Eileen Shanahan: Interview #6

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Clark: This is Mary Marshall Clark. I'm interviewing Eileen Shanahan. This is session number twelve of our oral history and the last session. Today is May 22, 1994, and we're actually in the home of Betsy Wade in New York where we did a video yesterday of Betsy and Eileen.*

Hi.

Shanahan: Hi.

Clark: How's that for an introduction?

Shanahan: Wonderful!

Clark: Okay. All right. We're going to pick up where we left off in the last session, which was the death of the Washington Star.

Shanahan: Yes. And when that sad event—I still miss that paper—happened, I knew that I either had to get a job in a Washington bureau of a newspaper, which is very hard to do because they generally promote their own people to that plum job, and people who know about where they came from, which is valuable, or else I was going to have to leave town. That's how it turned out. I wanted to be as close as I could. I found something driveable—Pittsburgh, a five-hour drive, a forty-five minute flight—and was then into a commuter marriage, which I don't recommend to anybody, and that's really why I quit after two and a half years.

But it was a wonderful job. At the age of fifty-seven to go somewhere where you don't know a single soul. There was actually one other former Star person, a sportswriter, on the other paper in Pittsburgh, and we saw each other once in a while but not much. It was hard for me personally and professionally—my husband was always my balance wheel who would let me scream and shout and stomp and cry and then would say, "Okay, enough already now. You know you're not being realistic, you shouldn't have expected what you expected," and so on.

It's also journalistically—it's hard to learn about a city as an editor. If you're out there on the street as a reporter and you get a sense of the community and the mayor and whatever else you need, it would be much easier. For an editor, it's all coming at you at second-hand, through the eyes of a reporter. And I'm vain enough about my reporting ability to think that if I'd been out there, I would have seen something more than what they saw, or something different.

In fact, I think the fact that the big chains who now own a very large percentage of newspapers with a very large percentage of all the circulation and who move their editors around constantly from place to place—I think that's one of the main causes of the deterioration of local reporting in newspapers today. The reason commonly ascribed for that is that they're saving money, they're filling the papers with wire-service copy from across the country and abroad, which makes you think when you first look at them, "Oh, gee, they're doing a good job of covering the serious news."

But then you look and there's hardly any local news. And saving money is a big part of the reason. But I think part of the reason is that those editors mostly didn't grow up where they are now in the chains, or go to school there, or have any real roots there. And if you don't understand the history, you don't understand

______________________ * The videotaped interview session was not transcribed. It is available for viewing at Columbia University Oral History Research Office, the National Press Club Library, and California State University at Sacramento.

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In Pittsburgh—well, I obviously had photographers and graphics artists, headline writers and so on to do those things that I didn't do. But I had to think it all up myself. It was great training for my subsequent career running a magazine.

Clark: What was the circulation?

Shanahan: Poor. About 180,000 when I was there. They have since—the other paper fomented a strike with the Teamsters and subsequently went out of business. And the Post-Gazette bought it so that now it's a monopoly and I think the paper is economically healthy. But for a metropolitan area of a million and half, it was a tiny circulation and a tiny paper. There were days at the bottom of the '81-83 recession, which is when I was there, when the whole paper was twenty-eight pages. I say that to people in journalism and they think I mean the "A" section. No! The whole paper.

One other little thing that's kind of worth telling, it's a great, typical—you'll recognize it—feminist story. I was the only woman in the daily front page meeting, which I think I described in the Star part, where the various section editors and the copy editors trooped into the editor's office and talked about what you have for tomorrow's paper and figured out what ought to go on page one, and also any longer term stuff in the pipeline and so on. And that's a very standard thing on all daily papers.

Well, there I was the only woman. And there's always a lot of chatter—usually, there is, unless you've got a giant story that everybody's got to get back to work right away. There's a certain leisurely pace to those meetings frequently and very often they would start with some conversation about sports. Well, I got there in October of '81, which means right into the football season, right? And so there was lots of conversation about football which I don't care for. I don't follow it. I'm sort of a bred-to-the-bone Washington Redskins fan but I don't know the names of anybody but the megastars.

So I just sat there while they talked football. Then came hockey with a new team in Pittsburgh, and I've never followed hockey so I didn't say anything. And then came basketball which I know a little more about but I'm not very interested in. And finally came spring and baseball. And the very first day somebody mentioned something about baseball—I love baseball and I know something about baseball. And at some point, I just spoke right up and said something. They never mentioned baseball again. It was the clearest case—and it's in a lot of feminist books—of using conversation about sports to exclude women. It was absolutely remarkable.

Clark: How did you respond? Or did you?

Shanahan: I didn't. I didn't overtly respond at all, just tucked it away as an incredible experience. And they would even sometimes get to discussing a movie that I hadn't seen, especially violent movies. Somehow they probably found out that I didn't like violent movies—the Mafia movie, I can't think of its name.

Clark: "Godfather."

Shanahan: "Godfather" and "Godfather II" and long discussions about which—"Godfather II" was better than "Godfather I," and so forth, and I had seen neither one, so I would just sit there. I don't know whether Jack Craig was conscious of that or not. I did find no lack of respect for me on his part or any intent to downplay me.

I guess we probably need to move on a little quickly.

Clark: Well, just a quick question.

Shanahan: Oh, you've got questions. All right.

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Shanahan: It was a good job, as I said, but I really didn't like living the way I was living, with my husband in Washington and a great drive to go home every weekend, while at the same time if somebody asked me out to dinner in Pittsburgh, I thought to learn the community I ought to go. So I wound up going home maybe once every three weekends. And it was just a hard way to live. Though the job was wonderful, I decided to leave.

We had rented the house and John had moved into an apartment and the lease was up in June of '84. So actually, I made up my mind I had to come back to Washington over Christmas of '83. I came back and told the editor and told him that I didn't really want to go back to Washington till June but I thought I'd give him all this notice if it was okay with him. He said, "Absolutely. Stay as long as you like." So I did come back the 1st of June, 1984. My older daughter not much later became pregnant with her first child, still her only child, and I probably would have come back for that, if not earlier.

I had found a job in that period, which was teaching in Medill School, Northwestern University, Washington Journalism Program, which I thought I would love and I didn't quite. It was like running a little newsroom. The kids came—the students in the graduate program came to Washington and were the reporters, the Washington correspondents for small papers, clients' papers all over the country who got this service free except for paying transmission charges and so on. So it was like running a little newsroom.

And there was a lot about it that I really liked. I discovered I couldn't stand the kids who just wanted a certificate, who just wanted a degree and didn't care about what they were doing. A lot of people, when you say that to them, think that means I just liked the "A" students. Not so. There were kids that almost flunked who gave a damn and I loved them. And others whom I had to give a good grade to—not usually because the ones who were just trying not very hard just wanted the degree.

But it was interesting. It was all part of some further growth on my part. I didn't mention in Pittsburgh that I came to understand state and local government and how it is to live in a real place. I grew up in Washington, D.C., which is part of no county, no state, the whole governmental structure is different. And for many years we didn't even have home rule. We had an appointed government in Washington.

So I learned about a real place. I learned, after all my years in Washington, that people in a state really feel they know their governor. They don't feel they know their senator. They think the governor's much more important than the senator and they're right because he has real decision-making authority. That was enormously valuable to me, just to kind of think about the city and the county. County government happens to be quite important in Pennsylvania; it isn't everywhere.

So there was a lot of learning there that was good. And then, with the Medill job, in a way I was back to what I'd done with Cronkite, as an editor, filing Washington news of importance to specific regions, which our client papers ranged from Montana to South Carolina to Wisconsin to New Jersey. And I understood—got refreshed on that whole area. Quit actually, after five quarters. I would otherwise have stayed and might be there yet, although I was at that time a little reluctant about leaving journalism, the active practice thereof myself, in a way.

But I quit in a dispute over money. The then dean informed everybody that we would get paid less for the summer session, summer quarter. Well, that was ridiculous. It was the same length of time, it had a large number of students, and I wrote him a letter saying, "Sorry. You'd have to be a fool to teach in Washington in the summertime for less money than I make in the winter and I won't do it." I never heard a word. And so I figured, okay, he knows. Called his secretary, made sure he'd gotten the letter. Yes, he had. And then the first check arrives and it's for the reduced amount. And we got into a hell of a fight about it. And you could say he fired me, for being contentious about this.

We're not talking pennies here. We're talking $6,000. He paid. He paid it. Anyway, so there I am, out of work again. It took me eleven weeks to find the job in Pittsburgh from the Star, which I was told was very fast.

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Clark: Oh, wonderful.

Shanahan: He had been thinking about it for ten years but had not—because he had some problems, I think, with the guy above him—had not moved on it. And he suddenly saw me as the person who could realize this vision.

Clark: In other words, he wouldn't have been able to articulate it because of his problems with the guy above him?

Shanahan: Well, he may have—no, no, he actually had done a prototype or a little bit of a prototype many years previously, for example, and somehow there just—partly, he may not have had the drive himself. But in any event, it didn't happen, but it was something he'd thought about for a long period of time.

So I got the job covering the rest of the '86 tax bill which was enough to tell me that maybe I didn't really want to do Washington reporting any more. I had a good time doing it but I knew it was finite. It was over in eight months when the Congress ended, and it was a big story and it was fun to do. All the movers and shakers read CQ, not the public at large, so it's a nice audience and you have good access to people because everybody in Congress reads it and knows who else reads it.

I had no promise except that there would be a job after the end of the tax bill and after Pam Fessler came back. But about ten minutes after Congress finished doing the tax bill, Peter relieved me of all my other duties and said, "Start planning this magazine." So I was sitting there in the middle of the CQ newsroom doing that. Meanwhile, he's telling—not his boss in Washington who was kind of a stultifying hand on things, but the big bosses down in St. Pete. [St. Petersburg, Florida]

Clark: Are you talking Eugene Patterson?

Shanahan: Exactly, Eugene Patterson. The St. Petersburg Times owns Congressional Quarterly and then in turn owned Governing magazine. I guess I may not have said the word so far. We are talking about the creation of a magazine called Governing which is all about state and local government, a national monthly, gorgeous four-color magazine. And that is what ensued. I started planning and thinking. I had a file folder that was probably an inch and a half thick into which over the years, as I thought I was going to look for a job, a beat, doing this. I had just kind of thrown a bunch of clippings or articles or whatever, suggesting story ideas to me.

In any event, Peter and I talked about it and I wrote him long memos about—he had originally thought of this publication as a state government report. And I said, "No, it should be state and local because the interrelationships between—what you do with the localities, the tax issues, how you split up the revenue pie, everything you have from federal to state you also have from state to local in terms of problems, areas, taxes, spending, fights, whatever. I quickly saw that that was the case and the publication should be state and local government. He took a little convincing but he saw it my way. [Tape interruption.]

You know, it really is extraordinary to be able to create something. I talked earlier about being one of those who created the beat of national economic policy and one of those—with splendid colleagues—who created the beat of the women's movement, with just dazzling women—they were all women—who were covering that. And now, starting at the age of sixty-two, I created a magazine. It's really remarkable.

It took a lot of nerve. It took a lot of nerve.

Clark: So it was founded when, in 1993?

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And then there was a guy who was the supervisor of the affiliates which included statewide business magazines in Florida, Georgia and Arizona. And CQ was considered an affiliate of the paper, the St. Petersburg Times Company.

Patterson and I barely knew each other, through when I was a member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors when I was at the Star and at Pittsburgh we had met. But we each knew a lot about the other. And when Harkness hired me, he was quite delighted and wrote me a wonderful little note about it, and then wrote another note when I did a tax story he especially liked. He writes great notes. I've still got them all. They'll find them in my effects when I die.

So Harkness was keeping Patterson informed as to what I was doing. And as I say, I had this stack of memos talking about it. And I had said to Harkness at some point, "Whenever you want to see it, I've got a list—I'll bet you I can give you a list of fifty stories such a magazine ought to do right away," from my folder where I'd been throwing these little notes to myself and clippings for several years. And Harkness always called it the "nifty fifty."

So in due course, and it would have been—I can't tell you the date on this; I could tell you the date of the meeting when they made the decision—all those people, Harkness, Barnes, the bean-counter, Rick Edmonds who was the head of the affiliates came to Washington and with Harkness and me sat around the table. I had meanwhile looked at my nifty fifty in my folder and discovered I had seventy-three ideas that were still viable. So I scampered around and got two more to make it a nice little number of seventy-five and wrote a memo with about, oh, a six-to-eight-line description of each one of these stories.

So in the course of that meeting, I mentioned that I had the memo and handed it to Patterson—I had only the one copy—who sat right there and read the whole thing, and when he had finished said, "You have a magazine."

Clark: Wow!

Shanahan: Well, there was more to it after that. There was real nitty-gritty stuff to do about budgets and really figure out what the cost would be and look into things like art and so on. But then there was a second meeting. It was in December of 1986 when the whole gang trooped up again from St. Pete, talked about budget—well, there were a number of things to be discussed. We had to really discuss to decide was it state or state and local. That decision was made rather easily. We had to decide—the big fight—well, it wasn't exactly a fight—a tug of war I lost and in retrospect I'm very glad I lost it as to whether it was going to be a bi-weekly headed toward becoming weekly and more kind of nuts and bolts like Congressional Quarterly, or a monthly.

Well, this dummy table of contents that I had done had, without my realizing it, really made it look like a monthly: It had news briefs up front and then several long features, and then some other shorter stuff, trimmings in the back and so on. And Patterson was quite adamant about it had to be a monthly, mostly because more frequent publication would run up the cost so much, and Harkness and I originally were broken-hearted about that. I'm very glad. It would have been—I don't know what it would have been as a weekly since, after all, after the decision was made it was going to be a monthly, I stopped thinking about that. But I have a feeling it wouldn't have been as good. And I'll never know and I don't care.

The other decision that had to be made which raised what was to me a shocking concept was whether it would be paid circulation or what they call controlled circulation, which more and more magazines are. You get the magazine free but you have to be a certain kind of a person before you can get it. I mean, American Chef goes only to chefs. There is such a magazine.

There are lots of what the industry calls "niche" magazines, as Governing would be, and it takes millions, I learned, to keep up your circulation. Anybody who takes magazines knows how many times they mail circulation renewal notices to you and you look at it and you say, "For Pete's sake, this is only February

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How did I know how to hire an art director? We were just loaned Bernloer for the basic design. Not too much probably survives now though it started off very much based on that and then developed.

Well, at the Washington Star I had worked with one of the great newspaper designers, Eric Seidman, but who had also been in the Time organization and a protegé of a man named Walter Bernard who is one of the giant figures in magazine design, who did the next-to-last redesign of Time, which was wonderful. The current one is ghastly in the opinion of practically everybody. We had become good friends at the Star. Actually, he and I were on the New York Times together, too, and he was in the financial section, the graphics person there, as I mentioned earlier. We happened to start at the Star the very same day and we became great friends and I loved talking to him about design because I'd always been interested, particularly I saw what good charts and graphs could do with an economics story.

So when I'm agonizing over how the hell do I find a good art director, I thought, "Well, Eric may know some," but he mentioned one or two who were all far too expensive for us. And I finally decided, I asked him if he would critique the magazine for me, the prototype, and then as I interviewed people for the job, I would kind of bear in mind what they said about the prototype, compared to what he had said, figuring—I had confidence that he would be right. So I would pick out the one who agreed the most with Eric.

And that's how I found the person I found, basically—Peggy Robertson who had been on the Washington Post on the weekly health tabloid and who had been promised that it would be printed in the Post's razzle-dazzle new plant out in the Virginia suburbs that had all the latest equipment. And instead they printed it in the old downtown plant and she couldn't get any decent color reproduction and she was just fed up with the whole situation that wasn't getting any better. So that's why she was looking for another job. And she'd been on magazines before—mostly magazines, the Post was her first newspaper job. And she heard about us somehow, or I heard about her, I forget. I think she heard about it from somebody. People in magazines kind of know each other, too, and the word was out on their network that there was this new start-up with some money behind it. I had a lot of applicants.

Anyway, I hired her, one of the best decisions I ever made in my entire life. She's temperamental and hard to get along with, and warfare between editors and art people is very traditional. The art people want something that looks nice and different and cutting edge, if they're that kind of person, which she was. And the editors say, "But it has to illustrate the story."

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

Shanahan: Some people get so upset about professional arguments. I don't. I figure that's just part of the way it is. And as long as they're professional arguments about what should be done instead of "You're stupid" characterizing, personalizing things, or "You don't know what you're talking about," which people do say to others on the job and shouldn't. Professional arguments about the merits of stories, or art, never bothered me. It bothered her; she cried a lot. She was a very easy crier, I must say. I warned her when I was leaving—because she was ready to leave Governing for some other reasons—that she should watch that. I could stand that, women don't get upset at other women crying because we all know that it's either chemical or training or something that we just don't have the discipline against crying the way men do. So I think it doesn't upset women the way it does men but I told her she really ought to find a way not to do that.

But anyway, she was brilliant and we won design awards right from the start. And the warfare was never over. My all-time favorite picture in that magazine is one she hated—it was in a wonderful story done by, I guess the freelancer we used the most, though we also had staff writers, unlike most magazines, except for the news mags—they have staff writers and most other magazines do not. But it was a wonderful piece done by a guy named Bill Fulton who was a regular freelancer for us, all of it on the subject of economic development; he runs an economic development newsletter in California.

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Well, finding an assistant managing editor turned out to be a tough job because we were a startup, nobody had ever heard of us. In doing the stories for the prototype, we had had access partly because of the Congressional Quarterly name. Very respected publication, mostly circulating in Washington with government people and lobbyists and other people that connect with the government. But it had some circulation in state and local government. In any event, it has just a sterling name, a ferociously accurate and thorough publication, so that to call up state or local officials and say, "I'm working for Governing magazine which is going to start publishing, it is being published by Congressional Quarterly," provided some fairly decent access.

But to try and find somebody who knew how to be assistant managing editor and was willing to take a flyer on this was tough, much tougher than the other people I hired. Kathy Sylvester was out of work—that's an interesting story I'll tell. And Rob Gurwitt had taken a year's leave to travel around the world and was just back and didn't have a job. And John Martin—I told Peter Harkness that this was absolutely the one and only guy I wanted to be my managing editor and he was going to have to tell him that he'd have a job at CQ if Governing never made it. And he did so. But the staff was just wonderful.

I kind of skipped around a little bit. I mentioned the prototype.

Clark: I have a couple of questions, if you don't mind.

Shanahan: Okay.

Clark: And then we can jump back to yours.

Shanahan: If I don't mind?

Clark: No. I mean, you're doing a nice job of telling straight through. But I guess what struck me, just because I've been listening to the history of newspapering so much, mainly, in this project, is what you can accomplish through a point of view but also multiple angles on various issues that you maybe couldn't accomplish, say, in economic beat. In some of the stories that I read, it's very clear that there is—I'm thinking particularly about the Asian-American story, about the fear of the Japanese or hatred of the Japanese.

There's a coverage that really has to do with the seriousness of statistics and economics. It's a political story but it has cultural and economic angles. It has a primarily cultural angle in some ways, or a social science angle. I wondered how you thought about that, how you laid out the magazine and going back to that first dummy and how that evolved every time in terms of the way that you covered stories and the different angles that you tried to integrate.

Shanahan: Basically, the answer to your question is you hire brilliant people, of whom Rob Gurwitt was one, the man who did the piece on Asian Americans' emergence in U.S. politics. Kathy Sylvester was another. Penny Lemov I hadn't known before but she'd freelanced in Washington for years while her kids were growing up and I knew her work. I was very proud of that Asian-American story. I do not know of another publication who did one at that time. That was the December 1990—November or December 1990 issue—was my last issue as editor.

Clark: November 1990.

Shanahan: Next to last issue as editor. And basically you turn a guy as brilliant as Rob Gurwitt loose on a story and he finds those things. He finds the opening anecdote about the Chinese who got beat up on the streets of Detroit because people thought he was Japanese—a couple of unemployed auto workers or somebody who—

Clark: Oh, that's a very famous case, the Vincent Chin case.

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I was just about deciding to take a very, very green young woman from Fredericksburg, Virginia, as the best of the lot, when the phone rings and it's Kathy. And she says, "Guess who's unemployed again." They had cancelled the Mudd show. And I said, "That's wonderful news!" and quickly said, "Come work for me. All I can promise you is four weeks' pay. We don't know whether it's going to fly. Somebody besides me is going to decide that. But I can promise you four weeks of good professional level pay."

And so she came and did it. She wound up not just doing all the news briefs but actually writing all the headlines—she was a great headline writer—and also in the crunch when we had to get the prototype pasted up and Gary Bernloer came up from Georgia to do it—and we were hard up against the deadline because I was determined to make that April 1 deadline. That's what I had been told and that's what I was going to do. And the two of them worked until two or three in the morning and came back at eight in the morning and got it all pasted up. She had once worked on a non-union newspaper in one of the Maryland counties right outside of Washington and that's where she learned to do paste-up. So it got done and she was certainly one of the mainstays. She has introduced me to a lot of people as the person who said it was wonderful when she lost her job.

Oh, we had a great time! We had a great time. There were so many things we did that I remain proud of to this day. And a lot of them are like the one you mentioned, like Rob Gurwitt's piece about the new importance of Asian-Americans in American politics. One of my last issues, Penny Lemov did a piece about state experiments with improving health insurance coverage.

Clark: I thought that was very interesting, given that the last line of it said, you know, the next president in the White House will have to take up the issue of health coverage for all in this country.

Shanahan: Isn't that interesting!

Clark: A rather prophetic remark.

Shanahan: Yes, it was a real breakthrough story that no other publication had done, up to that time. That one was my idea, I have to say, and Penny just went out and did her usual spectacular job and now you know, because it's been in all the papers, that Hawaii—actually, I think her piece says "universal," it turns out it's like 97 percent in Hawaii, which is a whole lot closer than the 85 percent we have insured in this country now.

But they just went out and did it, all of them. Well, you know, you make a mistake or two in hiring and I had to let one person go. There were other people that were hired that were good. But that original core was Kathy and Rob and Penny and a woman named Elder Witt who came off of CQ and who is now the deputy publisher. She really wanted to be a manager ultimately. She's now making a lot of trains run on time, not so much on the editorial side as the rest of the magazine, and it's a very good fit with her talents.

I was starting to mention, I got off the track, hiring the assistant managing editor—which was a terrible problem because nobody'd ever heard of us—but finally found a woman who somehow heard about it, somebody I told knew her, who had been at Smithsonian magazine, which apparently was one of these truly psychotic organizations and everybody there was miserable and knifing everybody else. There are whole organizations that can get really sick and this was apparently one of them, though it's a great magazine. And she wanted out and she heard about it, and it was clear to me that she was far and away the best that I was going to see. And she was. She was good. She did good stuff.

She subsequently left. She had told me when she came in for the job that she really wasn't all that interested in state and local government, foreign policy was her interest, and that she thought she probably would go back to go to graduate school and take a degree in foreign policy. But she thought she'd like to try this because she wanted the credential of having been the assistant managing editor. And I said, "Okay by me. Come, stay a year, stay a year and a half, whatever."

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except making the plates. I said, "Call him up. We can get this thing in on time tomorrow," which is when it was due, "if we have to. But Vivian and I"—Vivian Noble, the assistant managing editor—"Vivian and I will have to stay here through the night, probably, to get it done, or until two in the morning. Just ask them if they're in any shape to take us a day late." And they said, "Absolutely. We're in terrific shape to take you a day late."

I think in part they would have said that even if they hadn't been because we were so great. I hear stories all the time about how magazines are late. We were never late. I'm very proud of that, particularly since who the hell was I to be a magazine editor?

Clark: Oh, that's wonderful!

Shanahan: But mostly what I'm proud about is the contents—it evolved, it got better, the articles did have more of a point of view as we went on. And you knew it was read. It was the most wonderful thing to go to one of the conventions of state and local government officials. They have a lot of meetings. Many of the city—there are two city organizations, the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The latter is only the larger cities; the former is everything. Many of them have two conventions a year, usually one in Washington about February so they can go lobby Congress for more money for this or that, and for no additional regulations—federal mandates which say you must do this or that, mandates often without money to do them. When the feds say, "You must do this, state government"—usually state—and they often don't provide any funding. It's a real problem, it's a terrible problem for state governments.

But anyway, they usually have one convention in February in Washington where they troop up to Congress and lobby their own members of Congress, and then one somewhere else during school vacation time in the summer. And we began going to those conventions, to meet people and to pick up ideas. Kathy in particular would always come back with nine or ten absolutely first-class story ideas from those conventions. Everybody did but she happened to be a particular star at that.

I went to a few of them. And it was just thrilling. You'd get on the elevator to go down to the morning session with your little badge that said, "Eileen Shanahan, Governing." It didn't usually even say "Executive Editor, Governing," just "Governing." And they'd stop me and say, "Oh, Governing, I love that magazine." You weren't fishing, it just came at you. And they would say, "I couldn't believe your story about X. You had it exactly right. And nobody has ever understood that before." It absolutely kept you going. That first year I worked seventy to ninety hours a week, partly because we were understaffed.

Clark: Just out of curiosity, were you making a salary that was commensurate with your previous salaries?

Shanahan: I think I was making a little less than I had made as assistant managing editor of the Washington Star but we're talking about a couple of thousand. I went to Pittsburgh for less than that but the cost of living is cheap in Pittsburgh. I learned to buy all my clothes in Pittsburgh. I bought a Bill Blass coat for two hundred dollars less than it would have cost in Washington, the identical coat. And CQ, no. I mean, when I went to CQ, I took about a ten thousand pay cut. But I had to get into a regular job. I hated freelancing.

So yes, given that company, which has kind of a low salary history, I think I was not quite back up to what I had made at the Star. And that was sort of okay with me, and whether if I'd been a man I'd have gotten more, I'll never know. I got some—oh, I'd forgotten about that. I planned Governing on the same salary I had been getting at CQ. And after I was shifted over officially to do that planning, I went to Peter Harkness and said, "I don't think I should have to do this on my CQ salary." Well, he went to his boss, this fellow Rick Edmonds, of whom I was not greatly fond, at the beginning or the end—

Clark: What was Rick Edmonds' job?

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Well, that creep Edmonds got his copy of the letter, of course, and suddenly, oh, dear, the big boss thinks this is good, and wrote me a letter saying, "I guess I forgot to tell you what was good." I'd have had more respect for him if he hadn't. He subsequently got passed over for a promotion in the company and quit, or maybe he was fired. I don't know and I don't care.

But anyway, I am so proud of what we did at Governing, the stories that nobody else did. They are legion, I mean, everything from the health care story we've talked about, Kathy's foundation story, Kathy's story about putting social services together to have a unified approach to the dysfunctional family, using the kid in school who may be the only person in the family who has any attachment at all to the mainstream society as the point person to get into that, a story called "Joining Forces for Kids," an absolute breakthrough. In another two years, that's going to be a cliché approach. You begin to hear about it now.

And the nits and grits of management in state and local government, stories about trash, stories about traffic. Penny Lemov, who had worked—had freelanced and she'd also worked for Builder magazine, the magazine of the National Association of Homebuilders. When I came to recognize—I think I probably knew it going in—that state and local governments finance—that is, not taxes and expenditures but borrowing money which they do for capital expenditures, roads and buildings and so forth, dams, whatever—that that was a big story. And I'd known that from my background in economic reporting.

So I set Penny to doing a story about what is known as the municipal bond market. It doesn't just include city bonds—city and state and county and everything else—but for some reason they've traditionally been called munis—municipals. Well, she didn't know beans about it when she started, just an absolute blank and she needed a bit of help from me, but she came through on that very first effort. It was terrific. She now is regarded as the greatest journalistic expert in this country on the subject of state and local government finance. She's one of these people who just does it. Tell Penny to do something and she doesn't bitch and moan, she just does it.

The only time I ever heard her complain, I gave her another one of these hard-core, how-to-do-it stories to do about procurement. Government procurement's got a lot of regulations because you shouldn't steal the taxpayer's money and give it to your friends—too many regulations—and they're making an effort at the federal level under [Vice President Albert] Gore, the "reinventing government" initiative, to reduce those regulations because it had gotten to the point where they're counterproductive and costing more in time and money than you could possibly save from catching the occasional improper let of a contract.

But I remember the only time I ever heard Penny complain—state and local government typically for that era was ahead of the feds in trying to make procurement more flexible, you didn't rigidly have to take the lowest bid, and so forth. So I sent her out to do it. And she came back after a trip to somewhere to interview some people and came in, with this nice little smile on her face, said, "These people! They never give you a good quote. They never tell you an interesting anecdote. I don't know what I'm going to do to make this piece something anybody will read."

Well, the people that were interested read it because it told them what Governing stories told you, which is what people were doing somewhere else, what problems they had encountered, how they solved them, and "you can do it, too" was always the unstated message, because there was stuff out there that was working. There was also stuff that wasn't working, and that's in Governing, too. And that's what that magazine was about: What works and what doesn't. Something else that's sort of become something of a cliché.

Then there were the news briefs. They were very well read. And it was absolutely amazing the reaction some of them got. My all-time favorite was a news brief about a little teeny, tiny town in West Virginia called Vienna, which they pronounced Vie-en-na. And if I remember right, the population was 18,000. And somehow, somebody on the staff—maybe reading out-of-town papers, which we did a lot—somehow found out that the mayor of Vienna, West Virginia, had come up with the bright idea of asking everybody, if they could afford it, to round up to the nearest dollar when they paid their utility bills.

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and they are two different things. You go through politics to elect your government. One of my enduring criticisms of journalism in general is that we spend all this money covering elections because we say it's important who governs, and then we don't half cover how they govern. And that's true on the national level and on the state level, on the city level, on the county level.

So I was very much focused—as I had always been because I'd always been a policy person rather than a politics person—on how they govern. And Alan wasn't then, at the time I was threatened with what I felt was unwise, too early, retirement. But he learned; by the time he took over, he'd had a good break-in. But meanwhile, during my extended editorship, he was proposing some stories to Peter that I wasn't crazy about and we had some struggles that weren't very fun. And he did—to his credit, I must say—he came to me at some point toward the end of 1990 and said, "Look, you've got some stories you want to get done? Just tell me what they are and I'll support you. I want you to get done every single story you want to get done before you step down," which I thought was quite decent of him. The Asian-American in politics was one, Penny's health story was another, and some others as well. So that was good.

I stayed on. I think people thought I would be more wretched than I was. I wanted to stay. I got the title of senior editor and did some reporting and some editing. And I was not wretched. Alan made a number of changes, most of which I very much approve of and if there are one or two I don't—well, that's inevitable. The magazine is still wonderful and fulfilling a real need. But then the recession came along in 1991 and they were really looking to cut expenses. They had hoped to break even in '90. But we lost IBM and practically all the computer advertising just because of the recession. And you didn't know whether this was forever or just because of the recession. It's now clear it was just because of the recession but it ain't clear when you're going into it.

They were really looking for a way to cut the budget. And it did sort of cross my mind that they might throw me over the side. And one day Andy Barnes called me and said, "I'm going to be in Washington next Tuesday and I want to have lunch with you." And I really thought, "Oh, shit, he's going to break the news that 'you're wonderful but you've had a good run and goodbye.'"

Well, it didn't turn out that way. It turned out that yes, they really wanted me to leave Governing for reasons I well understood: the need to cut back on spending. But he said—we had this wonderful lunch—"How would you like to come back to your old life of covering economics and do it for the St. Petersburg Times?" And it's quite a decent company, you know? And so I did.

Clark: Would you say what that job was?

Shanahan: Covering national economic policy in the Washington bureau of the St. Petersburg Times, a small Washington bureau. I made a fourth reporter when I was there, plus the bureau chief. Then in due course I became the bureau chief because the bureau chief left to become executive editor of the paper.

Let me go back because I forgot to say something terribly important that I wanted to say about the magazine business. Except for the news magazines, which I've never heard this about, most of the magazine business is corrupt in the sense of advertising being tied to what purports to be an independent editorial product. I was so shocked and horrified to discover this. I may have, by good fortune, inherited the only ad director in the world who thought this was terrible and would never sell with a promise of favorable editorial copy. I didn't have to tell him this. Frank Quigley came in there committed to the idea that you shouldn't have to do that, even though he'd never been an editorial person. He could sell, though. Oh, boy, could he sell! And a wonderful colleague who had a short fuse but got over it. We had a couple of fights but they came out perfectly okay when they were over.

I couldn't believe it when I would get called as the executive editor by somebody from big companies saying, "We're sending you an article for your May edition." And I would—I don't know what I said the first time.

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And the other two, I remember they came to me shortly before the final week of the presidential campaign and said, "We want to go, one of us with Bush and one of us with Clinton, this final week." And I said, "Why? What are you going to add to the wires?" We get the AP and Reuters and all of the great supplementary or most of the great supplementary wire services—the New York Times, the Washington Post, L.A. Times, and so on. There just isn't a whole lot that we don't get. But sometimes you just have to let people who work for you do what they want to do. And I let them go and by God, they came back with glorious stuff. I've got to say, they had—Karl Vick did a kind of a Reporter's Notebook with lots of little things about Bush and David Dahl did a more analytical thing. In any event, they did wonderful stuff.

But intellectually I'm homesick for state and local, I want to physically be in Washington, and I've done some good stuff for the St. Pete Times—on economic policy and other things. I did a very Governing-like story on welfare reform because that's something, like health care, that's bubbled up from the states, as they have tried to get out of these desperately damaging, ever-increasing expenses, that are keeping state government from doing all sorts of things it wants to do and ought to do, both in health and in welfare. The welfare rolls are still growing very rapidly.

So I went out and I found out who was doing the best stuff out there in the states, like a Governing story, and went out and did it, and had a wonderful time doing it, which just made me more unhappy than ever with the Washington stories. And that welfare story just sank like a stone. Nobody in Washington or elsewhere across the country saw it. Zero impact—and I stay in this business for impact.

So here I sit, seventy years old, as of last February. I may decide yet again to do something else. Before I turn up my toes, as the old saying goes.

Clark: Before we find out what the next chapter's going to be, I wanted to ask you to repeat something on this tape that we had on the videotape yesterday, and that is a word of advice to young journalists.

Shanahan: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And it is more needed to be heard today than it was when I first encountered it, by far. I'll tell you a little story about it. When I was at United Press Radio—mostly just rewriting stories from the daily papers—but I got to go out to do a little coverage, including in Washington's appointed-at-that-time city government, a three-person commission appointed by the president. So I had hung around Washington's poor excuse for a city hall some.

And in due course, the senior reporter on that beat, Robert Buck on the Washington Daily News retired. And they had a retirement party and they invited all the people that had covered the city government with him as well as the people on his own paper, and so I got to go. And the editor of the Daily News—my husband was at the Daily News and he was a good friend of both of ours—had the bright idea of having the newest, youngest reporter on the paper, for the entertainment at the party, interview Bob Buck. And the kid asked wonderful questions about city government and everything. But then at the very end he asked Bob Buck, "What advice do you have for a young reporter?"

And Bob Buck replied, "Be a skeptic but not a cynic. A skeptic demands to be shown but a cynic won't be shown." I think, to this day, that that statement is perfect. And I think cynicism is the most enduring flaw, the most damaging flaw in the American daily press today. It is utterly destructive and getting worse all the time. And I don't know what you do about it. We understand some of the roots in the presidential lies about Vietnam, about Watergate. But the idea—and these young guys that work for me today share this view—the idea that all politicians are liars and only in for themselves, that's not true. That's not true. There are people in Congress who are there because they have a vision of where the country ought to be.

And we've got a man in the White House right now who has such a vision. Ronald Reagan had a vision of where he wanted the country to be. It's a vision with which I almost wholly disagree. But he had a sense of what needed to be done, by his lights, to make America better.

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concerned, and they were huge, he was a great journalist himself, and a great judge of journalists. I still feel proud that I was good enough to make it into Reston's Washington bureau.

But there was something else that night—which was what I set out to tell you. Right after Reston had turned our thoughts to the longer term future, he said, somewhat sternly, "I am not encouraging enterprise on the Bobby Baker story."

We all knew what he meant. Bobby Baker had been kind of a high-powered flunky for Johnson when he was Senate majority leader but was currently under a serious cloud concerning some financial dealings, and the press, including the New York Times, was baying after the scent. Reston said nothing else on that subject, beyond that one sentence, but I think we all understood why he was "not encouraging enterprise on the Bobby Baker story." The reason was that he felt it would not be in the national interest, in the wake of the shock and grief caused by the Kennedy assassination, to pursue a corruption story close to the new president. Reston went after many a scoop that enraged officials in the course of his career, but he always had a sense of the national interest, too, a sense that there were some rare occasions when serving the national interest was more important than pursuing a story. If anybody in the bureau disagreed, I never heard about it, then or later.

The Washington Post, among others, had also been in hot pursuit of the Baker story, but they didn't take up the cause again either—or maybe they did, but only much later.

Yet I doubt that any Washington bureau chief today would make such a decision or adhere to such a principle. And I think that is too bad, and too bad for journalism and too bad for the country. The "gotcha" story is now widely, damn near universally, considered the most important task of journalism. I don't agree.

Just for the record, law enforcement officials were already on Baker's trail and later on, he was tried and convicted and served several years in prison.

Clark: Okay. Thank you so much for your contribution to this history project.

Shanahan: It has never been more truly said: My pleasure!

[After reviewing the transcripts of her tape-recorded interviews, Ms. Shanahan had the following to add]:

Shanahan: One thing I discover, as I read this transcript following the formal end of the interviews, is that we focused so much on my jobs that I failed to really talk about my various "extracurricular" activities, other than those involving women.

One of them really does have to be mentioned, because it has meant so much to me. That is my involvement in programs designed to bring more minorities into the nation's newsrooms and to facilitate their rise up the career ladder once they were there.

From 1976 through this year (and on into the future, I expect) I taught, every year but three, in the programs created by the late Robert C. Maynard, the Summer Program for Minority Journalists, located at the University of California at Berkeley, which trained entry level reporters, or the Editing Program for Minority Journalists at the University of Arizona. The editing program was originally designed to train entry-level copy editors, but in recent years more and more of the students are minorities who've already reached such jobs as assistant city editor, assigning stories, and dealing directly with reporters, whose bosses want them to know more about the nuts and bolts of copy editing, to qualify them for broader management jobs.

Teaching in these programs, usually for two weeks each summer, has been a glorious experience for me. Partly because I could feel I was making a contribution to the American Dream of equal opportunity and