Brief Tenure, Sudden Exit   

After eight months as executive editor of the Daily Oklahoman, Stan Tiner is out of a job.

What happens when a hard-charging, aggressive new editor steps into the newsroom of an underachieving newspaper? Well, in the case of Stan Tiner , the editor doesn't last long.
After a mere eight months as executive editor of the Daily Oklahoman , Tiner is out of a job, leaving staff, media watchers and Oklahoma journalists to speculate on what could have caused the surprise hire to make a surprise departure. Sue Hale , former general manager of Connect Oklahoma Inc., the paper's online arm, and a longtime Oklahoman staffer, takes over.
Neither company officials nor Tiner have detailed what precipitated the editor's abrupt departure. Ed Martin , the Oklahoman's vice president and general manager, would only say: "The company and Stan just disagreed on the future direction of the newspaper. I underline future." Tiner, 57, did not return AJR phone calls.
The ex- Mobile Register editor pushed the paper hard--and fast. Tiner was able to spend money and make things happen that "we've been saying for years we wanted to do," says one staffer, who asked not to be identified. When shooting erupted at a school about 150 miles away, reporters and photographers were dispatched to the scene in a helicopter--something that would have been unthinkable in the past.
Washington bureau reporter Chris Casteel says he didn't have much contact with Tiner, but was impressed that the editor asked him to travel with the four major presidential candidates. "I had not done that before," says Casteel, who's been in the bureau 10 years.
But while the Oklahoma City daily improved under Tiner, the anonymous staffer says, newsroom stress hit a record high. Another employee compared Tiner to "a teenager who'd gotten a sports car for their birthday, and the only way they knew how to drive it was with their foot to the floor."
Tiner arrived at the 251,437-circulation Oklahoman shortly after a Columbia Journalism Review article labeled it "the worst newspaper in America" and a year after an AJR story criticized its writing and the size of its staff and newshole in an article on independently owned newspapers (see "Endangered Species," June 1998). The changes Tiner instituted, including a redesign, are generally praised, and some question whether the paper was as bad as it was portrayed. "The news staff of the Oklahoman got a bad rap in the CJR article," says Joe Worley , executive editor of the Tulsa World . "They're a good, hard-working staff. Stan had come in and capitalized on that."
Worley liked the fact that, under Tiner, the Oklahoman expanded its newshole, and he was impressed with a series the paper ran on public education. "I thought they were being aggressive, and you love to see any newsroom [being aggressive], even when they're competing against you," he says.
Dave Story , publisher of the Claremore Daily Progress in northeast Oklahoma, wrote in a column that Tiner "immediately and dramatically altered the looks and content of the state's largest newspaper." Story criticizes Tiner's departure, and he's not too hopeful Tiner's initiatives will survive. "They had a chance to turn that paper around and didn't do it," he says.
Did politics play a role in the editor's exit? Tiner's liberal views were clearly at odds with the paper's conservative editorials and the philosophy of owner Edward L. Gaylord , says J. Leland Gourley , owner and editor of Friday , an Oklahoma City weekly. That may have contributed to his departure, but Gourley, in effect, says "so what." "Ed Gaylord has a right to hire an editor... and keep an editor whose views are similar to his own ideology and philosophy," he says.
"Stan has the ability to be an objective journalist," Gourley says. But his story "selection and play did not really reflect that." He adds hard news was moved inside, leaving page one filled with "more magazine-style" features. Gourley does allow that the editor "created some excitement in the paper."
Perhaps the modifications Tiner wanted were more than management had expected. Many staffers didn't want to comment on the change of editorship. One staffer who did says a sign that there could be serious trouble came when only the first of a planned three-part series on the Karen Silkwood saga was published in December. Silkwood worked for a nuclear plant owned by Oklahoma-based Kerr-McGee Corp., which, she charged, had committed safety and security violations. She was killed in a car crash in 1974, reportedly on her way to meet with a journalist. The first article recounts the 1979 federal trial in which Kerr-McGee was found liable for contaminating Silkwood with plutonium. Ten days after the story ran, an Oklahoman editorial praised Kerr-McGee for its contributions to the state and its citizens.
The irony, says the staffer, was that the second article consisted largely of an interview with a Kerr-McGee public relations official. A possible link between the Silkwood series and Tiner's departure was first raised by the New York Times . When asked about that suggestion, General Manager Martin said, "I thought that was a reachŠ. I don't have a response."
In the newsroom, there are "mixed feelings" about Tiner's leaving, says the staffer. A restructuring "pissed people off," some of whom immediately asked for their old jobs back after he left. Tiner was "a dynamic leader," says the staffer, but "unpredictable." There's "relief that this intense pressure is off," this person says, but those in the newsroom will "admit that a lot of the changes were good."
What's next for the Daily Oklahoman? At this point the sports car is idling at a red light, waiting for its new driver to pick a course. Hale, 55, says she likes the paper's new look. She's now "trying to assess how we want to move forward."
Since Hale took over, says one staffer, the aggressive push from above has vanished. But improvements, such as better writing, are still evident and shouldn't fade completely. Barring a major newsroom upheaval, says the staffer, "I don't think we can go back entirely."