Quest for a Personality

In Norfolk, the present often meets the past with a loud clang. Daily, the old Southern attitudes clash with the bustle of a boom town. Once just a sleazy, rollicking seaport, Norfolk is now bigger and far busier than Virginia's capital city of Richmond. The U.S. Navy is the most important fact in Norfolk's life (indeed, the U.S. Government provides 40% of Norfolk's payroll)--but many of the city's citizens have never quite got over the feeling that for years prompted them to post "Dogs and Sailors Not Allowed" signs. Part of downtown Norfolk remains a warren of grimy apartments and noisy taverns, but urban renewal projects have swept other parts to make way for public housing, hospitals, and a $15 million civic center.

Nowhere is Norfolk's quest for a new personality better reflected than in the city's two newspapers: the morning Virginian-Pilot and the afternoon Ledger-Dispatch and Portsmouth Star (which is in fact one paper, with separate editions for Norfolk and neighboring Portsmouth). Although both are owned by the parent Ledger-Dispatch Corp., the papers are fiercely competitive in their search for the news and often differ editorially on some of the South's most basic problems.

"Not As Obnoxious." By Northern standards both papers are conservative. But by Southern standards the Pilot is downright liberal, and the Ledger-Dispatch is at best middle-reading. In Virginia's 1958 school desegregation crisis, the Pilot was the only daily in Virginia to agree from the very beginning that the U.S. Supreme Court's integration orders must be obeyed. "We don't call ourselves liberals," says Editor Lenoir Chambers of the Virginian-Pilot. "We never preached the doctrine of integration." But as Chambers wrote in a 1959 editorial series that won him a Pulitzer Prize, "The mark of Virginia's political shame is that in this confusion it found no better method than abandoning public education entirely rather than follow the Court's directions about admitting a few Negro children into all-white schools."

The Ledger-Dispatch, on the other hand, remains staunchly states' rightsist, though there are signs that it has mellowed slightly. Says former Editor Joseph Leslie, an ardent segregationist who retired last year: "The paper is not as obnoxious now as when I was running it." Arriving this week to take over Leslie's old job is an editor who can be expected to follow the Ledger-Dispatch's traditional policies: William H. Fitzpatrick, 52, a Pulitzer prizewinning editor for the New Orleans States and for the past eight years an editorial writer on the Wall Street Journal.

"An Honest Difference."In chasing the news, the Pilot and the Ledger-Dispatch have no truck with togetherness. "We try to preserve the feeling of two separate newspapers," says Frank Batten, 33, the publisher of both. "But we don't want differences unless there is an honest difference." Batten oversees both the busi ness and editorial sides of the papers, but gives his editors free rein so that the papers, with their separate staffs, can maintain their individual identities. So stern is the competition between the papers that the Ledger-Dispatch locks its newsroom at night to keep out Pilot staffers who might be on the prowl for Ledger stories. With its smaller circulation (94,904 v. 109,139), the Ledger-Dispatch is more news-hungry than the Pilot, often holds back the copy on exclusive stories from the composing room until Pilot deadlines are past. The Ledger's managing editor also has an unlisted telephone so that his reporters can call him with stories, bypassing the papers' common switchboard.

The result of the competition between the Pilot and the Ledger-Dispatch is that they cover Norfolk, and all its conflicts, with a thoroughness rare in today's U.S. newspapering. Says Norfolk's Mayor Fred Duckworth: "Their reporters hound us to death." Adds Publisher Batten: "When newspapers have a monopoly, they have an obligation to the community to give it a wide range of expression and a wide discussion of the topics of the times so that people will have both sides of important issues." The results of that policy have given Norfolk two of the South's better newspapers.

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