Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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An American Editor
Disaster was defining moment for Grand Forks (N.D.)
Herald and the city it serves; Mike Jacobs’ goal before, during and afterwards:
‘readers deserve the best paper we can put out’
For Mike Jacobs, editor of the Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald, 1997 will
always be the year of The Flood. April’s epic flooding was more than just
a very big story — it changed the shape of the community and of the paper
that serves it. The Herald lost the building that housed the newsroom in
the fires that swept through downtown after the flooding; the newsroom
is still in temporary quarters. But Jacobs is determined to make the paper
even better than it was before — and he’s already seeing signs that is
happening.
Jacobs’ career has included work in Dickinson, Fargo, Bismarck and
Mandan, N.D. He joined the Herald staff in 1978, and he rose through the
ranks to editor in 1984. Jacobs has a reputation for innovation in the
newsroom, experimenting with newsroom structures and journalism approaches
to better serve readers.
Q: So what is the status of Grand Forks these days? How are things
coming back together?
A: The status of the city is that things are coming back together more
quickly than we expected but not as quickly as we would like. The way I’ve
been phrasing it is that the city has had difficulty holding the consensus
together. In the wake of the floods, there was consensus that we were going
to rebuild the city. Now there are political differences emerging about
exactly how we’re going to go about doing that. People are warm and dry.
There is adequate housing. The biggest problem is there is a critical shortage
of labor.
I think we all feel pretty good about the recovery. There is what I’ve
called a differential recovery — some people are recovering more rapidly
than others.
Q: What is the status of the paper? You lost some of your building
to fire, didn’t you? Are you back in permanent quarters yet?
A: The Herald had three separate buildings. Two burned. The building
that remains had the press, advertising, information services, administration
and human resources housed in it. That building still stands, but it had
water about 36 to 40 inches deep on the main floor. The press was badly
damaged. The worst thing that happened, I guess, is that we were interrupted
for evacuation in mid-run. The press was webbed. In the flooding, the paper
expanded. The press was salvaged, but it’s not serviceable for our purposes.
What we’re doing right now is building a production facility in an industrial
park on the west end of town — away from the river. We’re hoping to be
printing in the new facility by mid-March. The newsroom will move into
the downtown building about June 1. In the meantime, all of our operations
are housed in what was once a discount store.
Q: That accounts for the buildings and the equipment. How are your
folks doing?
A: That’s a very difficult question. I would say that there’s a very
high level of commitment to getting the paper out every day, to making
it as good a paper as we possibly can. There is also a level of fatigue,
which is worrisome. We’ve kind of been burning the candle at both ends,
to quote Edna St. Vincent Millay.
We’ve had turnover. This is a newspaper that has for many years been
a feeder — a good small newspaper that has many good big newspapers around
it. ... The turnover hasn’t been flood-related. People are not leaving
us because they want to leave the community. They are leaving because they’ve
gotten better jobs. But the turnover is more difficult to manage, because
everyone is tired and it’s more difficult to get people to suck up and
take on more. We keep trying to add things to the newspaper to make it
whole. That requires a lot of effort and dedication.
When you ask how we’re doing, I say we’re real tired.
Q: In your view, how is the quality of the paper these days, compared
to before the flood?
A: Most days, it is at least the equal, and some days, it is quite a
bit better. A few days, we fall short.
Q: When you talk about the paper being better, what do you mean?
A: One of the things that happened in the wake of the flood is that
it became clear we serve a readership area that has a lot in common and
yet is not the same. About half of our readers are right here in Grand
Forks and East Grand Forks, and about half are in a very far-flung geographic
region. And those folks felt that we were not serving them, because of
our intense focus on the flood. So we have chosen to reformulate the newspaper
in a way to make it more obviously a regional newspaper. We became, in
a weird way, more conscious of the regional nature of our franchise.
We’ve also tried to create themed pages aimed at segments of the community
to give them more prominence, such as the military community around the
Air Force base here, and the campus community around the university. It’s
not that we didn’t cover those communities before, but we hadn’t created
pages that were specifically devoted to that coverage.
Q: What’s been the reaction to those sections?
A: Well, we’re just a few weeks into it. We went to a four-book paper
for the first time since the flood the first of December, then we rolled
out the new themed pages.
Q: You don’t let much grass grow under your feet, do you?
A: No, my attitude is that readers deserve the best paper we can put
out. Not the best paper we can put out under extraordinary conditions,
but the best paper we can put out. They expect us to be at least as good
as we were before the flood, and I want us to be better.
Q: Let’s talk about your relationship with your readers. How did
the flood affect the paper’s tie with the community?
A: The best way to explain this is that this disaster returned the Grand
Forks Herald to the role it had when the paper was founded in 1879. At
that time, there was no Grand Forks, or it was just a pioneer settlement.
The founder of the paper needed to build a community at the same time he
built a new paper We need to rebuild a community at the same time we rebuild
a newspaper. Our understanding of who we are is much more bound up in the
community than it was.
My favorite way to talk about this — and this is a work in progress,
we haven’t driven out some of the us-and-them mentality that has characterized
newspapers — is to say that we are trying to practice journalism in the
first-person plural. We want to think about framing stories differently
than we did before, not necessarily in terms of conflict. We’re trying
to provide a base of information that people can use in public discussion.
We’re trying to create public spaces where people can talk about the community.
We’re using the word we in editorials to mean we who live here, rather
than we who run the newspaper. One of our critics argued insightfully that
the tone of our coverage is different, but the tone of our headlines hasn’t
changed. There still is a tendency on the desk to choose the inflated verb.
That is a reality which we continue to try to deal with.
Q: I love the way you describe it as practicing journalism in the
first-person plural. That seems so clear and easy to understand.
A: Well, you know, there are journalists who just think that the paper
as an institution is an adversary, that it ought to be positioning itself
to be critical of decision-making of government, particularly of
private business. I guess my response is that a level of skepticism is
very, very healthy. A level of cynicism is more likely to be destructive.
It is right when someone comes forward with a plan to ask how is this
going to benefit the community, to ask questions that will illuminate those
critical issues. It is not appropriate to say immediately who is getting
rich from this, who is screwing whom. Skepticism and cynicism are not the
same thing.
Q. Talk a little about the national media. You’ve had the experience
as the editor of the community’s newspaper, having the national media swoop
in on a big story. How do you think they did?
A: Overall, I’d say the coverage was pretty good. There were some egregious
errors — one network had the river running the wrong way. There were some
exaggerations. But there’s no doubt in my mind that this community is better
off because of the attention, the sympathetic attention, we got from
the national media.
As summer wore on, there were people coming here with the angle of how
this poor town’s never going to recover.
The problem was reporters who had a preconception of how things must
have been.
A frequent charge, and one that was proven true, is that we report our
assumptions.
But on the whole, I would say that national media acquitted themselves
well. It is the exceptions that stand out because of that.
Q: Let’s move off the flood a bit. You have a reputation in the industry
as someone who is willing to experiment, who is an agent of change. Many
folks say it’s impossible to experiment with structure and forms of journalism
in small papers because you are just so focused on getting the daily product
out. How do you foster experimentation in your shop?
A: I’m easily bored and I don’t like doing things in the same way all
the time. I’m not so much in search of the better newsroom organization
as I am in search of different ways of doing things that might get us different
results. I’m perfectly willing to abandon things — and have repeatedly
done so — that don’t get us the results we want. What we’re doing here
is approaching things differently because we may uncover an insight that
gives us the opportunity to understand things differently and therefore
a better job of reflecting on and reporting on the community.
You don’t ask different sources the same question. My interest in change
is not as a destination but as a process. I’m interest in trying things
in an effort to get to a different understanding of how we work together
and how we serve the community. And I just talk!
Weaver, a co-chair of The American Editor Committee, is managing
editor of the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune.
