In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a chubby, clean-shaven reporter named Frank Sutherland sat in the middle rows of The Tennessean newsroom.

Sutherland, like all the reporters, was assigned a metallic desk and a manual typewriter. In the back rows during that era sat the more veteran writers—Larry Daughtrey, John Hemphill, Jack Hurst, Bill Kovach, Jim Squires, Jerry Thompson, and Wayne Whitt.

Many veterans in the back rows of the newsroom say they perceived Sutherland at the time to be insufferably submissive. Five people who were colleagues of his at the time, in separate interviews and without prompting by the interviewer, used the term “ass-kisser” to describe Sutherland. Four of those say that from time to time they played a little trick on young Sutherland. They would begin whispering to each other—just loud enough for Sutherland to hear—details of an impending secret meeting with a union organizer. Of course, The Tennessean was a non-union paper, and such a meeting would be sure to rankle management. But the meeting in question was purely fictitious. What was in progress was a practical joke. And Sutherland was the butt of it.

The veterans would wait to see how long it took before Sutherland found some pretense to wander away from his desk and into then-editor John Seigenthaler’s private office, presumably to report what he had heard.

“He wouldn’t usually wait but a few minutes,” one of Sutherland’s former colleagues recalls. “Frank would usually stop by the bathroom first so it wouldn’t be too obvious.”

Sutherland, whom Seigenthaler handpicked to succeed him as Tennessean editor in 1989, strongly denies ever talking to Seigenthaler about union activity during that time. But the former Tennessean newsmen who took part in the scam independently explained the details of their little game to the Scene. However, all the veterans, including Seigenthaler, declined to be quoted on the record.

In the end, the truth of what went on may not matter that much. What does matter is the perception that people had of Sutherland, the man who now edits this city’s daily newspaper. On the positive side, the old-timers recall him as a solid and diligent reporter. They remember his going undercover in the early 1970s for 31 days as a patient in a Nashville mental hospital, after which he wrote a riveting, award-winning account of conditions there. They remember he covered his beats well, got his facts right, and was energetic and ambitious.

On the other hand, he was regarded as the type of young journalist who tried to get ahead by currying favor with Seigenthaler and others high on the masthead. It was, the veterans say, a characteristic of Sutherland’s demeanor and an annoying trait. There is abundant evidence that Sutherland has excelled at what, in organization speak, is an ability to “manage up.” That skill has served him well throughout his impressive journalism career and especially in his relationship with Gannett Co., the largest-circulation daily newspaper chain in the United States.

Former Tennessean investigative reporter Joel Kaplan worked under Sutherland from 1979 to 1982. “Frank had good newspaper instincts and terrific news judgment,” he recalls. “He had come from the community and knew who the players were in town. I didn’t mind working for him, but he had a tendency to kiss Seig’s ass. I used it to my advantage, so I didn’t complain about it. But it did foster some resentment in the newsroom.”

To understand the 55-year-old Sutherland and the way he edits a newspaper is to peer into a national drama, one in which the role of editors at daily American newspapers has been utterly transformed. Once upon a time, editors were larger-than-life visionaries, inspirational and opinionated figures who swashbuckled through their communities. Much like Seigenthaler, they were willing to use the power and influence of their papers to lead their cities. Often, these papers were independently owned, and profits could be sacrificed in the pursuit of a story or for some other investment to enhance the paper.

Today’s editors are different. They must understand demographics, market surveys, and financial statements. They have to carry on “initiatives” foisted upon them by their corporate bosses. They have a whole lot more on their plates than simply deciding what to put on the front page. Sutherland’s other job title even has a corporate ring to it: “senior vice president news.”

Sutherland has one foot in the past, and can share in the romance of The Tennessean’s glory days. He has also presided over the transformation of his newspaper into a 21st century Gannett product. In fact, he has survived the trek from the Tennessean of old to the newspaper of today.

Of the reporters who congregated in the newsroom during Sutherland’s early days at the paper, several went on to win to Pulitzer Prizes. Sutherland and five others ultimately became editors of large daily newspapers. Of the six who became editors, two—Squires and Kovach—have left journalism because, they told the Scene, they couldn’t stomach the pressure to produce profits rather than good stories. Sutherland, however, the country boy from Mt. Juliet who has spent the bulk of his career at Gannett, is still grinding away at editing a daily newspaper.

“Frank Sutherland has had to survive in the same kind of corporate environment that I was in,” says Squires, who left The Tennessean to become editor of The Orlando Sentinel and later of the Chicago Tribune, and whose 1993 book, Read All About It!, is considered one of the more perceptive critiques of contemporary journalism. “The concessions Frank has to make are the same kinds I had to make in Chicago. At some point, I ran the string too far. Frank is probably not going to do that.”

A now bearded Sutherland has adapted well. He is conversant in budgets, knowledgeable in research, and sophisticated in marketing strategies. He sits atop a financial powerhouse of a newspaper and is adored by his parent company’s top executives. He also has instituted a number of editorial programs at his paper to improve quality and fairness, namely, he says, “training sessions on our ethics code, some of which were daylong. We have brought in lawyers joining experienced staff members to do sessions on libel.” He has been, quite literally, the poster child for Gannett. His likeness, accompanied by a prominent interview with him titled “A conversation with Frank Sutherland,” adorned the company’s 1997 annual report.

In that question-and-answer session, Sutherland is asked what newspapers can do to win back the public’s trust. His response: “Be accurate. That means the search for the truth has to be more diligent than ever. No titillating readers. Get all sides. Be fair and honest. No hidden agendas.”

In his newsroom, reporters and editors praise Sutherland for his ability to identify a good story for the next day’s paper, for his editing skills, and for his judgment.

The Scene interviewed 68 editors and reporters who work, or have worked, with Sutherland at The Tennessean. Virtually all of them offered some praise for Sutherland. Among the persistent complaints that emerged from those interviews, three stemmed from his perceived inattention to the news operations of the paper: He doesn’t spend enough time in the newsroom, doesn’t pay attention to what’s in the paper, and delegates almost all editorial responsibilities to his managing editor.

Those who were critical of Sutherland also charged he has no sense of “vision” for the paper. They criticized the lack of big, important stories that are critical to the life of the city. They said Sutherland is afraid to go after big Nashville institutions. And they worried that he has allowed marketing and advertising to play larger roles in the editorial operations of the paper than they should.

Basically, 57 people who have worked with him raised serious doubts about Sutherland’s ability to produce an excellent newspaper.

“Frank Sutherland may not have been as flamboyant or aggressive as some of Seigenthaler’s other choices,” explains Kaplan, now chairman of the newspaper department at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. “But Frank is a smart guy, and Seigenthaler knew he would survive in the Gannett culture.”

Sutherland has survived. And that can’t have been easy.

“These editors are willing to maintain high profits in the face of evidence that it may not be sustainable,” Philip Meyer, professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says of today’s editors, not commenting about Sutherland specifically. “What’s been lost is the romance and poetry of the newspaper business.”

Ernest Franklin Sutherland Jr. was born on May 31, 1945, on what was then called the Smyrna Air Force Base, and moved to Mt. Juliet as a small child. A graduate of Castle Heights Military Academy in 1962, he then took the short hike to Vanderbilt University. “I went to Castle Heights because it offered foreign languages, and Mt. Juliet High School at the time did not,” Sutherland says. “Most of the colleges my parents thought I might want to attend, including Vanderbilt, required foreign languages for admission then.”

While at Vanderbilt, Sutherland had little time for a social life. In the morning, he was in class. At nights, he worked full-time at The Tennessean covering local colleges and universities and editing the paper’s youth page.

In those days, Sutherland was clearly a man imbued with a distinct ideology. “Vanderbilt was a very conservative campus at the time, and I believed strongly in civil rights,” he recalls. “So I was not in the mainstream political philosophy of the campus at that time. But it would be a mistake to infer very much from that, because there were many students on the campus who felt the same way I did. The ’60s did have its influence on Vanderbilt too.”

He graduated from Vanderbilt in 1970 with a major in philosophy and minors in mathematics and East Asian history. It took him eight years to reach graduation, in part because, unlike most college students, he was working full-time. He stayed on at The Tennessean, covering, among other things, local and state politics. Four years later, he hit it big with his undercover investigation on the atrocities at a local mental hospital. During the 1977-1978 academic year, Sutherland studied at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow in journalism’s most distinguished mid-career academic program.

He returned to The Tennessean after his fellowship, entering the management ranks first as a regional editor and later as city editor. Sutherland left the paper in 1982 for a series of top jobs with other Gannett papers. First, he became managing editor of the Hattiesburg American in Mississippi. There, Sutherland faced a significant ethical dilemma. As the 1988 book The Virtuous Journalist by Stephen Klaidman and Tom L. Beauchamp explains: “Sutherland’s particular problem turned on whether a newspaper...should cooperate with a police operation. The police maintained that press cooperation was essential to protect an innocent life. But the requested cooperation entailed lying in print...a fundamental breach of trust between the press and the public.”

In a taped conversation with his reporter, who was leaning toward cooperating with police, Sutherland explained his rationale: “Once you tell a lie, no matter for how good a reason, your readers will always remember it. They will never know for sure about us again, whether we will ever tell a lie again under another circumstance.”

Ultimately, Sutherland agreed to a compromise that neither satisfied police nor involved lying to readers. No one was killed, and months later officers, using conventional police methods, arrested the person they’d been pursuing, who had been trying to hire a hit man.

In 1984 and 1985, while he continued to run the Hattiesburg American, Sutherland served an elected term as national president of the Society of Professional Journalists. He told the Scene that “one of the most significant things I did” in that role “was convert our annual convention into a series of professional development seminars. Prior to that, we had typical speeches and panels like other such conventions.” Under his stewardship, SPJ also launched a minority-affairs campaign and “Project Watchdog,” which, according to a column Sutherland wrote in SPJ’s Quill magazine in late 1985, was a “plan to help inform the American public of its stake in a free and vigorous press.” Casey Bukro, SPJ’s national ethics chair at the time and now a Chicago Tribune overnight editor, recalls:“Frank was a force in ethics [at SPJ] because he thought they were extremely important.”

In 1986, Sutherland became executive editor of The Jackson Sun, where, according to his bio, “he led the newsroom move to convert the newspaper from six days a week to seven.”

In 1988, Sutherland moved to Louisiana, where he became editor of The Times in Shreveport. There, he oversaw a series that called for reform of the state’s public education system. For the series, the paper was named a finalist in the public service category of the Pulitzer Prize competition in 1989. (See sidebar, “Fact-Checking a Bio.”)

When Seigenthaler announced he was stepping down as editor of The Tennessean in 1989, Sutherland was his choice as successor, and he shepherded the younger editor through the Gannett hiring process. Sutherland was both a Seigenthaler ally and a company guy. And at being a company guy, he excelled.

Gary L. Watson, president of Gannett’s newspaper division, raves about Sutherland. At Gannett, where editors take their corporate awards seriously, Watson points to Sutherland’s many internal accolades. In 1991, Sutherland was named Gannett’s editor of the year. Since then, he has been ranked among Gannett’s top 10 editors eight times. In 1993, The Tennessean was named the company’s outstanding newspaper. Every year since then, the newspaper has won what Gannett calls its “Gold Medal” award, meaning it has ranked among the top five or six newspapers in the company. Gannett chose The Tennessean for the award last year for, among other reasons, the paper’s “innovative use of targeted reader groups to tailor content,” according to Gannett’s Web site.

Since coming back to Nashville in 1989, Sutherland is tied with another Gannett editor for the most internal company awards. His self-written bio makes references to 12 different Gannett awards.

Sutherland is also respected for another reason: His paper is very profitable. The Tennessean is one of the five most profitable newspapers among the 114 dailies in Gannett’s chain, according to three Gannett finance officials. Add the financial dimension to the awards, and Sutherland becomes the ideal Gannett editor. To be certain, Sutherland is not graded on profitability in any formal sense. But his reputation has been greatly enhanced within Gannett’s corporate culture because of The Tennessean’s robust profit history.

“Frank Sutherland has an aura and glow about him at Gannett,” says a former editor of a Gannett newspaper. “People want to sit near him at corporate dinners. I’m sure that would lead Frank to think, in his own mind, that his paper is great, no matter what those in Nashville say about it.”

Many in Nashville do not share Sutherland’s positive view of his newspaper. The Scene identified 136 community leaders to hear their views about The Tennessean. A persistent refrain among the 50 of those who commented on the record—and the majority of the others who spoke off the record—is that The Tennessean is of average-to-poor quality. Clearly, Sutherland thinks otherwise.

In an hour-long interview with the Scene, Sutherland sank deep into a brown couch in his well-appointed 1100 Broadway office. On his desk and walls are photographs of his wife, Natilee Duning, and their two children, a framed copy of the First Amendment, and various awards. Possessed of a large, booming voice, Sutherland proudly refers to The Tennessean’s success in the internal Gannett awards and state competitions as evidence of the fine quality of his paper.

“I don’t keep such a list [of awards], nor do I have one handy,” he later explains. “Those that come to mind include education writing awards, NPPA [National Press Photographers Association] awards, column writing awards, editorial writing awards, feature writing awards, APSE [Associated Press Sports Editors] top awards, including general excellence, individual writer and editing awards, special sections.”

Yet The Tennessean hasn’t, under Sutherland’s stewardship, won a single, prominent national award of the sort that most ambitious newspaper editors and writers covet. “The awards people care about are the Pulitzer, George Polk, IRE [Investigative Reporters and Editors], and SPJ-national,” explains veteran journalist Robert Greene, who has won dozens of top journalism prizes, including two Pulitzers while at Newsday, and now teaches journalism at Hofstra University in New York. Since Sutherland became editor in late 1989, The Tennessean has won none of these. The paper has, however, won lots of awards from Gannett, Sutherland points out. “To be blunt, most internal corporate awards are feel-good things,” says Kaplan, the former Tennessean reporter now teaching journalism at Syracuse University. “They tend to be political, a way of boosting someone’s pay without actually paying them more.”

Newspaper experts aren’t any more impressed with Sutherland’s contention that his paper wins many awards in Tennessee-wide journalism contests. “The dominant daily papers across the country tend to do well in state journalism contests because their competition isn’t very stiff,” says Rob Gunnison, director of school affairs at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

Asked to rate the editorial quality of his newspaper, Sutherland says: “The only general rule I know is readership,” a reference to the number of people who pick up the paper each week. Sutherland says that the paper’s readership has “substantially and consistently grown over the years I have been here.”

In fact, an independent analysis released last year by Scarborough Research, a leading market research firm for the media, showed that The Tennessean ranked 18th among newspapers in the top 50 metropolitan markets in terms of the percentage of adults who say they read the newspaper on weekdays. That survey also showed that 42.2 percent of adults in Nashville read The Tennessean on weekdays, a favorable readership statistic.

The Tennessean’s rankings in this report were provided to the Scene by the paper’s managing editor, David Green. For what it’s worth, The New York Times placed 56th on the Scarborough list, below such papers as Asbury Park Press of Neptune, N.J., and The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif.

Gary Meo, senior vice president for print sales at Scarborough, explains: “Clearly, there are other factors besides journalistic excellence which drive readership.”

High readership is indisputably favorable. Still, other newspaper experts dispute Sutherland’s argument that his paper’s high readership means that his paper is a good one. “I would not use readership data by itself as an indicator of the quality of a newspaper,” says David Weaver, the Roy W. Howard Research Professor at Indiana University’s School of Journalism. “Just look at where they place The New York Times, and you’ll see that quality and readership are not highly correlated.”

Papers with high readership tend to face little competition and benefit as well from other factors, such as high-income levels in their markets, Weaver says.

Professor Jack McLeod, who studies media issues at the University of Wisconsin, says it would be “misleading” to contend that a paper is first-rate because of strong readership data alone.

Meanwhile, The Tennessean’s paid circulation during the Monday-to-Friday period has shot up an impressive 47 percent from 128,039 in 1990—Sutherland’s first full year back in Nashville—to 188,529 last year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Some of the growth can be attributed to two factors unrelated to the quality of the newspaper: the population explosion in Middle Tennessee during the 1990s, and the closing of the Nashville Banner in early 1998, which caused many new subscribers to switch over to the morning paper.

Circulation is the number of the newspaper’s paid subscribers, as opposed to readership, which reflects the percentage of people in a market who say, in surveys, that they look at the paper at some point during the day. For example, if a Nashville office gets one subscription to The Tennessean but 15 employees there scan the paper during the day, that paper would count as one subscription toward circulation, but all 15 adults would be considered part of the newspaper’s readership.

Sutherland’s pride in his news product is evident. “It is easy for me to find a long list of important and interesting stories in The Tennessean,” he says. Asked what big stories he has presided over since coming back to run The Tennessean, Sutherland is vague. “The ones we are working on for tomorrow,” he explains. “Not to be flip, but I am always looking ahead, not backward. I find that readers want to know what you’re doing for them today, not what you did years ago. If your question is about 11 years of stories, there have been many superb ones.”

Sutherland, not alone among Gannett editors, presumably gets mixed signals as to how vigorously to pursue investigative reports. One former Gannett editor, who ultimately left a top post, contends that the company dissuades editorial aggressiveness. “It’s subtle. Gannett corporate loves to win awards, but they hate to be sued for libel or to get letters complaining about the paper.” In the face of these conflicting mandates, editors tend to chase “safe” investigative stories that won’t upset community leaders.

So, what is Sutherland’s vision for The Tennessean and the city it covers? “To always be the preeminent source of news and information for Nashville and Middle Tennessee.” What role does he believe the paper should play in Nashville? “It should provide news and information for its readers and play a leadership role in the community.” How does he see this role differing from its earlier role under Seigenthaler? “I don’t see the role as differing. The news priorities of our readers have changed, just as our community has changed.”

In terms of what the paper covers, Sutherland says the paper must write about “more subject areas now and sometimes give them larger display than politics.” Politics and government, he says, “don’t automatically get good display. If the Legislature doesn’t do something substantially significant on a given day, that story will go inside the newspaper. When I covered the Legislature, stories were more often on Page 1.”

Sutherland also says that the “kind and amount of attention we give business has changed drastically. Our business staff used to consist of one person who wrote one column a day. Now we have a business staff of 14 and a separate daily section each day.”

As for comparing his newspaper with Seigenthaler’s, he says, “What we cover today is so different in its breadth from what we covered when I started, it is often an apples-and-oranges comparison. There was one education writer when I started. Now there are four.”

Sutherland’s view of a newspaper is based on changing dynamics in the media and entertainment industries.

“If I were putting out a paper that appealed solely to me, on the front page I’d put articles there about golf, wine, how to cure baldness, and if there is sex after 50,” he says. His point is that it’s difficult to please everyone because newspapers are a mass medium in an industry of niches. It is, understandably, tough to edit a mass product when there are so many different ways for individuals to get their news and information.

And so, with increased competition from TV, cable, the Internet, and elsewhere, editors like Sutherland across the country are trying to apply business-school solutions to an age-old editorial problem: How do we get readers to buy newspapers in such an environment? Once upon a time, editors focused on getting stories. Now they must follow a “something for everyone” approach. It is not a matter of writing a story that all of the community will find interesting. It is more about finding the little elements that will lure a reader to the paper based upon his or her interests.

As a result, there are few big stories that offend, or startle, or boggle the readers’ minds. Instead, the paper develops into an amalgam of tiny things, each there for a demographic reason. “Day-to-day news coverage is stronger in some ways today than it was years ago, but the newspaper just doesn’t seem as relevant as it did when Seigenthaler and others had missions, or crusades, like civil rights and mental health,” says former Tennessean business reporter David A. Fox, the founder of the online business newspaper NashvillePost.com.

“The corporate response is to lower the paper’s voice,” adds Jim Squires. “What matters is relevance.”

In the Tennessean newsroom, Sutherland is not the type who rolls up his sleeves and gets into the down-and-dirty of newsgathering—nothing like his predecessor.

“You’d often be at a dinner party with Seigenthaler, and he’d race back to the paper at midnight to check on a story,” says U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Gilbert S. Merritt.

Sutherland almost never shows up at the daily story meetings where editors decide what goes where in the next day’s paper. Meanwhile, Sutherland began writing a wine column in 1994 that appears regularly in The Tennessean’s food section.

Some staffers worry that when important players in the community ask the paper to hold a story, or to tone down a hard-edged columnist, he accommodates them. What he wants, some people in the newsroom believe, is to be looked upon with favor by powerful interests and show that he, too, is out for the good of the community.

Take the case of former Tennessean reporter Will Pinkston, now a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Pinkston’s August 1998 Sunday feature story on problems in Nashville’s tourist industry was held out of the newspaper for one week after Sutherland intervened. Had it been published as planned, it would have hit the newsracks the same weekend that some 5,000 members of the American Society of Association Executives were gathering at an annual meeting at the Opryland Hotel. Publishing the story during the association’s visit would have made local tourism officials look bad.

When Butch Spyridon, head of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Bureau, complained to Tennessean officials about the story—Spyridon confirms that he lobbied “vigorously” for Pinkston’s story to be held—the story was, in fact, held.

Pinkston also confirms this chain of events, but Sutherland says the story was held for other reasons. However, he says he can’t remember what they were. After Sutherland held the story, a visibly annoyed Bill Choyke, Pinkston’s editor at the time, wore black to the office and made it clear to a few of his colleagues that it was in protest.

Consider as well the scoop that Fox, the former Tennessean business reporter, uncovered in early 1995. Fox learned that Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp. was relocating its corporate headquarters from Louisville to Nashville. But for several days, Fox and other colleagues were miffed when Sutherland refused to run the story. At the time, Sutherland alleged the story was held because he was not comfortable with Fox’s sources. But Fox had the story dead right.

Fox’s scoop eventually ran under a six-column banner headline on the front page of The Tennessean. That was on the morning of Jan. 10, hours before then-Mayor Phil Bredesen and senior company officials held a news conference at the Metro Courthouse announcing the relocation. While Fox and many of his colleagues suspected the story was delayed because someone important in the community had asked Sutherland to hold it, Sutherland tells the Scene the story was held because unnamed journalists at the Louisville Courier-Journal, which is also owned by Gannett, told him that Fox had the story wrong. The company, they told Sutherland, was to remain in Kentucky.

But no stories on the impending move ran in the Courier-Journal between Jan. 1, 1995, and Jan. 10, 1995—the approximate period when Fox had the story that Sutherland wouldn’t let him run. In fact, Kyung Song, who covered Columbia/HCA for the Courier-Journal at the time of the merger and is now a business reporter at The Seattle Times, tells the Scene that she had no information that Fox’s story was inaccurate.

She also says she wasn’t aware that anybody else at the paper had such information. “I find it highly disturbing that the editor of The Tennessean would rely on a competitor’s information rather than his own reporter,” Song says.

For his part, Sutherland tells the Scene that he can’t remember who at the Louisville paper told him Fox’s story was wrong.

Then there were the arguments with Tim Chavez, the newspaper’s passionate columnist who was one of the loudest critics of the Bredesen administration. Chavez’s self-proclaimed mission is to give voice to the voiceless, and he has lambasted the city for having spent taxpayer money on sports stadia rather than on education and other social needs.

In one particularly barbed column, Chavez termed Bredesen “Pharaoh Phil” for having built monuments to himself. Sutherland was exasperated and prodded Chavez to write about other issues. One former reporter recalls Sutherland’s walking into the newsroom to light into Chavez after another anti-Bredesen screed. “Frank kept saying that Tim needed to act more like a reporter, and present both sides of the story,” the writer recalls.

“Tim just took it quietly. A lot of people could hear Frank yelling, but everybody kept their eyes on their computers.”

Chavez declined comment. Three of his colleagues, however, say Chavez recently confided in them that Sutherland specifically ordered him not to talk to the Scene. They say Chavez wondered why he had been singled out by Sutherland.

Bredesen says his press secretaries “were aggressive, as they should be, in promoting my agenda with reporters like Chavez.” As for Sutherland, he says he is “proud” of Chavez’s work at the paper, but declined to discuss the matter further.

Then there’s his relationship with Al Gore, who was a reporter with Sutherland in the 1970s.

Critics pounded the paper for favoring Gore during the presidential election campaign, when in fact The Tennessean bent over backward to be fair. But one incident regarding Gore and Sutherland did raise eyebrows in the newsroom. In March 1997, a fax arrived in The Tennessean newsroom containing an engagement announcement: Karenna Gore, the vice president’s daughter, was to wed Drew Schiff. The fax ended up on the desk of gossip columnist Brad Schmitt.

To localize the story, Schmitt made a routine follow-up phone call to Al Gore’s parents in Carthage, Tenn. Inexplicably, Al and wife Tipper had authorized the engagement announcement to be faxed, but had failed to inform Karenna’s grandparents. So Schmitt, who declined to talk about the imbroglio, unknowingly bore the news to the grandparents of their granddaughter’s engagement. The befuddled grandparents placed angry calls to Washington, D.C. When it all got back to Sutherland, he went ballistic. As it turned out, the fax had been addressed to him personally. Sutherland quickly killed Schmitt’s news item, which was reasonable enough. But staffers still chuckle when they recall what happened next.

Sutherland started walking around the newsroom trying to find out who gave the fax to Schmitt. Embarrassing Sutherland in front of the Gores was not acceptable behavior at The Tennessean, even if the mistake was an honest one.

Sutherland’s memory of the episode is very different: “I asked Brad how he got the letter. He said he found it on his desk.”

Many staffers say Sutherland tends to lose his temper with subordinates but defers to his boss, Tennessean publisher Craig Moon.

As well, Sutherland is known for developing strong relationships with those on the business side of the paper.

“Both Frank and [managing editor] Dave [Green] are very receptive to our ideas,” says Kelly Harville, the paper’s marketing director. “I work well with both of them. They are trying to put out a good product, and they understand they need to listen to us.... We don’t make business decisions based on one editor’s vision, but based on a lot of thought and research.”

Marketing, circulation, and advertising all poke their heads in the operations of today’s Tennessean newsroom. Years ago, by contrast, the closest editorial staffers got to staffers from the paper’s business side was meeting in the bathroom or passing in the hallways.

Now, at Thursday-morning meetings in Sutherland’s office to discuss the content of the Sunday paper, circulation or marketing staffers from time to time join Sutherland and other key editors. And Sutherland includes them in the conversations, asking them questions like, “Do you think story A or story B will drive more rack sales?” Often, those staffers weigh in on what they’d like to see above the fold on the front page, given that the top half of the paper is what drives rack sales. Circulation and marketing staffers also attend the daily story meetings from time to time.

Many of the paper’s top business executives, with whom the editorial department has historically had poor relations, seem to like Sutherland. Leslie Giallombardo, The Tennessean’s top-ranking business executive after Moon, explains that Sutherland is clearly the best of the dozen or so editors she has worked with during her 23-year Gannett career in terms of “understanding the big picture.” She notes that Sutherland is “always thinking about the whole operation, while other editors are more territorial—they won’t let you in the newsroom.”

The perception in the newsroom is that Sutherland is receptive to doing whatever publisher Moon wants. “When Frank wanted us to do something, he’d try to sell us on it,” explains a former Tennessean editor. “When we didn’t buy into it, he’d finally take us aside, one by one, and whisper in our ear, ‘Craig wants us to do it.’ I heard him do this 20 to 30 times. Like that somehow made it OK.”

The same former editor recalls Sutherland’s meeting with a group of editorial staffers one day, because Moon had told Sutherland he wanted more business stories. “It turned out that Craig had been counting the number of stories in the Nashville Business Journal. The next thing you know, everybody is leaning on [former business editor] Lisa Green to have more short business stories.” The former staffer says Sutherland did the same thing when Moon decided he liked the entertainment listings in the Scene more than those in The Tennessean.

“It seemed pretty clear what Frank’s thinking was,” the former editor says. “As long as he did what Craig wanted, he couldn’t be blamed if the circulation numbers didn’t improve.... That was pure Frank, trying to keep Craig happy.”

Sutherland says he doesn’t “recall ever saying ‘because Craig wants it done.’ ” Sutherland says Moon’s only involvement in the newsroom is in strategic planning, such as setting goals for circulation and readership. “I, like other editors, have to manage the newsroom operating budget and news hole according to my publisher’s expectations,” he explains.

But, even as editor, Sutherland makes it clear who’s in charge at 1100 Broadway. “I work for Craig Moon,” an unapologetic Sutherland says. “He is my boss.”

Sutherland goes on to say: “Moon has never asked me to kill a story, nor to do anything journalistically inappropriate or unethical. He does not edit, nor has he attempted to edit, the newspaper. He does not see stories until the newspaper is published. I tell him about major issues that might involve legal action, and I tell him about series that we might promote to our readers, but he does not meddle in any way with the journalism of the newspaper.”

However, two Tennessean executives and two newsroom staffers who were at the paper in May 1994 told the Scene they have seen precisely the kind of meddling Sutherland says doesn’t happen. Case in point: On May 20, 1994, The Tennessean ran a news brief on the front of its business section announcing a recall of Mazda sedans. Car dealers didn’t like the negative publicity, and they complained loudly to the paper. Of course, the item had news value, and Sutherland was right to publish the story. Nonetheless, during a meeting of the newspaper’s operating committee, Moon laid into Sutherland with such forcefulness for running the piece that the incident left a lasting impression on two members of the committee who witnessed the exchange.

Moon’s anger trickled back to the newsroom, according to two staffers there at the time. “Frank was very angry that we’d run a negative story in the car section,” one of them recalls. “You knew he’d only said it because he’d been pushed there by Craig.” Says Sutherland: “I don’t recall the incident, nor is that my style.”

One top newspaper executive, who has been present at hundreds of Tennessean operating committee meetings with Sutherland and Moon, disputes Sutherland’s statement that Moon doesn’t interfere with the paper’s editorial content. “That is absolutely not true,” the executive says. “I was not only present, but participated in several meetings in which the quantity of [news] content as well as the placement of the coverage was mandated by Craig to Frank. Then it would happen.”

Gene Roberts, former managing editor of The New York Times who now teaches journalism at the University of Maryland, says it’s not unusual for newspapers to be run essentially by operating committees. Speaking generally, and not specifically about The Tennessean, he says: “A major problem at chain-owned papers around the country is that the publishers are now in charge. They set up operating committees—of which the editor is just one person—and then that committee makes decisions by consensus. These operating committees—which are run by the publisher—make policy decisions affecting the news coverage of the newspaper.”

Sutherland is savvy about market research, and when the numbers come back saying that the Nashville reading public wants a specific type of story, he gets on it. Sutherland has made no secret of the fact that his interest in education and urban growth has been driven, in large part, by market surveys. “It is one of the tools we use in making strategic judgments about readership and circulation issues,” he says. “We also use formal and informal focus groups, reader advisory boards, anecdotal information gathered by staff members from sources and readers, and past experience of reporters and editors.”

Some critics, however, disagree with this type of editorial outlook. “If you allow readers to tell you what to put in the paper, you don’t need reporters, much less the passion or energy or wisdom to inspire them,” says Wendell “Sonny” Rawls, a former investigative reporter for The Tennessean who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize at The Philadelphia Inquirer and who now teaches journalism at Middle Tennessee State University.

One former writer recalls Sutherland’s regularly saying during in-house meetings that he wasn’t interested in more political coverage because politics didn’t deliver readers. Some newsroom staffers, for example, were dismayed that The Tennessean failed to send a reporter on Al Gore’s campaign plane during last year’s election. Sutherland, they argued, cared more about saving money than he did about delivering the news, even with a native son running for president. Tennessean staffers remember that it cost about $2,000 a day to put a reporter on the Gore campaign trail in 1992.

“We had no special access to the candidate,” explains Sutherland, who adds that such coverage was “expensive to do.”

If working so closely with the business side of the newspaper has its downside, there may, in fact, be an upside. Sutherland says Gannett’s stability has meant he’s been able to get more “resources” for his team, and the evidence supports him.

Since Sutherland took the reins as Tennessean editor in 1989, the number of editorial staffers has almost doubled, growing from 118 to over 200 today. Over roughly the same period, the average number of news columns in the paper every day has shot up from 131 to approximately 200 last year.

Meanwhile, what becomes apparent is that Sutherland partially defines editorial success in numerical terms. If yesterday’s editor crusaded across the city with an agenda a mile long, today’s editor carries a calculator and a dossier of market research.

Former Tennessean reporter and Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam tells the Scene: “The editors who get promoted are the ones willing to play the game. Those who don’t like this baseline generally leave the company pretty quickly.”

Or as Roberts says of today’s editors generally—not about Sutherland particularly—this “new type of editor who is rising to the top of news organizations today is the one who knows how to keep his corporate bosses happy.”

Next week, meet Tennessean managing editor David Green.