Breach of Faith: A Crisis of Coverage in the Age of Corporate Journalism, University of Arkansas Press. 288 pages. $29.95.

The year was 1979 and Jim Hale, the publisher of The Kansas City Star, was explaining to me -- his managing editor -- the necessity of a public company such as ours showing higher earnings each year to meet its obligations to its shareholders. "But," I protested, "at some point in the future won't that be impossible? Surely we can't keep this growth up year after year and retain quality. When is enough enough?"

"Never," he replied. "We always need more."

That's the underlying theme in Breach of Faith. It's the second volume of articles based on a comprehensive study and analysis of the newspaper industry that first appeared in 1998 and 1999 in the American Journalism Review, published at the University of Maryland. It is edited by two authorities in the field, Gene Roberts and Thomas Kunkel. Roberts is the legendary editor who led The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1972 to 1990 before becoming managing editor of The New York Times and a journalism professor at the University of Maryland. Kunkel is the dean of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism.

The first volume explored the buying, selling and consolidation of the American press that has been transforming the industry over the last 50 years, an evolutionary phenomenon editors have been whining about for as long.

This volume attempts to document the impact of that transformation, with the theme of how the increased emphasis on profits has undermined good journalism and the historical civic mission of newspapers. It is genuinely enlightening and sometimes makes a convincing case.

In one of the most glaring examples of cutbacks in coverage, writers Mary Walton and Charles Layton show how coverage of state government has dramatically declined over the past several years. Using a survey of state capitol bureaus, the husband-and-wife team, longtime reporters at The Philadelphia Inquirer, demonstrate the decline from the early 1990s in the number of reporters covering state government.

They also report that in today's smaller newsrooms statehouse reporters generally have less experience than their predecessors and that the gulf between reporters and editors has widened, with many editors not understanding state government and not inclined to learn.

How did this all come about? Mainly, Walton and Layton argue, because many editors believe that government news is boring and readers don't care about it. This editors' belief was reinforced by market research conducted for industry trade groups and individual papers in the late 1970s and early 1980s that said readers wanted more lifestyle and "how-to" content and advocated numerous but briefer stories to compete against television.

At the same time, the new national newspaper, USA Today, exploded on the scene in 1982 and seemed to support the findings as it emphasized "soft" content and short stories. The authors contend that all of this led to "editors and publishers answerable to corporate bosses outside the state" often losing their commitment to statehouse and other coverage of serious events, sometimes called hard news.

In truth, however, most of the research advocating more soft news didn't specifically advise editors to publish this kind of news instead of hard news. It simply stressed the need for more lifestyle content. Actually, market surveys then and now frequently find that people read newspapers primarily for hard news.

So why should readers care about state government coverage, especially if it's written and presented in boring ways? Because, the authors argue, more and more of the real action of government is at the state level, especially since the federal government has been surrendering authority to the states in many important areas of domestic policy. There's evidence aplenty to make their case: for example, 25 states have started their own meat- and poultry-inspection programs.

In the book, the editors have updated the survey of state capitol coverage, as well as the statistics in the studies involving international and Washington news. They discovered an initial increase in statehouse reporters after the article was first published but by this year the numbers had declined again, dropping slightly below the original findings.

Many of the book's other articles, written by a wide variety of journalists, contend that similar trends show up in other aspects of serious news coverage. Among their findings: More reporters are covering Washington than ever before but far fewer are covering the federal departments where decisions affecting most peoples' lives are made every day. Instead, they favor thematic coverage of such issues as the environment and health care. Only the major wire services and the largest and most prestigious newspapers produce an original foreign report, even after the 9 / 11 terrorists' attack on America. Business coverage still focuses on the misdeeds of a few at the expense of more thorough, enlightening journalism about commerce.

All of this has occurred, many of the articles conclude, mainly because the corporatization of the industry has reduced newsroom resources.

That's the case against consolidation and public ownership of newspapers as presented by Roberts and Kunkel, distinguished journalists of impeccable integrity.

Yet as I look back after more than 41 years in the newspaper business, most as an editor, the conclusion about public ownership -- while somewhat true about a few companies -- doesn't mirror my experience.

Let me explain.

Few would dispute that today's journalists are far better educated than their predecessors and generally more professional in their approach to news. Furthermore, many if not most of today's newspapers have more space for news than a few decades ago, a fact confirmed in one of the book's articles featuring a study of news space at 10 newspapers.

And despite vast changes in ownership and the influence in the past several years of a culture of entertainment and changing news values that sometimes trivialize important issues, many of today's newspapers are far superior and more sophisticated than just 30 years ago.

One has to look no further to advance this argument than at just five of the many newspapers owned by Knight-Ridder, which in the past few years has been constantly accused of increasing profits at the expense of news coverage.

The five -- The San Jose Mercury News, The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Kansas City Star and The Philadelphia Inquirer -- were privately owned about 30 years ago, as were some other Knight-Ridder papers. And their quality at that time ranged from weak to just plain awful.

In the 1960s, the family-owned Star-Telegram was declared one of America's 10 worst newspapers. Under family ownership, the Lexington Herald and Leader were possibly even worse. Quality constantly suffered in San Jose under private ownership. The employee-owned Kansas City Star had declined significantly from its lofty position in journalism in the 1940s and '50s. And the Inquirer was a newspaper whose private owner consistently used it as a weapon against his enemies, banning coverage of newsworthy people when they offended him. The Evening Bulletin, until briefly before it died in 1982, was always a better paper than "The Inky."

So how have these papers fared under Knight-Ridder ownership? All are vastly superior today to their earlier editions, despite some recent shrinkage in their news operations. The Inquirer, which in the last 10 years has lost many talented journalists, is not as exciting as it was under Roberts' leadership but still retains many outstanding journalists and remains among the best dozen newspapers in America.

And these are not isolated cases among metropolitan newspapers. Many other papers in the last two decades -- The Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, The Sacramento Bee, the Wilmington, Del. News Journal, Newsday, the Sun-Sentinel in Ft. Lauderdale, to name just a few -- have improved -- even excelled -- journalistically under public corporate ownership.

As Breach of Faith correctly notes, coverage of some substantial news has suffered in the last few years. But in many cases, editors are more responsible for this than corporate executives.

Despite shrinking growth in budgets, many editors still have the ability to decide their newspaper's journalistic priorities. If editors are going to be successful in the future, I would advise them to:

Quit complaining and lead:

I mean really lead. Lead with passion and conviction. Become agents of change and apostles of hope. Paraphrasing Gandhi, you must become the change you want to see. Focus the mission. Inspire your staffs and create environments where they can do their best work. Sit down and actually edit the work of some of your writers instead of chewing up time overseeing administrative tasks. Be dedicated to excellence, however you define your mission. Set high performance standards and enforce them. Walton and Layton correctly conclude that state government coverage is vital, so make it a priority, even if other coverage has to shrink. Ditto for investigative and explanatory journalism, the substantive content that distinguishes newspapers from other media. Even small staffs can excel at some things.

Embrace innovation and creativity:

Take some risks and support ideas from the staff that you don't especially like. Get out of the way of people who have passion. Be a champion of all forms of journalism, especially narrative story-telling, photojournalism and vivid headline writing and editing that puts a premium on not only accuracy and fairness but also literate prose. Create new reporter beats every year to reflect changes in society and discard the ones that don't work. Be the editor of the entire paper, not just your favorite sections.

Hire the very best journalists you can afford:

Track their careers for as long as it takes, before hiring -- to reduce the danger of mistakes. At the same time, cherish your experienced, senior journalists, who too often get little attention and less respect as years pass.

Stay ahead:

Take advantage of new technology to advance better journalism.

Advance democracy:

This must be the most important social mission of any newspaper. Your primary obligation is to help readers make informed decisions in matters of governance and public policy. You have a First Amendment protection -- and thus duty -- to do that; excel at this, if at nothing else.

Keep it simple:

Do as Jim Hale told me in 1979: "Take in more money than you spend, write good stories, and don't screw up."

As for his assertion that The Star always needed "more," it continues to prosper today, earning more nearly every year, even during recessions, and retaining solid quality.

Michael E. Waller is The Sun's chairman and former publisher and is retiring at the end of the year. He spent 41 years working in newspapers, 23 as a senior editor at five newspapers before being named a publisher in 1994.