Editor to Staff: Who Should Be Your Boss?   

While hiring and promotions at many newspapers can resemble covert operations, Editor William Woo of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently made the unusual move of asking his staff to help him select a new managing editor. The open search, which ended with the hiring of an editor from the Charlotte Observer, won high praise from staffers.

Woo appointed a committee – three editors, the photo editor, the deputy Washington bureau chief and a reporter – in early May to advise him and keep the staff updated on the search. The managing editor position had been vacated when David Lipman was promoted to direct long-term planning for parent Pulitzer Publishing.

Woo made clear that he would make the final decision but encouraged the committee and his staff to make suggestions and research the backgrounds of potential hires. He also circulated thumbnail sketches of prospective hires and introduced outside candidates to each news department.

"I have for a long time believed that one of the most liberating, empowering, effective ways of getting good ideas is to do things with maximum participation," says Woo, a 30-year Post-Dispatch veteran who has been editor since 1986.

After soliciting nominations from his staff and 10 outside journalists, Woo and his committee asked 18 candidates to submit a personal biography and an essay describing their management styles and vision for the Post-Dispatch.

From those, Woo and his committee selected three in-house and three outside candidates. Woo added a fourth outsider to the pool. After interviewing the insiders, Woo and his advisors invited each outsider to spend a long day touring the news departments, meeting with the committee, the staff and Chairman Joseph Pulitzer Jr., and having dinner with Woo.

Woo listened to the committee's assessment of the finalists, then spent a day "sitting on the banks of the Missouri River" to consider his decision. He chose Foster Davis, an assistant managing editor at the Charlotte Observer and a favorite candidate among the committee and Post-Dispatch staff.

Woo and the committee talked to more than 30 people about Davis, 52. By the end, Davis says, "I felt like a worn out scratch-and-sniff book. But nothing in the process felt abusive and it brought me here with about as much political legitimacy as any outsider could hope to have."

Reporter Bill Smith, a committee member, says he and others were skeptical that the body would have any influence on Woo's decision. But, he says, "almost from the first day it became clear that we were going to play more than just a token role."

Although Smith says he felt uncomfortable at times discussing the shortcomings of coworkers who had applied, candidates within the Post-Dispatch say they don't harbor ill feelings. "You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who was at all close to this who thought that it didn't work," says Richard Weil, assistant managing editor for projects and a finalist for the job.

Woo's approach is "about as open and collegial and collaborative a process as any I've ever heard of in the United States," says Robert J. Haiman, president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, who recommended candidates at Woo's request. He adds that some European newspaper staffs elect editors or are given veto power over publishers' choices.

Smith says the process helped boost spirits at the Post-Dispatch, which he described as having had "serious morale problems." But the very public search was not so appealing to some outside candidates, whose bosses and staffs soon heard about their applications. Managing Editor Jane Amari of the Los Angeles Daily News, one of the seven finalists, said that while the process was admirable from the Post-Dispatch's viewpoint, it disrupted her newsroom. "It's kind of like being married to somebody and getting up and saying, 'You know, tonight I may leave you,' " she says. "After a while, that gets on people's nerves."

Although Davis wonders whether the open search might have kept some qualified candidates from applying, he still supports the idea. "I like what it did for the newsroom," he says. "I like the amount of horsepower it turned loose."