At first glance, Michael Gartner may have seemed an odd choice to run a broadcast news network. Almost all of his three decades in journalism have been as a newspaper man, an identity he takes care to embellish.
Outside his office at NBC News hangs a green roadside delivery box for the Daily Tribune, a small Ames, Iowa, paper that he owns with a group of partners and of which he retains the title of editor. And his taste for Iowa corn extends to his wardrobe. With his bow ties, wide suspenders and baggy shirts, Gartner looks like he's headed for a casting call for a revival of "the Front Page."A car picks him up at his Greenwich Village apartment at 6:15 a.m. every weekday, and he remains at the NBC News office for 12 to 14 hours at a stretch. On weekends, he commutes to Des Moines, Iowa, where his wife and three children maintain the family home. "I'm crazy about Iowa and its values," Gartner said. "My friends, my family and my roots are there."
Gartner may like to play the part of a Midwestern innocent in the big city, but he doesn't carry the act into his career. In 10 years at the Des Moines Register, editor Gartner presided over a newsroom that won two Pulitzer Prizes and a place on Time magazine's list of the top 10 newspapers in America.
But in his first year as president of NBC News, he has acquired another reputation, that of a "hatchet man" dismembering one of the world's greatest news organizations. He has slashed $55 million from the news division's budget and watched seasoned correspondents leave the network.
The paradox between Gartner the editor and Gartner the executive, however, may be more perception than reality. In his eyes, paring budgets and reshuffling personnel eliminate waste without endangering quality. With 1,000 employees and a budget of $245 million - even after the latest round of cuts - Gartner suggests the atmosphere at NBC News is hardly Dickensian.
But critics view Gartner as a front man for the counting house, a careerist whose ambitions to succeed in business may overshadow his instincts as a journalist.
The turbulence during Gartner's first year at the network reflects changing currents in the economics of the industry. Broadcasters are grappling with declining audiences, the demands of new network owners and increased competition from cable and independent news networks.
As many as 30 TV news services have sprung up in recent years. Often they are rivals for viewers and air time on local affiliate stations in a competition where hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.
The corporate battles being fought over budgets and personnel in network news could have consequences for millions of Americans who rely on television as their primary source of news. They could determine whether NBC and other major networks will be able to cover wars, earthquakes, famines, elections, revolutions and other events around the globe with all the costly manpower and technology required to meet the challenge.
NBC News commentator John Chancellor, who started at the network in 1950, said that until the past few years, nobody expected news operations to make money.
"The news division was like an eight-cylinder Buick. The ride was nice, but it was expensive to run," Chancellor said. "I guess it was inevitable it had to end."
Chancellor credited Gartner with making the best of a bad situation, but quickly added, "That doesn't mean that some of us who have been around here a long time are happy with these developments, because we are not."
In an atmosphere of upheaval, some NBC veterans are wondering how long Gartner can expect to keep his job. One rumor inside the network portrays him as a transitional figure hired to make unpopular decisions and depart once they are implemented.
Gartner denies the rumor and insists he will be at his desk this time next year. Maybe so. If all goes according to plan, Gartner could be a hero to parent company General Electric. By one estimate, NBC News operations lost $80 million in 1988. Gartner predicts his division could break even this year.
Gartner, born 50 years ago in Des Moines, displayed an interest in newspapers at an early age. His father worked on the editorial staff of the Register and, as a teenager, Gartner got a job in the sports department.
He won a scholarship to Minnesota's Carleton College and soon after graduation in 1960 landed a copy-editing job at the Wall Street Journal in New York. He rose through the ranks and ultimately became page one editor, an influential post at the Journal.
During his years at the Journal, Gartner studied law at night at New York University, where he earned his law degree in 1969. But despite his success in New York, when Gartner saw a chance to return in triumph to Des Moines, he took it. In 1974, he was hired as executive editor of the Register and Tribune.
"He was enthusiastic as an editor," said James Risser, a former Washington bureau chief who won two Pulitzer Prizes at the Register. "His impulse was always to say yes."
Risser, now director of the John S. Knight Fellowship program for journalists at Stanford University, says his first Pulitzer was due in large measure to Gartner's offering the time and money to uncover a major scandal involving the inspection of U.S. grain exports.
Yet Gartner had to manage a budget squeeze in the newsroom in the 1980s, as a slow local economy and mistakes in corporate acquisitions haunted the company. By most accounts, he passed his first test as a manager in hard times. The afternoon Des Moines paper, the Tribune, closed in 1982, but reportedly with minimal disruption in the lives of employees, who were offered either jobs at the Register or generous severance packages.
His tenure in Des Moines ended in discord, however, when Gartner the editor became tangled in the designs of Gartner the executive. In 1984, Gartner, Register publisher Gary Gerlach and financial backers at Dow Jones & Co. made a surprise bid to buy the Register's parent company for $112 million.
David Kruidenier, chairman of the Register company and Cowles Media, was shocked and angry and suspended Gartner and Gerlach.
Ultimately, the unsolicited offer led to a bidding war, with Gannett Co. buying the Register company for more than $300 million - nearly triple the price Gartner and his partners had offered.
Gartner doesn't want to talk about the Des Moines episode these days, except to say that Dow Jones executives estimated the value of the company and felt they made a fair offer. Whatever the case, Gartner and his family received about $3.5 million from Gannett for the Register stock they owned.
Later, Gartner was hired as an executive at Gannett, a company known for wresting the maximum profit from its chain of newspapers, broadcast outlets and billboard operations. As editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, acquired by Gannett in 1986, he oversaw the closing of the afternoon Louisville Times, reorganized top management and took steps to raise profits.
Similar complaints rippled through NBC after Gartner came to the network news department last summer. A veteran NBC correspondent recalled a dinner where Gartner lectured Washington reporters, shortly after his arrival at the network, about the need to reorganize management, tighten budgets and ensure that news turned a profit for NBC.
In the following months, veteran correspondents such as Connie Chung, Chris Wallace and Ken Bode left NBC News. Gartner was criticized by television writers who suggested he didn't do enough to avert the talent drain.
But Gartner denies budget considerations had anything to do with the departures. Of the network's 1,000 employees, only about 70 are correspondents, hardly enough paychecks to change a $245 million budget dramatically, Gartner said.
Instead, Gartner said the bulk of the savings he's engineered at NBC News has been in reshuffling management and doing away with wasteful habits in coverage. In the past, he said the "Nightly News," the "Today" show, the "Weekend Nightly News" and "NBC Sunrise" each might dispatch a reporter to the same story. Gartner has assigned an executive to ensure that four NBC reporters don't end up at the same trial or space launch. One correspondent provides a report for each NBC News program.
"If one of the complaints is that I'm adhering to a budget, I'll stand up and take that," Gartner said. "I'm proud of it. By doing that, I'm working to solidify the future of NBC News."
He said that unless somebody reins in expenses, particularly those that have more to do with supporting a bureaucracy than with putting news on the air, the combination of slowly declining viewership and lower-cost competitors will put TV news in a downward spiral from which it won't recover.
If he's right, maybe someday his critics will give him credit. If he's wrong or becomes a casualty of the network news wars himself, at least he has another job to fall back on: He's still editor of the Daily Tribune in Ames.