After the Fall   

William Woo was on vacation when he learned that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had launched a search for his successor as the paper’s top editor. In an interview with AJR Woo reflects on his career and the state of journalism.

William Woo, 59, joined the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a feature writer in 1962. Twenty-four years later he became its editor. Woo and his wife, Post-Dispatch reporter Martha Shirk, were on vacation in Germany when he learned that top management had told the staff that it no longer wanted him in command of the paper's newsroom and editorial pages. In response to a question at a staff meeting in March, Publisher Nicholas G. Penniman IV said that the paper, the Pulitzer family's flagship, was going to search nationwide for a new top editor.

Woo, who at the time headed the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Change Committee, fell victim to a desire for change at his own paper.

Penniman and Post-Dispatch Chairman Michael E. Pulitzer refused to discuss the reasons for the decision with AJR. In a statement to the staff, Pulitzer said the paper was doing well but had been hurt by increases in newsprint prices and dwindling circulation. "I've concluded that it is time to make some management changes to move the Post-Dispatch forward into the next century," he added.

An outspoken, thoughtful, nationally respected editor, Woo is a disciple of Joseph Pulitzer III and has been instrumental in maintaining the Post-Disptach's liberal editorial voice. He also has been a prominent skeptic on the subject of public journalism.

AJR interviewed Woo in April at the ASNE convention in Washington, D.C. He had been told he could stay on at the paper in a senior writing position. However, at press time, Woo and the company were in the midst of separation negotiations. His successor had not been named.

AJR: Tell me about your journalism background.

WW: My mother and father were journalists. They met at the University of Missouri when they were journalism students. My father was Chinese, and my mother was from Missouri. They married in Illinois because of the miscegenation laws in Missouri. That fact has had a powerful effect on me. I was born in Shanghai. My mother and father were divorced after the war. My father married a Chinese journalist from his office. My mother never remarried. I lived with my mother back in the United States. In my adolescent way I somehow associated journalism with my mother's misery and the breakup of my family.

AJR: So why wouldn't you have steered clear of journalism?

WW: I did try to steer clear of it. I was going to become a professor of English literature. In my junior year at the University of Kansas, I ran out of money. I got a job at the Kansas City Times. I went in and wrote death notices for six months. I worked for some very tough men who trained me in ways I've never forgotten. I didn't intend to be a journalist.

AJR: You joined the Post-Disptach in 1962. What did you do?

WW: Feature writer. In 1967, my life caught the attention of Joseph Pulitzer III, who was the chairman, editor and publisher. He sent me to Russia for two months to cover the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. I came back, and my old job was gone. I went to work as a special projects writer and two years later went to the editorial page. Joe Pulitzer trained me. He really cared for me. He really cared for the platform of the paper.

In 1986, I became the first lay person, so to speak, non-family member, to be the editor of the Post-Dispatch. Joe was my mentor. He wished me to lead a newspaper that was active and had a view that was consistent with the view of the paper. He died in March 1993.

AJR: You grew up as a Chinese-American. How did that affect you and your interest in journalism?

WW: I can tell you, to be someone of two races, two countries, a broken home, sets you forever outside the main circle of society. It's not to say you'll be mistreated. It makes you forever with your nose pressed up against the glass.

As I've grown older, I've come to understand how much my Asian background and heritage has shaped the way I relate to people. Very indirect. I was finding in my discourse with my colleagues--and this finally became a front-and-center issue--that people were not understanding what I was saying. I thought I was being very clear. One day I said to my staff, "I feel as though all these years I've been talking to you in Chinese, and it's been very frustrating for both of us."

AJR: Are you talking to me in English?

WW: I think I am. You'll have to figure that out. But I told my staff, "I'm going to start talking to you in English. But I also recommend you guys learn some Chinese."

AJR: How did you find out you would be replaced?

WW: Well, we had a lot of conversations about the succession of the editor. It was not news to me that there was going to be a succession and that I would have a role in the identification of this person.

AJR: Was it voluntary? Did you want to step down?

WW: No. It was not something that I wished to happen. But it was something that I knew that, as someone standing on the doorstep of 60, that this paper needed a person to look toward the future. We had talked about it... But the particulars of how it happened did come as a surprise to me. And I have expressed myself about this to the senior management.

AJR: Did you not find out until you returned?

WW: I knew something had happened because a colleague called me and my wife in Germany. It was distressing. Incidentally, the issue of an ownership wishing to change the editor is entirely legitimate.

AJR: That's true, but the issue of loyalty and how you treat your employees is also important. You've been there over 30 years.

WW: I have. I think everybody is in a difficult situation. I've been in difficult situations which did not produce the result that hindsight would have led me to produce. Nobody's perfect.

AJR: What will you be doing now?

WW: I've been asked to run the paper until this new person is on the job, however long it takes. I've been asked to continue at the paper in some serious role that's equal to my experience. But as I mentioned, I've been doing this for 40 years, there may be something else.

AJR: Okay, let's talk about journalism. What's the most dramatic change you have seen in your 40 years?

WW: A change that's occurred that I think about a lot is the gathering, growing sense of uncertainty. Lack of moral direction. Confusion that's come down on our business.

AJR: Talk more about the uncertainty.

WW: Let's talk about a dark constellation. Declining circulation. Declining public confidence in the media. The explosion in kinds of media. All of this has led a lot of journalists to believe the decline of circulation means that newspapers have become irrelevant. If you go to any journalism conference you'll be hearing about the disconnect. What's happened is a lack of confidence in the basic substance of our business.

So you have public journalism. The change movement. The new media. We also have seen over the last 15 years or so a difference in the way newspapers present themselves with the desire to be relevant in local news and the desire to engage local readers. The content of newspapers has changed. Institutional stories, or the so-called process stories, are no longer done. What is interesting to people is stories about real human beings.

AJR: Do you object to that change, ignoring the process stories?

WW: You bet I do. To say that the coverage of government, the coverage of institutions, of policy, is really irrelevant to our connection is, to me, to miss the fundamental. Sure we need stories about people. I think a lot of institutional coverage is awfully dull. And it's the responsibility of editors and reporters to somehow make it engaging.

AJR: So is the Post-Dispatch not one of these papers that has a pod for covering social change or violence instead of cops and courts?

WW: We have not reorganized our beat structure into hunters and gatherers. Our beat structure is fairly traditional.

AJR: What about the impact of television?

WW: We print journalists typically apprehend the threat of television in terms of television's immediacy. Oklahoma City blows up, it's on television. Our ability to get breaking news into the story has been badly eroded by television. Television, I think, has essentially stolen the human interest story.

AJR: You've been targeted as a designated critic of public journalism. Do you think you really understand what it is?

WW: I consider myself a skeptic--not an opponent--of public journalism [see "Missing the Point," page 39]. But public journalism has yet to demonstrate itself as the penicillin of daily journalism. When public journalism is criticized for hiring community activists or doing things that are seen by common assent as egregious, the public journalism proponents always say that was a bad experiment. That didn't work. It never reflects on the original premise.

What I wish the proponents would do is have a National Transportation Safety Board-like thing on public journalism. Was it pilot error? Or was man not meant to fly? Public journalism has not really been sufficiently critically assessed.

AJR: Yes, but proponents will tell you that public journalism is still very much in the inchoate stage: That didn't work, let's try this.

WW: I think nobility of purpose is a terrific thing. Wishing to improve the democracy is very hard to fault when we are operating under the First Amendment... But it's not healthy to me when we stop thinking of people who read our newspapers as readers and now begin to think of them as citizens or voters.

AJR: What specifically don't you like?

WW: One of the great canards out there is journalists are disconnected. It's totally untrue. We are human beings. Let me just tell you about myself. And I'll posit myself as a pretty typical person. My mother died of Alzheimer's disease. My aunt had to spend down her money, and I had to sit in public welfare auctions to get her onto Medicaid. I have three children. Two are in public schools. I go to church. I do all things that ordinary people do. It's simply loony to imagine my life is somehow different. It's certainly different from the lives of some people.

AJR: What about the notion of the journalist as the excessive outsider?

WW: There's a difference between denying your connection to the human race and denying you are part of the human race. You see?

AJR: No. I think you are talking Chinese again.

WW: Okay, I'll try that one again. A critic who says the journalist is disconnected is essentially denying the journalist is part of the human race... I just think we need to get beyond the disconnected issue and say we are people who clearly don't listen to our communities enough and we ought to do more and become more involved.

AJR: I think about the early days of my journalism career where I just cared if it was a good story. I didn't care what damage it did. I'm much more compassionate and empathetic now.

WW: I've increasingly found myself coming to the proposition that supports what you're talking about. I've concluded there are no such things as journalism values or ethics. There are a set of values and set of ethics that govern or affect us as human beings. Journalism merely provides the situations where those ethics and values are challenged.

AJR: I believe you said that sensational stories such as Tonya Harding and Lorena Bobbitt have a journalistic worth.

WW: I never said that. What I said was that we've been challenged to keep the Bobbitts, Tonya Harding, the president's underwear off of our front pages, and we make the argument that these things have journalistic worth because they reflect issues in society, such as spousal abuse. Those are the fig leaves we put on those goddamn things. I'm simply saying there are certain stories that, through their very sensational nature, you couldn't keep out of the paper. But the value of the Bobbitt story... I just wish, for Christ's sake, people wouldn't be telling me I'm reading something significant about the human condition. That's what I object to.

AJR: To me the only thing that's significant is the desire for it.

WW: When I said they have worth you have to be very careful to understand what I'm saying is that journalists and editors often impute worth to them as a justification to stifle their shame in putting the stuff in the paper.

AJR: How do you handle it?

WW: People are talking about it. I won't pretend we live on the moon. But the management of a newshole is a very serious responsibility.

AJR: Let's talk about the corporate pressure on the newsroom. Some CEOs earn salaries of a million-plus [see "Are They Worth It?" June]. What message do those salaries send to the rank and file who are being asked to take a wage freeze or put out an extra section without hiring more people?

WW: That message is sent throughout corporate America today, whether you work for an aircraft company or a computer company or a news company.

AJR: What is that message?

WW: The message that people in senior management are being paid in salaries that reflect the shareholders' pleasures or anxieties. As long as the journalist is treated with respect and has a decent standard of living, the fact that the CEO may make a salary of several hundred thousand or more is not one of the things I'm most exercised about.

AJR: What do you think is the biggest problem facing print journalists?

WW: I think what's facing print journalism is a failure of confidence. Public journalism. Depending on consultants and other things suggests collectively that the answer lies beyond our own capacity to control our destiny. So someone from such and such a foundation or consulting group comes in and helps us play with Legos to develop teamwork and then gives us a definition of the future.

AJR: Do you feel disillusioned with journalism now?

WW: No. Do I sound disillusioned?

AJR: No. But 40 years is a long time in the field.

WW: I don't feel illusion, but I'm pretty much of a romantic about journalism. I still love to do it. How can you be disillusioned about an enterprise that is a wonderful opportunity for people to be better human beings?

AJR: If you had to do it all over again would you go into journalism as it is today?

WW: (Long pause.) When I was 21, the Kansas City Star was a great paper. I simply loved newspapering. It was so romantic. I used to go to work with 25 cents in my pocket. That's all I had. Fifteen cents for a bowl of soup at dinner. There was a saloon that sold dime beer. I lived on 25 cents a day, and I was really a terribly happy guy. I've been a terribly lucky guy. If I could have all the pleasure I've had, I'd do it in a minute.

AJR: Your wife, Martha Shirk, works for the paper. How do you work that out?

WW: It's really been a very difficult thing. Basically I've had to put her career in trust. In another words, recuse myself. I don't promote her. I don't give her raises or order her stories for page one or keep them off page one. She suffers from it. Everything that goes right for her, some people say I've made it work rather than based on the merit of it.

AJR: You are well-known for taking principled stands. Why is that?

WW: I've always advocated that the paper should be activist and have a moral compass. It does not embarrass me to say that the platform of the Post-Dispatch essentially makes it a paper with a social mission. These are things we don't really say out loud today: that you have a mission.