Tonnie Katz: Interview #1

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Katz: It's about 350[000] daily and 405[000] on Sunday. My boss told me that no other woman runs one of the top twenty-five papers in size. I find that hard to believe in 1992 America. There are several women managing editors, but not women top editors. I think that's where women can really change things, they take the top editorship. It's easy to be the number two, the [Vice President] Dan Quayle, but to say that we're good enough to be the number one, I think is a step that's still to be taken at newspapers.

Biagi: Your job before this was as managing editor.

Katz: Managing editor.

Biagi: So that, in a newspaper, would be the second spot, the Dan Quayle spot?

Katz: Yes, the Dan Quayle spot, except I did it better than Dan Quayle is doing his job. [Biagi laughs.] But, yes, the Dan Quayle spot. I've been Dan Quayle three times.

Biagi: Tell me all about the Register as a newspaper, its history, briefly, and what it's like to be there.

Katz: I'm not sure when the Register was begun. It's now the fourth largest paper in California, was the third largest paper for many years until this year when San Diego folded together its two papers. It is family-owned. It's the main newspaper in a chain of newspapers and television stations owned by the Holies family. I believe the family originally came from Ohio, two brothers who were Libertarians, which is pretty unusual. They came out here to California at the turn of the century, I'm not exactly sure of the dates—and bought the Santa Ana Register, which is what it was called at the time. It was simply a voice for the Libertarian philosophy until twelve or thirteen years ago. One of the two original brothers had two daughters, one of whom married the current publisher, Dave Threshie, and Dave Threshie decided to turn the paper into one of the great papers of America.

Biagi: That would be about what time?

Katz: About twelve years ago. I would say it would be thirteen. He probably made the decision thirteen years ago. He then hired Chris Anderson, who was twenty-nine years old at the time, from Seattle. I don't think anybody of any note would take the job because the Register was a paper that, in its news pages, espoused the Libertarian philosophy. For example, they couldn't use the words "public schools."

Biagi: What did they say instead?

Katz: "Tax-supported schools." Their editorial philosophy and the news were never separated at that time. Chris and Dave together changed all of that and decided to make it the highest quality paper they could. Dave provided the resources and Chris provided the vision and the leadership, and it grew over the past twelve years into the paper it is today.

Biagi: You arrived on the scene what year?

Katz: 1988, February first.

Biagi: From?

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Katz: I never did get to be a general news executive, because within a couple of weeks, they decided that they needed a managing editor in San Bernardino and sent me out here to talk to Bob Ritter. Bob Ritter had been a publisher and was now an editor again, a fantastic guy. We hit it off right away. He was exactly the kind of editor that you would want when you wanted to learn how to do something, because he shared the glory and he taught you what you needed to know. He would sit you right down next to him and go over the budget, which I never did understand, but at least I got my tutoring. He was very good about that. I decided to take the job as his managing editor, figuring that since he had been a publisher and really understood that, I could learn a lot from him and still be the managing editor.

Biagi: At the San Bernardino Sun, what did the managing editor do?

Katz: The same thing the managing editor does everywhere else. You basically run the day-to-day operations of the newsroom. Bob basically handled all the parts that I felt were the worst parts of the job, which I guess I'll be stuck with now, which is dealing with the publisher, dealing with the budget, dealing with, in their case, the chain, and none of the fun bits at all, like the dealing with the news. Basically I ran the meetings, ran the paper, and we both did hiring, and it worked out really well.

Biagi: Then from the Sun?

Katz: I was at the Sun about fourteen months, and I really loved it. I've loved every job I ever had, as my friends point out to me. I had no intention of leaving there. In fact, my kids were in high school and I was committed to staying to get them out of high school in one place since we'd moved so much. One day I got a call from Tim Kelly, who was the managing editor of the Register, and he asked me to meet him and Chris Anderson for lunch. I said, "If you're buying, I'll come." Bob Ritter had once told me, "You talk to anybody, if it doesn't cost anything." So I told him about the lunch, and he said, "Go on."

So I went and talked to them, and we had what probably was the most bizarre lunch. In fact, I talked to Tim Kelly yesterday, when he called me to congratulate me, and he said, "Does this make up for the bizarre lunch we had all those years ago?"

Biagi: Tell me about it.

Katz: We met in Riverside, halfway between Orange County and San Bernardino, and Tim and Chris came in Chris' BMW. Riverside and San Bernardino are kind of truck kind of places not BMW kind of places. Chris and Tim had these dark suits and they walked in lockstep. It was a very fancy, dark restaurant. We sat there for about four hours, and nobody said why we were there. I said to myself about halfway through, "Well, I'll be damned if I'm going to ask why we're here."

Biagi: What did you talk about for four hours?

Katz: We chatted, I guess. I can't even remember now. Just chatted. Chris stayed quiet most of the time. Tim Kelly asked a lot of questions. Mostly I blithered, is the way I felt. I remember thinking, "This is just ridiculous! What is going on here?" But I got it into my head that I wasn't going to say anything. So we talked. It was good food. After a while, we went out into the parking lot, and they—

Biagi: What time was it, about four in the afternoon?

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Katz: They had three assistant managing editors at the time. Most of the staff reported to me, which was all the production people, all the news people, the metro people, the community people, but there was also an assistant managing editor for features and an assistant managing editor for photo and graphics. So about two-thirds of the staff reported to me.

Biagi: The news side.

Katz: Right.

Biagi: Which would be how many people, roughly?

Katz: I don't know, a couple hundred, probably. Maybe a few more here and there.

Biagi: That was for how long, then?

Katz: That was February '88. I guess about a year and a half. In August '89 I was named managing editor. Tim went home to Kentucky; that was his goal in life. We were launching what has now become our famous, or infamous, Newsroom Without Walls. We had taken our top managers to a retreat at Lake Arrowhead. Those were the money days when things were good. We had this wonderful retreat at Lake Arrowhead, and Chris announced that I was going to be the managing editor. He always said there was another candidate, but I never was able to find out who it was.

Biagi: Yassir Arafat. [Laughter.]

Katz: It was really interesting. Chris Anderson is not one of the good old boys, and I'm not either, obviously. But it was scary to be working so closely with him.

Biagi: What do you mean, scary?

Katz: He is a man with a very powerful image, and he is a man with a national reputation for innovation. He is probably, I think—he'd laugh, and I don't mean to make this sound pompous, but he is probably the greatest visionary in journalism today, and he's really young, too. He doesn't care much about what other journalists think. He cares about readers as customers, which is something that a lot of journalists don't agree with or like to think about. Of course, if they don't think about it, we're not going to be able to retire from this business; there won't be one. But Chris is a very imposing man.

Biagi: You mean large in size?

Katz: Not so tall. Bald. He has a presence about him that makes him larger than life. He's forty-two now, probably. Maybe he's forty-three, but I think he's forty-two, but I never thought of him as younger than me. I always think of him as much older. He just has a larger-than-life presence. You can see that mind clicking away. You just never want to be caught in the crossfire. With the other editors I had worked for, two fabulous guys, Jim Toedtman and Bob Ritter, you knew their philosophy and where they stood on anything within twenty minutes. You could speak for them. Chris is a much harder person to work for, because you just never know which way he's going to jump. You feel like you're standing on one foot a lot of the times. He is not predictable.

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a relationships reporter. We have somebody who writes about families. We now have a reporter who covers aging issues. She does a page every week called "Maturing." The idea is good. What are the important issues as you change from being a baby boomer into that next older group, which many of the people in Orange County are doing?

So we customized the beats to match the interests of Orange County, and we also changed the structure of the newsroom. In a traditional newsroom, at least in our previous newsroom, in the business reporting group we had a reporter who covered health businesses, and on the metro staff we had a reporter that covered health delivery. In the feature staff, we had a reporter that covered health and science. We have lumped all those reporters together. They never talked to each other before and their editors never did. Now they work together under one editor so there's a lot of cross-pollination. What we did was put the reporters together by related beats under groups of editors, and then they write for every section of the paper as opposed to just one. They're expected to write for every section of the paper. Someone who covers courts recently did a big fashion piece on what attorneys wear. So it's really given us some very different perspectives.

Biagi: Rather than section editors.

Katz: Yes. We have no section editors. That's caused somewhat of a problem, because the question has come up, "Who's in charge of these sections?" But we've sort of patched up a system that seems to work, and it's a system of cooperation. The whole Register newsroom depends on people cooperating with each other and building bridges with each other. I have picked up two editors several times and just switched their jobs, even though they know nothing about the other job. They both wanted to do new things, and it's meant that they had to really build bridges. So the newsroom is much quicker on its feet to work in teams, I think, than most newsrooms are. But suddenly we're looking at the news from the point of view of the reader rather than from the point of view of the journalist.

Biagi: If you had to characterize the Register and why it's different or better than other papers, what would you say?

Katz: Very innovative, willing to take risks, a staff that is very eager, very creative, and we're not bound by the traditions that some of the big papers are bound by. I worked at Newsday, great place, great paper, but the paper had its own momentum. To get an idea from a lowly soul into the paper could take months or years. Some of our best ideas come from lowly souls, and they can get in the paper in a couple of days. One of the most interesting things we do now was suggested by a copy editor. It was just in a note he sent to me, saying, "Hey, what do you think of this?"

Biagi: What was the idea?

Katz: It's called Life Letters. Anybody can write a couple of hundred words about someone they knew who recently died. The letters are just staggering. We don't edit them particularly, grammar maybe, but they're just beautiful. We've had gang members' mothers write about their sons who were shot down; one woman wrote about her neighbor across the alley whom she waved at every morning for fifty years. A woman wrote last week about how her baby had died after just a couple of months of life. They're very touching in their naivete, because they're not written with the skill of journalism. They're very beautiful, very touching. But the copy editor sent the idea along, and we said, "Hey, that's a great idea," and it was in the paper as soon as we could get a form ready.

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and we should let the New York Times cover the stories that they can cover better than us. That is very much a hallmark of the Register. In my time here, we have been all over the world. We went to Saudi Arabia, but we covered Orange County troops in Saudi Arabia. We've been to Afghanistan, we've been all through, of course, South America and Mexico. We spend a lot of time in Mexico anyway, it's so important to us. But we don't just go there. I joke about the two whales that got stuck up in Alaska in the ice. Somebody will say, "They swam by Orange County from Mexico." I say, "No. Breakfasting here isn't good enough." It has to have a real reason, a real connection. Someone just came back from Romania and did something on Romanian orphans, but it was connected to Orange County. It's not just the story everyone is writing.

The only place where that's a little difference is in sports. I think readers identify with sportswriters, so our reporters cover every sport.

Biagi: So Dave Laventhol came.

Katz: Dave Laventhol came. He brought a New York killer mentality with him. I can't speak for Dave Laventhol, but he, I think, decided that he was going to take us on. He has poured millions—millions and millions and millions into this battle, and they have made some substantial gains with some very bright moves.

Biagi: Dave Laventhol at the L.A. Times, for people who may not know.

Katz: Right. And the L.A. Times has made some substantial inroads. They have built some circulation here, some significant circulation here. The question is, can they keep it? I don't know. They also did the same brilliant thing they did in Denver with the TV book here to get 50,000 extra people on Sunday. So the battle has been joined, as they say.

Biagi: So two things, circulation and TV book, what do you mean by those?

Katz: What they have done is done everything they can to make the paper work. I mean, they've done some brilliant things, marketed the paper tremendously. Where everywhere else but the Los Angeles Times circulates the paper is sold for probably 35¢, you can buy the Orange County edition of the Los Angeles Times for 15¢, and the home delivery prices are lower, too. If anybody in Orange County is paying full price for the Los Angeles Times Orange County edition, they should immediately call up and complain, because I don't know anybody who isn't getting it at half price. At one point—I don't know if this is still true—they were giving away five pages of car advertising for the price of one page in our paper.

The way it worked with the TV book is that they own Dimension Cable, which is the biggest cable system in South Orange County, which is really where the battleground will be in the next five years. They took over the cable company's TV books, not just Dimension, but many of them, and they put out the books for the cable companies, these fancy cable-specific TV books, and billed customers for the Sunday Times on their cable bill for 50¢. It's a brilliant move. So you get the Times sort of along with the book, and the Times can count that circulation. Eventually, their goal will be to take circulation that they gain that way and try and turn it into daily circulation. It's a very, very brilliant move. And every week they have another contest. They give away a car a week. They are just spending money like water, taking it away from their other properties and focusing it all here. What it means for us? It mainly means good things for us, because when you're in a competitive situation, your publisher doesn't want to cut the budget so much; he wants you to have some resources to go out and fight. I think we have a publisher

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won't look traditional, but it will have the news. They want more about the things they're interested in.

My daughter worked in the circulation department last summer, a torture job, taking cancellation orders. I always asked her, "What are people canceling for?" She said a lot of them cancel because they say they didn't have time to read. That's one of the things you check off. But the truth is that people are reading more than ever; it's just that they're not reading newspapers. They're reading romance novels or niche magazines or things that interest them. So I think what will happen to newspapers is there will be some kind of core newspaper and then you will choose from a menu of some kind or another—how, I have no idea, probably through television or telephone—for the extra sections that you're interested in. They could be very specific sections like a weekly section on health and fitness or monthly tab on something else. I'm not exactly sure how it would work, but it would definitely be customized to your interest.

Biagi: It would be almost like a basic cable service and then you'd build on that, the other things that you want.

Katz: Exactly. That's how I see the way newspapers are going to be. I would be willing to bet we will be doing that within five years.

Biagi: Really?

Katz: Oh, yes.

Biagi: So you would have different sections, and you would be able to custom order them.

Katz: Yes, that's how I see it.

Biagi: Inserted, perhaps.

Katz: Right.

Biagi: If you wanted health and fitness and religion and those kinds of news, then you would have that delivered.

Katz: Right. Somebody else might want entertainment and sports. I don't know whether there would be some kind of limited number. There would be a limited number of sections, and some of them maybe weekly sections, some of them maybe daily sections, some of them maybe monthly sections. You would make your menu.

Biagi: It's going to be an information packet, essentially, that would be customized, and really newspapers are in a special position to deliver all that stuff.

Katz: Right. It's possible now. This is possible now. I presume every newspaper can, but we certainly can drop you a different product than we can drop me. But we haven't done that yet. I foresee that coming very soon. And people would pay more, because they would get exactly what they want. Every Sunday morning when I go out and take the two papers, you can hardly pick them up. The first thing I do is head for the trashcan, and I stand in front of the trashcan dealing the sections I'm not interested in into the trash. What a waste of time and money and paper! A lot of trees died for nothing, you know. I think this way all that would be avoided, but the point is that we could target people who are interested in mountain biking, we could target you right down

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Katz: I was a journalism teacher once at Suffolk University in Boston in the late seventies. I taught documentary film. I knew nothing about documentary film, but I happened to be sitting in the Boston Globe office one summer opposite the head of the journalism faculty of Suffolk. He needed somebody to teach documentary film, he looked over at me, and I said, "Sure, I'll do it." I was about three pages ahead of the class in the book, and I showed a lot of movies. And they made movies. It was fun. I had them make movies, which was really the most fun of all. They really got into it. We really got into it. We had a great time.

At the time I was married, and my husband was teaching. He was a lawyer. He's now a diplomat, but he was a lawyer then, and he was teaching criminal justice courses at Northeastern University to policemen. We would read the papers of our students to each other, because we were in such disbelief that these could be written by people who were about to be college graduates, about to go into their professional fields.

I had two rules in my class: one was that my students spell my name right, and one was that they write in complete sentences. People couldn't even do that, and these were seniors in college in a journalism program. They could express themselves fabulously verbally, but they couldn't write a word. It was really sad. There were too many that couldn't write at all.

Biagi: So if you had to design the ideal journalism program on a college level, what would it be?

Katz: Oh, gosh, I don't know. Today it would be a program that definitely would have to have basic courses like news writing and libel law. But it would also at how to disseminate information. What's the information you're trying to get? What's the best way to package it and present it to whomever it is you're trying to publish it for? Therefore, it would involve lots of creative thinking about how you package information, and maybe it wouldn't be a newspaper at all. Maybe it wouldn't be words.

I think that if I was a journalism teacher, I would immediately stop talking about stories, and I certainly wouldn't talk about inverted pyramids; I would talk about information and say, "Then how do you deliver it? Who are you aiming at? What are the questions the reader wants to know? What does it mean to the reader, whatever it is you're doing?" Try and get them to find the best way to deliver that.

Biagi: The concept of answering the readers' questions, then.

Katz: Right. First. There is some creative thinking going on at some journalism schools. In fact, we're talking to someone from Northwestern about a really interesting idea he has for teams on stories. I would turn a journalism school into a living laboratory, and I would think of a new way to process copy from the point of the line editor to the composing room. We've been running it like an assembly line, in a linear way, for many years. Maybe that's not the way to do it. Why should copy editors write heads? It's stupid, to me. Reporters know much more about the story than the copy editors.

Biagi: They're always complaining about the heads. [Laughter.]

Katz: And the reason readers complain is because the head is completely different from the story. I think we have to examine the way we do things. We have a group now that's, in fact, studying just that, studying that piece of the process, how to manufacture the paper. I think you can make some efficiencies. One of the questions is, well, if you take away headline-writing from the copy editors, what's left? I think if you made it a series of circles instead of lines, and put copy editors

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Biagi: How do you see your audience changing? Is your audience changing in any way?

Katz: Yes. I think our audience is changing. This is Long Island with palm trees.

Biagi: Orange County?

Katz: Orange County is Long Island with palm trees. Having worked for Newsday, I can say authoritatively this is Long Island with palm trees. Orange County is basically split into two parts. North County, which is older suburbs full of a lot of people from Los Angeles, and which is changing ethnically dramatically. Most of our ethnic residents live in North County. We have the largest population of Vietnamese in the world, outside of Vietnam.

I think 20 percent is the official number of Hispanics throughout the county, primarily based in Santa Ana, in north county. There are Asians of all kinds here. Very few blacks, less than 2 percent blacks in Orange County, and most of them, I think, are professional. The county is becoming more ethnic. The Register, in the last two months, started a Spanish weekly called Excelsior, that is doing very well, very well. A local weekly newspaper in Spanish.

South County is really the battleground between us and the Times. There you have families that are unaffiliated with Los Angeles, who are young, white, primarily, families who live in new communities. Giant new communities spring up overnight. It's amazing. These are people who have no allegiance to anything, and this is where the giant battle is going on or will go on.

Biagi: Where have they come from primarily?

Katz: I don't know. Transients, I guess.

Biagi: Are they centered around a particular industry?

Katz: No, I don't think so. In Orange County there were a lot of people in the defense industry. There are a lot of them out of work right now, but these are mostly young families. South county used to be orange groves. In Suffolk County, Long Island, it was potato fields. Here it's orange groves. These orange groves have literally overnight turned into sprawling developments of tract homes, some very expensive, and they're filled with people who look exactly like everybody else. Basically, they're the young families, the two-worker households, upscale yuppies. They are very interested in international and national news as well as local news. Their communities are new, so they aren't so tied to local news. We've got to convince them that we are their local news source as they grow into the community, and that we have enough national and international news that they don't have to look anywhere else.

We can never out-national and inter-national news the Times, although if you ever did a survey of the number of stories from around the world and the nation, I would say we far outnumber the Times because they write such long, boring things. But the perception is that they are the king of the mountain on that stuff. I learned a real lesson with the war in Saudi Arabia, which was we don't have to beat them. We don't have to outnumber them. They can always outspend on us. They can always send more reporters. They can always throw more resources at something. But we have to have enough. The readers must feel that we offer a complete picture so they don't have to go somewhere else for the rest of the story. That's what I think our goal is, basically.

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Our whole life revolved around her golf game. She played every day, won trophies. She probably could have gone professional; she was really good. But that wasn't the way of the world then. She was really just a housewife who played golf. She was very much involved in volunteer activities, with everything from the Smith College Club to Jewish charities to all kinds of clubs. She was very much into that.

Biagi: Did you live in Lowell?

Katz: I grew up in Lowell. I went to school, until high school, in Lowell. My mother was a believer in boarding schools, so both my brother and I were sent to boarding school.

Biagi: You had just the one brother?

Katz: I have the one brother.

Biagi: And his name is?

Katz: His real name is Nathan Steven Schwartz, but everybody, since he was born, has called him Nicky. Maybe now that he's grown up they call him Nick, but I still call him Nicky.

Biagi: Older or younger than you?

Katz: Younger than me by five years. My mother had a lot of miscarriages, and he and I were the only ones who made it. My mother was a very determined woman and always told us—I mean, you could never do well enough in school. If you got an A, it wasn't good enough; you had to get an A+. She really encouraged—she sent a mixed message in some way, but she always told me I could do whatever I wanted, which was, I think, a very good message. Later, when I was trying to juggle career and children and I would ask her for help babysitting if my kids got sick, she would say, "If you're going to have kids, you should have stayed home and taken care of them." But both she and my grandmother on my father's side were very determined women who controlled the situation all the time and really pushed. So my brother and I were pretty well pushed into being overachievers in every way we could be.

Biagi: Grammar school and the name of the school?

Katz: Pine Street School. Gosh, I haven't thought of that in a lot of years.

Biagi: In Lowell?

Katz: In Lowell.

Biagi: Did that go through sixth grade?

Katz: No, I think that went through third grade.

Biagi: So that was through third grade and then you went third through—

Katz: That was through third grade, definitely. Then fourth, fifth, and sixth I went to the Morey School. Then I went to Daley Junior High school. Then in ninth grade I was sent away to the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York. It was really a pretty strict place and I've always been the kind of person where if there are rules, I'm out to break them. I always was a troublemaker,

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Katz: And you couldn't talk to anybody. Maybe Miss Delaney gave me the ruler more than most teachers, I guess.

Biagi: What did you read?

Katz: What did I read? Oh, God, I read anything I could get my hands on. I read every Nancy Drew book. I read the Bobbsey Twins. One of my favorite books, and I can't tell you why, was Green Poodles. I don't even know what it was about, but I remember it and I saved it. But I just basically read anything I could. I loved mystery stories. Still do.

Biagi: Did you go to the library a lot?

Katz: Yes. Just as the Sunday ritual was to go get the three comic books, my mother's ritual was at least three times a week to go to the library. When I think of my mother—she's dead now; she died three years ago—I think of her in the middle of the night, I mean two, three in the morning, sitting in the kitchen reading by herself, because it was a time she could read quietly.

Biagi: Not during the day so much?

Katz: No. During the day she was out playing golf and doing her charities. I don't know when she ever slept, when I think about it. We had a housekeeper. She didn't have to ever cook or do any of those things. Her life was a pretty easy one when you think about it. But going to the library was something she did through her whole life, and she knew the librarian so well, both in Lowell and then later in Andover, Massachusetts, where she died, that they would save the best books for her. She could read ten or twelve books a week. She was an amazing reader. I think she lost herself in books.

Biagi: Mostly fiction?

Katz: All fiction. The tragedy of my mother was that she was born out of her time, in a way, so she had to live through books. She was really a very strong woman, a very strong-willed woman, and if she said this pen was red and it was really white, you wouldn't argue with her. You'd say, "Okay, it's red." She was a very strong-willed woman. She controlled us all with an iron hand.

My dad was a moody kind of guy, and didn't talk much. But my parents really instilled the idea that you had to do the best you could, work real hard, and if you did that, good things would come to you.

Biagi: Did you see them working real hard? Your mother was busy.

Katz: She was always busy. I think I resented it as a child. Oh, did we resent the golf stuff. I mean, I would never pick up a golf club, although it probably could help me a little now if I played golf. We'd be sitting there at dinnertime, waiting, waiting, waiting for Mom to come home. Oh, we hated it! And it seemed so frivolous to me. But, of course, it was her way of achieving something. When you're grown up, you look back, and you can see that. I am convinced that if my mother had dedicated herself to a career the way she dedicated herself to the things she did, she would have been the president. She was just an incredibly driven person, but she just never had an outlet.

Biagi: So when you went away to boarding school, you say it was a very rigorous routine.

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Katz: Such as, "Students are not to drink. Students are not to smoke. Students are not to throw anything from the windows, including their voice." That was one of my favorites. I threw lots of things from windows.

Biagi: Did you drink and smoke, too?

Katz: I smoked. I never drank. I don't drink now, except an occasional glass of wine, but I smoked. You were allowed to go on occasional weekends. Your parents would come, and you were allowed to go out to dinner with them. Of course, my mother was a tremendous smoker—oh, tremendous. It's amazing she never got cancer from it. But you'd rush into the ladies' room and smoke till you were green, then come back and throw up. It was just to thumb our nose at the school. I got in trouble there for talking in class, too, most of the time.

Biagi: No ruler?

Katz: No. There, I don't remember the punishment. Study hall, probably. Think of this. I graduated from there in '62, so that will give you [an idea]. We were never allowed outside the grounds of the school without a chaperone, and the four years I was there, you couldn't walk in front of the school because there was a fraternity across the street. We could never leave the campus except with a chaperone, even to go downtown to shop. But times were different then.

Biagi: So was it an almost collegial bonding experience for all of these girls?

Katz: Yes. Even as we talk about it, I see the faces of some of these teachers that we did terrible things to, and housemothers. Oh, we were awful to them.

Biagi: How many students were there?

Katz: In the whole school?

Biagi: Roughly, would you guess?

Katz: I don't know. I bet there were like a hundred kids in my class. Only two Jewish kids. It was limited, I think. I'm sure they had quotas. I don't think they would say so. I'm sure they did have quotas.

Biagi: Were you conscious of that?

Katz: I guess I was. I don't know. I've never been really conscious. The only time I was really conscious of it was when I lived in Austria. I don't think I was, but I mean, now when I look back on it, it was clear. It's interesting to see what's happened to the people. You became very close because the teachers and the housemothers were your enemy, and you were trying to outsmart them every way you can.

Biagi: What was the best trick you ever pulled?

Katz: We sunbathed naked on the roof of the school. It wasn't big stuff. You couldn't do big stuff. There was nothing big to do, although somebody in my class ran away with one of the teachers and got married. That was pretty exciting. But most of the teachers were old women.

Biagi: But you did have some male teachers?

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Biagi: Did you have any friends who were journalists? Did the family have any family friends who were journalists?

Katz: No, they were always in the clothing business of some kind or the food business or the wholesale this or that business.

Biagi: So when you left high school, did you have that as an idea, or was it when you got in college that you wanted to be a journalist?

Katz: I think high school, I wanted to be a journalist. I can't remember ever wanting to be anything else.

Biagi: Did you have any heroes or heroines who were journalists?

Katz: No, not at all, really. I had heard of Helen Thomas and people like that. But papers themselves were held in such different esteem back then. The newspaper was a sacred object in my family's home, especially on Sunday when the Boston papers came and the New York papers came. I mean, these were treasures to my family. So, you know, obviously I think my parents held them in such high esteem that I thought there must be something good there. When I grew up, I never thought about money, the idea that what you would do would have to make you money.

Biagi: You never made that connection?

Katz: Never made that connection. I always assumed I would get married, and I guess I always assumed that there would be money, and I always assumed that I would have kids, and I always assumed that I would have a house.

Biagi: Did you assume that you would work?

Katz: Yes, I did. My entire journalism goal in life was to be a reporter in Boston. That was it. I never went beyond that. I never wanted to be an editor. I became an editor by a fluke, and I've stayed an editor, but I never wanted to be one. When I grew up in journalism, you were terrified of editors. I remember when I first started out as a reporter, you would die before you walked into the office of the managing editor. I mean, you would. When I was at the Globe and I went to see Tom Winship, I couldn't talk in front of him. And Bob Healey, who was a columnist for the Globe. When I was managing editor in Baltimore, I met him at a Washington Press Club dinner. I mean, I had spent years seeing him, and I was a grown woman, married with children, and I could not bring myself to talk to him. He was like a god!

Biagi: Because of his position or because of the kind of person he was?

Katz: Because he was the great columnist. He turned out to be a very charming gentleman. But back then, the city editor was like Captain Queeg. You wouldn't talk to him unless you had to. It was a very different time in journalism. You went out and got that story or they'd kill you. Jim Toedtman, my friend, tells of the time when he had to get a picture of a dead boy, and he went to the family and they went after him with a gun, saying, "Get the hell out of here." He went back to the newsroom without the picture. The city editor said, "I'll do worse than come after you with a gun. You get back out there." And that's what it was like. Very different. There were women in the newsroom of the Lowell Sun, where I started as a copy girl.

Page 26

You'd say, "The people." She'd say, "What do you mean, the people?" I mean, she really just bore into you. She terrified me.

Goucher was a hard school. It had rules, and you had to wear skirts. It was sort of just a small extension of this boarding school I had been imprisoned in for four years, and I wanted to see the world. I stayed there two years. Then I convinced my parents that there was this teacher whose name—don't even ask me his name, this fabulous history teacher at Barnard College who I wanted to study with—

Biagi: Whose name you can't remember.

Katz: I can't remember. He very quickly thereafter went to Boston University, and I didn't even have him as a teacher. But I convinced my parents I had to study with this man, so I had to go to Barnard. Well, Barnard was New York City. I could really open up my life.

Biagi: What made you really want to go to Barnard College?

Katz: Because I thought of New York City as total freedom, big city, you know. Goucher was, as I said before, just an extension of Emma Willard. It had a campus. Barnard has a little campus, but Barnard is a big university in a giant city. Think of all those opportunities to live. I love cities and I love New York, and I just felt that I'd be more at home. I wanted to loosen up after all these years of wearing girdles, really, if not metaphorically.

Biagi: Up until that point, talk about your social life and your friends.

Katz: I was always pretty chubby. My mother said that when I was born, I was a two-and-a-half-pound preemie and that she spent the first five years getting me to eat, and then I never stopped. I don't know if that's true, because I recently found my baby book, and I was actually five pounds when I was born, so she sort of stretched the truth there. It is true that I never stopped, so I've always been up and down in weight. It never really affected my social life too much.

I always had a lot of friends, because I was pretty funny. I had friends that I grew up with in Massachusetts, some of whom I still keep in touch with. I guess I was pretty popular, and I had a very close circle of friends at boarding school, and then in college, too. A lot of friends.

Really, the truth is I'm pretty shy. People think that I'm very outgoing, and people think that I tell them everything about my life. The truth is I'm really much an introvert and they don't know anything at all. But reality and perception are two different things.

Biagi: They think you're forthcoming.

Katz: Yes. I think my staff will tell you that I am very forthcoming.

Biagi: Why do you think they'd say that?

Katz: Because I act that way. I always have a lot of friends. I don't know if my social life has been the greatest, but it wasn't awful. In Lowell, I belonged to one of those little Jewish religious organizations, Young Judea. Our whole social life revolved around the temple, although we were not a religious family. My grandmother, my mother's mother, by that time had married someone whose family came over on the Mayflower, so we were definitely not a religious family.

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Katz: He didn't own the whole department store. He owned the men's department. It was like a concession. A company has a shoe department in all the K-Marts. So he owned the men's department in several of the stores. They were called Stuart's Department Stores. I worked there and fell madly in love with someone who I met there, who then turned out to work at the local paper.

Biagi: How old were you then?

Katz: I was probably a senior in high school, and he was working for the newspaper and working part time in this department store, in the shoe department, I think. He was a sportswriter at the paper.

Biagi: Did you ever go with him to the paper at all?

Katz: Not at the time, no.

Biagi: So then when you were at Barnard and when you were a junior, would you say, was the first time you went to work in the summers?

Katz: No, I think I worked right from freshman year.

Biagi: At Goucher also?

Katz: Yes.

Biagi: Where did you work? At which paper?

Katz: Lowell Sun.

Biagi: That would be for two years, then?

Katz: I worked there, I think, three summers. Yes, three summers. I'll tell you why I remember, because Pat Collins, a TV personality, began the year before me. And Nancy Scannell, the late Washington Post sportswriter, started the year after I did. We all worked in the women's department. My mom had grown up in the town. She knew the head of the women's department, so she got me the job there, writing weddings. Actually, I started out as a copy girl.

Biagi: How did you get the job?

Katz: I'm sure my mother got it for me. I'm positive.

Biagi: Did you go down and apply, or did she tell you that there was a job waiting for you?

Katz: I don't remember, but I had to go see the managing editor. I went there and he hired me as a copy girl. My family was pretty prominent in Lowell, my mother's family. My mother had grown up there, you know, and she knew all these people. So she must have fixed it, actually.

Biagi: That would be what year?

Katz: The summer between high school and college, I think, was the first year I worked there, and I was a copy girl. So summer '62. My job was very exciting. That was hot type.

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Katz: No, I just remember the heat. It would rise up. You could see it. But the men were wonderful and very kind to me.

Biagi: You would have been seventeen?

Katz: Yes, seventeen. I joked around with them a lot and had a really good time, and it just seemed like the greatest. I remember the men in the composing room more than the people in the newsroom.

Biagi: The other women you talked about, were they copy girls as well? Nancy?

Katz: No. They were interns on the women's desk. They graduated. I don't remember who took my place as copy girl. Maybe it was a boy. I don't know.

Biagi: Did you do that for a year?

Katz: One summer or two. I'm not really certain.

Biagi: Were there any other copy girls?

Katz: No, I was the only one. There was only one person who did this. It was a small newspaper. I did it all day. That was one of my thinner periods because I walked so much all day and it was so hot. You could just see the heat rising and the metal bubbling in those pots. I was so impressed with those guys. They would just punch away, and they just seemed like the coolest people. They really were so friendly. The man on the bank, his name was Ebby. I have never thought of that till this day. He would talk to me about newspapers. This was their life, putting out this newspaper.

The people in the newsroom were real kind to me, too, but a copy girl was just a nobody. When I moved up to the women's department, though, and wrote weddings, then I got to be a little more of a somebody. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Anybody particular? Why did that happen that you moved to weddings?

Katz: I think I just sort of graduated after a couple of years. They knew I was pretty eager to be a journalist. They liked me a lot, and I worked hard. The woman who ran the department, whose name was Ann, was a friend of my mom's, too. She was older than my mom, but she was a friend of my mom's. She drove me pretty hard.

Biagi: Was your mom involved in what would be society or women's news? Is that how they knew her?

Katz: Yes, probably. My mom, with all of her charity stuff, was president of Hadassah. My father, too, was involved in charities. So my mom's name was in the society column a lot. That's probably how she knew these people, but also she knew some of them from school when she grew up. It was a great newsroom. It was a classic newsroom.

Biagi: Describe it to me.

Katz: It wasn't very big. I see the composing room as vast. I see the newsroom as small. Down the end toward the composing room was the county desk. The Lowell Sun had several county

Page 32

inauguration. So I could be with this guy. But it never did work. We dated for a long time, but it never worked out, and he dropped out of journalism, I think. But there were a lot of young kids in that room, because they paid nothing. There were a lot of old people. There are very few old people now.

Biagi: Were there any other young women working in the women's section?

Katz: Nancy Scannell was there, Pat Collins was there. There were others, I'm sure.

Biagi: You worked there two summers?

Katz: I'm not sure. I think I worked there the summer after my senior year in high school and then the summer after my freshman year in college, summer after my sophomore year in college. Yes, because the summer after my senior year of college, I went to Europe. The summer after my junior year, I worked for a congressman. So just basically three years, I guess, three summers.

Biagi: You graduated in 1962?

Katz: 1962, from high school, '66 from college.

Biagi: So you did graduate in four years.

Katz: Four years. Most people did then. Everybody did then.

Biagi: It was expected, yes.

Katz: I can't imagine anybody who didn't. I didn't know anybody who didn't.

Biagi: Then how did it come about that you went to work for a congressman?

Katz: It must have been after my junior year in college I went to work for my local congressman, Brad Morse, F. Bradford Morse. That's right, it was after my junior year. I met my husband, in fact, in that office. I was hired by Brad Morse. My mother knew him, too. My mother knew everybody. That's probably how I got the job. It was one of those summer internships. You had to apply, though. It was probably not just because my mother knew him, but I'm sure that helped, and from her good deeds.

I went to work for a group called the Wednesday Club, under a man named Doug Bailey, who is now a very famous political consultant, a brilliant, brilliant guy. Three or four of us kids worked with him in an office, researching political strategy, that kind of stuff. My ex-husband was there. He was younger than me, a year. He got the job because his father was a very well-known Republican in Massachusetts, was assistant to the governor, and ran political campaigns for people like Elliot Richardson.* He ran Brad's [Morse] campaign. So he was down there for that. So I did that one summer.

Biagi: Your husband's name is?

______________________ * Elliot L. Richardson, secretary of defense in the Nixon administration. Born in Boston on July 20, 1920.

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Biagi: Let's stop a minute.

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

Biagi: And you met him—

Katz: I met him the summer of my junior year in college. We were both interns in a group of congressmen's offices in Washington. They were called the Wednesday Club. It included Tupper from Maine and Brad Morse from Massachusetts, Silvio Conte was one. They were liberal Republicans. It was a group of liberal Republican congressmen. We had both been hired to work through Brad Morse, who was my congressman and, as I said, Steve's father ran his campaign.

Biagi: Was this in New York?

Katz: Washington.

Biagi: So you went to Washington and worked.

Katz: Yes, it was a summer internship, the traditional summer internship in the House. Lots of college kids go every summer and work in Washington. We worked for Doug Bailey. There were the two of us and a guy named Nicholas Danforth III. I don't know whatever happened to him.

Biagi: Right. [Laughter.] Purina or something.

Katz: Once during the summer he had enough money to fly to England for the weekend. We worked for this brilliant, brilliant man named Doug Bailey, who has become a very famous Republican political strategist. We just did research, I think, pretty much.

Then when the summer was over, Congressman Tupper, one of the Wednesday Club, wanted to become ambassador to Expo. He was from Maine. He wanted to become ambassador to Expo, which was in Canada that year. So they asked me if I would help them research a book on Canadian-American relations. Doug Bailey was the lead writer. I did some work the first few months of my senior year, but Steve did most of it and I took all the money. It was called Canada and the United States: The Second Hundred Years. Congressman Tupper got to go to the Expo.

Biagi: Whose name was on the book as author?

Katz: Stanley R. Tupper. I'm sure three people read it. But it got published, and I got a thousand bucks or something, which Steve had really earned, to be honest with you. I took the money and went to Europe that summer after my senior year.

Biagi: Did you go alone?

Katz: No, I went with a friend named Ellen Rosenbush. We had a pretty nice time. We went all over Europe and fell in love a few times, and we went to the traditional spots and then we drove all over Yugoslavia and Italy. We had a great time. Rented a car and really had a wonderful time.

Biagi: Then when the summer was over?

Katz: I came back and went to journalism school.

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I was madly in love with one of my classmates, and he was madly in love with me, too. I had a great time there, didn't really learn a lot, but made tremendous contacts.

Biagi: Let me move back one second. I didn't clarify. How did you learn to type?

Katz: I went to typing class one summer. (Lowell High School, I think.) My mother thought that would be an important thing to do, I'm sure.

Biagi: So you were typing by the time you got to high school?

Katz: I think during high school. One summer during high school I went to typing class. My mother was the kind of person who believed every minute—and I'm the same way—every minute must be filled with something productive. My children have never been allowed to just sit around all summer; they've got to work. They've got to earn their keep. So you had to go to typing school if you couldn't do anything else.

Biagi: So you graduated with another B average, would you say, at Columbia?

Katz: Probably.

Biagi: And you were there the year?

Katz: I was there the whole year. Right. I remember the very first day of journalism school. I got all dressed up. I had bought this beautiful gray suit at Di Pinna with orange trim, and I was really dressed up. We sat in the auditorium. As they read our names off, they read a place in New York City next to it, and then they said, "Okay, go find a story. Be back at four." I mean, half the class didn't even know where they were. I was lucky, because at least I knew I was in New York City and I had been there for two years. I got the Bronx Botanical Gardens.

Biagi: You weren't dressed for that. [Laughter.]

Katz: No, I wasn't dressed [for that]. As I recall, it was raining. I had snakeskin shoes. I was so proud of those shoes. I got them at Di Pinna, too. I was really dressed up. I had to go slog around the Bronx Botanical Gardens in the rain. I'd never been into the boroughs. I didn't know where the hell Bronx was. I remember going down into the subway and seeing someone named David Diaz, who was in my class, looking equally lost. I mean, some of these people really had no idea where any of these places were. You had to go find a story at these places.

But I went there and I found some story. God knows what it was. But I found a story. As I said, that was always a thing that I did best. It wasn't a bad story, but you had to write it, too, by four o'clock. That was really tough. But I accomplished that, too, I think.

Biagi: Was that kind of typical of the curriculum, that they'd send you out to do things and then you'd come back?

Katz: Yes. They believed at that time far more than they do now that students should understand the community. During January we had internships, and three of us went to the New York Times in Washington. I worked with Eileen Shanahan. I was in such awe of her. I couldn't even talk. Of course, when we met again twenty-five years later, she didn't remember a minute of it, but I remembered. I trailed her around for a week. I knew I wasn't going to be a TV journalist.

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I took the job in Washington and moved there. I worked at it very briefly. Steve came to move my stuff down from Massachusetts. I was living with a girl I knew when I grew up, and we were going to move together into a bigger apartment, a nicer apartment. She said, "If you're going to marry this guy anyway, you might as well do it now and get it over with." We decided on the spot to elope, but Steve had come from a much more religious household than I had, and he wanted to be married by a rabbi. The rabbi wouldn't marry us—said Steve was under age—and we went back to Massachusetts.

The way I quit my job, when I think of it now, it's amazing I ever got a job again. I just wrote on—it must have been a teletype machine, "I quit. Goodbye. See ya around," and sent the message, and that was it, and walked out.

Biagi: And you'd been there a few weeks?

Katz: A couple of months maybe. No two weeks' notice, no nothing. I had worked for these people for years. All through college I had done work for them in New York, even, too. I remember I covered Princess Margaret and her husband Lord Snowden when they visited New York, and by mistake I tripped him and he put his foot in a wading pond at one of the museums.

Biagi: By "under age," you mean?

Katz: He must have been twenty. I think you had to be twenty-one to get married.

Biagi: But you were—

Katz: Twenty-one. Yes, he's nine months younger than me. So we came back to Massachusetts. I quit my job. It's amazing anyone ever hired me, really. Think about it. If anyone had ever done that to me, I'd make sure their life was blackballed forever. But the [Lowell] Sun was pretty good about it, I guess.

We came back to Boston, we got married, over my parents' objections, because they didn't like Steve.

Biagi: By a rabbi?

Katz: By a rabbi. Steve was in law school at Boston University. I got a job with the Quincy Patriot-Ledger. I worked in their Norwood bureau. It was in the basement of a bank. I covered Norwood and Dedham. Then later I graduated to Wellesley and Needham. One of my highlights there was covering Congressman Margaret Heckler, as she campaigned at the dump on Saturdays. You'd go to the campaigning in the dump. You know, you covered city council and you covered school boards. When I think of it now, how hard that stuff was. But I loved it, and I worked nights.

We had no money, Steve and I. Steve went to law school and he worked for the attorney general. Remember that his family had connections with the governor. I worked nights for the Ledger and days for a kosher deli as a waitress. It was the only job I was ever fired from in my life. I mixed milk and meat once, and they threw me out on my ear. But I worked days for them and nights at the Ledger.

Biagi: When did you ever see Steve?

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Katz: Right. He's been responsible for my whole career. In fact, when I got named editor Friday, he was the first person I called. He'll get a big dinner out of it. He's been there for me for my whole life. I'm only getting to know him now, twenty-seven years later, as a person, which is very interesting, I think. But he's been part of my whole life.

Biagi: We want to go back to you in Brookline and Charlie O'Brien in the basement.

Katz: Right. And a whole bunch of young kids, truly young kids.

Biagi: You included.

Katz: Right. Young, pushy kids covering city council meetings, making them boring.

Biagi: Do you remember any stories that were particularly noteworthy, either because they were particularly good or particularly bad?

Katz: No. I just remember covering millions of city council meetings and selectmen's meetings. I don't remember ever at the Ledger doing anything of note, but I must have at some point. The boss was this old coot named Bill White. He's dead, so it doesn't hurt to say bad things about him. This old drunk ran the place. It was a mess. It was just a bunch of kids running wild.

Biagi: Other women there?

Katz: Yes. Janie Eckstein sat next to me. I wonder whatever happened to her. Steve and I were actually very friendly with her and her husband. She left journalism, I think, and became a chef in Miami. But it was all just young kids. The Ledger recruited tons of young kids to cover these towns, and then each of us had a local person who worked part time as a correspondent that helped us cover each town. I had a woman in Norwood who also wrote for romance magazines. So that was her side career. But she was pretty good, actually. She also bred kerry blue terriers, I think. In Dedham I had this guy named Dan something or other. Oh, he was another old coot who drank himself to death.

But we had a great time. It was a whole bunch of kids stuck in this basement of the bank, just having a hell of a time.

Biagi: For how long did you have these two jobs?

Katz: I don't think I lasted at the restaurant that long, to be honest with you. Maybe six months. I was not ever cut out to be a waitress, although in boarding school I worked in the kitchen crew and in college, to make money, I worked in the kitchen crew.

Biagi: And Steve is going to law school.

Katz: Steve is going to law school, doing real well, liked being in law.

Biagi: How long were you in the basement?

Katz: Let's see. October '67. Well, I couldn't have spent too much time with the Lowell Sun, because I got out of journalism school in June '67, and Steve and I got married October 1, '67, so it was only a couple of months in Washington. We didn't have a honeymoon. We got married the night the Red Sox won the pennant. Everyone in the temple had radios in their ears; they were

Page 42

Biagi: When you recruited for that job, where did the people come from? Were they people you had met in journalism? Were they people you had met in journalism school?

Katz: I don't know how I found them. Some of them worked for the small newspapers in the suburbs. At the Brookline Citizen, I found someone named Barbara Rabinowitz, who I've remained friendly with all these years. People like that. They worked for the little papers around. They were correspondents, basically.

This was not the Don Forst time. This was when the paper was owned by—who did own it? I guess it was a group of people who owned the paper and owned Channel 5, the television station. Eventually they had to divest, and they sold the newspaper to Hearst. I was gone by then. Hearst did the craziest thing. They combined the Record American, this racy, blue-collar tab, with the most staid Republican broadsheet of the world. I mean, it was impossible and never worked. Well, I shouldn't say it never worked, because it's still going. Two men who were very important in my life were at the Herald Traveler besides all the characters. One was Bob Kiersted, who was the city editor, and another was Charlie Ball, who was the assistant city editor.

Biagi: Another Charlie.

Katz: Another Charlie. Charlie Ball had gone to Columbia. He was a pretty sharp guy. Kiersted was an old Irish—well, he wasn't old. I take that back, because he just retired this year from the Boston Globe. But he seemed old. Everybody seemed old. He was the city editor. He really liked me a lot and he really pushed me a lot. I did real well with him. I just loved it there. I loved every person, I loved listening to them talk. I remember when Chappaquiddick happened and they talked about what the real story was and how it could never be printed.

Biagi: Now that we're on the sixties, let's just take a few minutes here, because you are in the sixties. I'd like to just mention some of the highlight events of the sixties and ask you what role they played in your life, news events. John Kennedy's assassination [November 22, 1963].

Katz: I was still in college. I was on a train to the Harvard-Yale game. The only time in my life I ever got invited, I didn't get to go. They stopped the train in New Jersey, and I was with my Goucher roommate. We got off the train and went back to Goucher. Then we got a group of kids together. Somebody had a station wagon; I don't even know who the hell it was. We drove to Washington and stood all night outside the Capitol. We just waited with everyone else. For news. That's what I remember. Thousands of people waiting. We drove to Washington. We had this incredible need to be there. I remember that, and I remember the Cuba crisis, listening to that on the radio at college, not understanding a bit of it. But, you know, John F. Kennedy was—well, I came from Massachusetts, so he was like a star where I came from. My dad had gone to Boston Latin School with his older brother, and my dad always told stories about how they would give speeches in Latin School in Latin, and the kids would try and make each other laugh during the speeches, but when the older Kennedy, Joe, would give speeches, he would say, "I'm going to be president of the United States one day. I take this seriously."

Biagi: In Latin?

Katz: I don't know. But, "This is a serious thing. Treat it seriously." My father had great respect for him, but not much respect for John F. John F. Kennedy, I think, was more respected outside of Massachusetts than in. I remember that assassination. A sad time.

Biagi: And then Martin Luther King's assassination [April 4, 1968].

Page 44

Katz: No. In fact, it was just the opposite. The journalists were unethical. I'm at the Boston Herald Traveler. You have a staff of basically old conservative people and young kids. What happened is, they made me go cover these demonstrations, and maybe 100,000 people would turn out, and the editors would cut it down to 20,000. I mean, journalists then played fast and loose with the facts. When I was at the Herald American, I remember once congratulating a reporter on great quotes in a story, and he said, "Yeah, I made them up." I remember at Christmastime. The Herald newsroom was on the second floor. They had this giant lobby below. We'd be like kids, you know, at a bannister, looking down as people brought in booze and all kinds of gifts for the staff. You could never in a million years get away with that now. All the reporters were incredibly close with the police, with the this, with the that. They were in everybody's pockets.

Biagi: So the ethical issue, you thought was different? You were participating in the antiwar demonstrations.

Katz: Funny, I thought it was wrong for the people to get the hams and booze. That, I thought, was outrageous. But the idea that I would participate in demonstrations, looking back on it now, I guess I felt that I could keep my distance as a writer and not let my own personal views color my stories.

Biagi: In reality, were you covering those issues at all as a reporter?

Katz: Yes, I was covering them. I was indeed covering demonstrations and all kinds of things. I felt that the Herald was being unethical because they were changing the police estimates and facts. I mean, to me that was unethical. The fact that I was covering it, even though I was a part of the anti-war movement, didn't seem wrong.

I mean, the truth is that all journalists have views and we all come to every story with our history, our own eyes. So there's no such thing as true objectivity. One of the interesting things about the Register is that because the paper is Libertarian in its editorial philosophy and one of the deals that was cut when it came away from Libertarianism in the content of the news was that if you can't have Libertarianism in the news, you can't take any sides in the news. We have to be antiseptic and right down the middle. We advocate nothing. That's hard when most reporters come out of liberal backgrounds. It's very easy to see, now that I'm forty-seven, that just with whom you start the story, just the first words of the story can put you on one side or the other.

I'm real conscious of government stories because of the Register's philosophy and how the media presents them. Take a story from last week saying that the county government was going to close an office that did twenty adoptions a year. The story was written from the point of view that twenty families weren't going to get their babies. They would have to go to private adoption agencies, and have to pay $600 at a private adoption agency. I said, "You know, you could look at it in another way, that here they ran this whole office and all they did was twenty adoptions a year, and in a time of a county budget crisis, maybe, possibly, it might have been an efficiency that was not going to hurt too many people, you could look at it that way." But immediately reporters jump to the bleeding heart/victim point of view. So it's very hard to be straight down the middle.

It would be interesting to go back into the trunks and get out my clips and see now, with these old eyes, whether I was objective. I like to think I was.