Christy Bulkeley: Interview #7

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Ritchie: When we finished our last session, we had talked about your return to Saratoga in 1984, and shortly thereafter, you left.

Bulkeley: Yes, moving to the [Gannett] Foundation.

Ritchie: Do you have anything else you want to tell me about that time period?

Bulkeley: One of the changes in corporate culture that I never talked about was the switch from the early days when [Al] Neuharth and then [John] Quinn, on his behalf, made sure whenever there were meetings with "newsmakers" speakers or whenever Neuharth was doing a "take questions from all of us" kind of thing, Neuharth always wanted to be sure there were questions, and generally wanted to be sure there were questions of substance that the regular news media wouldn't ask. So John Quinn used to plant questions or they'd call us and alert us, some of us, ahead of time, to who was going to be there and be ready with your questions. So some of us just automatically, as part of our job and routine work, came to the regular meetings ready to ask questions.

Ritchie: These meetings would be at corporate headquarters?

Bulkeley: Gannett would do year-end meetings. It used to do the year-end meetings of CEOs in various cities, but part of the program was always newsmakers. It eventually settled into having them here in Washington. Then lots of times there would be meetings connected with the Publishers Association, for instance. They might, in addition to having in-house meetings on corporate stuff, bring in somebody who was going to be at a conference anyway to do a speech or bring in somebody for a speech with question and answer. But the point is that some of us were expected and trained, in effect, to be sure there were questions—different questions, but of substance, than particularly the political newsmakers would get from the Washington press corps.

I got so that I waited until—as the company grew and there were more and more people there, I figured, you know, everybody ought to be doing this, so I sort of started waiting and only filled gaps with my questions. But that last meeting I had with John Curley that we talked about before, one of the things he said to me that I didn't remember when we talked was to quit asking questions. He said, "You ask too many questions, and everybody's getting tired of hearing you ask questions."

"Fine, John. You're the boss." So I never again asked questions, even after I moved to the Foundation, and after the Foundation moved from Rochester to down here. We got a new president and we also started having luncheons with VIPs, particularly those who were connected with grants. Betty Friedan would come periodically and brief us on her men, women, and media work. But lots of other people—journalism deans or whomever. Well, I still didn't ask questions, except once or twice when there were dead silences that were not at the right time. Yet the last

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So anyway, that first year I thought we made an agreement in committee on reviewing grants, that we'd start having some professionally responsible expectations for the professional journalism organizations. Ten, eleven months later when they came back with a new proposal, there was no more information than there had ever been, including no accounting for the prior grants, and no explanation of why they had not been expected to provide this material. So in these circumstances, yeah, I'd get a little huffy and I'd refuse to vote "yes" on a grant recommendation. It just didn't make sense to me in the era when we were still doing community-based grants and issues-based grants, that people who were scraping to get by and organizations that were scraping to get by would be held to so much higher a standard than professional journalists whose work affects the democracy.

If they didn't learn about expectations and responsibility, then I don't really want them doing my newscasts or my newspapers. They aren't the kind of people I would turn loose to go ask questions somewhere. I would have trusted a lot more of these literacy people that I met over the years, or literacy students, who had much greater sensitivity to responsibility and accountability than some of the journalism professionalism stuff that we were encouraging and aiding and abetting through the Foundation.

Ritchie: Were there not standard guideline applications?

Bulkeley: No. When I went to the Foundation—

Ritchie: You went as a vice president?

Bulkeley: Yes, which was the professional title. Technically, an officer that ran a program staff, grants administration, program administration.

Ritchie: How large was the staff?

Bulkeley: The Foundation at that point had a financial vice president, a communications vice president, and three vice presidents dealing with grants, a president, and support staff. A couple of people were added, a couple of writers were added to the PR staff later.

Ritchie: Were there any other women in a position the same as yours?

Bulkeley: Not handling grants. The communications vice president was a woman. The financial vice president was a man. All of us except the communications vice president had come from Gannett. The local grants vice president was, in fact, Cal Mayne, whom I had gone to work for on the editorial page and succeeded as editor of the editorial page.

Ritchie: Back in Rochester.

Bulkeley: In Rochester, at the Times-Union in the early seventies. The vice president who handled the journalism education grants was a man named Jerry Sass, who had been the personnel director at Gannett Rochester newspaper some of the years I was there, so I didn't really know him. He was a friend of David's from growing-up days—David, my husband. I had worked with Jerry a lot over the years on journalism grants. The grants dealing with status of women he'd have me look at. Some of the other grants, he'd have me look at any Missouri grants. Neuharth had originally had me involved with grants to University of Missouri back when I first became a publisher.

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It really is just a "thank you" to people for doing the unsung-hero work that most nonprofits do, but also some commercials for us.

So anyway, I was setting those up. We'd do twenty-five or thirty a year. The speech texts needed to be put together, the arrangements made.

Ritchie: Long distance you were doing this?

Bulkeley: The work would be done by somebody at the local Gannett property, but there were certain standards and expectations Gene [Dorsey] had. We'd never had guidelines to help the local people. Somebody would sit on the phone and talk them through it. So I wrote guidelines as I found out what was needed. I'd do guidelines and revise them, checklists for the local people, and just try to organize and systematize the thing, so when whoever was making the trip had whatever worked and was right for them in terms of facilities and arrangements. I was several months without a secretary. Once I finally got one, we also put the speech text together, and that was basically a formula format, using the computer printouts.

In addition to that, money had been budgeted for an adult literacy program, $300,000 the first year. Cal [Mayne] had a general idea. He was involved with Literacy Volunteers of America. That's an organization—LVA. He had a general idea on how the money could be spent, but I needed to set up a program, and I didn't know anything about adult literacy or the organizations or the rest of it, so I spent some time learning that. We ended up with $100,000 for local grants, which with eighty Gannett properties wouldn't go very far—$100,000 split a couple of ways or split between the two national organizations who do adult volunteer training literacy organizations, and another $100,000 for some special project stuff.

I said, "We have to have application blanks if I'm going to have to hold the locals accountable. If they don't know any more about this than I do, they don't even know what to look for, but an application will help them know what to look for, and guidelines." We never had either one.

Ritchie: For any of the grants?

Bulkeley: No. No. Some general guidelines had evolved on the grants competition, but no formal application sheet and no format for keeping track. I was told to design a program that could be self-contained or go on. This was 1985. Endowed foundations such as the Gannett Foundation are required to spend the equivalent of 5 percent of their assets every year. Well, during those years when the stock market was growing by leaps and bounds, that was no big deal, because the egg kept getting bigger every year anyway. But it also meant some years we didn't budget high enough, so we had extra money to spend during the year.

Ritchie: The Foundation.

Bulkeley: The Foundation did. We ended up doing nearly a million dollars that year in adult literacy stuff because we got so many valid applications back for the local grants that the president, Gene Dorsey, and the board agreed we should go ahead and put it into more local grants and help build the capacity of organizations. At that point, adult literacy organizations and those publicly funded adult education things dealing with basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills were reaching about 1 percent of the estimated population in need of help at that basic level. Now they're reaching closer to 10 percent. The federal budget has increased by leaps and bounds,

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better documentation certainly, but probably 90 percent of the grant proposal requests that came in could be handled as a technical paperwork pass-through. The rest would need more work or more questions or be rejected for some reason. Then there was the community priorities proposal, which was a big job, and there would be around thirty grants granted every year that then had paperwork. In the early years of that program, they had arbitrarily cut budgets or cut amounts out of grants to try to get more grants.

Ritchie: To spread the money around.

Bulkeley: To spread the money around, not necessarily with discussion, because nobody knew who won until they were announced at the year-end meetings. So proposals would be cut. Well, we started asking for more budget information partly to help them see how to justify the dollars and do better budget planning, and to help the Gannett people learn to evaluate nonprofit budgets when they were working on hard computer print budgets, profit-oriented budgets. But that also meant more paperwork, and the more information you get, the more questions it raises, of course.

One of the things I learned in the newspaper business was if your business office isn't functioning, the auditors write very short reports. But the better the records are, the more things they find to raise questions about, so even with internal auditors, you get longer and longer reports the better your office is. The better your budget proposals are because you zero-base them, the more questions you get from the corporate staff. Well, it's the same on grant proposals. So they kept getting fatter and taking more work.

It was wonderful stuff. When I went to the Foundation the first year, we went to the annual Council on Foundations meeting, and David went with me, and between us we could not get to all of the programs that offered new information on issues we were interested in or needed to know. By the third or fourth year, when I'd been exposed to these major proposals every year plus the literacy stuff, community foundation work, the volunteer luncheons, I did some of those speeches. By then the Council on Foundations wasn't so far ahead, and I realized that with all the autonomy we're allowing, that the Foundation allowed in grants, we really were getting cutting edge, both the big proposals. And once we'd learned the detail for the big ones, we could go back and see in the local grants that people out in the countryside were not only ahead of the news media (which I found out that at the council the experts were ahead of the news media, is part of what I read into that council experience), but also the people in the countryside who see problems and see each other at the grocery store or at work or at church or at the gas station or wherever, bake sale, talk about a problem and figure out how can we do something about it, and they go ahead and do it without access to the experts who might tell them, "No, you can't do that. No, it's never been done that way." Well, it is done that way.

The first year I was there, in 1985, in Fremont, Nebraska, one of the site visits I made was to the organization that coordinated the stuff for battered women. It wasn't the shelter, because the shelter was tucked away somewhere. But in 1985, in Fremont, Nebraska, guys who battered were walking in off the street, asking for help. In 1985, there were lots of progressive cities in this country that didn't even have shelters for the battered women or ongoing programs of advice. But in Fremont, Nebraska, it was so well established and so trusted and the battery syndrome being so understood, beginning to be understood on the streets, that guys would walk in saying, "Hey, I do that. I need help." In those early years we were seeing people move the services for homeless into the shelters, so the overnight shelters also became all-day get-help peer places. This city, Washington, D.C., in 1993 is only starting to talk about that. It's coming out of the churches and agencies in Northwest Washington, where the problem is the least and where it aggravates people the most, now starting to talk about a day-care center to get the homeless people off the

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endorsement that said, "Hey, these two individuals have their feet on the ground and their heads on straight, and they know what they're doing. Sooner or later somebody will come in who can put it on paper the way we used to, but turn them loose."

Ritchie: So you probably had done a lot of this in your position in both Saratoga and Danville?

Bulkeley: As publisher, I certainly was involved with community services, on boards of things and committees, and I had handled grant proposals to the Foundation, but I really had a committee that handled grant proposals—a committee of employees that I set up because I figured I was from out of town, I didn't know where money ought to go, and the geography was more than I could reach, so I invited employees from each department to make a committee to look at proposals and recommend them.

It turned out, as people found out later everywhere, in those days I wasn't to tell that I had a committee, that it was publisher's prerogative. So the Foundation president, it was Gene Dorsey's predecessor, a guy named Jack Scott, who is now dead. But when he was the publisher in Hawaii, occasionally filled in as the judge on "Hawaii Five-O." So Jack is still with us in more ways than one. But anyway, Jack said, "Well, just don't tell anybody you've got a committee. Really it's the publishers who are responsible."

I said, "Yes, sir."

He said, "But it's a wonderful idea."

I said, "Okay."

Well, a few years later, the Foundation was promoting it and saying, "You really need more input than a CEO can have. You really need committees working with—" And what we all found is the employees were so tickled to be able to do something constructive for community, on their own they'd go make site visits. A lot of times they'd end up finding places they wanted to volunteer and help or they'd be volunteering for something that was entitled to establishment attention and never had it because they never knew how to ask. Our employees, of course, had become empowered and could help them do it. So it just greatly increased the reach and the connection of the newspaper to the community.

But I also had, over those years, with the Women in Communications stuff originally and then community service stuff, learned enough to know that there are some core pieces of management that are the same, whatever you're managing, and there are some pieces of synergy and chemistry and creative insight that will never fit in a form and can never be explained, but if it's there, you can feel it even coming out of the paper. You could feel it in some of those proposals. While to read through it, it absolutely would not have passed muster if you were being computer printout rigid, but you knew they were on to something and you simply had to say, "Let them do it."

Ritchie: So you had the flexibility to do that?

Bulkeley: Yes. Our accountability was fifteen typewritten lines to the president and maybe six to the board of trustees.

Ritchie: The president of—

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There were a couple of times when Cal and I bargained over some, the ones his gut said "do" that mine said "don't" or that mine said "do" and his said "don't." But other than that kind of bargaining or bargaining over amounts in cuts, I don't think that there were grants given just because somebody felt sorry for somebody, or somebody said, "Well, he's a good guy and he hasn't had any lately. He ought to have one." I think most of the concern about the program came from our own not always clear handling of it. I think the effort to make the announcements quick and short as part of an overloaded year-end Gannett meeting and doing it verbally with pictures and not detail necessarily on a fancy slide show kind of thing, caused as much problem for the program as anything else, because if a day care said it was getting money, by the time you got the community, the publisher, the organization, day-care center, the amount named, you didn't have room to say what was new and different about it. Some of that kind of stuff. We worked on it.

Ritchie: Did you like working there?

Bulkeley: It was okay for a while, and I had fun doing the adult literacy program. One of the innovative things we did with that, ultimately we did a big project with USA Today. I felt the Foundation, in a whole lot of ways, kept itself from living up to its potential. The budgets were never approved until December for the fiscal year starting in January. We were not allowed to recommend grants for more than twelve months. Dealing with adult literacy, as a for instance, in a developing, evolving field, I had no way to assure a start-up organization or somebody working on innovative stuff like developing a technology for adult literacy learners, that I could fund them more than twelve months.

We wouldn't fund research, so there was no way to do formal academic evaluation of the adult learning stuff, which ultimately has to happen if it's to become part of the learning system, as it should.

On these community priority things, they could have renewal grants, but they'd have to apply for them by Labor Day or August, whenever the deadline was, which meant within four or five months from the start-up of an innovative project, which meant they probably didn't have any record with which to apply. To apply that early but not know till December whether they were getting money and how much, because we backed down on cutting budgets finally at some point, or cutting them so hard, that if an innovative project was to maintain any continuity and if our intent was to let them concentrate on building the record and documenting why other people ought to fund it, then to have to have them turn around with a new proposal and sit there and not know until December whether they were going to get money for the next month, with this new thing hanging in the balance, and often with publics that were hard to get involved anybody because they had been disappointed, abused, neglected, insulted, condescended to, screwed by agencies and governments before, a lot of it didn't make any sense. But nobody was ever willing to change it or do anything realistic about any spirit of philanthropy discussion about why weren't we willing to do it and to go ahead and do it.

Some multiple-year funding would have meant when you first started the overlap, you'd be short a couple of years, but ultimately they'd settle out so you'd have a consistent dollar amount to deal with every year. You'd just have to do some policy or operating decisions on how much you were going to commit and how far ahead, unlike the Congress, which seems to have committed the full federal budget for a number of years. You don't have to do that, and most foundations with big assets and big grants budgets operate on a longer string than twelve months, and it wasn't always twelve months. Well, we could do grants for twelve months. If I'd recommend a grant for approval in November, then it would carry through to the following November.

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Well, I called up my friends there and told them I knew what they were doing, and we weren't going to do it. I didn't tell them until we announced the winners.

In some states the proposal would come from the white folks, and we'd get a side proposal, the second proposal from minority groups—Urban Leagues or OICs.

Ritchie: What's an OIC?

Bulkeley: Opportunities Industrialization Centers. We talked about Leon Sullivan's. Or the anti-poverty program state executives, which, in effect, would say, "Don't be fooled. The rest of the community, the grassroots community, is organized in this state and should be in that proposal and isn't."

Ritchie: So these proposals were really removed from the Gannett people in the state.

Bulkeley: Yes. The connection was USA Today, which by then was doing high school kids' all-star teams by state, has its daily states page and does a variety of things at the state level, so it fit their format. With them as co-sponsors, there were a lot of places where Gannett Foundation $100,000 wasn't a big deal, but USA Today would give people the entr&$233;e to the governor's office, for instance, or whatever. USA Today, I had a partner from there who helped work out what we were doing and helped do the judging. The CEO of USA Today, Tom Curley, happens to be the brother of Gannett's CEO, John. Tom was the one who would sign off at USA Today for this project, and he's the one who ultimately made the call in doing state level out of the proposals I had put together. We talked through all of our stuff with him. He had sign off on the winners at the time we did them.

One state, with a change of governors happening, had an election during the first proposal round, with a new governor elected. We had sign-offs by the outgoing and the incoming, but then the incoming governor's staff tied the money up. I even made a visit, trying to shake it loose. But by the time the next year's grants were around, they hadn't done anything. We rescinded, took the grant back, much to everybody's surprise. They thought until they got around to it, we'd let it sit, because foundations don't take their money back. Well, we took it back and made more grants with it in the second round of the program.

At the same time, the national literacy field was putting in the first proposal ever in Congress to recognize adult literacy as a particular discrete field within adult ed, within job training, for people who needed the basic reading, writing, arithmetic skills, and how to use them in context. At the time they started introducing that legislation, the experts, including both social analysts and policy people who had dealt with other issues, said, "We might get it through by the end of the next Congress after the one where it's introduced," meaning at the end of four years. For sure we'll get it by the third Congress. The bill died in conference over Jesse Helms* wanting to be sure that birth control and abortion stuff was not ever any of the learning material that it would finance, at the end of the first Congress in which it was introduced. It got that close. The differences were reconciled over the winter break, before the new Congress was sworn in, at the staff level, so the adult literacy bill was signed, was passed and signed into law in the first four months of the second Congress in which it was considered—two years and four months after it was first introduced.

______________________ * Jesse Helms, (b. 1921). (R-NC). U.S. senator, 1973 - .

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discovered what we had learned elsewhere, that often the best tutor is somebody who's two weeks ahead of the person being tutored.

Ritchie: So they were on the same level.

Bulkeley: The same level. They can explain what it feels like. They haven't had hierarchy beat into them, and, "This is the way we do it," as opposed to, "Any of these seven ways are fine." Well, that foundation made a multiple-year grant, from the beginning made sure that everybody knew its intent was to document everything, to do formal academically and elsewhere acceptable research, to document what happened and why and how and where they changed things if it didn't work. Within three years, that was the basis of federal legislation on the Even Start program, basically creating a whole new way and format of involvement.

That foundation and others have continued to fund it, and it's now a major national training center, some pieces of which will be spun off into the federally financed one if it ever happens, but the difference being multiple-year commitment, recognition that if you want documentation, you've got to have staff, and recognition that if you want your contribution understood, you've got to pay for research, because the other people who hold money want research, and without it they're not going to recognize it and it won't institutionalize. If innovation is worthwhile, you also need the research so people can adjust it as circumstances change.

Ritchie: But your grant program wasn't quite at that level?

Bulkeley: My programs were basically stuck with the same rules that the local grants were—twelve months, no research, minimal administrative money, and generally only what it took to convert whatever records they had into what I wanted. Our trustees never really recognized that in an evolving field, you've got the whole learning curve thing to deal with. Even those whose career is education never understood that in a start-up, scattered across the country in a field without any resources, you've got to overinvest in the learning end even for the people who are leading it. You've got to overinvest in communication to find out what's going to work to create a field out of disparate parts, and out of parts that historically have not talked to each other and sort of been at odds over some things.

All of those things we needed to be, and our trustees never really understood that. Some of them really wanted to know how many more people have learned to read this year because of us, and how many words have they learned to read. As staff, we sat with trustees in committee for some discussion. The last meeting, one of our trustees said, "Our technology stuff should have just been having all of our famous friends read their favorite books on television and run the words across it, and everybody could learn to read that way, you know, like an adult 'Sesame Street.'" She said that.

At the other end of the table, a college president who's on our board says, "What research underlies our program?"

I said, "There isn't any, except the first-cut anecdotal stuff."

"Oh," he says, "there's got to be research underlying information."

I said, "There isn't. There's no money in this field."

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make the difference for the vast majority of those marginal and non-readers. We've got enough leads that we could go find out what is it or what are the choices of what is it."

Well, at this point the Foundation had started reinventing itself. It stopped all the Gannett local programs, decided to sell the Gannett stock that was the primary endowment, and invest in multiple ways.

Ritchie: The Foundation owned stock?

Bulkeley: The Foundation was endowed with 16 million shares, and they decided to sell all of that and do other kinds of assets, and to focus primarily on journalism programs and to work internationally and nationally, not locally at all. So even though I was quite ready to work toward a program that would satisfy the interests and ideas of both trustees and with my integrity intact, we didn't have a chance to do it.

Then shortly thereafter, I was invited to take a one-year terminal leave from the Gannett, so I did. The journalism stuff I had not been welcome to do before. The executive committee was still dominated by Rochester trustees, one of whom was the guy who had been after me from the day I was named publisher, that I never should have been named publisher, the same guy whose wife chewed me out at a party at the White House once upon a time for being a publisher when all those men should have had the jobs, and he was the one sitting there telling the Foundation president, "She couldn't run newspapers. Why could she run anything else?" When in fact, working against all common sense on what it takes to innovate and to do things from scratch, we had made great waves.

Ritchie: But then the whole focus was changing.

Bulkeley: The whole focus of the Foundation was changing, but with that guy sitting there, and the other one was the guy who had been the corporate news executive, who told me, no, not to get any more involved with my newsroom, and who then was as put out as some others in Danville when the negative readership report came out. They had been told and they had been warned, and I had tried to do things about it. They all said, "No, no, no, no, no, no." So they were all sitting there telling the new trustees, "She can't run newspapers. She can't run programs. She's done Neuharth's stuff for twenty-eight years, so she's entitled to better than just being canned. Buy her out." So they did. And I was tired of beating my head on a brick wall, and I also was ready to go to school.

Ritchie: Had you been thinking about that at all?

Bulkeley: Early, early, early, back when I was doing government and politics, I thought about law school, but I never lived where there was a law school, and I never was in a situation where I wasn't learning a lot doing what I was doing. I wasn't learning a lot about what I wanted to know about at the Foundation.

When I went to the Foundation, it was a move back to Rochester. For the first time, my public was not where I lived. As a newspaper person, I had always been accountable to, and trying to serve, people around me.

Ritchie: Did that feel funny?

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stuff, I'd keep going one more source, one more source, and end up with three times the material I needed for a five-page paper. It was my first ever graduate work. I was in school the first time when those of us who could type automatically got a grade better than our classmates who were turning in handwritten papers, so writing expectations had increased. I didn't really know what it took at first for a five-page paper or ten-page, fifteen.

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Bulkeley: Without some kind of feedback, I wasn't willing to put me on the line or the seminary on the line as a full student, so I did part time two semesters. Then in the spring after the mid-term, when I had mid-term grades, I took New Testament, a four-hour course, and I did that two hours and two hours split. I took Sociology of Religion that first term. The second one, I took the rest of New Testament, plus Ecumenicas and Ethics, so I got a third faculty member. By the time I knew that I could satisfy at least that many and was beginning to get a handle on how to spend my time so that I could do more than five hours a semester, I decided that really was what I thought it was and I really needed to do that. So I quit applying for jobs.

Ritchie: You had been applying for jobs?

Bulkeley: I had been applying for jobs—various things.

Ritchie: Were they journalism jobs?

Bulkeley: Some were journalism and some were grant-making and some were issues project kinds of things. I can do any of that stuff. I don't really know what's the best use of what I ought to do.

The newspaper business at that point was still in the throes—still going down in the recession and laying off people, which was unheard of. It had not flattened out, let alone started back up. It also had not started the big companies hiring away the women from the other ones. There was a long period when a lot of them still didn't think women could do the job. Gannett had lots of us. Then there was a period in which I'm told they all figured we'd be so loyal to our companies, we wouldn't leave. Well, that's never stopped them from going after men who discovered they were executive caliber when they started out with no thoughts other than professional-level work. Then they had to get to know us, because we weren't part of the social circles, where you get casual with people and find out whether they can talk sports or not. We just did some committee work.

But in the last year, a lot of that's changed. Companies have been bringing in outside men and women into publisher jobs and editor jobs, I've seen in the trade publications. The newspaper business, the news business, including the Freedom Forum, which is the new name of the Gannett Foundation, have suddenly discovered that the world cares about religion and the news media should learn how to cover it and how to recognize it when they see it in every-day issues. Well, that makes me more valuable as a reporter than I've been in a long time.

Ritchie: Would you like to be a reporter again?

Bulkeley: For the right place, with the right agreement. What I would like to be is respected for what I know and can do, and allowed to do it without being second-guessed, and if the rules are going to be changed, then let's talk about them, don't just impose new ones and expect me to sit

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you can't reach everybody at the same time. The postal service can do it, but again that's print. You've got to have something for them to deliver. And advertising alone doesn't cut it.

Even some of the catalogs with the highest response are putting editorial content in their catalogs, and some of the advertisers who have always been sought after, their ads have been sought after, are now buying ads in the least likely places—paperback books with ads in them and some of those other kinds of funny things you'll run across, or the front and back of the movies that you rent and bring home. Now we know how come you can rent a videotape movie for a buck, because you've got ten minutes of commercials on each end. Well, all right. There are some things that we've just all got to have at the same time.

Ritchie: Do you think newspapers fulfill that now?

Bulkeley: Some of them do some of the time, to paraphrase our friend Mr. Lincoln—Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Twain or both of them. Anyway, and some of them do most of the time. Nobody does all the time, and not very many do it very well. If newsrooms understood the principles of advertising and classified, in particular, that there's some stuff that's got to be there all the time because over a period of a week or a couple of weeks everybody wants it, but not everybody wants it the same day, if they understood the principles of storytelling and letting people tell their story their own way, which is part of what makes some of the so-called entertainment television valuable—

Ritchie: You mean like the talk shows?

Bulkeley: Not only that, but the story shows. There's a lot of social change coming down through entertainment television because it's telling stories in contexts people can relate to, or it's telling issues they can relate to in a context that's not threatening. "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" is an absolute knock-out program. They are dealing in contemporary language, but a safe frontier setting, with contemporary issues—contemporary language and contemporary ways.

"Star Trek: The Next Generation," I don't like the new "Star Trek" with all of those ghoulish people. While the commanders are all men and hierarchical, to some extent, in fact, the issues, the interpersonal issues they deal with in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" are the ones we deal with today. The high-powered women counselors with positions who in fact run the ship when the men are gone, and make the tough decisions on a sound basis, but also the relationship of powerful peers, because without the counselor, without the doctor, it doesn't matter whether those men are there to run the ship; they're dead in the water. When, in fact, the women can cover for the men running the ship, the men can't cover for the counselors or the seer or the medical person. So the women are absolutely indispensable, and we see adult relationships on a peer power basis, which so much of our generation has had so much trouble learning to do.

We see some of the same thing in "Medicine Woman." Those are safe places. But those are also stories we ought to be able to tell in our feature sections. Those are stories we ought to be able to tell as part of the profiles of candidates, as part of the profiles of the new chief executive or school superintendent or hockey coach or whatever. We ought to be able to tell those stories, but we're so busy telling the stories the hot-shot journalists think they have to tell, or that their bosses want for their cocktail parties, or because those are the questions we always ask, that we're not finding the ways to put the stories where the readers can deal with them.

A lot of us would like to know what goes on in our high schools, but what do you see in the "back to school" advertising sections that the advertisers want? All sorts of canned garbage

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Bulkeley: You'll find mixed views. There are people who say their job is money, and you put around the ads what it takes to get them sold, and as long as we make enough money, we don't care whether 20 percent of the households read it, or 1,000—100 percent. There are people who say as long as we're not losing money, then we'll do whatever we have to to provide news the public wants. The whole range is out there.

I have not been at the journalism meetings in two to three years, so most of the debate that I see now is in some of the trade publications, and I've even had to stop reading some of those while I'm doing my school stuff, but they're easy enough to catch up on. There are people who think the way we've always done it is still the way to keep doing it, as long as we're making enough money. So there's all kinds out there. Some newsrooms think that they are the ultimate and people ought to accept what they put in the paper, and trust the newspaper to know what's important, what they ought to be reading, even though they write dollars in billions. They don't even know what billions of dollars are.

Ritchie: It's hard to imagine.

Bulkeley: Why can't they tell us how much the federal penitentiaries are paying for eggs this week and how they decide they're going to pay that per egg, and how much they're paying for cars and for auto mechanics? Why can't they give us those numbers that relate to things we know about in the real world and that are in dollar sizes we deal with?

Ritchie: I know you tried to do this in your work in Rochester. Do you feel you did that successfully in Saratoga and Danville, at your papers?

Bulkeley: We had a wonderful Saratoga example. Did I talk about the New York City Ballet and changing how we covered it? I don't think so. The New York City Ballet summered in Saratoga and did when I was there. I didn't know anything about ballet until Pete Wait, the bank president, was on the Fed and took me down because they had citizens at the Federal Reserve Board meetings in New York. When we got out of that meeting, he said, "Come on," and we raced up to Lincoln Center and went into a New York City Ballet rehearsal. I don't know how he knew I hadn't done ballet yet. But we were sitting second or third row center, and I suddenly realized what a superb art ballet is and what superb talent and discipline and training and stuff it takes to do ballet.

Then I went home and looked back and discovered that ballet is the same as anything else on stage—some of it stories, some of it is motion for the sheer joy of the motion, some of it is motion to describe something, whether music or something else. But the stories we had before the ballets didn't tell us any of that. Oftentimes our stories after the ballets didn't tell us that. I thought, "Why is this?" Because we tell what a musical is going to do or a non-musical play, we tell what a movie is doing, we tell what a book is doing. But we don't tell what an opera is doing, we don't tell what a ballet is doing, and we don't tell what the symphony is doing. We tell how often it's been staged where and who costumed it when, and all of that stuff that really doesn't mean a whole lot to the greasy spoon owner or cook or the bank teller or loan officer or the school teacher who's trying to help kids learn how to connect to the world, and those are the readers of our paper.

So I went out to the Performing Arts Center and sat down with the executive, and I said, "I need the stories of the ballets. If they're not telling stories—" "Coppelia" was one of the great Balanchine ballets—George Balanchine. Another one was "Jewels." He had a western one called "Rodeo," and was, of course, still alive and still up there. And the Philadelphia Orchestra

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garbage collection. It was three times what the private was. Well, we wrote that and put it in one of the budget stories, and we raised the questions about why is this so, and what can we learn from the private ones about efficiency, and is it even really necessary for the city to do garbage collection when we have private collectors in place. Well, the council—it also just happened to be about the kind of money they needed, so the council just automatically, almost, went ahead and gave up the garbage collection business as a city business and turned it over to the private contractors. That took some of the controls off the private contractor, and if we'd been smarter about privatizing, there would have been other things we would have looked for and done in those days. It was shortly thereafter that I left.

But all of that just comes from asking the other questions. In Danville, we had so much. Danville was so archaic in the newsroom and we had so much we had to do, none of those department heads had seen budgets for their departments. Again we've talked about a lot of that remedial work. But even to bring that newspaper's news coverage up to the minimum standards of the other two places was a multiple-year project because I was being fought tooth and nail by editors. Ultimately, Ron Dillman went off to St. Thomas. I had him spend one summer doing the budget for the whole paper, because I knew he wanted to leave, but the odds were he didn't really want to leave, he wanted to run Danville. His only other interest was St. Thomas, which is pretty interesting—a guy from the corn fields wanting to live on an island. I knew there was a possibility that that would come through, at least the news part of it, but he needed to know the whole budgeting thing.

Ritchie: So you gave him the opportunity.

Bulkeley: So I had him put it together and work out the conflicts and contradictions and stuff among departments, and the coordination, and give me a finished budget, basically.

Ritchie: Did you ever put stories on the front page that a man might not have?

Bulkeley: Probably. I don't really have examples. I didn't spend a whole lot of time in Danville on the news thing. The decision-making cycle in Danville was peculiar, because the feature pages and sports pages were pretty well locked up before they had the news meeting. They also never thought ahead on anything. When we got to another election year two years after I'd been there, I discovered that they weren't planning their campaign coverage and they weren't anticipating and assigning ahead the election result stuff. They were going to wait until they came in the day after the election and figure out what they had to cover and do it.

Ritchie: After the election?

Bulkeley: The day after the election, they were going to figure out what they had to cover and make the assignments and do it, and we'd get the paper out sometime that afternoon, but probably not on time. Well, I had to do such remedial work like that, and I also didn't have access to the news digest because I wasn't allowed a news computer in my office. So unless somebody had time to print it off the machine and tie up the computer to run a printoff for me, I was having to just listen by ear to what was going on in the nine o'clock news meeting. But with those other two sections locked up ahead as long as we were stuck with that, and we were for longer than we should have been, I really couldn't affect the front page a whole lot, except I started flagging which sports things came into the consciousness of those of us who weren't sports people, and insisting that they be moved out, which killed everybody, because they knew I had no interest in sports anymore other than golf, and they'd just get hysterical when she'd say, "Get the horse race out ahead of time. The story needs to be on the front, including when it's on television," or,

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customers or whatever. Or I could wander through my building and see what was going on, or go poke around in the basement or be sure that the rest rooms were being cleaned, or whatever. I had nowhere to go in the Foundation. It was just our little row of offices on one side of a building and six or eight other people who were there. I couldn't get outdoors in less than ten minutes. The best I could do was stay out a whole hour or more at lunch, which was a little hard to do in downtown Rochester, which had really become nothing but an office place with not much for stores or anything, unlike other cities.

I also didn't have a secretary, and while I was very good at detail—well, not very good, I was almost very good about detail in the newsroom. I could never letter-perfect any copy on paper. They always found typos and things I didn't catch, but I could do my own chasing of details for budgets and things. But by the time I'd had secretarial help for twelve years, without an aptitude for that, the ability to do it had atrophied. I went to the Foundation and didn't have a secretary. I didn't even have a terminal. The secretaries had modest word processing attached to the financial computer. The men, some of them had typewriters and some of them dictated. Two of them dictated. But they didn't even have a spare typewriter for me. They had to go borrow. By then, of course, the Selectrics had all disappeared and they didn't want to buy one anyway if I was going to be on a terminal. Well, the printer situation was so bad that I ultimately got a Selectric typewriter and a terminal, but I was five months before I had a secretary. I had to rely on the receptionist who did backup secretarial work for the executive secretary, I had to wait until she had time for stuff, so I couldn't communicate. I could, but not so it looked like much, or I couldn't be sure of the timing on it.

I was still developing the work to be done, so a lot of times I had to work hard to find something to do because I was waiting for decisions or whatever.

Ritchie: So it was a different pace.

Bulkeley: There was a lot of the crap I didn't miss, like circulation complaints in the middle of the night or from drunks or whatever, or dealing with second-guessers at corporate headquarters, or explaining computer printouts that were invalid printouts anyway because they weren't really relevant to the work that was going on. That kind of stuff I didn't miss and don't miss to this day. I wouldn't mind if I'd never experienced it.

Ritchie: But it's all a part of your business.

Bulkeley: As I got more and more into the grant stuff and found out how far ahead of the experts in the world our grant recipients were, then I'd get frustrated that we weren't doing anything with it, and I kept coming up with ways and formats to do that, but nobody else ever got excited about it, so it just became a drag up there, too. The adult literacy stuff, we weren't putting enough money in in a way to make the kind of difference that our volume of money should have been able to make, and that what we knew and the context we had should have made.

As I said earlier, I guess, I just wasn't learning enough anymore, but even more frustrating was I wasn't able to use what I knew. So when I passed that cycle, the learning curve was okay once I had enough to do to learn. Watching it happen and fixing it and all of that was fine. The outside learning was fine, but it ran out. Neuharth had his own agenda and wasn't going to rescue me anymore, and that's all right. I'm adult and have learned my way around the world a time or two.