A Pale Reflection of America

When Bill Clinton was president, he attended a soul food dinner at Douglas's home with nine black White House correspondents. Such a gathering would be smaller today, although the ranks will swell slightly Jan. 20.

Michael Fletcher covered the White House for The Washington Post before switching to an economics beat in 2007. His editors asked him during the fall campaign to cover the next president, and the African American correspondent says he is "sure they were betting" on an Obama victory.

"It feels like you would want to have black journalists there to bring a different racial sensibility," he says. "Race is such a subtext to the historic nature of his presidency. I find Obama a more compelling story than John McCain would have been." The New York Times has shifted Helene Cooper, author of a memoir about growing up in Liberia, to cover Obama.

Ryan says she was often the only reporter asking about problems in Sudan. "If there were more voices talking about the plight of urban America, the problems of New Orleans, New Orleans could be in better shape than it is now," she says. "There are segments of America that have been left off the radar screen, and minority journalists should have been asking these questions on a daily basis."

The black press has been energized. Ebony magazine, which named Obama its first Person of the Year, plans to devote more attention to the White House, perhaps with a full-time correspondent. Bryan Monroe, editorial director for Ebony and Jet, says the magazines have covered Washington for decades but that there is "huge interest" in Obama among readers. "It's a big deal," he says. "Without a doubt, the biggest story in black America in the last year or two, if not in our lifetimes."

Goler, a 22-year veteran on the beat, says such efforts aren't enough. "What I want to see is more black reporters without an agenda, more black reporters doing basic journalism," he says.

Tribune Retreats

When the Chicago Tribune launched a radical redesign last fall, the company's chief innovation officer, Lee Abrams, warned in an internal memo that critics might savage the big-headlines-and-photos approach that often left just one or two stories on the front page.

"With the press starting to cover the new look," he wrote, "I think we have to be on guard for, and defend against the 'shorter paper . . . smaller staff . . . more concise' thing that will certainly be the focus point of the 'trib is dumbing down and cheapening' crowd. . . . Now is a good time to really stress the positives. . . . I'm guessing that we'll see A LOT of 'Financial woes force Chicago Tribune into McTrib . . . ' "

Tribune Editor Gerould Kern thanked him for the "good advice."

Last week, in an unusual wraparound section titled "You Spoke, We Listened," Kern admitted that readers didn't like many of the changes. Headlines said that "You Told Us": "Too few stories," "Too many ads," "The paper is too loud," "Bring back my business section." The paper promised changes.

While it sure sounded like a mea culpa, Kern told Editor & Publisher: "We weren't apologizing. We were thanking readers for their input."

Persona Non Grata

Tom Ricks, The Post's former Pentagon reporter, was once blackballed at the Army War College.

"We all need to avoid Tom like the plague," Steven Metz, a department chairman at the school's Strategic Studies Institute, wrote colleagues in 2005. But Metz, who was wary of Ricks's critical reporting on the Iraq war, didn't hold a grudge. Last year he asked Ricks to blurb his book, and the reporter obliged.

Metz declined to comment, but he apologized to Ricks by e-mail, saying he feared retaliation from Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon: "Several members of SSI had been verbally flogged after interviews with you when the stories portrayed [us] as more critical of the administration than we intended. We were worried about what might happen to SSI."

Ricks tells the tale on the Web site of Foreign Policy, which was recently bought by The Post Co. and is being expanded online by the paper's former assistant managing editor for national news, Susan Glasser.

Obama Adulation Watch

"As Barack Obama stacks his staff with studs whose looks are as outstanding as their credentials, it's clear that the nation's 44th president won't be the only man on the hill who can rock a suit -- bespoke or bathing." -- Thursday's New York Daily News with a photo spread on "Hotties of the Obama Cabinet."