Demystifying the Editorial Page   

It's 9:30 a.m. on Friday, and the editorial writers for two sister newspapers in Portland, Maine, are sitting down in their fourth-floor office for their daily meeting.

It looks like your average editorial planning session: four editors with cups of coffee, editions of the day's newspaper, clips and legal pads. But a closer look reveals somebody else at the meeting, one Ross Bachelder. Bachelder drove an hour north from Berwick, Maine, to take the weekday Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram up on their invitation to readers to attend editorial meetings.

Bachelder, a freelance writer, watches quietly as Editorial Page Editor George Neavoll begins with an explanation. "We have no secrets in this department," he says. "We're here to decide what we're saying in tomorrow's paper and farther down the road."

Neavoll, a 53-year-old former Peace Corps volunteer with striking white hair and an "aw-shucks" demeanor, arrived at the newspapers last October from the Wichita Eagle, where he had served as editorial page editor. Less than two weeks later, he extended the invitation in a column. "We who are in the business of journalism are the foremost advocates of openness in government and openness in public affairs, and rightly so," he wrote. "Too often, however, we don't apply the same standard to ourselves." Since Neavoll began his campaign to "demystify" the editorial page, readers have come to meetings almost every day, and as many as nine people have attended a single meeting.

After the editors discussed the editorial lineup for the next few days, Bachelder spoke about his mother-in-law's bout with Lou Gehrig's disease. The editors listened politely, writing nothing down. When Bachelder finished, Neavoll said, "It might be a topic for a news story about which we could editorialize."

After the meeting, Bachelder was impressed. "It's really exciting that an organization of this stature lets the public come in and stir the pot," he said. The Press Herald has a circulation of 73,585, while the Sunday Telegram circulates 141,660 copies.

Executive Editor Lou Ureneck says there were some early concerns about opening the meetings. "We were fearful that we'd attract kooks and people who didn't have anything better to do with their time," he says. "But the reality is, uniformly we've had people who have serious concerns about public issues, not crackpots."

Neavoll says that unlike Bachelder, most guests have no agenda. "Most people don't speak – they just observe," Neavoll says. "But it makes the paper a lot more real for them."

Others are less impressed. "It's just window dressing and a public relations ploy," says Al Diamon, an afternoon talk show host and columnist for Casco Bay Weekly, who did a piece on the fishbowl meetings for Maine public radio.

"I don't have any gripe with making editorial decisions in private. But I think it's deceptive [to readers] to indicate they're getting an inside view of the editorial process when they really are not," Diamon says. The most important decisions "are still made in secret by who knows who." What visitors see primarily, he says, are editorials being assigned, not opinions being formulated.

"I don't think it's a dog-and-pony show," counters John Porter, a business writer for the papers who spent six weeks writing editorials to cover for a writer on leave. "People come in with ideas and give suggestions and tell you what's going on."

In each issue of the papers, a notice invites readers to the meetings. Neavoll says he's gotten calls from editors at other papers who are considering opening their meetings, and that he recommends it.

"Hopefully we can get something started where every newspaper opens their editorial meetings."