VOICES
Homegrown Editor
In a Transient Age, the Pleasure of Staying Put
When I became editor of The Buffalo News in 1999, I didn't need a tour of the second-largest city in New York State.
I knew where the courthouses were: my father tried cases in them. I knew where the major downtown department store used to be: my mother had been its women's clothing buyer. I knew where Bethlehem Steel's massive furnaces once roared — the soot from its smokestacks drifted down onto my grade-school uniforms, hung out to dry on a backyard clothesline.
In short, I knew my way around. That's the good news, but
it's also the bad news for any kid who grows up to become
the editor of the hometown paper. And it may be the good and bad
news for that newspaper's community, too.
These days, it's more the exception than the rule for a homegrown journalist to edit a metropolitan daily. In an age of chain ownership of newspapers, a far more typical situation is that of my friend, Thomas Callinan, recently named editor of Gannett's Cincinnati Enquirer. Before that, for two years, he was editor of The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, also owned by Gannett. When he got that appointment two years ago, he'd been to Phoenix only for a couple of visits. He'd spent the last seven years as a top editor in Rochester, and before that he'd been in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Lansing, Michigan; and Fort Myers, Florida.
Over the years, he'd become adept at getting out into different communities, connecting with readers, and becoming familiar with local concerns. Phoenix was no different; he just climbed the learning curve, and started doing the job.
For me, the built-in familiarity has advantages. Although I've lived in Washington, D.C., and Chicago, and spent time in places as far-flung as Calcutta and Katmandu, I remain fluent in Buffalo's local language. I know, for example, that the words "wide right" conjure up not just the errant kick that lost the 1991 Super Bowl for the Buffalo Bills but the entire soul-crushing string of four Super Bowl losses in a row.
More to the point, when a health-care corporation threatened to close Buffalo's Children's Hospital last year, I fully understood that the hospital was more than a building with doctors and equipment. Residents treasure it as a community jewel; they're attached to Children's in a deep and not entirely rational way. That understanding helped guide the paper's aggressive coverage of the controversy; and, arguably, that coverage may have helped save the hospital.
But familiarity can have its drawbacks, too. How do you get a fresh perspective on a city in which you blew out the candle on your first birthday cake or went to your first dance?
What about fair play? Can anyone really exert utter impartiality when a story involves people you first met when they were twice your height? And how about the old friends who call and want something — are you fully prepared to tell your old parish priest that there's no reporter for that church story he's so enthusiastic about?
Sometimes, the hometown connections can get downright bizarre. When I spoke recently at a local suburban high school and told the students that I had grown up in nearby Lackawanna, it caused a big reaction — some students goofily pretended to cower under their desks. That's because only a few weeks before, a huge national news story had been based in that small city that adjoins Buffalo: a suspected al Qaeda sleeper cell had been identified in Lackawanna's Yemenite community.
Making a few spectacular leaps of illogic, these teenagers figured
that if the newspaper editor were from Lackawanna, she must be
a terrorist or maybe a sympathizer.
The truth is, though, that The Buffalo News covered the Lackawanna
cell story no differently because of my local roots. We neither
pulled our punches nor threw them harder.
And I must admit that my familiarity proved useless in this case. The day after the story broke, as we were scouring Lackawanna for yearbook photos of the suspects, I handed a reporter the phone number of a minor official I'd known years ago. The reporter's request was greeted by a shout of "No!" and the unmistakable sound of a slammed-down phone.
So much for my inside connections.
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