Last Updated: May 26, 1999
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The American Editor
The rumor factory
Keeping a secret in a profession with only 54,000 people
in it is an uphill battle — especially when most of them are trained to
uncover secrets.
By Deborah Howell
The rumors were rocketing from coast to coast.
First that Los Angeles Times Editor Shelby Coffey was resigning. Then
that John Carroll, editor of The Sun in Baltimore, was taking his place.
Why Carroll? Not only is he a fine editor, but he was in Los Angeles. Then
that Times Managing Editor Michael Parks would take Carroll’s place. If
the rumors were rocketing coast to coast, they were ricocheting off computer
terminals in newsrooms from L.A. to Baltimore to Orange County to Washington
and back, changing minute to minute.
"It was a fever pitch. Every hour, a new rumor. It was bad. Not much
work was getting done," said Jeff Gottlieb, a new editor in the Times Orange
County Edition. And it was especially frustrating because no one could
get good information. "We make our living trying to find out things we’re
not supposed to know. We don’t turn off those skills inside the newspaper,"
Gottlieb said.
By the time the announcement was made in L.A., the story had already
appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Times. And the original
rumors weren’t true.
Parks was to be the new editor and Carroll was staying in Baltimore.
"It just happened," Carroll said, "that I was in L.A. meeting with some
consultants and a whole lot of previously indifferent people were treating
me with respect. Next visit, I’m sure I’ll revert to being just another
suit from the boondocks."
It happened very differently in Philadelphia the same day. Everyone
in the newsroom knew immediately when the note came around in the system
that there would be a staff meeting with Publisher Robert Hall and Editor
Maxwell E.P. King and that it was important. Max was outta there.
It was a surprise, but not a shock. Everyone knew that King wasn’t happy,
but no one knew it would be that day. King said they wanted to keep it
quiet. He said Hall wanted it to be an open process "with no back-door
deals and everything in the open."
This all goes to say: The world of newspapering is very small. Very,
very small. And the rumor mill is large, very large.
Howell’s Law: Don’t try to keep a secret in the newspaper business.
Just try it. Make a little blunder or a smart-ass remark. See how long
it takes to travel coast to coast. Have a fight with your publisher. See
how long it takes for the newsroom to find out. You want to discreetly
hunt for a new job? See how long it takes your publisher to find out.
Why? Just like Gottlieb said, we are all reporters. We report all the
time whether we know it or not. We can’t not report. We can’t stand not
to know a secret or to be out of the loop. And if we know one, it’s hard
to keep. After all, we’re in the business of telling and writing everything
we know. We want our reporters to be the same way — unless it’s aimed at
us.
The redoubtable and barely retired Gil Spencer (that’s Mr. Spencer of
The Times of Trenton, N.J.; the Philadelphia Daily News, the Daily
News of New York; The Denver Post and the nearest racetrack) notes: "Publishers
and people on the business side go crazy when there are leaks. They’re
outraged. Reporters are like gerbils. They’re all over it. The best thing
a reporter can have is something to tell another reporter that he or she
doesn’t know. You can’t tell more than three people and keep a secret.
Preferably one."
Example: At an ASNE meeting years ago, at a Knight-Ridder cocktail party
before the closing, Friday night dinner, I noticed much-furrowed brows
and furtive conversations among David Lawrence, Kent Bernhard, Joe Stroud
and others from the Detroit Free Press and the corporate suits from Miami.
Gene Roberts (that’s Mr. Roberts of The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New
York Times and the nearest thing we have to a journalistic archbishop)
noticed it, too. We started reporting the story. By halfway through the
dinner, we had the lede: JOA in Detroit. The announcement was made Monday.
The reporters in our newsroom are the same way. They are like the old
Kremlinologists. They watch for arcane signs, body language, sounds behind
closed doors. Who are we talking to and about what? They do it for a living.
Why are we surprised when they do it to us?
And what’s that lying on your desk when the reporter comes in? "They
will stand right in front of you talking, but their eyes keep darting down
until they figure out what is on your desk and whether they are interested.
They’re shameless," says Jim Amoss, editor of The Times-Picayune in New
Orleans.
Corollary one: Never gossip or fight when you can be overheard
by the wrong people.
Example: A new reporter, unknown to the publisher or business manager,
sat at a nearby table while the two dissected the editor. Was it all over
the newsroom the next day or what?
Example: When I was the managing editor at the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer
Press, I once had a roaring good argument with my then-boss, David Hall
(now editor of the The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and earlier of the Chicago
Daily News, The Denver Post and The Record of Hackensack, N.J.). He kicked
a wastebasket and I slammed his door so hard the glass rattled.
As I left in a fury, I bumped into a reporter standing there listening
to the argument, word for word. It was John Camp, who later won a Pulitzer
Prize, not for eavesdropping but for feature writing. When I caught him,
he smiled as if he expected to be patted on the back. "Having a domestic?,"
he asked, laughing. Did we expect the argument to stay secret? Are you
kidding?
Example: You don’t always have to hear an argument to know something
is up. I once sat at dinner between a publisher and an editor I had just
met who never exchanged one civil word between salad and dessert. They
talked, testily, through me. At the end of the evening, I knew they heartily
disliked each other. No surprise when the editor was toast a few weeks
later.
Corollary two: Never throw anything secret away.
Example, low tech: Way back when at The News Journal in Wilmington,
Del., one copy editor went through through the publisher’s wastebasket
every night. Another went through the editor’s.
Example, high tech: A new editor came to the Minneapolis Star. Several
subeditors got special system log-ons and read everything in his queue
and the spike queue every day. Just needed to stay up on what was happening...
Corollary three: In the history of movable type, no newsroom romance
has stayed secret for more than 48 hours.
Leave the newspaper bar with a person of the opposite sex at closing
time, and by starting time the next morning, the eyebrows will already
be in raised position.
Example: There was once a couple at the Minneapolis Star having a blazing
affair they thought they were keeping a secret. Steamy and explicit notes
passed from her queue to his queue. They didn’t know (or maybe they did)
that everyone in the newsroom was reading their e-mail.
Worse example: A male reporter at the Detroit Free Press, married to
a copy editor at the paper, is sent to cover an important story out of
town with a female reporter. They fall in love. They return and exchange
passionate messages on the system. They keep all the messages.
The husband sends a message to his wife, the copy editor, and a glitch
sends her every piece of the romantic correspondence.
Richard Aregood, editorial page editor at The Star-Ledger in Newark,
N.J. remembers when he was working at the Philadelphia Daily News and hanging
around reporter (now his wife) Kathleen Shea’s desk. "I think that the
Daily News newsroom knew that we were an item before we did. After all,
they are trained observers."
Aregood tried to start a rumor about a purported romance with another
woman to throw them off the track. "It didn’t work. They were good reporters.
They knew it wasn’t true."
EXCEPTION: When ASNE treasurer-elect Tim McGuire was the editor in Ypsilanti,
Mich., (before Corpus Christi, Texas; Lakeland, Fla.; and Minneapolis),
his now-wife, Jean Fannin, was the assistant managing editor. It was on
the newsroom grapevine that they were seeing each other. It wasn’t true.
But after they denied the rumors, they decided a couple of years later
that it might be a good idea. So they fell in love and got engaged and
the newsroom didn’t have a clue until they were told.
Corollary four: Never expect to look for a job quietly.
So you get the call from one of the newspaper headhunters (or you’re
head-hunting yourself)...
The patter goes something like this: "Help me out on this. I have a
large metro Midwest paper looking for a top editor. Know anyone good who
would be interested?" Whether you’re interested or not, you want to know
which paper, if the editor being replaced, and what the deal is.
Carl Youngs, president of Youngs and Walker and Co. of Chicago, a major
headhunter in the newspaper business said, "One of the reasons that early
on we don’t tell anyone what the paper is, is that all of the sudden all
these editors will say they have been talked to and offered the job. If
everyone who ever said they were offered a job by Youngs and Walker had,
we’d be responsible for almost all the working executives in the newspaper
industry."
Do editors accept the anonymity? "Editors always press. They can be
pretty tenacious, so you have to be pretty general. You have to keep it
confidential until you tell the first individual. Once you tell one, you’re
done. You have to assume the rest of the industry will know."
EXCEPTION: That cagey former president of ASNE, Bob Giles (he of the
Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, The Detroit News, the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat
and Chronicle) knew for months he was going to leave Detroit to take over
the Media Studies Center for The Freedom Forum in New York. How was it
kept a secret from January to May? Because only a small group of people
knew and oddly enough, they all kept their mouths shut. Well, almost shut.
ASNE Executive Director Lee Stinnett found out about it in April. But he
kept his mouth shut.
Corollary five: There are only 200 people in newspaper journalism,
and after you’ve been in this business long enough, you’ll know 198 of
them.
What’s worse is that they know you.
I believe that any two people in the newspaper business will know a
third person in common.
If you’re over 40 and walk into an ASNE reception, you’ll know many
of the people there. If you’re over 50, you’ll know most of them. If you’re
a woman, or minority, there’s no way you won’t know almost everyone in
your gender, racial or ethnic group.
Corollary six: Never write anything in the system.
You might as well tell a traveling syndicate salesman. And pull—eease
watch who you write in the "send" or "to" in your messages.
First note earlier examples under romance category, then try this:
Example: A summer intern was writing his girlfriend in France a letter
in the system. The intern thanked his lady friend for having spent the
night with him, described the features of her body and the depth of his
passion and his interest in repeating the act many times over. It was spotted
in the system and became known in the newsroom. The intern probably thought
he was safe because he wrote the letter in French. Wrong city, wrong newspaper
to get away with that. Lots of folks speak French in New Orleans.
Worse example: Associated Press President Louis Boccardi, the all-seeing
eye of the newspaper business, tells this about writer and TV personality
Linda Ellerbee. Ellerbee was working for the AP Dallas bureau. She wrote
a note on the computer system to a friend in Alaska maligning some Texas
newspapers, the Dallas city council, a fellow she was dating and her bureau
chief. Not only did her boss see the note, but it was accidentally sent
to every client in four states.
Corollary seven: Even the laziest reporter will be a whirling
dervish if the story involves the boss.
Example: Note the newsroom phone bills with L.A. Times staffers calling
Baltimore Sun staffers when they thought John Carroll would be their new
boss.
When a newspaper is interviewing a possible new editor, the reporters
are on the phone in a flash, calling other reporters in newsrooms where
the editor worked before. If he or she gets hired, the story in the paper
the next day won’t be nearly as juicy as the story put together for their
own use.
I know. When I was in St. Paul, I had had one dinner with Steve Newhouse
and within two days, everyone in my newsroom knew about it. By the time
I arrived in Washington, the reporters at the bureau had dug up everything
about me but my birth certificate.
Corollary eight: Read all about it in the alternative newspaper
in your town.
Who among us has not picked up the alternative paper and wanted to throw
up? And wondered why our newsroom leaks like a sieve to the competition?
How do they find out so much? David Carr, editor of the weekly
Washington City Paper, says, "You begin with the culture of complaint.
Reporters are kvetchers as a matter of profession and storytellers by nature.
We (alternative papers) believe it to be a service to put the megaphone
to the concerns of otherwise well-behaving news aces. The best papers in
the world can’t cover themselves.
"Reporters are the most frantic about their image and you can never
get them to put their name on a quote. It’s a good place to get a good
firm whack against your boss. I have made cold calls into The Washington
Post newsroom and gotten help from complete and total strangers."
Corollary nine: Even good news is hard to keep secret.
As Jim Amoss knows all too well. He had good reason to believe the Times-Picayune
was going to win the 1997 Public Service Pulitzer Prize. He told not a
soul of his suspicions (well, maybe he told his wife and his publisher).
But he hired a brass band for the announcement, and it arrived early and
was waiting behind a door near the newsroom.
How do you explain a brass band?
Corollary ten: The world of newspapering is not going to change.
We love to find out things. So do all the people who work for us. Hopefully,
some of us will live long enough to call Lou Boccardi and tell him something
he doesn’t already know.
Howell is Washington bureau chief and editor of Newhouse News Service.
