Last Updated: July 28, 2000
Printer-friendly version
An American Editor
Sarasota follows its rising star
As a managing editor by 29 and executive editor by
36, Janet Weaver’s bumpy rocket ride has hinged on leadership
By Rena Pederson
Janet Weaver has been executive editor of the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune
since July 1999, having served as managing editor for two years. As executive
editor, she directs news coverage for the newspaper Web site and SNN, the
paper’s 24-hour local cable news channel. That means supervising a combined
staff of 200.
Weaver, 37, previously was managing editor of The Wichita (Kan.)
Eagle and deputy managing editor of The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk. A native
of Ooltewah, Tenn., Weaver is a graduate of the University of Missouri.
She and her husband Mark have two children.
She is chair of ASNE’s Partnerships and Diversification Committee.
Q. Where did you get your start in newspapers?
A. My first job out of school was at the Irving (Texas) Daily News.
I covered city hall for a year-and-a-half. My husband Mark Weaver was in
Richardson covering the courts for the Dallas Times Herald. It was great
fun.
The mayor of Irving used to call me “Little Gal.” I don’t think he ever
knew my name. Fortunately I was enough of a Southern girl to know that
was a generation gap. But there were some days where I knew they thought
I was too stupid to live because I was 21 years old and blonde. The good
thing was they thought they could say whatever they wanted in front of
me and not think I would get it. Which was good.
Q: How do you juggle being the mother of young children with work?
A: My husband now is staying home full time with kids. He wanted to
do that, which gives me incredible freedom. I couldn’t do this job or do
it the way I want to do it if I worried all the time about the home front.
It does help that he understands that right now we’re putting in a pagination
system, so that’s not foreign. He understands there is a reason I’m insane.
That doesn’t make it any easier for him, when I call at 6:30 and say I
won’t be home until 9, but at least he understands what I’m doing and why
I can’t always control it, or can’t ever control it.
Q: There now seem to be enough women in management around the country
for there to be a women’s network. Is it true you were recruited for your
current job at the ASNE convention women’s reception?
A. That’s right. Diane McFarlin had the managing editor’s job open and
I was looking around. We had talked by phone. We wound up in the corner
at the women’s reception talking and she convinced me that I needed to
come see it. While the paper was about the same size, I thought the complexity
here and the challenges of the market here were things that could be very
interesting for me.
Q. Have you seen the value of mentors at newspapers?
A. I have been blessed to have a lot of good mentors, men and women.
You don’t go up the ladder as quickly as I have — I don’t care how good
you are — unless you have people who believe in you and are behind you
pushing you up that ladder.
My main mentor was Sandy Rowe, who plucked me out of obscurity at the
Virginian-Pilot and put me on rocket slide there. I was managing editor
when I was barely 29. Everybody in the city room thought that was nuts.
But she believed in her choice. She knew I was lacking in some areas, so
she was very careful to work with me and see that I knew that if she put
me in this job that I had to be really aware of my ignorance and she was
going to help me see those areas where I needed help.
My first editor, Cathy Williams, who has since left the business, was
an incredible, hard-driving hard-news, tough-as-nails editor. She would
have walked through broken glass for a reporter she believed in. You felt
that. She pushed you. She sometimes pushed you into scary places. We were
a 10,000 circulation paper doing some tough investigative pieces. But when
you went out on a limb, you knew she was out there with you.
Working with Diane has been fortunate, too. When I was managing editor,
I was comfortable when things were going well, but I had a harder time
with those conversations when somebody who should have been stepping up
wasn’t stepping up. I learned to say, “Look here’s the bar, you better
meet it.” She really helped me.
The hardest thing a young editor learns is to depersonalize that. She
really helped me see how to be close to a newsroom without being too close
once I got to a senior management position.
Q: Have you helped mentor others?
A. I hope so. I guess the proof’s in the pudding. A fair number of people
who worked for me in Wichita are now in middle management at bigger papers.
There are two reasons to be a mentor: When you’ve been the beneficiary,
you want to give it back to others. And the longer I’m a senior manager,
I see that what I’m really creating over the course of my career is this
core of people.
So it’s not so much a story of editing for tomorrow’s paper, but giving
skills to people as you work that story. It is a thrill to teach and trust
and develop those folks. That, in the end is the legacy you leave, even
more than the paper you leave a community. To see people I’ve worked with
and I saw as talented, recognized by other papers as talented and see them
doing well is very gratifying.
Q: What’s the toughest thing about being a leader?
A. One thing that is hard for me and a lot of people is trying to lead
traditional print reporters into a world where not everything that they
do will be done in newsprint. We’re trying to find a way to communicate
to staffers that have hard time with that. I’ve been at the front line
of change movements where newspapers did teams or public journalism. Now
I’ve come here where convergence is the new challenge. I have to convince
people that it is not a fad. It’s something that’s real and there is value
to doing it. It’s a huge issue.
Q: What leadership issues do you struggle with?
A. I’m trying to find a way to encourage participation in the decision-making
of the newsroom without communicating that it has become a democracy. There
have been lots of experiences in other newsrooms, where ... everybody gets
together to brainstorm about what to cover, what the beats should be. ...
A lot of what came out of it was this sense that the news staff can pick
and chose without management. I don’t think that is healthy for newsrooms.
...
In Wichita, I thought it would be good to say I knew I was not the smartest
journalist in the newsroom on everything. I said I was not infallible and
would need their help. I found out later it made them horribly uncomfortable
because they wanted me to lead.
There are times I don’t know the answer. But when it gets right down
to it, the staff wants somebody decisive. ...
People want somebody to lead, to decide, and say, “This is where we
are going.”
Q. Do you have any leadership secrets?
A. I’m opening my desk drawer right now and taped to it is a note that
Sandy Rowe gave me when I became a deputy editor. It is a Zen quote:
When standing stand, when sitting sit, but above all, don’t wobble.
Every now and then I have to pull it out. This may sound like complete
contradiction, but I also think that on rare occasions, one of the most
powerful things you can do as a leader is to say publicly, “I was wrong.
Boy, that looked good last night when we were thinking about that, but
I was wrong. Maybe we should do it another way.”
When you give yourself permission to be fallible, then they know they
can take a chance to make something work. If it doesn’t, they know it’s
not the death penalty.
Q. What came out of your participation in ASNE’s Journalism Credibility
Project?
A. (One thing that came out of it was that) about four or five months
ago, I started writing a column, alternating with Diane, explaining news
decisions. One of the things I hear back from that is that people view
the newspaper as a leader of the community, as an institution. So we need
to be out front in explaining the choices that we make, because that is
part of the obligation of being a community institution. The newspaper
holds everyone else up to explain themselves, so we should do so.
Q: What are your goals?
A. To survive pagination.
And to find some balance in my life. Back when I was starting out, I
had this myth of a giant career map in head, which I have since erased
and thrown out. Now I find what life is really about is trying to find
a balance. My son will be four in July. My daughter is almost 18 months.
I’m trying to do my very best as an editor and do right by this newsroom
and community and have enough of me left so I can do right by my kids...
I told my son I wouldn’t see him tonight because I had to stay for the
new computers. He gave me that “I-don’t-like-it when-you’re-at-work-that-long”
speech. That doesn’t get any easier. The hardest thing I do all day I do
before I get here, which is leaving those kids. Even though I make plenty
of tough decisions, by comparison, they don’t feel so hard.
So finding balance. That’s my great ambition.
Pederson, editorial page editor of The Dallas Morning News, is co-chair
of The American Editor Committee.
