The Press: The Yes and the No

The chief of the St. Petersburg Times editorial page took a hard look at his own handiwork and found it wanting. Certain that few of the Times's 191,000 readers in ultraconservative St. Petersburg were reading—much less heeding—the paper's consistently liberal editorials, Robert Pittman expressed his dissatisfaction in a memo to fellow staffers last fall: "When an editorial writer doesn't know the answer to a problem, he frequently describes it as a dilemma. There are also many dilemmas in the concept of the present editorial page." As an alternative, Pittman proposed a new editorial format that would include factual essays on each...