From the business side of the business

Moving from editor to GM or publisher might sound like a painful proposition, but life on the other side can be interesting and rewarding

By Wendy Zomparelli

As I chatted with ASNE colleagues at the April convention and mentioned that I’d changed jobs, the reactions fell largely into three categories:

“Really?” (Disbelief.)

“Are you enjoying it?” (Incredulity.)

“Uhmm . . . why?” (Curiosity, concern, maybe even fear that it might be catching.)

These responses didn’t surprise me. I was, after all, announcing to editors that I had given up the editor’s role, with all its exhilaration and challenge, to become general manager of The Roanoke Times. Now, instead of wrestling with issues such as how and when to expose an undercover drug investigation gone amok, I am preoccupied with transient classified revenues and the health of our geriatric presses. Hardly a glamorous change.

Yet the discomfiture I read in the eyes of many esteemed ASNE colleagues told me I wasn’t articulating how rewarding life on the business side can be for a journalist, how much you gain, how little you lose. Perhaps, I thought, if I consulted others who’d made the change before me, their answers could help me shape mine. I found one of my old reporter’s notepads and picked up the phone.

A painful proposition

Diane McFarlin is in her first year as publisher of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, where she had served as executive editor since 1990. The idea of a move to the business side was suggested to her a few years ago during an annual performance evaluation.

She utterly rejected it.

“It was not something I thought I wanted to do,” she says emphatically. “The difficulty for me was envisioning myself leaving the newsroom.”

But her boss continued to float the notion, and McFarlin began to waiver. “I had been executive editor for 10 years, and I needed a change, so it boiled down to whether I wanted to leave Sarasota and The New York Times Co., or whether I wanted to move to the business side.”

McFarlin had received some exposure to the business side in 1995, when the Herald-Tribune launched SNN, and she added the title director of broadcast to her business card. It was the beginning of the paper’s multimedia franchise, and McFarlin had responsibility for both news and advertising. But it was four years more before she was persuaded to make the move: “I couldn’t fathom the thought of not being involved in the news coverage every day — it was a painful proposition at the time.”

Everyone in my tiny sample of former-journalist newspaper executives listed some aspect of leaving news as the only downside to the change.

“The hardest thing about my own transition was leaving writing behind,” e-mailed Jack Fuller, Tribune Publishing president, “and I did that when I became executive editor after being editorial page editor. The other adjustments have all been, well, incremental.”

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times, says he misses the physical act of writing the most: “Somehow memos don’t always cut the mustard.”

McFarlin laments losing the daily creative rush of planning layouts, discussing the day’s stories, getting her hands into someone else’s copy — what Fuller calls “the stimulus of being in the center of the action.”

And yet, McFarlin says, “My biggest surprise is how much I’m enjoying the publisher’s role. Before my conversion, I worried that my life would be overtaken by P&Ls and conference calls. In reality, my focus is still on journalism. It has to be if I’m going to make the right decisions affecting the paper’s direction, its relationship with the community, and its economic foundation.”

A deeply sensed personal mission to protect and advance journalism is the second theme I heard among my consultants.

The good you do

The publisher’s job is “interesting and it’s important because it makes the newspaper healthy and capable of being the community service institution that it is — doing the watchdog function and the investigative function,” says Jack Davis, the new publisher of The Hartford Courant. “You don’t have to be a journalist to be a great publisher, but if you’re a journalist you can more readily appreciate the good you’re doing.”

Fewer publishers may experience such full appreciation in coming years.

Mike Walker, who co-founded the recruiting firm Youngs, Walker & Co. in 1977, says media companies increasingly draft publishers from advertising, marketing and other business departments.

“It wasn’t all that many years ago, they weren’t going to make somebody a publisher if they didn’t have that news-side experience,” he says. “Now it’s rare. ... Publishers are spending so much time on strategic issues, on marketing issues, that companies want them to be trained in those particular arenas.”

Ironically, just as companies grow less interested in editors as publishers, more editors are expressing interest in becoming publishers.

“What’s happened is that . . . the really good editors are trying to gain more understanding of the business side, particularly on the marketing side of it, and they’re feeling more comfortable about making the change to the business side,” Walker says.

Watch that first step...

A factor making it more difficult for editors to become publishers is that many companies no longer have a general manager or business manager position, where an editor can gain experience and demonstrate business acumen before being considered for publisher. As Walker notes, “The best of both worlds is . . . making the move to the business side before you take over running the entire newspaper.”

Bill Burleigh didn’t get much business-side training before he became Scripps Howard’s vice president and general editorial manager in 1984. “When I made the switch, they took away my bully pulpit and failed to teach me how to read a balance sheet. In the long run, both developments proved beneficial,” says Burleigh, now chairman and CEO of E.W. Scripps Co.

“In the first instance, it saved readers from my further editorial nonsense, although I miss that pulpit more than I would have suspected. As for the financial illiteracy, it prompted a crash course of learning on the job — humbling to be sure, but putting a rapid focus on creating shareholder value.”

Some of us were luckier.

The ads attitude

Sulzberger’s first business-side experience came in the early ’80s, a decade before he would be named publisher. “I moved from news to ad sales, which traditionally is not supposed to be the easiest of transitions. I found it the opposite, and what most surprised me was how similar ad sales is to news in one major respect — both have an overriding daily pace to them, a ‘what have you done for me today’ attitude,” Sulzberger says.

“Also, in both areas success comes, in many cases, from tenacity. I thought a few of my new ad colleagues would have made great reporters. They just wouldn’t have left without the story.”

Davis’ very first exposure to the business side of publishing came at the start of his career, when he worked as managing editor and an owner of Figaro, an alternative weekly publication in New Orleans. In 1983, after 10 years of writing and editing at the Times-Picayune, he joined Tribune as associate metro editor in Chicago. Four years later, he was named editor of the Daily Press in Newport News, Va.

At Tribune, he found not only an example in Jack Fuller, a distinguished journalist turned publisher, but also a holistic culture. “Tribune expected all of the top managers to understand the whole business and work with each other cooperatively,” Davis says.

My first experience on the business side happened in 1992, when I changed from features editor to assistant to the publisher. I led projects in strategic planning, ad rates and reader research before being named editor in 1995.

The view from here

Such a resume isn’t unusual at Landmark: At its three metro newspapers — The Virginian-Pilot, the (Greensboro) News & Record, and The Roanoke Times — a working stint outside news has been part of the preparation of the last four editors. We all agree that the experience made us better editors — much better.

“It gave me a broader perspective of the entire company and allowed me — at that point, having been in three newsrooms for 21 years — to see the newspaper world from a point other than the newsroom,” says Kay Tucker Addis, who worked for five years as the Pilot’s human resources director before being named editor. “For sincere reasons, we in news tend to see news as the center of the universe and sometimes give too little regard to other departments’ value to the company ....

“As HR director, I rode with circulation drivers at 3 in the morning. I went on sales calls with the ad director. I got to know folks on the floor of the distribution centers. I saw and heard first-hand what havoc is created when deadlines are missed and readers don’t get their papers.”

For me, the move back to news from the business side occasioned the loss of something I’d learned to love: deeper involvement in the community. As assistant to the publisher, I was free to sit on community boards. Not only did my awareness of community issues gain new dimensions, but I also saw how I could use business and journalistic skills in community projects, such as helping a non-profit child-care center articulate its mission and fund-raising goals.

The rewards of community involvement, both personally and through the editorial pages, turns out to be the final major common theme for my little focus group.

“I’ve learned more about this community in the last year than I did in the previous 20; that’s absolutely true,” McFarlin says. “When you can feel comfortable being a participant, you learn much more . . . than when you’re maintaining that editorial detachment.”

In other words, you can be involved in deciding what should happen, not just in defining what has happened.

Privileged understanding

Davis describes the publisher as having “a privileged access that I wish journalists could have, because you start understanding things more coherently, about forces at work in the community.”

“One thing that I really value, that I hang onto as publisher, is the involvement in the editorial page,” he continues. “It’s important for the publisher to be an activist member of the editorial board. It does two things; it keeps the editor and editorial page editor out of each other’s way, and it gives the publisher a way to be involved in community affairs.

“I really like the civic involvement part,” Davis adds. In Newport News, “I thought it was important to get involved in economic development, race relations, United Way. That was something I wanted to do because it was a contribution to the community, something laudable — but an editor can’t do it.”

Serving the community

What an editor can do, of course, are all the things that drew me to journalism in the first place: write, edit, exercise the power of the written word, revel in unraveling each day’s events. As general manager, I’ve been divorced from news; re-establishing that connection is what I’m most looking forward to as publisher.

For me, journalism has always been about serving the community. My life on the business side has shown me that such service happens throughout the company, not just in news. The ads we run help businesses succeed, which helps drive the economy and provide jobs. The events we sponsor enrich the culture of the region. Our charitable donations ameliorate social conditions that drive poverty, ignorance and crime.

As editor, my job was to create an environment in which people could do their best work. As publisher, my job will be the same — just with more people. Some of them support the journalism indirectly, by running presses, fixing computers or answering subscribers’ phone calls. But they take just as much pride in our daily miracle as anyone in news. It’s a privilege to work alongside them.

So the next person who asks me why I’ve moved to the business side is in for an earful, replete with quotes from my colleagues. If I still can’t make my reasons clear, I’ll just take the easy way out: I’ll smile and say I’m in it for the money.

Zomparelli became publisher of The Roanoke Times on Dec. 1 She had been vice president and general manager.