Meet Dave Green, the real editor

In the fall of 1998, Tennessean editor Frank Sutherland approached an old friend, colleague, and golfing partner, Wendell "Sonny" Rawls, about coming back to work at the paper as sports editor.

Rawls and Sutherland went way back. They were reporters together at the Nashville daily in the late 1960s. Rawls, who started in the paper's sports department, left The Tennessean in 1972 and went on to a distinguished reporting career at The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times. Rawls won the Pulitzer Prize at the Inquirer in 1977 for reporting on the woeful conditions at Pennsylvania's Farview State Hospital for the criminally insane. From 1986 to 1989, he ran the day-to-day news operation at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. During that time, the paper won two Pulitzer Prizes and was a six-time Pulitzer finalist.

Having come back to Nashville because of his wife's job, Rawls was teaching, consulting, and writing when Sutherland sounded him out about the sports editor position. Several staffers who later heard that Rawls had considered a return to The Tennessean told the Scene that it would have been a coup for the newspaper. Rawls, a smart, aggressive, hard-driving—if gruff and outspoken—journalist, would also have brought, they say, a sense of energy and vigor to 1100 Broadway.

Sutherland, as he does on most newsroom issues, delegated the details of dealing with Rawls to his managing editor, Dave Green. Rawls, who told the Scene he was ambivalent about the job from the beginning, says that he had two lunches with Green.

"I told Dave at our first lunch that I only wanted to work at a great paper—a paper that was already great or a paper that wanted to be great," he says. "He stared at me like I was from Mars, his hand shaking so badly that his coffee was sloshing over the top of the cup he was holding."

Rawls says that, after his first lunch with Green, he was reluctant to go forward. Later, he and Sutherland played a round of golf at Richland Country Club. "Frank told me then that I scared the shit out of Dave Green," he says. "I suppose that he meant my background and experience constituted some kind of a threat to Green's position."

After his second lunch with Green, Rawls says that he remembers clearly Sutherland's telling him that he didn't "make the cut" with Green.

About his conversations with Rawls, Green says: "Since Rawls has told you that he talked with us about the sports editor's job, I feel comfortable confirming that. Beyond that, I can't elaborate."

Former Nashville Banner media critic Tom Lee, a Nashville attorney, says, "I think it's shocking, frankly, that somebody the quality of Sonny Rawls wouldn't be hired by The Tennessean."

As for his dealings with Green, Rawls recalls: "Dave was rather condescending when we talked." From there, the veteran journalist doesn't have much positive to say: "Dave said to me, 'I place far more value on market surveys than on the arrogance of experience.' I get the sense that they are just filling space at the paper today. Dave lacks energy, vision, and drive. It's a focus-group-driven mentality, the mind-set of new market-research-oriented leadership. It appears that Dave Green has limited news judgment. They build in excuses for failure. Dave's obsession with fairness is, more than anything else, an excuse for not breaking good stories."

Those are harsh words. But based on interviews with 66 current and former Tennessean staffers and journalists Green has worked with at other newspapers, Rawls' on-the-record views represent the conventional wisdom about Green. Criticisms about Green's lack of news judgment, leadership, and vision, and his apparent unwillingness to attract quality journalists, were consistently voiced during those interviews with the Scene.

Dave Green is typical of editors rising to the top of news organizations today, in an era when most daily newspapers are owned by publicly traded media companies. Gene Roberts, the former managing editor of The New York Times who now teaches journalism at the University of Maryland, says that in newsrooms across the country, "a new type of editor" has arrived.

"They are ambitious," Roberts says, speaking generally and not about Green per se. "In most cases, they have bought into the corporate way of doing things." As for Gannett Co., the media conglomerate that owns The Tennessean and 113 other daily papers, he says, "The era of the independent editor is over at Gannett. The overall thrust of these corporations is to breed out the individual judgment of the editors in favor of a corporate collective set of goals."

Most readers don't know it, but Tennessean editor Frank Sutherland isn't the one calling the shots in the newsroom today. The guy really running the show is Green.

Most of the nitty-gritty newspaper work has fallen to Green, as Sutherland goes about discharging his corporate responsibilities. Green effectively is in charge of the content of every section of the newspaper except the editorial and op-ed pages. He oversees the newspaper's reporting on everything from the mayor's office to Gaylord Entertainment to the Tennessee Titans and the neighborhood zoning controversy in your backyard. As he himself acknowledges, Green is the man responsible for the news you read in the paper each day.

It's impossible to understand The Tennessean's news operation without first understanding Green. He gets mixed reviews from his staff. Those at the paper who like him say he is an organized and efficient team player conversant in spreadsheets and budgets. His supporters say he is serious, thoughtful, intelligent, and dedicated. They say he is a first-rate line editor. They also describe him as an intellectual, a mentor, and a quality boss.

"Dave Green is the best boss I've ever worked with," says D'Anna Sharon, assistant managing editor for visuals at The Tennessean. Sports editor Bill Bradley—who got the job Rawls didn't—adds that Green has been "tremendously helpful" and is "a great sounding board."

Former Tennessean reporter Will Pinkston, now a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal, believes many of his former colleagues are just too thin-skinned and don't appreciate the thoughtful editing and constructive criticism Green provides. "Not everyone can take it," Pinkston says of Green's criticism, "and he didn't dole it out gently."

Neal Scarbrough, Tennessean sports editor in the mid-1990s who is now a senior editor at ESPN The Magazine, says he remembers the carping about Green. "He wasn't viewed as a perfect manager, and I'm not trying to defend him," Scarbrough says. "I reported to Dave, and he ultimately helped me a lot in what I did."

Baltimore Sun reporter Julie Bell, who worked for Green at The Tennessean from 1996 to 2000, says Green "really helped me develop as a reporter. He has a heightened sense of fairness and objectivity."

But Bell acknowledges that her view is in the minority: "I've thought a lot about why my perception [of Green] is so different from so many people I was close to in the newsroom." Her theory? "Dave is a very private person. He often doesn't choose to let people in. So they end up not trusting him or liking him."

The positive views of Green expressed by Sharon, Bradley, Pinkston, Scarbrough, and Bell are hardly typical. The overwhelming majority of people interviewed for this story were highly critical of The Tennessean's managing editor. Take, for example, Andy Mead, a reporter at the Lexington Herald-Leader, who worked under Green in the late 1980s, when Green was projects editor at the Kentucky daily. He was among those in Lexington who were overjoyed when Green decided to move on to The Tennessean. "He didn't take anybody with him to Nashville," Mead says. "People here were relieved when he left. I can't think of one reporter who was sorry to see him go."

One former Tennessean staff member who says he left in large part because of Green is local author E. Thomas Wood, a business reporter at the Nashville daily from 1993 to 1995. "I had a great deal of respect for Dave Green's talents and his very sharp mind, but I had fundamental differences with him about the whole enterprise of journalism," he says. "Dave enthusiastically bought into the Gannett way of bringing news to the people, the notion of market-research-driven journalism. He believed in giving the people what they want. I think sometimes you have to give the people what they need. Sometimes you have to feed the readers asparagus."

Bill Estep worked as a reporter under Green at the Herald-Leader in 1989 and 1990. "I liked him personally. He was a nice guy, interested, enthusiastic, helped keep me motivated, and he was a very good line editor," he says.

But Estep says that sometimes Green "just didn't get it. There was a communication disconnect. It's possible this wasn't entirely his fault. It seemed that at times he tried [when editing] to push a story beyond the facts that we thought we had."

To assist with the Scene's research, Green, without prompting, offered the names of six people who have worked under him during his journalism career. Of the five whom the Scene located, one declined to speak at all and another said, "I don't want to be involved." The other three were Bell, Scarbrough, and Estep.

Six consistent themes emerge when colleagues discuss Green: Even his supporters generally agree that Green is lacking in inspiration, vision, and leadership. Many in the newsroom say he drives away good journalists and rejects applications from quality ones, such as Sonny Rawls. His critics blame him for setting a poor tone in the newsroom. They say he talks about improving the quality of The Tennessean but does little to demand or inspire excellence in his staff. Many believe that he relies too heavily on focus groups and reader surveys in deciding what to put in the paper. Finally, they say that he is largely oblivious to the way he's perceived in The Tennessean newsroom.

"I've worked with Dave for many years now," says Frank Ritter, a 41-year Tennessean veteran who has just retired from the newspaper. "I have never had a personal conversation with him. Not one. He's insecure, and his reputation in the newsroom is bad."

A current Tennessean writer who's been at the paper since Green's arrival in 1992 says that the staff "doesn't like him or trust him. And vice versa. He doesn't know much about the city and seems uninterested in learning. He's let good talent fly out the door and hasn't been able to replace it."

Ed Kimbrell, an Emmy-award winning media critic who teaches journalism at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), describes Green as a "man of nuance, of sensitivity, with a facile mind. I admire Dave for having an open mind and [for] asking the right questions about journalism today and where it is going."

But, Kimbrell says, "I don't sense one bit of the intellectual fire or passion in Green that you need to run a paper. Where are the tough, hard-charging, fair investigative pieces that make a newspaper great? I don't want to be told that the mayor is having another zoning meeting. I want to know what the hell is going on in Middle Tennessee, where the abuses of power are. Whether he likes it or not, that goes back to Dave Green's door, and it isn't going to change."

Green's tendency to berate subordinates has earned him little respect among those who report to him in the newsroom. But he has the respect of his current and former bosses. Sutherland says that in a large newsroom, there always will be naysayers. "Not everyone likes every boss," he observes.

"Dave is absolutely a top-notch guy and journalist," says Timothy Kelly, publisher of the Lexington Herald-Leader, who was editor of that newspaper for part of the time Green worked at the Kentucky daily.

John Carroll, who preceded Kelly as Herald-Leader editor and is now editor of the Los Angeles Times, says he recalls Green as "a very fine person and serious-minded guy," although Carroll is careful to note that he—Carroll, that is—has "no idea what's going on in Nashville."

David Harris Green, 47, was born in Yonkers, N.Y., and grew up in a number of suburban towns outside New York City. He graduated from Cornell University in 1975 and proceeded to assemble an impressive résumé. Patricia Calhoun, editor of Westword, an alternative weekly in Denver, toiled with Green at the Cornell college paper. She recalls Green as "very kind and helpful working with green journalists, which I surely was."

After college, Green put in a short stint as a reporter at The Ithaca Journal in New York before moving on to various editing positions at The Associated Press news wire. He made his way to Kentucky in 1984 as city editor for the Lexington Herald-Leader. Green later became projects editor at the Lexington daily, supervising a series about University of Kentucky basketball players who improperly took cash payments and other favors from boosters.

In 1986, the series won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. (Later, when a subject of the investigation sued the Herald-Leader for libel, the paper reached an out-of-court settlement with the plaintiff for an undisclosed sum. The Pulitzer was not rescinded.)

Jeffrey A. Marx, a co-author of the series that captured the Pulitzer, has "no comment" about Green. He is now a freelance writer in Washington, D.C., and co-founder of the Wendy Marx Foundation for Organ Donor Awareness, a foundation named for his sister, whose life was saved by a liver transplant. Michael York, the other co-author and now a Washington, D.C.-based attorney, recalls that "Dave was an integral part of the team. He was engaged and very enthusiastic throughout the whole ordeal."

The staff of the Herald-Leader was a Pulitzer finalist in 1990 for a project Green directed uncovering political abuses and their damaging effects on students in Kentucky's public school system.

Green was a fellow in the prestigious University of Michigan Journalism Fellows program during the 1990-1991 academic year. In 1992, after returning to the Herald-Leader, a series Green supervised on sexual abuse of children won the 1992 National Headliner Award for public service. That same year, he won an internal award as the outstanding journalist at Knight Ridder, the newspaper chain that owns the Herald-Leader.

Sutherland recruited Green away from Lexington in 1992, hiring him to become The Tennessean's managing editor for news. Since Green's arrival in Nashville, the paper has captured a sizable number of awards from Gannett and from the Tennessee Press Association, but few others of note.

Former Tennessean reporter Joel Kaplan, who now serves as chairman of the newspaper department at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, isn't impressed: "When you can't win a Pulitzer or a substantive national award like an Investigative Reporters and Editors' medal, you settle for extolling the virtues of silly internal corporate contests or [of] state awards against negligible competition."

Despite Gannett's unwritten policy that the best path to promotion is to move around from paper to paper within the company, Green has made a commitment to Middle Tennessee. He lives a quiet life with his wife and two children in Williamson County—specifically Brentwood—and he is active in Congregation Micah. "Dave is a pillar in the synagogue," says Rabbi Kenneth A. Kanter. "He is enthusiastic, positive, and sensitive, and dedicated to his family and Judaism."

Staffers say that Green's lack of interpersonal skills might be acceptable if he were putting out a great newspaper. But 51 of those who work or have worked for him at The Tennessean questioned, in interviews with the Scene, whether he is capable of that. They do say he is capable of executing a formulaic approach to journalism being pursued by many other newspapers across the country.

Former Tennessean feature writer Clark Parsons, who left the Scene in 1993 to take a job at The Tennessean and worked there for two years before moving to Germany, wrote a stinging rebuke of the paper's direction under Green in 1994. The criticism was posted on the newspaper's internal electronic newsletter "Hello."

"Being the local Gannett franchise, this paper now sees its mission as some sort of reader kiosk, a daily Yellow Pages, a poll-driven, focus-grouped corporate entity more content to follow its customers and offer information-as-widgets than really say anything," Parsons wrote. "That approach may increase circulation 2 percent a year, but it long ago made this newspaper something of a local punchline. Our tone? Numerous words spring to mind: chatty, simplistic, boosterish, chirpy, naive."

Parsons' views are not dissimilar from those of many Nashville insiders today. The Scene identified 136 community leaders to hear their views about The Tennessean. A persistent refrain from the 50 of those who commented on the record—and most of those who spoke off the record—is that The Tennessean is of average-to-poor quality, and has become bland and irrelevant.

Green's assessment of his paper is different: "The Tennessean is a very good newspaper that is getting better."

Jimmy Carnahan, a journalist who joined The Tennessean in 1947 and retired as night city editor in 1993—leaving the newsroom void of a knowledgeable, colorful character with an intimate familiarity with Nashville—doesn't mince his words when it comes to grading Green and the paper he runs. "It's clear that Frank delegates an awful lot to his managing editor, and I'm not sure Dave knows how to handle that authority. There is clearly a vacuum of leadership from the top down at the paper.... I don't get the impression that too many reporters there have a fire in their belly."

It's a familiar refrain.

Keel Hunt, president of The Strategy Group in Nashville and former Tennessean reporter, Washington, D.C., correspondent, and city editor during the '60s and '70s, says he misses "the newspaper's sense of outrage. We had genuine crusades then and tried to stay close to the street. I felt I had important work. I guess it's possible there just isn't any corruption anymore. Maybe that's it. I do get the feeling that reporters today don't have fun or enjoy their jobs."

Parsons, the former Tennessean features writer now living in Germany, seems to confirm Hunt's theory. "Perhaps the scariest thing I can tell you about The Tennessean is that while I was there, much of the staff knew their product was focus-group, research-driven crap," he says. "That newsroom is full of bright, talented, well-meaning people, but they are working in a system where Gannett has laid down the law, and management has bought into it."

Parsons says that, during his two-year tenure at The Tennessean, it was clear to him that Sutherland and Green believed that the only way for the paper to prosper was to adhere to Gannett's rules. "Often things seemed to be judged through the prism of adherence to Gannett award standards instead of importance to Nashville."

In interviews with the Scene, 40 current and former Tennessean journalists expressed frustration about Green's sense of what a newspaper should be and what news it should cover.

Green is an editor who believes that the primary role of newspapers is to chronicle what happens in their communities. Many editors, including Sutherland, grew up in a different era of journalism, when editors saw themselves as watchdogs. This apparent tension between Sutherland's and Green's views of what The Tennessean is, and ought to be, was highlighted in an internal document last year produced by a group of Tennessean journalists. (See sidebar, "The Vision Thing," on p. 23.)

Green considers it important to follow the community's lead, which is why he supports focus groups and market research to help decide what goes in the paper. "There is a theory that the downfall of journalism is listening to readers," Green says. "I don't subscribe to it. We need to talk to them and ask them questions."

Voicing a sentiment shared by many of his colleagues, veteran sports columnist Larry Woody says that while he doesn't want to "second-guess" Green, he has his doubts about poll-driven journalism. "Dave is a very smart guy," he says. "But many of us wonder about these reader polls. I remember one survey that showed readers were more interested in girl's basketball than in car racing. That's crazy. There are a hundred thousand people at a stock car race, and only a relative handful at some local women's [basketball] games."

Green says that a good newspaper has to be a leader. "The task for me and my staff," he says, "is to identify the important issues facing this community and provide balanced news coverage that explores all sides without taking a stand. To do this, we have identified key topics for coverage." Those, he says, include "education, particularly as it involves the public schools; growth, including business development, transportation, and infrastructure issues; quality of life, etc.; the workings of state and local government; the music industry; and health care."

Beyond that, Green says, "our role in Nashville's future is to provide readers with news and insight that will help them make decisions on the direction of the community."

Many journalists and Nashvillians expressed frustration with Green's unwillingness to take stands. "The flaw in this neutral attitude," explains Richard Campbell, director of MTSU's School of Journalism, "is that it assumes the power relationship is equal—but that almost never happens. The old great editors used their papers to equalize power inequities and championed the little guy."

For someone with his fingerprints all over the dominant daily newspaper in town, the Scene found that civic leaders hardly know Green. The managing editor says he thinks he has a "pretty good understanding" of what's going on around him in Nashville. He cites his participation in Leadership Nashville, an educational foundation that annually selects a class of 40 community leaders from diverse backgrounds to discuss issues facing the city. "You may just not have picked the people who know me."

Sutherland has heard the criticisms that he himself has been absent from decision-making in the newsroom, and he says he has taken steps to get more involved. "We have made a number of organizational changes in the newsroom," Sutherland says. "I am involved in changing how we assign and plan coverage of some stories. I am focusing on our strategic initiatives for the next three years."

Sutherland doesn't run the daily news meetings in which top editors determine what's going into the paper. Green often attends the meetings but doesn't run them. Instead, an assistant managing editor typically presides.

Describing his management style, Green says he makes an effort to "mentor people" and prides himself on rewarding good performance. He says he admires editors who are "unflappable" and who avoid highs and lows.

Green, who supervises about 180 newsroom employees at The Tennessean, says he places a "high premium on ethical behavior, fairness, and aggressiveness," saying, "I strive for leading a staff toward producing the best possible paper we can every single day." As for the criticism about his personal interactions, Green says he doesn't think of himself as "a cold person."

The best and brightest simply are no longer attracted to the management ranks at daily newspapers such as The Tennessean, says author Jim Squires, a former Tennessean reporter and former Chicago Tribune editor. The emphasis on the business operations at newspapers, rather than on the journalism, is driving the talent pool toward investigative reporting, broadcast reporting, and book writing, he tells the Scene.

Take the editors of two student newspapers, James Evans at MTSU's Sidelines and Jennifer Whatley at The Vanderbilt Hustler. Neither is particularly excited about the idea of working at The Tennessean in any capacity. "It doesn't piss people off anymore," Evans says. "It has kind of a stigma as being boring today." Whatley says she doesn't think she'd "be able to do anything interesting there."

Kimbrell, the MTSU journalism professor, believes that many quality journalists "don't want to work at The Tennessean because they don't want to be part of the Gannett culture. That culture exists. It's not mythology. Gannett has goals and quotas and a news philosophy, and they are adhered to across the company."

Green's critics point to Diane Nottingham as an example of someone who has moved ahead in the Gannett culture under Green's direction. Nottingham's title is "assistant managing editor, nights," and on some occasions she determines what goes on the front page of the paper. Her background is in graphics and planning, and her only reporting experience was as an intern at The News-Journal of Wilmington, Del. Nottingham is well-liked among the staff, but critics blame her lack of reporting experience for putting what they consider the wrong stories on Page 1.

Many Tennessean staffers—even those who say they respect Green—express concern that he attracts "plain-vanilla" journalists who won't rock the boat and aren't capable of, or interested in, doing exceptional journalism.

Says Jeff Pearlman, former Tennessean sportswriter and now a senior writer at Sports Illustrated: "I was kind of an immature jerk when I started at the paper, and I owe The Tennessean a ton when it comes to my career. But one philosophy always bothered me: They think the reader is kind of stupid. It's definitely not a place for writers who want to be creative. They stress conventionality."

Susan Passi-Klaus is another reporter bothered by the emphasis on conventionality at The Tennessean. She put in a short stint as an education writer there from January to April of this year, after freelancing for the daily since 1988. Passi-Klaus, who started work earlier this week as a columnist and reporter at The City Paper, says she quickly realized that she didn't fit into the Gannett corporate culture. She is among those who feel sorry for Green. "I heard the internal PR on Dave Green long before I joined the paper, that he had problems and it was an unhappy place to work," she says. "After I got there, I found he was just a shy guy trying to do the people thing. He's handicapped at it. He's socially challenged."

As for Sonny Rawls, his take on the situation is that Green isn't a real journalist. "There is a big difference between working for a newspaper and being a journalist. For a true journalist, it's not just a job, but a calling. Dave Green thinks he has a good job."

Next week, independent experts critique The Tennessean