Desperately Seeking the News
Not surprisingly, Tennessean managing editor Dave Green took Monday off. It was the day he was demoted to administrative editor in charge of budgets and paper pushing, the day his replacement as managing editor, former Poughkeepsie Journal executive editor Meg Downey, was introduced around the newsroom with fanfare and excitement, the day his reign as No. 2 in the newsroom finally came to a screeching halt.
Though sources say Green was offered a position elsewhere within Gannett sometime during the past month, he didn’t want to move from Middle Tennessee. In the end, the paper decided to make the most of it by playing to his strengths of number-crunching and technology. Inside 1100 Broadway, news of the management shake-up was met with “wild ecstasy,” as one Tennessean source puts it.
This, and the naming of reader editor John Gibson to editorial page editor, are just the latest in a string of changes from new Tennessean editor Mark Silverman since he was named to the paper’s top editorial job Sept. 14. Also popular with newsroom staffers was his elimination two weeks ago of an onerous, time-consuming computer planning tool that had reporters spending as much or more time logging what they were going to report than actually reporting. An equally tedious fact-checking system that Green had instituted bit the dust before that.
Tuesday, the Scene spoke with Silverman about some of the changes, and following are excerpts of the interview:
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How did the newsroom take all of this?
I think people were pretty enthusiastic, as they have been since I’ve been here, about moving forward.
Tell me about your new ME.
I’ve known Meg since about the early ’90s. She is extremely intelligent, very organized and just a great listener. She used to be an editorial page editor, and did some interesting stuff. She did editorial page projects and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist at one point for editorial writing. If you’ve ever been in a Pulitzer jury, you start with about 150 entries, you get down to 20 and then it’s really hard. You get to the final three, and it almost doesn’t matter which wins, although it does change careers. To be a final three in editorial writing, considering what you’re going up against, is I think indicative of her mind. She’s just really smart, very sophisticated. Why has she stayed in Poughkeepsie her entire career? That’s where her husband is and that’s where she carved out a life…. While their kids were in school, they had no desire to leave. The Poughkeepsie Journal is the best newspaper I know of its size—it’s kind of a mid-sized paper. They do in scaled-down fashion exactly what I think The Tennessean should do, which is to get out ahead of issues, to provide some community leadership, to explain where things are going, and to give people a pretty good reflection of their community, you know, good and bad.
Are you looking to beef up the beat reporting?
Yes. We would like to do a better job of beat reporting. State government, city hall. I think we need to cover public education as well as colleges, so we need to broaden education coverage. I think our health coverage can be more sophisticated than sometimes newspapers’ health coverage has been in the past. I think that if you take a look at this area and you take a look at what’s happening, I think very aggressive coverage of growth is important to us. So what do I mean by beat coverage? I mean leaving someone in a beat long enough so that they know what they’re doing, giving them time to develop sources and looking for enterprise to come out of beats, not just three or four stories a week…. I fully believe that good newspapers, especially newspapers this size, the bulk of the enterprise reporting comes out of intelligent beat knowledge. I think we may have shortchanged reporters, and thereby readers, in the past by not paying enough attention to developing beats.
What about hiring more reporters?
I mean, everybody would like to increase the size of the staff. I don’t think it’s reasonable in these economic times for newspapers to increase the staff size, and if you take a good look nationally we’ve done a pretty job of holding on to what we’ve got. Having said that, internally, would we shift people around to get more reporters? I don’t know. We are going to look very, very closely at the newsroom organization in the next six months.
Why did you choose John Gibson to lead the editorial page?
I think he’s an exciting choice. John has been reader editor for a number of years and, as such, has had more contact in the community at all levels, from CEOs to people who are just hanging on trying to scrape together the rent money, and I think he’s got a heck of a handle on what life is like in the community. He’s a smart guy, he’s a former editor of a medium-sized paper, he’s been editor of a big paper…. He’s a sharp guy. We’re not going to do a 180-degree philosophical shift here, but I think it’s important to be more open to all kinds of opinions and really give people who disagree with our positions more prominent opportunities to air their gripes with us. I think John’s a good person to do that. This is just a smart, smart community—there are a lot of bright people here—and I’d like to get some brain cells on our op-ed page. I think that John will be very good at going around and taking a look at people who have accomplished things or have ideas in various corners of the community and give them some voice.