A Publisher's Might   

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ONE DAY RICK MARSI was an award-winning, syndicated and much beloved nature columnist at the Press & Sun-Bulletin in Binghamton, New York. The next day his column was killed. " 'I don¹t want you to take this personally,' " he says Executive Editor Martha Steffens told him. " ' But your column is gone.' She also told me it was not her decision. It was the publisher's decision and his alone."
Other than that, there was no explanation. "I was flabbergasted. Dumbfounded," says Marsi, who had written the column for 20 years, most recently as a freelance writer. "I knew Marty wasn't behind it." He and Steffens had a great relationship, he says; they often collaborated on stories and columns, several of which had won awards. Marsi blames Publisher William Monopoli, who arrived at the Gannett-owned, 65,000-circulation paper in 1997.
Never underestimate the power of a publisher. Marsi's column disappeared in Feburary 1999. Later that year, so did Steffens. Marsi believes she was forced out because "she didn't toe the line. And he found ways to get her out." Pretty soon, the features editor was gone, as was a longtime arts writer and other veteran staffers.
Steffens will only say she resigned in November. Her severance agreement prevents her from discussing what happened. Monopoli declined to comment on Steffens' resignation, though he says he finds Marsi's comments "surprising." He adds: "So much of the thrust of this discontent is more than a year old. It's not an issue that has endured."
But some readers disagree. Michael Starke, owner of the Binghamton Tennis Center, remains disappointed by the Press for its treatment of Marsi. "The Press has seen a drastic changeover in the past year. It seems unfortunate, but [nothing is] more disgraceful than the manner in which they treated Rick and their readers."
After the last column ran, readers circulated petitions supporting Marsi, collecting nearly 1,500 signatures. They then sent them to Monopoli "and got nowhere," says reader Rose Rutkowski, so they forwarded them to Gannett headquarters in Virginia. Gannett Senior Vice President for News Phil Currie sent the petitions back to Monopoli. Readers sought to meet with the publisher but were rebuffed. They brought their complaints to Steffens. The editor "was sympathetic, but she couldn't do anything," says Rutkowski, a former nurse and teacher. "This was Mr. Monopoli's doing."
Monopoli says he answered every letter he received and spoke to many unhappy readers by phone. "Some of these callers were abusive. I didn't see how meeting with folks who had been orally abusive with me would serve a purpose," he says.
At the end of March, Steffens told readers why Marsi's column had been dropped. "Rick's last column had been about a trip to Ecuador, reporting on an environmental expedition he conducted for a local travel firm," she wrote. "While writing about the diverse habitat of the rain forest made for poetic copy, it made us uneasy. It was about a trip he took for a commercial enterprise. The lines that journalists normally draw were more blurred now; we had less control of a situation that could pose ethical problems down the road."
Marsi found the reason for his termination "pretty bogus." His last column was a mood piece about an Ecuadorean town in the shadow of the mountains, a typical look at a natural setting and the flora and fauna that inhabit it. There was no promotion of the travel firm. "If they didn't want me to write about travel," he asks, "why not call me and tell me not to?"
Monopoli says he doesn't know whether anyone warned Marsi away from writing about his travels. In any case, he adds, "We're always trying to make a better match between the paper's content and our readers' interests."