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May/June 1995

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN

The Star-Ledger has always seen New Jersey — from the shore communities in the south through the urban/suburban sprawl of its central counties to the exurban north — as one big hometown, and it has chronicled its citizens’ common concerns. A common concern these days is the tumult of change at the Ledger.

Comprehensive, successful, and dull, the newspaper was shaped by the obsessive vision of editor Mort Pye, who retired in December after three decades at the helm. It is being reshaped by James P. Willse, who has all of the state wondering what its somnolent giant of a newspaper will be like when it’s finally wide awake.

The Newhouse-owned Star-Ledger was little more than a scandal sheet when Pye arrived as a top editor in 1957. Assuming full leadership six years later, he tied its fate to that of New Jersey. The paper aggressively promoted development and commerce in New Jersey and followed its largely white, upper-middle-class readers out to the suburbs after they fled the paper’s urban base. The Ledger thrived while its main competition, the respected Newark Evening News, closed up shop in 1972 after a disastrous strike.

Pye’s formula included covering the hell out of local sports as well as the state government, building an enormous statehouse bureau. He dropped the word Newark from the masthead in the early 1960s. “What we set out to do was very simple,” Pye says. “It was to create a paper that anybody with interest in what is going on in New Jersey would find it in the paper.” All this for 15 cents, until its climb to a quarter in 1990.

In a business sense, Pye’s strategy worked. The Ledger has a circulation of 455,919 daily and 685,551 on Sundays, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, making it respectively the fourteenth- and twelfth- largest paper in the nation. In a journalistic sense, however, even the paper’s admirers had to admit that The Star-Ledger could be mind-numbing. Its clumsily designed look was vintage 1949, heavy gray with hard-to-understand headlines; its gigantic newshole was both a blessing and a curse — a huge beast with an insatiable appetite that, combined with weak editing, often produced lifeless prose. The paper sometimes gave the impression it produced type only to wrap around the voluminous ads.

That Willse’s every move since he took over in January is still subject to speculation and analysis all around New Jersey illustrates the delicacy of his task. How do you fix a newspaper that, in an economic sense, ain’t broke?

E. Donald Lass, editor and publisher of the Asbury Park Press, the state’s second-largest paper, wonders how much he would change the Ledger if he were running it. Why change when you have such a potent formula for success? he asks. But in a six-page “Memo” to Willse the New Jersey Reporter’s Stephen Barr, the “spokes-man” for “Ledger Junkies of New Jersey,”offered a not-so-modest list of requests: better writing, editing, photography, and layout, less dependence on institutional coverage, more explanatory and investigative work, thoughtful editorial and op-ed pages, and so forth. The Ledger, the memo said, is “indispensable, but not admired.”

In a competitive market, Willse has been reluctant to disclose his vision for the paper, but he leaves no doubt about the company he’d like it to keep. The Star-Ledger, he says, can play in the same league as The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald,The Boston Globe, and The Dallas Morning News, regional newspapers that are both economic and journalistic successes. “The trick,” he says, “is to not lose sight of what is good and valuable about the Ledger: its commitment to New Jersey and its communities and the breadth of its information.”

Ledger junkies already see a better newspaper, somewhat cleaner looking with more inviting headlines and sharper stories. Reporters say their pieces are now getting “massaged.” “He is asking questions about stories that we’ve never heard before, which is very exciting,” says general assignment reporter Bill Gannon.

One of Willse’s first moves was far from subtle. He hired Richard Aregood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, to rejuvenate the Ledger’s editorial section. Aregood, simply put, is everything that The Star-Ledger’s editorial page never was.

That section had long spoken with a weak, inconsistent voice in editorials that were no more than summations of the news and suggestions and expectations about the future. Aregood, by contrast, writes editorials that are witty, engaging, and combative. “Somebody sedate the senator while we take a look here,” he wrote in March, after quoting an emotional Republican state senator who wants to free developers to build in a protected watershed. And for the kind of money that Henry Cisneros is alleged to have paid to keep his girlfriend quiet, Aregood wrote that the HUD secretary “could be wallowing in a vat of lime Jell-O with four hookers, twelve consenting farm animals, and a partridge in a pear tree to this very day.”

The twenty-six-newspaper Newhouse group has a reputation for running some of the most profitable but mediocre papers in the nation. In the past few years, however, it has been hiring respected editors and apparently giving them resources to improve their papers.

In Willse, it got a well-respected and well-organized editor known for his ability to spot talent and give it room to grow. The son of a New York City detective, he was born on St. Patrick’s Day in 1944, and caught the journalism bug by working summers as a copy boy at The New York Times and as an intern at The Wall Street Journal. At Hamilton College, he studied Yeats by day and covered the cops by night for the Utica Daily Press in upstate New York. He joined The Associated Press in 1969, becoming its San Francisco bureau chief, then city editor and managing editor for the San Francisco Examiner. It was while he was at the Examiner that his photographer, Greg Robinson, was killed, along with congressman Leo Ryan, by followers of the Reverend Jim Jones and his People’s Temple cult in Guyana just before the mass suicide there. A grief-stricken Willse put that day’s paper to bed and flew to Guyana to cover the tragedy himself. He produced solid journalism at the New York Daily News, his most recent career stop, during some of the toughest periods in the paper’s history, notably the bitter 147-day strike in 1990-1991, the death of its phony “savior,” Robert Maxwell, in 1991, and its subsequent bankruptcy. When the News was finally sold to Mort Zuckerman, Willse had to walk the plank with scores of Daily News staff members.

Now he has been handed one of those rare jobs in journalism, a chance to shape a paper that is willing to spend money to improve. “I don’t think there is a better editing gig in the country,” he says. “This is a wonderful, wonderful opportunity.”

Allen is a reporter for the New York Daily News. He did not work under Willse.