Is Fournier Saving Or Destroying The AP?

Ron Fournier says he regards Sandy Johnson, his predecessor as head of The Associated Press’s Washington bureau, as “a mentor.”

Johnson, though, regards Fournier, who replaced her in a hard-feelings shake-up in May, as a threat to one of the most influential institutions in American journalism.

“I loved the Washington bureau,” said Johnson, who left the AP after losing the prestigious position. “I just hope he doesn’t destroy it.”

There’s more to her vinegary remark than just the aftertaste of a sour parting. Fournier is a main engine in a high-stakes experiment at the 162-year old wire to move from its signature neutral and detached tone to an aggressive, plain-spoken style of writing that Fournier often describes as “cutting through the clutter.”

In the stories the new boss is encouraging, first-person writing and emotive language are okay.

So is scrapping the stonefaced approach to journalism that accepts politicians’ statements at face value and offers equal treatment to all sides of an argument. Instead, reporters are encouraged to throw away the weasel words and call it like they see it when they think public officials have revealed themselves as phonies or flip-floppers.

The new approach was on display in a Liz Sidoti news analysis written earlier this month with the lead, “John McCain calls himself an underdog. That may be an understatement.”

Last week Beth Fouhy’s dispatch on her feelings about the end of Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign began, “I miss Hillary.”

Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll said on Friday that she “loved” Fouhy’s column, and stressed that she saw it not as an opinion piece but as political analysis from a reporter who spent 18 months covering the Clinton campaign — despite the fact that it’s written in the first person.

Fournier himself, shortly before taking the job as bureau chief, wrote several models for what he’s called “accountability journalism.” A January lead declared that “Obama is bordering on arrogance.” A month later, he began a column with “The Democratic nomination is now Barack Obama's to lose.”

Fournier and other critics of the conventional press model, especially those on the left, have said that being released from the tired conventions of news writing is exactly what journalism needs.

By these lights, the mentality that presumes both sides of an argument are entitled to equal weight is what prevented the media from challenging the Bush administration more aggressively on the Iraq war and other issues.

Others warn that what Fournier and other proponents see as truth-telling can easily bleed into opinionizing — exactly the opposite of the AP’s mission of “delivering fast, unbiased news.”

“The problem,” says James Taranto, the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web columnist and a frequent critic of what he sees as the AP’s liberal bias, “is that while you can do opinion journalism and incorporate reporting into it, you can’t say you’re doing straight reporting, and then add opinion to that.”

A dispatch Fournier filed in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina began: “The Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes. The economy is booming. Anybody who leaks a CIA agent's identity will be fired. Add another piece of White House rhetoric that doesn't match the public's view of reality: Help is on the way, Gulf Coast.”

Fournier cited the article in an essay titled “Accountability Journalism: Liberating reporters and the truth” he wrote for the June 1 issue of the AP’s internal newsletter, The Essentials, as an example of how to be “provocative without being partisan … truth-tellers without being editorial writers.”

The essay was preceded by an unsigne note declaring that “It's AP's goal this year (and henceforth) to make this accountability journalism a consistent theme in our coverage of public affairs, politics and government. We have unmatched resources and expertise in every state to report whether government officials are doing the job for which they were elected and keeping the promises they make.”

“Katrina was a good example of when the journalism community got it right, because it was staring us in the face,” Fournier, seated in the AP’s Washington bureau, told Politico.

“When George Bush stood up there and said that things were going fine in Katrina, I was able to write, ‘The president is wrong.’ That was pretty liberating. It was also a fact.”

“It seems to me there’s a conscious effort to inject bias in the story, though obviously Fournier would see it differently,” Taranto told Politico. “It’s a conscious move in the direction of advocacy journalism.”

However it’s described, it’s clear Fournier’s voice has drawn favorable treatment from the Drudge Report, which has linked to eight of his articles already this year, each in a standout format with his name in all caps and no mention of the AP as, for example, “FOURNIER: She may pay high price for selfishness …”

At first blush, Fournier is an unlikely brand-name byline, let alone a proponent for a new brand of journalism. He joined the wire’s Little Rock bureau in 1989, moved to Washington with President Bill Clinton in 1993 and remained there though the 2004 election. For years, he was well known in Washington political circles — if virtually unknown beyond — as a classic AP reporter. He was smart, obsessed with being first on breaking news and wrote in the classic Joe Friday “just the facts, ma’am” style.

But over recent years, Fournier pushed up against his own boundaries. He left the AP in 2004 to take a Harvard Institute of Politics fellowship that he he said let him look at the journalism world from “five miles off the ground,” rather than “five feet off the ground like you are as a wire reporter.” He then co-wrote the book “Applebee’s America” and went to work as editor in chief of the political social networking startup Hotsoup.com, which went under in March 2007 when he returned to the AP as online political editor with a new and decidedly un-AP-like philosophy.

“The only thing he ever managed is a startup that he ran into the ground,” cracked Johnson when asked how her former protégé would handle overseeing the Washington bureau.

“I think there’s mixed feelings — there’s reluctance,” said an AP staffer. “The AP has always been a just-the-facts type of organization,” the staffer added, where even star political reporters typically play a more behind-the-scenes role than those at other papers. And it was Johnson who hired the majority of reporters in Washington, meaning they’re now following not just a new leader but a new agenda.

While Johnson frequently clashed with AP’s New York headquarters, it’s clear Fournier has their support to continue the transformation of what Carroll described to Politico in January as “not your father’s Oldsmobile.”

“We probably weren’t as boring as you thought we were,” Carroll said when asked about the new style, adding that the AP has made “enormous changes” since she became editor in 2002. “Don’t make us decrepit or dull when we’re not.”

“Ron is a fully empowered acting bureau chief, and is doing a number of structural things,” said Carroll, who added there is no “asterisk” next to his name, even though the move hasn’t been made permanent.

Fournier’s acountability journalism is at least in part a reaction to how the Web has reshaped the news business since the 2000 election, significantly reducing the barrier to entry for outside voices even as it has eroded newspapers’ advertising revenue, which in turn has meant staff and bureau cuts — all of which have left the AP in an even more critical role as the last bureau standing, as it were.

It also makes the shift to more assertive reportage a risky one for the world’s oldest media organization, which relies on a base of subscribing news outlets from across the ideological spectrum that for decades have expected to receive clean, well-structured copy that addresses opposing views on equal terms and can easily be cut to length.

Until now, the AP has in effect served two roles: breaking news and serving as the last — and definitive — word. Outside editors who rely on the wire are excited about the change, but also concerned that Fournier’s new brand of journalism could cut against both those traditional roles.

Craig Klugman, editor of the Ft. Wayne (Ind.) Journal Gazette, called Fournier a “true heavy-hitter in this business,” but said his newsroom has been split on the new format for AP stories, which some staffers consider “innovative,” while others don’t believe it’s “as cutting edge as the AP thinks it is.”

The day he was interviewed, the paper was running a piece of the AP’s accountability journalism — which seemed to Klugman a lot like enterprise journalism — on the front page. The article, by Sharon Theimer, began with the Fournier-esque lead: “Nuclear weapons? No way.”

David Bailey, managing editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (where Fournier worked as a reporter in the 1980s), said that since the departure of former AP chief executive Louis Boccardi five years ago, he’s noticed “a new philosophy” as the AP tries “to do more with dazzle and footwork these days than [stories] with real substance,” which is why he said it’s important the paper maintains an active wire desk to vet and edit the copy. “We almost never run an AP story as we get it on the front of the paper,” he said.

Still, he said, “if the AP is smart enough to listen to what Ron will say, the AP will improve dramatically.”

“Washington bureaus are cutting back and newspapers in general are cutting back on their staffs,” said Fournier, who warned that the result would be fewer “really good investigative pieces that stick it to somebody who deserves it” and fewer “sharp, edgy analysis when somebody is breaking their promise, or when they are lying or spinning.”

Since there’s an opening in the marketplace for such reporting, he added, AP reporters have a responsibility not only as journalists and citizens, but also as business people seizing a market opportunity to keep the organization going.

Implicit in that argument is the idea that a Web-driven news environment has diminished the value of traditional commodity-style news.

The new approach, though, opens up the wire to the accusations of ideological bias often directed at other large outlets like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

In a critique on Best of the Web of Fournier’s Katrina coverage, Taranto argued that “The AP's embrace of ‘accountability journalism’ would seem to be a response to the proliferation of opinion, especially on the radio and online. You would think that given the glut of opinion, ‘mainstream media’ organizations like the AP would emphasize what they are particularly good at, namely impartial reporting.”

While editors still rely on the AP for “Breaking News” (the title of last year’s coffee-table book on the organization), Fournier prefers to move the conversationtoward multimedia and muckraking journalism.

“There’s a bigger need for this kind of journalism than ever,” he said. “The public is losing faith.” Fournier rattled off a list of institutions, including organized religion, government, media, the military, big business and the courts, in which recent Pew polls show public confidence at all-time lows. “It’s our responsibility,” he said, “to step into that breach and say, ‘Hey, what the hell is going on here?’”

In April, Fouhy wrote a 225-word dispatch from South Bend, Ind. that called out the Clinton campaign for an event in which the candidate, with the press in tow, rode with a commuter to a gas station to fill up. The lead: “Hillary Rodham Clinton, a former first lady who hasn’t driven a car or pumped gas in many years because of Secret Service restrictions, joined a blue-collar worker at a filling station Wednesday to illustrate how the high price of gasoline is squeezing consumers.”

“It was a totally camera-driven political stunt that was one for the record books,” Fouhy said, adding that she was “taking Ron’s philosophy” in calling it as she sees it.

At times, Fournier has pulled back. He wanted to open a news analysis written by Fouhy and Nedra Pickler in May with, “The Democratic presidential race is over.” The lead itself would have been newsworthy coming from the wire that, under Johnson’s direction during the 2000 presidential election, insisted Florida was too close to call even as the networks all called it incorrectly — twice, as it turned out.

After some back and forth, the reporters won out with “The Democratic presidential race is all but over.”

Another AP staffer, though, said that while some top reporters may be able to stand up to the boss, others are less likely to do so.

Since becoming acting bureau chief, Fournier’s written only one piece, but he intends to take on a more of a player-coach role, penning one or two pieces a week, and even occasionally hitting the campaign trail.

Even absent his byline, his influence has been evident, as it is in the lead to reporter Liz Sidoti’s June 19 news analysis on the Democratic nominee’s decision to reverse course on public financing: “Barack Obama chose winning over his word.”

In Fournier’s view, the average reader is “having a hard time figuring out the right from the wrong, the black from the white” in politics, where gray often prevails.

“But boy, when we can cut through the clutter, and we can say ‘Barack Obama put politics over his word,’ which he did — that’s a fact,” Fournier said. “He did. He may not like the way Liz wrote it, but it is a statement of fact.”