Last Updated: May 26, 1999
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Portrait of the president
For presidency, Rowe has come to work
Lessons learned in Harrisonburg, Va., and later in
Norfolk gave The Oregonian’s editor a sense of her readers, of news, and
of herself; her own diligence let her apply it
By Janet Weaver and David Zeeck
After days of emptying filing cabinets and carting out boxes, Sandra
Mims Rowe was leaving the newsroom where she’d spent her entire professional
career.
The Virginian-Pilot was home. She’d started there as an editorial assistant
in the entertainment department, putting together the paper’s television
guide. She was leaving as executive editor, moving on to an even bigger
job at an even bigger paper with another state in its name, The Oregonian.
And now, she’d finished boxing up 22 years worth of her working life
and was ready to leave Norfolk.
But before she left, she placed a small scrap of paper in her old desk
drawer. It was a message left behind for the woman who was inheriting her
old office furniture, a young deputy managing editor who had so much to
learn and was so afraid to see her mentor moving on.
The paper said: "When standing, stand. When sitting, sit. But above
all, do not wobble.’’
The act itself tells you something about Sandy. Even as she was getting
ready to embark on a great adventure, she was still looking for ways to
take care of those she was leaving behind.
The words of the message tell you something else. For those who know
Sandy Rowe well, there can be no more succinct summation of her approach
to her career and to her life. There’s just no wobble in the woman.
***
She’s known for the changes she’s brought to her newsrooms. She’s known
for the strong traditional journalistic values she upholds.
She values elegance — in presentation of stories, in writing, in management
style, in her personal life. She loves good art, beautiful furniture, good
wine.
But she’s also been known to drink a beer or three with a group of reporters
and sing Patsy Cline songs.
She loves long walks on the beach, but mountain views sustain her.
She’s the first friend who will call in a time of crisis. The question
is always "What can I do to help?’’ And you know she means it.
She’s terrified of violent or bloody movies, which she tends to watch
while scrunched down in her chair, hands over her face. While watching
"Unforgiven,’’ she flinched so violently during a particularly bloody part
that the headband she was wearing flipped off and landed three rows back
in the theater.
A gift from Sandy will invariably be something special and graceful
and uniquely designed to go to the heart of the recipient.
And the biggest gift she has given to the many she has mentored has
been her faith in them, her unshakable belief that good people will do
good work when given the chance.
"She has a whole slew of people under her wing,’’ says Deborah Howell,
Washington bureau chief and editor of Newhouse News Service. "She takes
care of people. She’s a guider of careers and a source of unflagging support."
***
I guess her greatest love is her parents. She bonded with her mother
and father beyond anything I am familiar with.
— Gerard Rowe, Sandy’s husband
Harrisonburg, Va., is a small town, the kind idealized in movies and
romantic Southern literature. It is easy to feel romantic about the place.
The town lies in the Shenandoah Valley, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge
— a place so beautiful, so lush that it can actually make you ache inside.
This is where Sandy Mims grew up, daughter of the editor of the town
newspaper. To understand Sandy, you have to know this: No matter where
she goes or what she does, she is the daughter of Harrisonburg and, more
importantly, of Lathan Mims.
Her father died 10 years ago, but speaking of him can still bring emotion
to her voice. It is a bond strongly felt, a connection that guides her
in her work.
"Part of what pushes me is just wanting to be a credit to him,’’ Sandy
says.
Those who have worked with Sandy always talk of her respect for readers.
That respect is expressed as the strong desire to incite passion in readers,
to make them feel, see, smell, taste the world around them, to take them
places in their own community they might not otherwise go.
It is expressed in distaste for the glib and a recognition of readers’
deep intelligence and their desire to feel smarter when they finish the
paper each day than when they started it.
Sandy loves and respects readers because she’s known them all her life.
Her father introduced her to them when she was just a girl.
There’s nothing like being a small-town editor to bring you close to
your readers’ lives. No focus groups or reader surveys are necessary; if
your readers want to tell you something, they just pick up the phone. And
your family cannot escape that fate, either.
"Every now and then, you got these ladies who thought nothing of calling
Daddy at home and saying their paper wasn’t there yet, and it was past
time for it to be there,’’ Sandy remembers. "And he’d send one of us kids
out with the paper.
"What I remember most about growing up was how close he was to his readers,
and feeling the full weight of that.’’
Lathan Mims lived to see his daughter become executive editor of The
Virginian-Pilot. He lived to see her lead that paper to a Pulitzer Prize.
"He would be so proud of the honor of my being this involved with ASNE,’’
Sandy says. "He’d be beside himself.’’
***
I was a decent enough reporter, but God, I was awful on the air.
— Sandy on her first job, covering news for a Norfolk radio station.
Being a newspaper man’s daughter didn’t mean that Sandy grew up itching
to be a journalist. In fact, she just fell into it.
She was a young graduate of East Carolina University with a degree in
English. After graduation, she’d helped her father work on a Senate campaign
and had started dating a law student named Gerard Rowe. When he graduated
and moved to Norfolk to accept a job in a law firm, she moved there, too,
and they were soon married.
She got a job for a Norfolk radio station covering the news. She hadn’t
been at the station long when she learned there was a job open at The Ledger-Star,
the city’s afternoon newspaper. The opening was for what the paper called
an editorial assistant — basically, a clerk.
In the interview, she explained that her job at the radio station was
to rewrite the newspaper. That candor won her the job. Three months later,
she moved into a reporting slot in the women’s department.
Women’s departments have gone the way of hot type, and most would agree
that’s generally a good thing. But for Sandy, starting out in the women’s
department wasn’t at all a negative experience.
"Being steered to the women’s department when there were few women in
news was great because it broadened my skills,’’ she says. "Because the
staff was small, you had to do everything. I learned editing, copy editing,
layout, working the composing room floor.’’
She was working as a reporter when her first daughter, Mims, was born.
It was while she was on leave that she realized what had been a job was
turning into a career. She found herself missing the work. "That’s when
I faced it, how important the newspaper had become to me,’’ she says.
Her work had impressed the bosses on up the line.
"For those who didn’t know (Sandy), the first thing they might have
seen was a very pretty young mother ... a pleasant, efficient member of
the women’s department,’’ says Perry Morgan, retired publisher of the paper.
"But she was a force. She came to work in the largest sense of those words
— she came to work.’’
The editors moved her out of the women’s department into a job as assistant
city editor on the metro desk — a world that was still overwhelmingly male.
And that’s where her gift with managing people first began to shine.
"When she was put on the city desk, she won good reports because of
how well she was handling reporters and how well she was handling their
news copy,’’ Morgan remembers.
After proving herself on the city desk, her rise up the ladder was quick.
She launched a new general features section called The Daily Break, then
moved on to assistant managing editor of The Ledger-Star. She now had a
serious career, the position of managing editor soon to be hers. She also
had a second child on the way.
This time, there was no doubt she’d be going back to work. The question
was, would she leave work in time to make it to the hospital?
She was in a lunch meeting at a Norfolk hotel when she realized she
was in labor. Without saying a word, she snatched the keys to a company
car, drove back to work, picked up her briefcase and a copy of the paper,
and went to the hospital.
"I’m in the delivery room, in hard labor, and the doctor is reading
the copy of the paper I’d brought along,’’ she remembers. "I’m going, ‘Hey,
do you mind? I promise, you can take the paper when we’re done here.’ ’’
She took a three-week maternity leave with daughter Sarah before she
was back at work.
***
That’s when I found out fundamentally how much of an optimist I am.
And how naive I was.
— Sandy, on the task of merging two newspaper staffs.
At age 31, Sandy became managing editor of The Ledger-Star. Her biggest
task would be to prepare the paper’s staff for merger with the larger morning
paper, The Virginian-Pilot.
The cultures couldn’t have been more different. The two staffs were
highly competitive. The Pilot was viewed as the more serious, substantive
newspaper. The Ledger was scrappy and brightly written.
"We thought this was a chance to combine the great qualities of these
two newspapers,’’ she says. "Of course, what we did initially was combine
the worst qualities.’’
Focused on the difficulties of merger, the quality of the journalism
suffered. The bright writing of the Ledger became simply glib; the serious
Pilot was plain boring. It took years to settle the staffs down, to combine
the strengths of the papers into something stronger. That was Sandy’s job
when she became executive editor of The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star
in 1983.
"The merger taught me a powerful lesson — how quickly a newspaper can
lose the ground that it has gained,’’ she says. "To me now, it feels like
sliding down a mountain that you had scaled inch by inch. I promised myself
I’d never again make that kind of progress, then have to fight to regain
it.’’
Sandy’s sense of news and of the kind of newspaper she wanted to put
out began to emerge in a more forceful way after the merger.
"Here was a young woman, a dynamic young woman, who was moving up very
rapidly and earning admirers in her own company and in the community,’’
says Morgan. "But in many ways, she reflected the values of an earlier
journalism. There was a lack of pretense ... (There was) just plain honesty
and forthrightness and work ethic.’’
She continued to shake off the label of coming "from features’’ with
a strong news sense. And she nurtured the paper’s community news sections
— not a particularly sexy part of the operation, but one that would be
vital to the paper’s success as the suburban communities around Norfolk
grew into cities in their own rights.
"That’s not dramatic news or headline news. But it’s news that nourishes
and she knew it,’’ Morgan said. "She had no embarrassment in speaking up
for community news, for the value of it, at a time when many of her colleagues
were embarrassed by it.’’
Combining the staffs and focusing on the work had made a difference.
And in 1985, the papers won a Pulitzer for general reporting for stories
on municipal corruption by reporter Thomas Turcol. The prize sent the industry
a message that the paper was about serious journalism. More importantly,
it was an affirmation for the staff.
"It was a hell of a lift,’’ Sandy says. "We celebrated for a couple
of days.’’
***
Her word is like gold.
— Reporter Mark O’Keefe, who worked for Sandy at the Pilot and is
now at the Oregonian.
Sandy Rowe is the toughest job interview anyone will ever face.
Usually, she’s wearing her glasses, and she peers through them with
blue eyes like ice. She’s got a Diet Coke in a cup, napkin wrapped around
it to keep it from sweating on the table, and she sips from it without
ever breaking eye contact. She leans toward you — the further you back
up, the closer she leans. She asks what books you like to read, and you
forget even knowing how to read. Somehow, before you even realize what
is happening, you are telling her the darkest secrets of your life.
The questions Sandy asks are personal. They aren’t on any human resources
checklist. One woman who survived a Sandy interview remembers finding herself
telling this stranger the story of her parents’ divorce — a story the job
candidate hadn’t shared with her closest friends.
The word got around about Sandy’s interview style. In one instance,
a job candidate had been clued in and waited until she was building to
her most probing questions. He got up from the chair, walked over to the
sofa, laid down and said, "Next question, doctor.’’
She hired him.
Sandy won’t hesitate when you ask her what her greatest strength is.
She believes it is hiring good people, then creating an environment in
which they can thrive.
She takes chances on people, and then she follows through to give them
the strength and the skills they need to succeed. She’s proud of the fact
that three women in senior newsroom leadership roles — Julia Wallace in
Salem, Ore., Kay Tucker Addis in Norfolk, and Janet Weaver in Wichita —
all worked in Norfolk and are people she believed in years ago.
"I do believe my job is to create the kind of environment where talented
people do their best work,’’ Sandy says. "That’s a simplistic statement,
but there’s a lot that goes into doing it. If I wasn’t confident that I
know what kind of nurturing, prodding and protecting great reporters need,
and that I understand the difficulty of what they are trying to do, I’d
be lost.’’
Once hired, people feel great loyalty to Sandy. They know that she understands
them.
Mark O’Keefe covers religion for The Oregonian. He’s one of the best
in the business at what he does. But he started his professional life covering
high school sports for the Pilot.
His first encounter with Sandy was when he went in to ask her for a
raise. He got the raise, and eventually, he got a job covering city government.
He wrote a series of tough stories about misdeeds in the city’s garage
department, and the city manager came to Sandy looking for O’Keefe’s head.
"The city manager met with her, she asked for examples of bias, and
he couldn’t come up with any,’’ he says. "She just politely but firmly
said you don’t have a case here.’’
I'm not the kind of editor who says what's the next biggest paper
I can go to. But I also don't believe in editors for life.
— Sandy, on moving to other papers.
Twenty-two years at one newspaper is a long time. Ten years as executive
editor of a newspaper is almost unheard of in a business where editors
are always waiting for the next bus to come take them on down the line.
It wasn’t as if there weren’t offers. But Sandy had a very clear idea
about what her role was, and why it was important to stay in Norfolk.
"I know my job was to make a difference. That’s all I care about, that’s
what I do, and you can’t do that in a couple of years,’’ she says. "I believed
you need to stay in a place and make it as good as you can, and then when
it’s time, you hand it off.
And by the early 1990s, she was thinking that it might soon be time
to hand it off in Norfolk.
She’d had what Cole Campbell describes as her "moment on the road to
Damascus’’ in 1990, when she spent 12 weeks at Harvard in a course for
business executives. She’d come back to the paper charged with ideas about
charting a new course that might involve changes in newsroom structure
as a way to get closer to readers.
And she’d started that process, as the newsroom began to question the
way things were done and whether there were better ways to do them. The
paper underwent a lengthy and exhaustive planning process that resulted
in the decision to move toward teams.
And with that process under way, Sandy got the call from Newhouse about
the editorship of The Oregonian. The opportunity was too good to pass up.
With Newhouse and The Oregonian, Sandy found the kind of editorial freedom
that all good editors crave. She found a company that truly believed in
local control of newspapers, that allowed each paper to develop its own
identity and make its own decisions. And she found a company that was putting
resources into the newsroom.
"I have the blessing of extraordinary freedom at a time when few editors
have freedom from resource constraints,’’ she says. "I have the freedom
to make decisions determining the quality of the newspaper, and I have
the resources to make those decisions work. It’s a great responsibility
on those of us here, to act on that and to make sure we’re pushing hard
enough and delivering.
"To me, that would be failure — to not do enough with what we have.’’
***
"She’s focused on content. She’s very into what we give our readers,
how we give them more, and therefore how we improve our papers.’’
— Gregory Favre, The Sacramento Bee.
In her nearly four years at The Oregonian, Sandy has shown a new excitement
about the future of newspapering.
"She seems more energized, more vibrant,’’ says reporter O’Keefe, who
has worked for her at both papers. "She has a lot more resources at her
command now. It’s like, ‘Let’s think big.’ "
O’Keefe has seen her take some of the ideas about newsroom teamwork
that she pioneered in Norfolk, modify theory into real-world practice and
make believers out of a skeptical room. "I do think it’s working here,
and it’s largely because of her,’’ he says.
Deborah Howell sees Portland as a perfect platform for Sandy’s kind
of leadership. "Sandy has a lot of interesting ideas about how to organize
a newsroom and put out a newspaper that’s more accessible to readers. The
Oregonian — there was a wonderful place to try out her ideas,’’ Howell
says. "She’s worked incredibly hard. The first year, I’m not sure she took
a day off.’’
Gregory Favre, executive editor of The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee, has
seen the changes under Sandy. "They’ve taken that paper to a new level.
It’s clearly one of the better regional papers in the country. I know the
Newhouses and the whole organization are proud of what she has done,’’
he says.
Sandy still sees all the work that’s left to do, both at The Oregonian
and in newspapers in general. She wants to emphasize developing reporter
expertise at her own paper, and it will be an area of emphasis during her
presidency.
"I really think that one of our flaws is that we don’t know as much
as our readers on some important subject areas,’’ she says. "In the early
part of this century, newspapers were a way to be smart — they helped you
know the culture, the language. I still think we can learn something from
those days. We still have to deliver cultural clues to change as well as
breaking the news. We have to explain, we have to pull back the curtains.’’
At the core of it all are the readers. And what she learned from Lathan
Mims years ago in Harrisonburg when he’d send her down the street to deliver
a missed paper still holds: It is an honor to be in service to them.
"I’m absolutely convinced that providing substance, that showing respect
for the reader, is what we have always been about,’’ Sandy says. "It’s
what can essentially be our salvation.’’
Weaver, co-chair of The American Editor Committee, is managing editor
of The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle.
Zeeck, co-chair of The American Editor Committee, is executive editor
of The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash.
