Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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The Editor
as leader
Katharine Graham and Stephen Covey have different ideas about leadership
in the newsroom but they both think editors must make their missions clear.
A two-part session on "The Editor as Leader" opened the convention.
This is the third year that ASNE has tried to alter editor travel patterns
by starting its convention Tuesday afternoon instead of that evening. A
key strategy is to begin with a program latecomers would be sorry to miss.
Graham, the retired publisher of The Washington Post, is a natural choice.
Covey also met the challenge, but not in a way he planned.
Covey has sold millions of copies of "7 Habits of Highly Effective People."
As questions from editors at his session attest, newspapers are among the
clients for his seminars on leadership and management.
Managers fail as leaders when they spend too much time managing. "Most
people are literally buried in management,’’ he said. Moving from operational
management to leadership is a transition that takes time, but eventually
saves time.
"I suggest leadership — the essence of it — is to get a culture behind
a common direction," Covey said. To do this, organizations must develop
a mission statement that involves everyone so that all have the "same purpose
or mission and have a similar vision and a similar set of values."
Maintaining the mission takes constant effort, he said, but as the job
changes from management to leadership, people begin to manage themselves
within the framework of the organization. Managers, as a result, will have
more time to think with the end in mind.
Covey said that leaders of the world’s best-run organizations spend
more time in planning than management. To illustrate where effort should
be put, he showed a box divided into four parts and said all tasks fall
into one of the quadrants: important, urgent; important, not urgent; urgent,
not important; and not important, not urgent. It is in the second quadrant
— important, not urgent — where long-term planning takes place and managers
become leaders.
This was one of several charts and lists Covey displayed during his
program that included the famous habits: be proactive, begin with the end
in mind, put first things first, think win/win, seek first to understand
and then to be understood, synergize, and self-renewal.
In contrast, Graham, who spoke later, said she had no leadership formula
but had to learn who was best to ask advice from and then made up her own
mind.
"If you all concentrated on long-term views when you are on deadline
and there is a story to print — I would not be happy," she told editors.
"He says he understands deadlines, but I doubt he does."
Those who missed Covey missed what became a running joke. Before leaving
to catch a plane, Covey introduced a videotape about a dog and man — both
named Max — serving the same master. After 131/2 minutes with no end (or
point) in sight, the audience grew restless and it was time for Graham.
Edward W. Jones, convention program chair, stopped the tape. The Maxes
were mentioned by speakers and over meals throughout the conference. On
the last day, Jones told how the story ended.
Graham was interviewed by Judy Woodruff of CNN. Woodruff strayed from
the subject of leadership, but what journalist could have resisted a conversation
with Graham on competition, the Internet, credibility and why President
Clinton’s sex life is a story but President Kennedy’s was not?
Graham said editors must edit within the context of their company and
audience. In a good publisher-editor relationship, she said, editors have
freedom but they also have responsibility "to use that freedom with some
measure of sense of what the company is about."
She said, "I think a great editor has to be a leader and has to keep
going when stress is on him and has to be independent and has to make very
gutty decisions at times — very."
On credibility, she said journalists have been grossly maligned.
"People are assaulting us in a way that I think is inappropriate. I
think what they are assaulting are societal values and issues," she said.
"We are now printing things I certainly never thought I’d see in print
about the president’s anatomy."
She said morés were different in the Kennedy era and that the
women involved "didn’t leap to television and discuss it." There was talk
among journalists about Kennedy’s relationships at the time, but there
weren’t enough facts to print.
On competition, Graham said it has actually increased despite big mergers.
Once a monopoly paper in a town had the place to itself. "Now, they’ve
got radio, they’ve got television, they’ve got cable, they’ve got the Internet.
The competition is almost too intense."
Graham was asked about the move to break down the walls dividing news
and business operations.
"There should be a wall, ... but I think that having said that,
it is really necessary for editorial to think managerially and to think,
in fact, to some degree with circulation and advertising," she said.
"There has to be some sense of what you’re about in the minds of editors."
Kille is editor of The New York Times Regional Newspaper Group Wire
& Graphics Network, New York.
