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Updated: Thursday, July 29, 2004 Published: Wednesday, March 21, 2001

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"We are deeply disturbed by Jay Harris' resignation," said NABJ President William W. Sutton Jr., a longtime Harris friend who knew Harris during his journalism career before he became a Knight Ridder corporate officer and publisher. "He has been a tireless diversity warrior, constantly pushing others to do more and, whenever he's had the chance, doing more himself to take action to back up his words. He's been one of Knight Ridder's greatest assets, one of the company's strongest leaders and one of our industry's key leaders."

Sutton said the decision by Harris is a major embarrassment for the media industry and particularly the newspaper industry. "There are too few African American publishers of daily newspapers, especially major daily newspapers, so to lose any of them is a problem. Overall, the market pressures on media companies these days is causing too many hiring freezes. What do we expect to happen when we're trying to have diverse staffs to more accurately and fairly cover all communities if we cannot hire?"

"The truly unfortunate thing is that this situation, this discussion, is happening in newsrooms across this nation. Knight Ridder is not alone," Sutton said, noting that Harris has had a journalism career that included time as an award-winning reporter at The Journal-News in Wilmington, Del., and Gannett News Service before becoming executive editor of The Philadelphia Daily News. "This same discussion is happening at Gannett, McClatchy, the Tribune Co., The New York Times Co., Thomson, CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC."

In a letter to Knight Ridder CEO Tony Ridder and the corporation's newspaper division president, Steve Rossi, Harris explained that he was stepping down "in that doing so will cause [them] to closely examine the wisdom of the profit targets that we've been struggling to find a way to meet."

Harris said the newspaper planned to layoff a number of employees to reach Knight Ridder's profit targets in a staff memo earlier this month. As part of that statement, he spoke of the "lasting harm" this would cause the Mercury News.

"Greed is threatening to kill institutions that address the public's need to know, give us a sense of what's right, what's wrong, what's fair, and that provide us with a window on the world," said Sutton. "What we, as an organization, need to do is not just rally behind Jay, but call out these greedy CEOs and point out that they are hurting everything that they claim they do in the public interest."

Sutton, a deputy managing editor at The News and Observer in Raleigh, N.C., addressed the concerns of the NABJ membership in a letter to Ridder. "I fear that the company's drive for double digit profits may have been a choice of pursuing profits over principles, including diversity, and I fear that some of these business decisions will disproportionately affect black journalists and other journalists of color," Sutton wrote.

Harris joined Knight Ridder in 1988 and was named publisher of the Mercury News in 1994. In a memo he issued to the newspaper staff Monday, he said he planned to look for another platform from which to serve the public interest.

Sutton said a quick survey shows that there are less than a few dozen black publishers out of hundreds of daily newspaper publishers in the nation.

"Sadly, we are already on notice that more black journalists are leaving the industry than entering," NABJ Vice President-Print Herbert Lowe said. "More than ever, we need role models like Jay Harris -- a leader with courage, conviction and character. With his departure, especially under these circumstances, the message may not be one of hope, but of despair."