goes from bad to worse. A quick glance at May 7 business headlines shows gas prices reaching new heights and Ford closing another plant in Ohio.

As newspapers everywhere try to work with declining revenue and pressure to cut the budget, automotive investigations will continue to be dominated by the big boys – the Free Press and The Wall Street Journal, and the smaller papers will be forced to run wire. But the indication is that editors will stick to the philosophy of the Herald-Journal’s Fair.

“There is no friendship.”

Andrew Dunn is a business journalism student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Posted May 31, 2007