Mr. Harry Browne:

A general observation. What the interviewee suggested - he was not off the record but I will refrain from mentioning his name - that the balance of forces within the newspaper was such that in the mid-1980s when he edited a critical series on property, the commercial side of the house could come in and say, "Don't do that. Why are you doing that?", and the editor would say: "This is our area." That hard wall is widely seen as having been, to a certain extent, breached in both directions.

One of Mr. Gageby's successors writes in his own memoirs that he sometimes regrets that he did not take more of an active role in the management side of the company, as opposed to just the editorial management of the newspaper. I mentioned the Los Angeles Timesearlier. When a new publisher came in there in the 1990s, he said he was going to take a bazooka to blow away the wall between commercial and editorial considerations. That was a more dramatic view of a kind of an idea that was widespread within the newspaper business at the time that said the editorial side has to think business, the business side has to think editorial and we are all in this together.

It was possible for a time in many national newspapers here for senior journalists to do an MBA and get funding from the newspaper to do it. In some respects, for people outside journalism that might seem perfectly normal. One is a manager within a company and one's company wants one to get a better qualification in management. From the point of view of a journalist, it is more problematic because an MBA is training in a certain kind of ideology as well as being training in the capacity to manage. That breach was much more widespread by the 1990s and beyond.