Last Updated: March 27, 2000
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An American Editor
Creating community in Ventura
Tim Gallagher’s ties to family, the region are reflected
in the Ventura County (Calif.) Star, which differentiates it
By John Temple
Tim Gallagher was named editor of the Ventura County (Calif.) Star
in 1995. His challenge was to lead the staffs of four dailies and a weekly
and turn them into one staff for suburban Los Angeles County, while retaining
a strong local emphasis with zoned editions for each city.
Gallagher was born in Brooklyn and moved to Albuquerque, N.M., as
a junior in high school. He got his first journalism job — at 19 — as a
sports stringer at The Albuquerque Tribune. He worked there as a copy editor,
reporter and assistant city editor before moving to the El Paso (Texas)
Herald-Post, where he was city editor and managing editor. Eleven years
after getting his start at the Tribune, he returned to the paper as editor.
During his tenure, Gallagher helped build it as an innovative, well-designed
small newspaper. He was elected to the ASNE board the day after the Tribune
won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994.
Gallagher and his wife, Cheryl, have four children and just adopted
a fifth, a 5-year-old girl. He’s a baseball nut who plans vacations to
New York around the Mets’ home schedule. He coaches Little League and youth
soccer.
Q. You became an editor when you were younger than most editors (at
age 30), and so you came out with a fresh approach. How has that affected
what kind of editor you are, and what can you tell other editors from that
experience?
A. Becoming an editor at a young age taught me never to get old in this
job. When you do something at a very young age, you have to understand
that you’re probably going to mess up and make mistakes. But you’re also
going to attack that job with a lot of energy and enthusiasm. What I really
learned and the way I hope it affects me is that I hope I never lose that
enthusiasm, that ability to be surprised by the news, by things that are
going on in the newsroom. I don’t want to become (someone) who says, “Yeah,
we did that story before,” or “Yeah, we tried that five years ago and it
didn’t work.”
Q. You’ve been editor of two papers now. One, The Albuquerque Tribune,
was a p.m. in a JOA and the other, the Ventura County Star, is a newspaper
that tries to be the principal source of information for its community.
How have those two situations been different?
A. Well the Tribune was what I call a “laboratory” newspaper, a p.m.
in a market that had a pretty solid newspaper of record in the morning.
Our job was to present readers with something different. When people get
a newspaper at 4:30 p.m., you’d better have something that’s going to make
them read because there’s no sense of obligation to read ... in the afternoon
anymore. The job at the Star is to cover news of record in an interesting
and sometimes unconventional way.
Q. In Ventura, you took five independent papers — one weekly and
four dailies — and turned them into one newspaper with six zoned editions.
That must have turned your focus to newspaper organization and structure.
What did you learn from that, and what can others learn from your experience?
A. In the mid-1970s, there were 24 weekly and daily newspapers in a
county that had less than half a million people. So you are talking about
an area in which people were sitting in their living rooms at night and
a dog down the street started barking. They expected to open the paper
tomorrow morning and find out what the dog was barking at. That was the
level of parochialism that we were dealing with, and still are to some
large extent. People expected a very local micro-newspaper; not just coverage
of the high school varsity water polo team, but how the JV team and the
freshman team did, too.
At the same time they also are starting to understand that they live
in a much larger community. Many of us consider this place a haven from
metropolitan Los Angeles. So there’s a sense of wanting to know what’s
happening in my little neighborhood, but also wanting to know what’s happening
across this county because there are more people out there like me than
unlike me.
What we’ve done as a newspaper is try to define community coverage areas
differently. Some communities are defined by geography. Some of them are
defined by community interests. And by community interests I don’t mean
by a city’s boundaries. I mean, I’m part of the community of parents who
have a teen-ager who drives. I’m part of the community of people taking
care of their elderly parents.
Q. How do you keep you staff motivated and together if the work that
you actually need to get done is not the work that the staff is hoping
to do?
A. When we hire, we’re very clear about what your specific role is in
the overall success of this newspaper. And if a young person who’s not
terribly experienced is coming here to cover a fairly small geographic
area, one of the things we say to them is, “Look, you’re working at a 100,000
circulation paper probably before you’re really ready to. So we’re going
to give you a smaller area and your focus while you’re here is to do the
best with your beat. We’ll try to teach how to broaden it, to get your
story in more than one zone, and eventually you’ll graduate to one of the
broader beats or you’ll graduate to another newspaper.” We’re just very
blunt about it when we’re hiring. Otherwise, people feel like they’ve been
misled.
The other thing I work very hard at is feedback. An editor’s job is
to set standards and then to let people know how they are meeting those
standards.
Q. Both papers you’ve edited have competed with larger competitors
and have probably had less financial opportunity. Yet you’ve been known
as an editor who motivates people. How do you work in the newsroom, what
are the things you do to make people feel good about working at the Ventura
County Star?
A. The first thing is to understand that most people want to do good
work. I have been behind more closed doors with editors who spent time
bitching and complaining about how the people who work for them are lazy,
don’t know how to spell, wouldn’t know a story if one slapped them in the
face. I don’t buy that. I start from the premise that everybody who works
here wants to do good work. I think what you have to do is go around and
try to find opportunities for them to do what the reader considers good
work, what the editor considers good work and what they consider good work.
I can’t tell you how disheartening it is to think of all the editors I’ve
met over the years who just seem to have a very sour, negative attitude
about the people they work with. That’s not me. My job is to light sparks,
to encourage, to reward enthusiasm.
Q. You’ve always been very active outside the newspaper — in your
childrens’ schools, in activities, in your church. How important is that
and how does it shape what you do as an editor?
A. It’s very important but there’s a danger. I have known a lot of journalists
who don’t have much of a life outside of a newspaper, and that’s a terrible
thing. You have to understand what makes people tick. You have to understand
what their concerns are. I think that one of the things that happens when
you are on a board, when you go to church, when you’re coaching your kid’s
soccer team, is you meet people who are talking about what’s on their mind.
Now the danger of that is that you tend as a human being to associate with
people who are like you in education, income, race, religion, what have
you. You have to look beyond that and force yourself outside your comfort
zone.
Q. You’ve always written a weekly column as editor and, as all of
us know, that’s time-consuming. You’ve stuck with it for many years. How
has that benefited you and what’s the value of that column?
A. I try to do three things with that column. I try to address issues
of journalism. By-and-large we do a lousy job in the newspaper business
of explaining ourselves to the readers. That’s important.
Second, I think you have to be, as editor, the voice of reason and insightful
analysis of your community. You have a very special chair as editor and
you make comments or pass judgments on things that are happening in your
community that are good or bad. People will listen to you, people will
respect you for those opinions, as long as you come by them fairly and
honestly.
Finally, the columns that I seem to get the most comment on are the
ones that are written about my family or something going on in my life.
The reason for that is obvious. People who read newspapers have hearts,
two eyes and 10 fingers, too. They’re just like us. And when you tell them
that your kid’s struggling in Little League or your kid’s about to get
married or, you just adopted a 5-year-old, they relate to that.
(Another) aspect of why that’s important ... is that your staff tends
to wonder what you do all day long. ... By writing and sometimes explaining
the newspaper, you’re not only explaining to them, but you’re letting them
know that you struggle as a writer, too ... (and are) not just some administrator
who worries about the budget.
Q. Your newspaper competes with the Los Angeles Times. What have
you learned that could help other editors who are competing with major
metros.
A. Chris Anderson, when he was editor of The (Orange County) Register,
really taught us all a lot of lessons in the way he moved the Register
into such a prominent position. You have to be first at local news and
you’ve got to be first in local news by a couple days. You have to clean
their clock. It’s not enough to be on the same cycle as the L.A. Times.
We’ve got to beat them and we’ve got to leave them in the dust in terms
of local news. We have to kill them with volume. We have to have three
and four times as much local news as they do. And then the last part, which
is really tricky, you have to have enough national news, international
news, sports, business, features to prevent your readers from going to
0the competition to get all of that.
Q. What are the keys to being successful as an editor?
A. Focus. There are so many times I read these interviews in which an
editor seems frazzled by all the flavors of the month and whatever the
latest trend is in journalism. I think in order to be a successful leader
in a newsroom, you have to stay focused on what it is you want to accomplish
and to make that goal very simple and very clear to your staff and to repeat
it again and again and again. Tell them what we’re trying to do and demonstrate
it through your actions. And try not to change directions on them frequently
because that causes you to lose credibility and that causes them to lose
hope.
The other thing is that ... there’s nothing else I’d want to do. I remember
when Gregory Favre gave his ASNE speech about loving our business to life.
Gregory was in tears because he was talking about how much he loved newspapers
and what we do. I remember watching him that day and having tears well
up in my eyes, too, because I thought that’s just exactly how I feel about
this business. I love it.
Temple, editor of the Denver Rocky Mountain News, worked closely
with Gallagher during his tenure at The Albuquerque (N.M.) Tribune.
