April 13 - 20, 2000
![[Don't Quote Me]](/standard/image/headers/dont_quote_me_header.gif)
Editorial privilege
New Globe publisher Richard Gilman faces his first big test: choosing someone to lead the paper's opinion pages
by Dan Kennedy
At the end of this month, more than 500 journalists and media executives from around the world will arrive in Boston for a congress of the International Press Institute. Greeting them will be the Boston Globe's H.D.S. "David" Greenway, a vice-chairman of the prestigious organization. For Greenway, the congress marks the capstone of an extraordinary career, much of it spent as the sort of old-fashioned foreign correspondent who is as comfortable slogging through Third World war zones as he is exchanging toasts with European leaders.
Inside the Globe, though, the festivities coincide with something of more immediate import: the beginning of the end of Greenway's seven-year run as editor of the paper's editorial and op-ed pages. On May 8 Greenway will turn 65, the Globe's mandatory retirement age, although he'll remain in the post until sometime this fall. For months already, the air at 135 Morrissey Boulevard has been thick with speculation over who will succeed him.
This will be the first important newsroom decision for publisher Richard Gilman, the New York Times Company executive who this past July was dispatched from Times Square to replace Benjamin Taylor, the last of the Globe's former ruling family. At the Globe, as at many other papers (including the New York Times itself), the editorial-page editor reports directly to the publisher, making her or him equal to the editor, at least on the organizational chart. Gilman's choice will say much about the role Gilman wants the Globe to play in the community: the business-friendly moderation of the Greenway years, the liberal crusading favored by his predecessors, or something else entirely.
The direction of the Globe's editorial pages is crucial: no one in New England speaks with a louder, more influential voice than the region's dominant daily newspaper. Greenway will leave something of a mixed legacy, one with the same "on the one hand, on the other hand" quality that drains the energy from too many Globe editorials.
By moving the editorial page closer to the political center on foreign, national, and local issues, he made the page relevant in a way that it hadn't been for some years. In particular, the Globe provided crucial support to former governor Bill Weld and to legislative leaders as they took steps to cut taxes, close a gaping budget deficit, and improve the business climate. The editorial page also deserves credit for keeping a sharp eye on city issues. The recent series of editorials about the future of the South Boston Waterfront was an outstanding example of well-reported advocacy journalism on a topic that's more important than it is sexy.
But if there's such a thing as a bold centrist, Greenway isn't it. Too many editorials are eye-glazingly incrementalist, showing deference and respect to all sides when what's really needed is passion, even some righteous anger. This past Tuesday's editorial calling on Big Dig chief Jim Kerasiotes to resign or be fired, to cite just one example, was so filled with praise for Kerasiotes that it undermined the conclusion. The op-ed page should be one of the liveliest reads in the paper, but Greenway -- following an initial shake-up -- has let it calcify. Joan Vennochi is a must-read, and Ellen Goodman and Jeff Jacoby write intelligently about a wide array of social issues from, respectively, a liberal and a conservative point of view. Little else, though, warrants more than a look at the headline and a quick glance at the lead.
Overall, Greenway's positives outweigh his negatives. But it's time for a change.
"It's premature," Gilman protests when asked about who will follow Greenway. "It's true that David is leaving sometime this year. But no decision as to his successor has been made. We have what I regard as a good slate of candidates."
The identity of those candidates is, officially at least, a mystery. But, within the Globe, speculation centers on four people, all of them long-time Globe employees. There would seem to be no other likely in-house candidates, although it's possible that a dark horse could emerge. There's also no way of knowing whether Gilman might consider an outsider, perhaps from among the ranks of editors at the Times. To judge purely from perceptions among the staff, though, the leading candidates are as follows:
* Renee Loth, 45, the deputy editorial-page editor. A product of community newspapering (the East Boston Community News) and alternative journalism (the Boston Phoenix), Loth has been at the Globe for 13 years. Among other things, she has worked as the Globe's political editor and has covered both state politics and the 1992 presidential campaign. Several sources believe Loth would be a shoo-in if Ben Taylor were still the publisher. Loth's supporters point out that she has frequently stood in for Greenway during his international forays, which makes her the most experienced candidate. It might also be politically difficult for Gilman to pass over a loyal, hardworking woman for such a visible post. "I don't think it would be a good signal. I think she deserves a shot at the job, quite honestly," says one staff member. Adds another: "I think there would be a lot of noses out of joint if Renee doesn't get it." On the other hand, Loth is seen as an old-school liberal (though friends say she has refined her views over the years). That may not sit well with Gilman, although it's hard to say, as his own politics are a mystery.
* David Shribman, 46, the Washington bureau chief. Shribman came to the Globe seven years ago from the Wall Street Journal, where he was the national political correspondent; previously he had covered Congress and national politics for the New York Times. Shribman is among the very biggest of the Globe's bigfeet, winning a Pulitzer for his thoughtful, non-ideological political column in 1995 and maintaining close ties to the Mother Ship in New York. Gilman might see Shribman as the best choice to maintain Greenway's moderate, pro-business tone (although Shribman's own politics are as much a mystery as Gilman's), with Shribman's Pulitzer giving him the pedigree to mollify Loth's supporters. The Pulitzer and his experience at the Times and the Journal also brand Shribman as a possible successor to editor Matt Storin, who's 57. A strong stint as the editorial-page editor would make Shribman a contender, just as the Times' editorial-page editor is always in the mix when the top job there becomes vacant. Less certain is whether Shribman is even interested. Although he's a native of Salem and an alumnus of the Salem Evening News, he and his family have lived in Washington for years. His wife, Cindy Skrzycki, is a financial columnist for the Washington Post.
* Helen Donovan, 52, the executive editor. According to newsroom sources, the buzz that Donovan would switch seats peaked some months back, when the paper was ablaze with rumors that Storin would soon depart for academia. But Storin, who has always insisted he's not going anywhere, is now heavily involved in Gilman's strategic-planning efforts, which has meant more responsibility for Donovan, his number two. Donovan, who joined the Globe in 1976 and became the executive editor in 1994, is also in the midst of an ongoing effort to revitalize the Sunday Globe, whose circulation has been flagging. "She basically is a key person in every single initiative right now," says one source, ruling out the possibility that Donovan would change jobs. Another source, though, speculates that Donovan -- whose father was Hedley Donovan, the late editor-in-chief of the Time, Inc., empire -- would be a strong contender if she let Gilman know that she wants it.
* Robert Turner, 56, the assistant editorial-page editor. Turner, in some respects, would be an odd choice for Gilman, since he's at least as liberal as Loth and is one rung below her in the editorial-page hierarchy. Nevertheless, Turner is a solid journalist with a strong background in state and city coverage. Turner joined the Globe in 1965 and wrote a political column for the op-ed page from 1979 until 1993, when Greenway, as one of his first acts, made Turner his chief editorial writer.
The contenders themselves are being circumspect. Loth and Donovan did not return calls; Shribman and Turner declined to comment. Greenway's only comment about his own role in the succession was this: "Richard Gilman talks to me, but of course it's his decision." And Gilman, sources say, is so leak-proof that virtually no one, not even the top editors, knows exactly what he's got in mind.
The chain of events that led to David Greenway's being named to lead the editorial and op-ed pages -- and, thus, to change the Globe's status as the most left-leaning metropolitan daily in the country -- began, in a sense, with the gubernatorial race of 1990. Editorial-page editor Martin Nolan wanted to endorse the Democrat, acerbic conservative John Silber. Then-publisher William Taylor (an older cousin of Ben Taylor) wanted to endorse the Republican, tax-cutting libertarian Bill Weld. The publisher won, as publishers are wont to do.Nolan, an old Washington hand, left shortly thereafter, taking a fellowship at Stanford University and staying on to establish a San Francisco bureau for the Globe. (Nolan, who is now retired and writes occasionally for the op-ed page, has always insisted that the Weld endorsement did not lead directly to his flight from Boston.)
Nolan was replaced by Kirk Scharfenberg, a crusading liberal who had served stints as city editor, metro editor, and deputy managing editor. Scharfenberg was young, and he brought to the job an activist approach and a love for the city. His sense of humor once almost landed him on the unemployment line: in 1980, he wrote the fake headline MUSH FROM THE WIMP over an editorial about Jimmy Carter's latest economic plan. To Scharfenberg's horror, the headline made it into the first edition. (It was changed to the lifeless ALL MUST SHARE THE BURDEN in subsequent editions.) To his relief, however, he kept his job.
Of all the hoary traditions that are part of a daily newspaper, perhaps none look as worn around the edges as the editorial and op-ed pages. There is hardly a paper in the country that doesn't follow the same formula: unsigned editorials that speak in the newspaper's institutional voice; a cartoon or two; letters to the editor; and, on the right-hand page, signed pieces by the paper's staff columnists and from a few syndicated services. Even the design of these pages is virtually the same from paper to paper. Rethinking the mix
"It has always seemed to me that editorial and op-ed pages ought to be an obvious candidate for innovation. Yet they're frequently one of the stodgiest parts of the paper," says syndicated columnist Geneva Overholser, the former ombudsman for the Washington Post.
Adds New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen: "If there's anything ripe for reinvention, it would be metropolitan newspapers' editorial pages."
For a format that appears so cast in concrete, the editorial/op-ed paradigm is actually of fairly recent vintage. A newspaper's editorial voice had generally been confined to one page until 1970, when the New York Times debuted its op-ed page. Within a few years, most papers had followed suit.
It's not that some papers don't excel. Ask around, and the same three come up over and over: the Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, both for the depth of their editorials and for the skill and breadth of their columnists. "For my money, I think one thing that really matters and sets off the Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal is a certain aggressiveness -- they have a strong, muscular voice -- and a scrupulous attention to facts and reporting standards," says Atlantic Monthly editor Michael Kelly, whose Post column was a finalist in the commentary category for the Pulitzer awards announced this week.
In too many cases, though, the formula has become, well, formulaic. According to Slate columnist Timothy Noah, the rise of the op-ed page should have led -- but didn't -- to a rethinking of the traditional unsigned editorial. Last year, Noah wrote a profile of Times editorial-page editor Howell Raines for George magazine in which Noah argued that the op-ed page had made the unsigned editorial obsolete. With op-ed columns providing a livelier forum for opinions, and with even news reporters now allowed greater latitude in analyzing as well as reporting, unsigned editorials, Noah wrote, are essentially a throwback, and a largely unread one at that.
"I do think that the editorial page has outlived its usefulness," Noah told the Phoenix in an interview. "I think that the minute the New York Times invented the op-ed page, that spelled the end of the editorial page, because the op-ed page does so much better what the editorial page used to do."
What now? One approach is to cut down or even eliminate the use of unsigned editorials, which tend to applaud or deplore in a particularly gaseous manner. "The idea that an editorial speaks for an entire institution is a presumptuous thing, an artificial construct," Noah says. "Newspapers don't really have opinions."
Interestingly, the Manchester Union Leader -- famous, or infamous, for its ultraconservative editorials -- has always included taglines to indicate the author's identity. "I think it's good, because the readers know if they have a beef with something, they can call me -- and many of them do," says Bernadette Malone Connolly, the paper's editorial-page editor. "There's a sense of accountability that I don't think is there with an unsigned editorial."
Jeff Epperly, the editor of Bay Windows, switched from unsigned to signed editorials several years ago, explaining: "To have it unsigned opened me up to charges of hiding behind the newspaper and making it seem like more than it was."
Another, complementary approach is to redesign the editorial/op-ed spread to break down traditional hierarchies. The San Jose Mercury News is as likely to lead with a signed column as with an unsigned editorial. Opposing views and letters are freely mixed so that it no longer appears that the newspaper itself is "a big strong voice" and the readers are "little mice," says Mercury News editor Rob Elder.
Even such radical changes may amount to little more than holding actions, though. The Internet has given rise to a new type of hybrid journalism -- a mixture of reporting, opinion, and attitude, delivered up faster than traditional newspapers can manage. Salon, for instance, is edgier than most any newspaper op-ed page, and Slate offers analysis with more depth and immediacy.
Jon Katz, a media critic who now writes for Slashdot.org, calls traditional op-ed pages "a nightmare, a ghettoized corral of mostly useless opinion." And the Web provides escape routes that weren't there before. After all, the Internet does not automatically make Salon's Camille Paglia or Slate's Jacob Weisberg better than syndicated columnist George Will. But if people can zip around the Web and read the best of the Times, the Post, and the Journal, and then check out Salon, Slate, Feed, Kausfiles.com, and the Drudge Report, they're not going to put up with, say, the lame-o op-ed page of the local Gannett rag.
"The Web has narrowed editors' idea of what's a good story," says Salon's news editor, Joan Walsh. Though she concedes that this sometimes causes substantive but potentially dull op-ed pieces to be squashed, she adds: "The idea that we ought to make stories relevant and engaging to readers just doesn't offend me."
-- Dan KennedyScharfenberg's close relationship with then-Boston mayor Ray Flynn, with whom he had been known to share a few beers at Doyle's, caused some consternation when Scharfenberg was directing the Globe's local coverage. But his passions were not out of place on the editorial page, where he quickly established an activist agenda. Indeed, it's interesting to think of how differently the Weld years might have turned out had a Scharfenberg-led editorial page inveighed against welfare reform, social-spending cuts, and tax breaks for business.
But the Scharfenberg era was cut tragically short. In 1992, he died of cancer, at 48. He was succeeded by his deputy, Loretta McLaughlin, who stepped down a year later, when she reached 65. And Greenway came in from the cold to take the editorial pages in a new, more moderate direction.
Hugh Davids Scott Greenway is one of just four American journalists to win the Bronze Star for valor during the Vietnam War: in 1968, he was wounded while attempting to rescue a badly injured Marine. Educated at Yale and Oxford, he held down his first reporting post in London, for the Time-Life News Service. He later worked at Time-Life bureaus in Washington, Boston, Saigon, Bangkok, the United Nations, and Hong Kong, and reported from Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and Bangladesh. Following a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, he moved to the Washington Post, opening the paper's Jerusalem bureau in 1976. In 1978, the Globe's then-editor, Tom Winship, brought the Boston native home to be the paper's foreign and national editor.
Greenway is tougher than his affable demeanor would suggest; he showed some of that toughness shortly after taking over from McLaughlin, when he broomed out liberal columnists Randolph Ryan and Alan Lupo (now with the Globe's City Weekly section) and moved Bob Turner from the op-ed page to the anonymity of editorial writing.
Conservative and centrist voices were brought in. Greenway hired Jeff Jacoby away from the Boston Herald and added freelancers such as John Ellis, a business consultant and pollster who's a nephew of former president George Bush, and Jon Keller, the political reporter for WLVI-TV (Channel 56). Cartoonist Dan Wasserman bloomed during the Greenway era, and part-time columnists James Carroll and Robert Kuttner added thoughtful liberal voices. Greenway also led the Globe to take un-Globe-like stands, such as opposing a ballot question that would have created a graduated income tax and supporting a $50 million tax break that primarily benefited Fidelity Investments. The Globe endorsed Weld again in 1994 against Democrat Mark Roosevelt, a conventional liberal who might have received the Globe's imprimatur in years past. (The Globe switched back in 1998, endorsing Democrat Scott Harshbarger over Republican Paul Cellucci.)
But Greenway failed to improve the pages -- especially the op-ed page -- as much as he might have. The work of two-time Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Paul Szep was deteriorating, but Greenway, rather than finding a way to help Szep recapture the spark he'd had in the 1970s, let him pick up his pens and his pad and move over to the funny pages. Ellis, who's both smart and eclectic, was brought on staff in 1998, but left shortly thereafter (in part because his cousin George W. Bush's presidential candidacy made it impossible for Ellis to write credibly about politics). Keller, who had carved out a unique beat -- the plight of the shrinking urban middle class -- was cut loose with no explanation. Long-time columnists David Nyhan and Derrick Jackson are both capable of better work than they've produced in recent years. Washington-based Tom Oliphant, an old college friend of Ben Taylor's, writes sneering columns that appear to be aimed more at serving his sources than benefiting the Globe's readers. And why in God's name does the Globe subscribe to the great Molly Ivins if Greenway is only going to run her stuff two or three times a year?
The question is, can Greenway's successor make a difference? Well, sure. Greenway, appointed by the Taylors, was constrained in ways that the next editorial-page editor will not be. If the regime of Richard Gilman still has some staffers feeling nervous and uncertain, it may be because radical change is now possible.
Tom Winship thinks he made a mistake. For years, he had proposed that the editor of the Globe -- that is, him, from 1965 to '85 -- be relieved of the responsibility of hiring and supervising the editorial-page editor, and instead have both editors report directly to the publisher. That's how it is at national papers such as the Times, the Journal, and the Washington Post, he reasoned. Why shouldn't this separation of church and state be implemented at the Globe as well?Winship eventually got his way. But in the Spring-Summer 1998 edition of the Media Studies Journal, Winship offered a mea culpa. He had come to believe that what was right for national papers didn't work for regional papers, where the separation amounted to little more than an "artificial barrier between editors."
It is worth noting that Winship -- an editor of national renown who presided over 12 Pulitzers during his years at the top of the masthead -- has not had a chance to make this point to Gilman personally. Winship, who now chairs the International Center for Journalists, says he and Gilman have had lunch precisely once since Gilman came to town. "He's had lunch with a lot of the has-beens," Winship quips. Speaking of the Greenway succession, Winship says of Gilman, "It's his call, and it's his first big decision on personnel since he came here." He adds: "One of the most unusual things about Rich Gilman is that he keeps his own counsel extremely well."
Indeed. Gilman betrays not a hint of when he's going to name his editorial-page editor. It could be tomorrow. It could be sometime in mid October, just before Greenway's going-away party. What Gilman does make clear is that, Winship's change of heart notwithstanding, it will be the publisher's decision, and the publisher's decision alone.
"To me, this clearly separates opinion from news, or maybe I should say news from opinion, and clearly separates what's done on the news pages from what's done on the editorial page," Gilman says.
He adds: "Ultimately it's a decision I need to make and plan to make."
It's a decision we'll all be living with for some time to come.
Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com
Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here
