Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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An American Editor
Rick Rodriguez overcame bias and journalistic despair
to lead newsroom
Rick Rodriguez became executive editor of The Sacramento (Calif.)
Bee in July, succeeding former ASNE president Gregory Favre. He joined
the paper in 1982 as a reporter — and Guild activist — and worked his way
to the top.
Rodriguez is one of a handful of Hispanics to lead a daily newspaper
in this country and he takes his role as a trailblazer seriously. He was
ASNE’s Diversity Committee chair in 1997-98 and held the first diversity
dialogue for the Society to update its goals for increasing the numbers
of minorities in America’s newspaper newsrooms, one of Rodriguez’s personal
interests.
The grandson of Mexican immigrants, Rodriguez has said that his family
taught him the building blocks of his journalism career: to care about
people, to be passionate about what he believes, and to stick to his principles.
Before joining the Bee, he worked at The Fresno Bee and The Californian
in Salinas. Before that, he worked at a tortilla machine...
By Sanders LaMont
Q. Who are your heroes?
A. My heroes are really my parents and my grandparents — my family first
and foremost. People think it’s corny, but the thing that has always motivated
me is that I am the grandson of immigrants who worked very hard to provide
for me and to provide for my parents and my aunts and uncles. And I feel
that unless I try to realize my full potential and try to make a contribution
back to society, I’m not doing the family justice.
My other heroes are the people who took me under their wing. Eric Brazil,
who was the city editor in Salinas, gave me my first job as a copy boy.
He plucked me out of El Charrito market where I was working — a Mexican
supermarket that made tortillas and had a butcher shop. I stocked and worked
on a tortilla machine (I was really bad at it because those tortillas went
too fast). But he gave me my first job, and put up with a lot of crap seeing
me learn under fire ... I was the only real Spanish-speaker on the staff
of The Californian when the United Farm Workers were organizing Salinas
Valley back in the early ’70s.
Bill Endicott did so much to resurrect my career at a time when I felt
like I’d hit a dead end and maybe it was time to get out. Bill gave me
what many folks would want — that was a chance.
And, obviously, the last hero is Gregory Favre. He gave me a chance
(as managing editor) that not many other people would have — as you can
see by the numbers of Latino editors in the country. He gave me a chance
and said, “Run with it,” and the rest was up to me. He’s been a good friend
and a guiding light these last five years and I expect him to continue
to be. He’s not too far away.
Q. Tell me about the early part of your life.
A. I was born and raised in Salinas. We were poor — rich in many ways
— but it was a working-class family. My paternal grandparents worked in
canneries and in the fields. They were immigrants from Mexico. My maternal
grandparents were in the military and from South Dakota. They are of French
and Russian descent.
Q. What were the major influences in your early life?
A. My dad was a high school dropout who did very well for himself through
hard work. When I was a young child, my dad was a garbage collector, in
the days when you had to carry the cans on your back. He later went to
work as a street maintenance worker, driving big rigs and stuff for the
city of Salinas, and worked his way up to become the supervisor of the
streets department of Salinas. He ended up going to community college ...
he knew that education was important.
My mom, on the other hand, was a high school honor student whose mother
— my grandmother — had been a teacher. It was kind of a conflict in the
family when she decided to marry. Ultimately everything worked out.
My mom was a very big proponent of education. My dad was a big proponent
of hard work.
We had a very, very close family, the typical Latino close family. The
Latino side of the family dominated my early childhood because my mom ended
up becoming very acculturated. My grandparents, who never learned how to
speak English, lived across the street. We had cousins living on both sides
of us. At one point, when my grandfather went to go fight in Vietnam, we
had my other grandmother living with us. ...
My grandfather was in World War II, the Korean War and in Vietnam. He
was a sergeant major. The tough sergeant, top of the line, top enlisted
man. And he had some discipline, too. This was my mom’s adopted father.
We had this whole block in a working-class neighborhood of Salinas.
It was essentially the extended Rodriguez family. I grew up bilingual in
Spanish and English. My parents still live in the same home. My brother
(a high school counselor) still lives across the street.
Q. Is it somewhat intimidating to become the editor of the McClatchy
flagship newspaper, following a string of what many people consider great
editors?
A. I think I’m prepared. I think I’m ready. I know the market. I know
the city. I know the staff. I had a great teacher, and if I have any questions
he’s just sitting a few yards down the hall.
I think we have a good team of top-level leaders in the newsroom.
I’m excited. It was about a week after the announcement that I sat up
— it was about 3 o’clock in the morning — I sat up, and I said, “Wow! Man.
I’m the editor of The Sacramento Bee.” And all these things started racing
through my head. I guess that was the only time that my knees were shaking.
It’s really an honor to follow in Gregory’s footsteps and to have people
like Gary Pruitt and Janis Heaphy and Jim McClatchy and Erwin Potts all
give me their vote of confidence. I’m not going to let them down. Somebody
who gives me a chance, I can’t let them down. There’s too much history.
Also, I see myself as a role model for minority journalists. There are
very few of us at the top of newspapers. And, it’s taken a long time to
break the glass ceiling. Only 11.5 percent of all print journalists in
the country are people from minority backgrounds. I will carry that responsibility
with me. I know the responsibility is such that I can’t fail.
Q. Given the recent journalism scandals across the nation, do you
think the standards of journalism are changing?
A. I hope not. I think those cases bring suspicion and discredit to
our industry, and really cut into credibility, which is already in crisis.
One of the things we need to do — Gregory did it very well — is to establish
standards and to abide by them. People have to be responsible. Editors
have to be responsible. Editors have to ask the right questions, and you
have to be able to trust reporters.
I see this profession as civic and almost sacred duty. I don’t see it
as strictly a business. I see it as a service to the community that
is a responsibility and it is something that you ought to take very seriously.
Once you breach the trust with your readers, you really don’t have very
much to sell. What we have to sell is credibility. Once we start doing
these things we’re not much better than tabloids and that undercuts the
profession. I am very concerned about it.
Q. You mentioned that you came close to getting out of journalism
years ago. You thought it was a dead-end. What got you through that?
A. I came up from Fresno and folks weren’t all that encouraging about
the work that I was doing. I thought I had leadership potential, but nobody
else seemed to see it. I’ve always been a leader ever since I was a little
kid, and I wanted the opportunity to feel that I had a shot — and didn’t.
What got me over that was Bill Endicott gave me a shot. First, to write
stories beyond what I’d written for two or three years.
They had you kind of boxed. If you wrote for Fresno, you couldn’t write
for Sacramento. Almost no one had made the transfer from Fresno to Sacramento.
I said, “Maybe this isn’t where I want to go.”
There weren’t a lot of Latinos in management. There weren’t a lot of
Asians, weren’t a lot of blacks or a lot of any minority. At that point,
did I perceive that the liberal media didn’t follow its own pronouncements
on issues like that? Yes.
I didn’t think I’d ever see the day where newsrooms would really seriously
bring in different voices or people of different backgrounds.
I thought maybe there were other opportunities, maybe in politics, law,
or in something that I could make a bigger difference and continue to grow
personally and meet challenges and meet goals. Bill gave me a chance to
write bigger stories and (have) more responsibility.
Q. What do you expect to be the biggest challenge in the next five
years?
A. How to cover more effectively the growing suburban areas.
How to use and package information and deliver it in multiple ways.
We have all this information, how do we best package it?
The thing that you can’t go wrong on is, when you try to make a decision
that serves the reader best.
That will be the overriding principle, overriding guiding standard in
which you try to make a decision. Sometimes the reader and I will probably
disagree.
Q. Have you thought about what you want your legacy to be?
A. I want to leave the paper in better shape than when I got it. And
it was already in pretty good shape. So I want the paper to improve. And
I want to maintain the quality reputation the McClatchy family has earned
over the 141 years that they’ve been a part of this paper. And I’d like
to help the community understand itself better, and to be a partner in
the process.
LaMont is ombudsman of The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee.
