Setting the community agenda

Tucker finds the editorial page isn’t a place to make friends, but it’s a great place to connect with readers

Cynthia Tucker, 45, has been editorial page editor of The Atlanta Constitution since January 1992. She leads a board of five writers and oversees a commentary page that offers Atlanta a unique array of voices who comment on national, foreign and local issues. Tucker began her career as a reporter at The Atlanta Journal (the Constitution’s afternoon sister paper) and worked at The Philadelphia Inquirer before rejoining the staff of the Journal in 1983 as an editorial writer. She moved into editorial writing by sheer happenstance, but she quickly figured out that she had found her niche in the newspaper business. Editorials and columns allow her to go a step or two beyond the typical news story — analyzing issues, offering solutions and helping the community to set its agenda.

A graduate of Auburn University, Tucker is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Minority Media Executives; she is chair of the ASNE Writing Awards Board. Her column appears in more than 70 newspapers around the country and has put her into the ranks of a select group of journalists who write authentically about the impact of race and diversity issues on American society.

By Arlene Notoro Morgan

Q. What does the role of editorial page editor and columnist enable you to do as a leader in your profession and in your community?

A. The phrase “setting the community agenda” seems cliched, but it aptly describes the role of the editorial page of a regional newspaper. Rather than concentrating on those issues in which we could have little influence, such as foreign policy, we home in on local, regional and state issues. By giving constant and repetitive attention to certain issues, we can not only influence the debate but also influence outcomes. I can think of no better example than our role in helping metropolitan Atlanta to come to grips with a host of issues related to uncontrolled growth — sprawl, traffic and air pollution. While most Atlantans were beginning to feel the consequences of uncontrolled growth, few had connected the dots and understood that sprawl was the cause of those long commutes and the noxious haze in the air. After all, in Georgia, environmental issues had traditionally had a very low priority. But after the entire newspaper, including the editorial page, focused on uncontrolled growth for a period of two or three years, Roy Barnes, who took office as governor last year, was forced to make controlling sprawl a priority.

My column has a slightly different role. I use it to try to reach out to all my readers — black, white and brown, liberal and conservative. While I will always be an unrepentant liberal supporting such issues as affirmative action (very unpopular with my conservative readers), I’ve taken a lesson from my distinguished predecessor Ralph McGill. He didn’t browbeat his conservative white readers with the moral superiority of desegregation every day. Some days he used his column to remind them he was a fellow Southerner and understood their backgrounds; he wrote about his hunting days or his favorite barbecue restaurant. I don’t have hunting dogs, but I do like barbecue, so every now and then, I write about that or about my family or some other nonpolitical topic. I think it helps my conservative readers understand that I don’t have horns.

Q. In the history of newspapers, the Atlanta Constitution ranks at the top as a leader for racial equality in America. How are your editorial stands continuing that legacy?

A. I am quite fortunate to have inherited the chair (or, quite literally, the desk) that once belonged to Ralph McGill, the greatly respected editor and columnist who was known as the “Conscience of the South” for his firm insistence on desegregation during the tumultuous early days of the civil rights struggle. I would like to think that the positions we take on the editorial page today — support for reproductive rights and gay rights as well as continuing support for full equality for Americans of color — simply continue McGill’s progressive tradition.

But it is important to remember that McGill won plaudits for his courage because he was taking stands that put him at odds with his social and professional peers; his white, working- and middle-class readers were often outraged by his support for desegregation. If I am to continue McGill’s tradition, that means I must sometimes take stands that put me at odds with some of Atlanta’s prominent African-Americans. So, I have vigorously criticized the family of Martin Luther King Jr. when I thought they were abusing his legacy. I have repeatedly taken Atlanta’s African-American mayor to task for his tendency to yell “racism” every time he is criticized by a white Atlantan.

True equality, after all, means the same standard will be applied to all public officials — no matter their color or gender. I try my best to apply that single standard, demanding integrity, progressive leadership and competence.

Q. What experience or person in your career prepared you for this role?

A. Wow. I sometimes feel singularly unprepared for this role. I’ve learned a great deal from both editorial page editors for whom I’ve worked —Durwood McAlister, retired editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal and Tom Teepen, retired editorial page editor of The Atlanta Constitution. Perhaps the greatest gift each gave me was support for my views — even when I dragged the page into controversy. Once, when I was a relatively young editorialist working for McAlister, I was writing editorials harshly criticizing the ethics of the African-American president of the Atlanta City Council. I believed he was using his public position for private gain — and abusing the city’s affirmative action program for minority contractors in the process. He fought back by taking out a full-page ad in the newspaper criticizing my editorials, and he persuaded 40 or so of the city’s most prominent African-American leaders to sign the ad. I was a bit shaken, but McAlister did nothing but stand by me and encourage me to keep writing those editorials. I did.

Q. If you were asked to mentor a young reporter who aspired to your job, what would you tell her?

A. If popularity is important to you — if you expect to be liked by the people you write about — you’re in the wrong business. Perhaps it is not surprising that many of Atlanta’s African-American civic and political leaders are people I know personally. I attend church with them; I’ve been at parties with them; some are among my closest friends. Still, I am required to separate my social connections from their public performance — and to criticize them if that seems appropriate. That is one of the most difficult parts of my job. (It helps to have friends who would never attempt to take advantage of our friendship or compromise my ethics.)

Q. There is a lot of concern that young people will never adopt the habit of reading newspapers because there are so many other mediums competing for their attention. How could editorial and commentary pages speak to this issue?

A. A few months back, we added a standing weekly op-ed column that is written by a reader between the ages of 15 and 22. We hope that it generates some interest in our pages, at least among those younger folk whose pieces have been published. But I also think opinion pages have to become a lot more Internet savvy because that’s the medium that most appeals to younger readers. Recently, we launched a new Web page called @issue on which all our opinion content — including letters to the editor and Mike Luckovich’s daily editorial cartoons — is a posted. It is updated daily. We also offer little features to try to generate interest, such as a daily online “poll” (nothing scientific about it) that takes a lighter slant on an issue in the news.

Q. An editorial writer must delve into so many aspects of coverage. What characteristics, background and training do you demand in a journalist when you hire someone as an editorial writer or columnist?

A. I’m looking for the same qualities in an editorial writer that newsroom managers expect when they hire reporters: sharp reporting skills, curiosity, a good work ethic and an ability to analyze sources as well as issues. Since I require my editorial writers to do their own reporting, I prefer to hire people with no less than five years reporting experience. Lately, I’ve also looked for writers with expertise in certain topics that I need to sharpen on the opinion pages. But it is easy enough to take a good journalist and give him or her the expertise he needs in a topic area through good programs such as those offered by FACS.

Q. What could journalism schools do to develop potential editorial board writers?

A. Editorial writing isn’t brain surgery. It just requires a broad liberal arts education and critical thinking skills. I am disappointed that so many journalism graduates seem to lack critical thinking skills. You cannot become a good editorial writer without the ability to analyze competing points of view and come to rational conclusions about which offers the best solution to a problem.

Q. Tell us how your job teaches you about the public and its concerns.

A. Letters, phone calls and e-mails are my best guides to the issues that really engage my readers’ interests. Sometimes, I completely miss an issue until we run a locally written op-ed piece about it. One example was a piece by an older reader about grocery stores carding even obvious grown-ups buying alcoholic beverages. He was incensed by it. It turned out a lot of other readers were, too, because, months later, we’re still getting mail in response. Sometimes we are aware an issue will generate responses but surprised by the volume. That’s the case with our (so far unsuccessful) crusade to raise the driving age in Georgia to 17 because of a high number of deaths of teen drivers in the metro area. If you’re looking for an issue to engage younger readers, there’s one! Not surprisingly, they are all opposed to raising the age for drivers’ licenses.

Q. What do you do and encourage your staff to do to learn more about the world they live in?

A. One of the greatest dangers for editorial writers is isolation from ordinary people and their concerns. I encourage my editorial writers to attend community forums called to examine the issues about which they are writing — neighborhood meetings on zoning issues, PTA meetings on school issues, etc. And several of us do a fair amount of public speaking before organizations such as the Rotary Club and Kiwanis Club.

Q. How do you handle community feedback?

A. I spend about 15 to 20 percent of my time answering phone calls, letters and e-mails. Indeed, now that my e-mail address is published in the paper, I am quite frankly overwhelmed. At this very moment, I have 740 unanswered e-mails in my public e-mail box, some of them generated by my column, which runs around the country. We also have a pretty liberal policy on letters to the editor. About once every three months, we have an issue that generates such interest that we dedicate the full op-ed page to running readers’ responses. Recently, we increased our Sunday letters space from a half-page to a full page.

Q. The ASNE Credibility study indicated that many readers think the news report is shaped by the editorial board’s policy and, therefore, is biased. This is an ongoing issue for ombudsmen and readership editors. How does the paper deal with this?

A. Whenever a reader complains to me about a news story, I remind him (or her) that news and editorial policy do not overlap. I then quickly refer the reader to our Public Editor.

Q. What role, if any, do you think community forums and outreach programs have in shaping the board’s agenda, especially around elections?

A. Very little, although I’ve already indicated that I encourage editorial writers to attend those community forums. We are generally not introduced to new concerns or issues at those forums. But they do serve to help us understand how better to write our editorials — what tone to use, which facets to emphasis — in order to better influence the debate.

Q. If you could create the editorial board function from scratch, how would you do it?

A. I wouldn’t dump the entire tradition and turn it upside down, but I would tweak it in several small ways. More than anything else, I would try to devise a way to make editorial boards and the work they produce seem less stuffy and formal. Perhaps we’d run a standing photo of the group around a conference table every day, naming the editorial writers.

I also long for enough writers that we could spend more time outside the office. I am extremely conscious of the dangers of becoming isolated. (It seems to me that journalists — better-educated and better-paid than they used to be —are already too isolated from the great American middle, which actually only earns between $30,000 and $50,000 a year.) I’d love for us to have enough time to regularly spend hours hanging out at schools and churches and synagogues and mosques and hospitals and other places where “real people” gather. We might come across some issues we’d never considered. I’d go out and start training some high school students to write good solid editorials. Not only might we recruit a new generation of readers, but we might also learn something. And, finally, I’d spend more time out of the office at community meetings and forums, ginning up more letters to the editor from women and people of color. Our letters column is always filled with letters from white men, but few from readers outside that narrow demographic.

Q. For years, the industry has voiced concern about the hiring, training and retaining of people of color in newsrooms. Do you have some specific suggestions on how to improve leadership in this area that ASNE has not yet addressed?

A. I think newspapers should be encouraged to broaden their search for promising young journalists of color. We may be missing some who don’t come out of journalism schools and haven’t worked for their college newspapers but who nevertheless have the requisite writing skills and critical thinking skills that would make them good reporters.

Q. On the management side, what would you have liked to have known about your job before you took it to better prepare yourself?

A. I wish someone had told me about all the different facets of managing people. I’ve learned that I not only must guide the work product of my editorial writers but also be sensitive to the issues in their personal lives. Nobody told me!

Q. Has the Web changed how the board functions?

A. An enormous amount of our time is spent now not only answering e-mails but also posting copy online. Rather than learning more about issues they cover, my editorial writers have all had to take classes to learn to post copy, which takes two to three person-hours every day.

Q. What are some of the positives and negatives of increased connections with the readers?

A. The ability to more easily connect with readers is overwhelmingly positive. We learn what really concerns them; they get to ask us questions; they begin to understand that we are real people and not just disembodied voices. The only negative is that each reader who writes a letter or sends an e-mail expects an answer, but the volume sometimes makes it impossible for us to reply to each one.

Q. What are the greatest challenges you think the industry has to meet in terms of society’s need for news, information and explanation; the use of technology; and the competitive forces at work?

A. The challenges? The decline in interest in news, losing advertising to the Internet, losing readers to other leisure activities are well known to all newspaper managers. My particular concern is the fracturing of the audience and the loss of a genuine mass medium. Sooner or later, bigger newspapers are going to learn how to deliver to each reader, probably electronically, a personalized newspaper. That means each reader will get only the narrow news that personally interests him and will be able to ignore everything that doesn’t. Suburban readers won’t learn about the inner city; soccer fans won’t know anything about baseball; people without young children can ignore the controversy over crowded local schools. I fear such a society would be hopelessly fractured.

Q. How can editors prepare themselves to meet these challenges?

A. I don’t plan to prepare. I plan to retire before that day arrives.

Morgan is director of workshops on journalism, race and ethnicity at Columbia University.