Ziegler remembers a story for which three reporters spent two months investigating a questionable manslaughter conviction. Mitchell recalls being given a month to work on a story that detailed how Rochester was undercounted in the U.S. census. And Michael Cortz, now at the Chicago Tribune, says he spent six or seven months investigating improprieties by newspaper book reviewers--including reviewers at Gannett papers.

But others who worked under Giles in Rochester and Detroit say while he was editor, the paper exhibited a soft approach to news.

"It seemed to me as the years progressed that we got much softer," says Hand, the metro editor. "You just felt that there were somehow pressures [in this direction] brought up in the front offices."

Scott Martel, who worked with Giles in Rochester and is now with the Los Angeles Times, said that under Giles's editorship, the newspapers printed a lot of "fluffy" news.

Martel says that Giles and the editors under his supervision assigned reporters soft news when there was more weighty news that should have been covered.

Other reporters say that Giles and the editors he hired sometimes created obstacles to investigative reporting.

"When it came to challenging powerful institutions, particularly private institutions, we didn't exactly add a chapter to Profiles in Courage," Meyers says.