Last Updated: March 23, 1999
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An American editor
Pam Luecke works to make the Herald-Leader essential
by constantly trying new things, tweaking old ones
Pam Luecke was named editor and vice president of the Lexington (Ky.)
Herald-Leader in 1996 after serving as the paper’s editorial page editor.
She came to Lexington in 1995 — her second foray into Kentucky newspapers
— from the Hartford Courant, where she was deputy managing editor. Her
first time out in Kentucky, she worked for the Courier-Journal and Louisville
Times for 10 years as a reporter and editor. She began her career as a
feature writer for the Courant.
A Cincinatti native, Pam has a bachelor’s in philosophy from Carleton
College, a masters in journalism from Northwestern University and an MBA
from the University of Hartford.
Q. With circulation under siege, editors talk a lot about making
newspapers indispensable. What, in your view, are the two or three things
the Herald-Leader must do every day to be indispensable?
A. The Herald-Leader simply has to give readers things they can’t find
anywhere else. On any given day, that might be a great enterprise story,
a stunning photograph, a provocative editorial or the unique viewpoint
of a particular columnist. Much of a newspaper’s indispensability is also
linked to the less glamorous parts of the newspaper —well-done local obituaries,
for example, or comprehensive crime logs. To be indispensable, we need
to be a predictable, reliable source of information like that as well.
Q. What do you as the editor do to drive that indispensability? What
do you avoid doing?
A. I’ve tried to intensify coverage of our home county and surrounding
counties, while maintaining our statewide mission on major issues. I also
try to make sure we give people something more than what they heard on
the television news the night before — or just found on the Internet. We
still need to give people the news of the day, but when possible, we try
to give it a forward spin or to add context or depth.
I try to avoid coming down too hard on people for taking a chance on
something that didn’t work — whether it’s an approach to a story or a design
innovation. That doesn’t mean I won’t let them know if I thought an experiment
didn’t work, but there are ways to present criticism that discourage risk-taking
ever again and ways that make risk-taking OK. I’m sure I don’t always succeed
at that, but creating an atmosphere where innovation is encouraged is something
I believe is essential to making newspapers indispensable.
Q. You say you are not hesitant to let people know if something doesn’t
work. Do you do formal critiques? Are you satisfied with the level of feedback
the staff gets from their editors?
A. I’m not satisfied with the level of feedback the staff gets from
me. I think they need and want more, and I’m always looking for better
ways to do that. I don’t do formal critiques, although we do have critiques
every few weeks by various members of the staff. Our most popular have
been by Lu-Ann Farrar, our director of news research, who reads our paper
in a very different way than most of us in the newsroom. Whenever she’s
doing a critique she draws a crowd.
I will often mention one or two things I like or don’t like at our daily
news meetings, but I generally reserve serious critical remarks for private
conversations. And I try to let staff members know directly if I particularly
like a story or photograph or headline.
One new feedback idea the managing editor and I are trying is an in-house
awards program. We’ve identified 10 newsroom goals this year and will reward
four or five people each quarter for stories or actions that correlate
with those goals.
Q. Newsrooms have done a lot of reorganizing in recent years. Has
the Herald-Leader? What have you done or not done — and why?
A. When my first managing editor, David Holwerk, became editor in Duluth
last year, I talked to people at a number of other papers about alternative
newsroom structures before I settled on a replacement, Tom Eblen. But,
ultimately, I stayed with a traditional newsroom structure — one managing
editor, one deputy, two AMEs and 10 or 12 department heads. For our newsroom,
this structure still seems to function well. But I’m constantly watching
for other models that might work better.
It’s always seemed a little odd to me that the editor has two people
reporting to her (managing editor and editorial page editor) and the managing
editor has the whole newsroom.
I’ve also looked into teams, but I haven’t yet been convinced they would
bring enough benefits to our newsroom to warrant the disruption. We have
an open newsroom layout — with everybody (except the bureau reporters)
in one room so compared to many newspapers, our turf issues are minor.
Q. Some people seem to think the remedy for what ails newspapers
lies in bolstering our credibility — a back to basics approach, if you
will. Others see innovation as the savior. What’s your view?
A. After the humbling year the media have just had, we certainly need
to shore up weaknesses in our credibility; that’s one reason we’re developing
a newsroom ethics policy right now. But given a choice between innovation
and credibility as the “savior” for our industry, I’d have to side with
innovation. We can’t keep doing the same things over and over again and
expecting different results. People today don’t get or use information
the same way they did even five years ago, and newspapers have to respond
to that. We have to figure out what it is that we alone can do and that
people still value.
Q. Speaking of innovation, what changes at the paper are you the
most proud of?
A. We had a substantial redesign in the fall of 1997 of which I’m enormously
proud. In addition to updating the flag and other standing elements, we
created a daily section front for business, started a new Faith and Values
section on Saturday and sharpened our weekly community news section. Reader
response has been terrific. In the past year or so, we’ve also introduced
several new features geared to popular culture and younger readers. And
this January, we started a Sunday sports commentary page called FanFare,
which is off to a great start. It’s sort of our answer to sports talk radio.
Q. Successful entrepreneurs start something, and if it doesn’t work,
they stop it and start something else. Newsrooms vary in how willing they
are to do this. Are there things you’ve tried and killed? Things you’d
like to kill, but can’t quite bring yourself to?
A. The only thing I’ve killed since becoming editor are a few comic
strips, like “Nancy” and “Magic Eye.” And that was to make room for new
strips that I wanted to give a chance. I guess we experiment more incrementally;
we’ll start a new feature but keep tinkering with it each day or week until
we think we’ve got it right. I don’t like to disrupt readers’ habits too
much or too often, but they seem to tolerate some mid-stream refining.
One thing we tried about a year ago that needs refining is a technology
page inside our Sunday personal finance section. It seemed like a good
idea at the time, but I’m not sure that’s the best home for it or that
we’ve yet figured out the audience and story mix.
Q. You’ve served in key editing positions in Connecticut and now
Kentucky, both well outside the Beltway. From your present vantage point,
what lessons are there to be learned from how the press handled the Clinton-Lewinsky
saga? Are there things you would do differently if you had it to do over
again?
A. What a horrible prospect — doing this all over again! But seriously,
I would try harder to engage our readers in the story and the discussion
— maybe with more directed write-ins for the op-ed page on key points in
the debate. Like most papers our size, the Herald-Leader relied largely
on the wires for coverage, and I think we made intelligent choices about
the stories we selected — giving perspective, analysis, etc. Still, I didn’t
get any sense that our readers were paying much attention. Circulation
numbers certainly don’t reflect that they were. And one caller the other
day begged us to never again put Monica Lewinsky’s photograph on the front
page.
Q. Of course, in Kentucky, there are stories more important than
presidential impeachment — horse racing and college basketball, for example.
How often do sports stories make it out to your front page? Are these controversial
calls? Why?
A. Sports stories make it to the front page a lot — whether it’s University
of Kentucky basketball, Keeneland going into business with casino operators,
or a tragic car accident involving UK football players.
Many are just natural high-interest stories and not controversial decisions
at all. During the NCAA championship season, though, we have lots of heated
internal debates about whether we’re overdoing it. Our cartoonist, Joel
Pett, will usually do at least one cartoon during tournament time mocking
the local media’s hysteria — including ours.
The one thing that’s hard to dispute, though, is that sports is big
business in central Kentucky and sports sells papers — at least, sports
victories do. The Sunday after a home UK football win, for example, we’ll
sell a couple thousand extra papers. The remarkable thing to me is that
all of these people already know the score of the game and have probably
listened to hours of post-game commentary on the radio. So they’re buying
the newspaper because we capture something else about the event — maybe
the emotion or the euphoria. If we could replicate our ability to bring
readers that extra dimension on every other type of story, we’d be onto
something.
One way we balance the prominence of sports in our paper is to put a
strong emphasis on education coverage, too. We’re always on the lookout
for interesting stories about academic research and trends at area colleges
and universities. And we recently did a major series on teacher training.
Q. Newsrooms headed by women are still the exception. What does our
industry need to do to turn this around?
A. For one thing, we need to make sure more women stay in the industry
beyond their 30th birthdays. It’s still way too hard for women — and men,
for that matter — to balance careers in journalism with somewhat normal
family lives. And it’s still way too rare that newspapers provide on-site
day care.
I’ve seen too many talented women drop out of journalism when they started
families — and they rarely seem to make it back. Unless we stop that early
exodus, the pool of qualified women from which to select top editors is
always going to be smaller than the pool of qualified men.
Teutsch is the managing editor of the Hartford Courant, where he
worked with Luecke.
