Sandra Mims Rowe, editor of The Oregonian, spoke to a crowd of UO faculty, administrators and students as well as members of the public at the 2000 Ruhl Lecture on May 10. Rowe’s lecture, titled “Ethics in the Age of Media Convergence,” addressed issues of integrity in the newsroom and the boardroom, and the relationship between journalists and their communities. The lecture accompanied the 2000 Payne Awards for Ethics in Journalism.

Rowe, former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, focused her speech on the ethical implications of the increasing commercialization in journalism. She cited a changing media environment, where stockholders and enormous media companies hold an increasing amount of influence—and pointed out that those same companies and stockholders must realize their influence on the integrity of their newspapers and radio and television stations.

“Because it is a time of great change characterized by the blurring of lines between business and news and marketing,” Rowe said, “we must better articulate and apply the standards that distinguish journalism from rumor mongering, talk-show blather and celebrity chit-chat.”

According to Rowe, the key to maintaining journalistic integrity through overwhelming media convergence lies in preserving the trust of an increasingly cynical public. She noted that “more depth on issues of complexity, more explanation of matters of substance and smarter journalism on everything significant in our lives” would strengthen journalists’ commitment to the public interest.

“As media organizations continue to merge and journalism becomes a relatively smaller piece of what they do and is no longer the reason many of these companies were created in the first place,” Rowe said, “then the fight to have the journalism values at the core of the company will be more challenging. It also could be determinant. The credibility, and the trust, the ethical force of the entire enterprise, may depend on it.”

Rowe, who took the helm at The Oregonian in 1993, has taken Oregon’s largest newspaper into a new era: dividing the newsroom into teams and increasing local and regional news coverage. Under her leadership, The Oregonian’s reputation has moved to a new level. According to a recent poll by the Columbia Journalism Review, The Oregonian is now rated among the 12 best newspapers in the country, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 1999.

Pulitzers are nothing new for Rowe. For 22 years, she reported for The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star in Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Va., and was named executive editor and vice president in 1984. The following year, the newspaper won the Pulitzer for general news reporting.

A former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Rowe is also on the advisory board of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. In addition, she is on the advisory board of the Freedom Forum Pacific Coast Center in San Francisco, a nonpartisan, international foundation dedicated to free press and free speech. She chairs the John S. and Janet L. Knight Foundation Journalism Advisory Board.

The annual Ruhl symposium, endowed by the late Mabel Ruhl, honors the memory of her husband, Robert Ruhl, the Pulitzer-Prize winning editor and publisher of the Medford Mail Tribune. Past speakers have included Susan Meiselas, Jerry Ceppos and Suzanne Braun Levine. The full text of this year’s lecture, as well as archived lectures from past years, can be found at http://jcomm.uoregon.edu/people/ruhl2000.html.