Washington Press Club Foundation

Catherine Shen: Interview #3

October 8, 1992 in Novato, California

Shirley Biagi, Interviewer

Catherine Shen- October 8, 1992 Tape 1 of 1

October 8th, 1992
Listen to audio
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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Biagi: What we want to do today, Catherine, is start with your career move from Honolulu and what took you to the mainland, what the motivations were, and how you ended up here in Marin County.

Shen: That's the simplest part of the story. I had been in Honolulu for almost three years, and when I had originally gone out there, when I was talking to John Quinn, who at the time was head of all editorial operations at Gannett, not knowing much about Honolulu except having visited there several times, I said, "Listen. I think three to five years is really about it. I don't really like palm trees, and it's not my kind of place. I'm going to go and I'm going to make a success of this, but I don't want to spend the rest of my life there."

Actually, as it turned out, I probably wouldn't have minded spending the rest of my life in some ways there. [Laughter.] But at the end of three years, by that time I was married and had a commuter marriage, because my husband at the time still continued to live in San Francisco for a number of reasons. Then we decided, well, what about having a child? I became pregnant. You can have a commuter marriage, but you really can't have a commuter family. We went back and forth about who would move where, and there really were more job opportunities for him certainly at the time on the mainland than there were in Honolulu, so I said, "Well, it's been three years. That's the lower end of how long I'd stay."

So I told John Curley this, actually, on a boat on the Li River in Guilin. I had gone on JetCapade with Al Neuharth, who at the time was still chairman of Gannett—this was a couple of years before he retired—the trip was with Neuharth and the board of directors. This part of JetCapade was the Far East, and I was with that part of it for about two weeks in Hong Kong and China. So we were on this idyllic boat trip with these fantastical—

Biagi: Explain what JetCapade is.

Shen: Al Neuharth had two great travel adventures that he did to basically promote USA Today himself, because it was the kind of thing he was so good at, promotion and marketing. You might hate it, but it works if you're willing to throw a lot of big bucks at it. He did BusCapade a few years earlier, where he traveled to every one of the fifty states in bus. I guess Bill Clinton must have taken his cue. Al was ahead of his time, as usual. [Laughter.] With a bunch of reporters basically interviewing just folks. Of course, he wrote about it in USA Today and subsequently published a big picture book that I have somewhere.

He then escalated that into JetCapade a few years later, where he went around the world and interviewed world leaders. For this leg of the trip, he also took the Gannett board of directors with him, and since I was based in Honolulu, had an interest in the Far East and was obviously Asian, I was invited to go along for two weeks of this trip, flying in his private plane, and then people who didn't fit on his plane, which only carries ten, after all, flew other—

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Biagi: How many of there were you?

Shen: At any given time, this was a floating [thing], there was a photographer, a reporter, a factotum, various visiting people such as myself, and the Gannett board of directors and their spouses. I can't remember how many are on the board of directors. I think it's probably about twelve to fifteen, plus their spouses.

Biagi: Never more than twenty-five or thirty at a time.

Shen: Yes. John Curley and his wife were along for this leg of the trip. Doug McCorkindale.

Biagi: And their titles are?

Shen: John Curley at the time was CEO of Gannett. Doug McCorkindale was head of financial operations, basically second in command. Al Neuharth was chairman. Doug McCorkindale was there with his two daughters, for example. The publisher in Guam was with us for a while.

Biagi: I see. You kind of picked people up. [Laughter.]

Shen: [Laughter.] Yes. It was actually an enormous amount of fun, even though it was hectic.

Anyway, I knew at this time that I wanted to leave Gannett (the Honolulu location, that is), but I wasn't sure of the timetable. I gave it about a year. This time I was not pregnant yet.

Biagi: What year is this now?

Shen: Since I left in '89, this must have been late '87. It was springtime. It might even have been spring of '88. I remember it was right after the ANPA [American Newspaper Publishers Association] convention that was held in Honolulu that year, because it was very dramatic, actually. ANPA ended. That day, that Aloha Airlines plane blew apart in mid-air. That was the day we took off. So the morning was spent rather hectically on the biggest news story to break in Hawaii in years. In fact, I remember running to the plane, clutching armloads of newspapers. I also remember Al Neuharth, who, after all, is a real newsie at heart, and was at one point editor of the Detroit Free Press, he'd been editor in many, many different places, basically saying that our Star-Bulletin headlines was so much better than the USA Today headline. I don't remember USA Today's headline, but our headline was "Miracle Over Maui," which is a perfect, positive Al Neuharth headline. Anyway, so we took off.

John Curley was standing by himself by the rail on the boat. I said, "This is the time to tell him that in about a year I think I'm going to leave." I had told John Quinn, actually, just after some big gathering and dinner in Beijing. [Laughter.] I had to corner these people. It was hard on this trip, so it was done during these odd moments. I decided to spring this on him. He sort of gulped and said, "Well, at least we have a year."

So the year sort of droned on. I became pregnant. I started to set a timetable by the pregnancy. I actually worked until two weeks before the baby was due. I felt fine. I was very sick the first few months, but I went to work anyway and just felt sick. I managed to get through it. Then the last few months I felt great and my mobility was never hampered.

So when I knew that San Francisco was where my husband was definitely going to be, I wrote a letter confirming all this to basically various VPs at Gannett. The chutzpah of it now

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even takes my breath away. I basically told them that I really needed to be back on the mainland for these personal reasons, which they knew about, and it was going to have to be San Francisco. I told them, "By San Francisco, I don't mean Stockton and I don't mean Salinas."

Biagi: Which is where Gannett has papers.

Shen: So basically that was it. So I basically told them that there was only one paper that really was a choice, and, in fact, it was Marin. So they finally called me back and said, "Yes, we can find a spot for you in Marin, at least for a while, not indefinitely." I went on maternity leave. I told them I was going to take four months, and two months into it, I moved to San Francisco, and at the end of the four months, I basically started work here at the IJ [Independent Journal].

Biagi: Was your job associate publisher when you came here?

Shen: Yes.

Biagi: So it has always been the same the whole time you've been here.

Shen: Yes.

Biagi: I want to ask you a little bit about Gannett's promotions policy and their whole approach to hiring and looking at and actively seeking minority participation in the company. What's your perception of it? Has it worked effectively?

Shen: It depends on what you're comparing it to. Has it worked? It's worked better than it has in other newspapers in other newspaper chains. Has it worked compared to how fast the United States is changing? No. The industry hasn't changed half as fast as the United States is changing. The industry is still basically white and it's still basically male, especially as you go higher and higher up. Gannett does have more women publishers. It does have more minorities working for it. You can call it a majority, actually, now, especially in places like USA Today. It's done a good job of getting minorities to newspapers that are basically in places where there are not a lot of minorities in the general community.

Certainly if you were to look at the people at the top levels of Gannett, they're all white and most of them are male. The only female is Madelyn Jennings, and she's head of personnel, which has traditionally often been a female. The head of news operations is male. The head of USA Today, who also has a say in other operations, is a white male. Head of finance is a white male. Head of production. Head of advertising is a white female,* and one of the most successful heads of advertising was Roz Black, who is now married to the publisher in Boise and doesn't work for Gannett anymore. She was one of the best. That might be a little unusual, although there are a lot of saleswomen in advertising, so it's probably not so surprising. And that's really about it. There are some Gannett vice presidents who are female. Sue Clark-Jackson, the head of Gannett West, for example, is a female. But that's really about it.

I'm really not familiar enough with Knight-Ridder or some of the other chains, except certainly the people I meet there tend to be white males. Jennie Buckner, of course, is head of editorial at Knight-Ridder, and she is a white female. She's interesting. She's based in Miami now.

______________________ * It's now a white male. CS.

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But for years she was managing editor of the Mercury News here. She has an interesting story which I'm sure she can tell much better than I.

But Gannett, especially under Al Neuharth and John Quinn, was very, very aggressive about recruiting and promoting minorities and women. I've sensed a slackening off of that under John Curley, actually, partly because I think you have to have a truly personal commitment to it to make it work and also because of the recession, which has basically curtailed a lot of hiring and decreased the number of slots that are available to be promoted into.

Biagi: I know that ANPA [American Newspaper Publishers Association] always reports the figures and the studies that are done.

Shen: So does ASNE [American Society of Newspaper Editors]. The figures in the newsrooms, I think ASNE's figures are between 6 and 8 percent in newsrooms.

Biagi: In minority hiring.

Shen: Yes.

Biagi: That's not much different from where it was ten, twenty years ago.

Shen: No. The fact that it's gotten slightly better in the last year is a big step forward. I can't remember what their goal is, but supposedly by the year 2000, it's supposed to reflect the population. Well, there's no way. There's no way you could get to that. You'd basically have to suddenly start hiring at a rate nobody could support, and it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen.

Biagi: Why would you say that that's important in a newspaper that there be diversity in the newsroom, in management, that it reflect the population?

Shen: Because newspapers, at least as they're conceived now, the print part, the stuff that we see every day, are moving into a lot of niche products, but the basic newspaper is a mass medium. The farther out of touch it becomes, the less likely it is to be a success. Certainly it would be strange to have a mostly white staff, but this exists. You have a mostly white newsroom staff at the Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, even when you include the suburbs, is a city that truly has every minority group in a significant measure. The city of San Francisco is 45 percent Asian. I can tell you right now that the staff of the Examiner and the Chronicle are nowhere near 45 percent Asian. Granted the Chronicle, in particular, is a paper for Northern California, but still it is the San Francisco Chronicle.

So you can see that in those papers where presumably a fair number of people would want to work and salaries are fairly generous, they haven't done it, for whatever reason. I have a lot more sympathy for the smaller papers in Montana and Wyoming, trying to get somebody to come up there for a salary of $19,000 to a place where there are no sushi bars. I sympathize with that. But for large metros that have people beating down their doors, it's a little more lamentable. It will take a while. I think it will change, but the change will be glacial and it will come so late that by then the newspaper will be one part of the communications business and a newspaper will be putting out all kinds of niche products, magazines, overruns that it markets separately, and will be making much more money off of alternate delivery. The newspaper will be one segment of a fairly diversified business.

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Biagi: But why is it important that a newsroom be diverse?

Shen: Because otherwise I don't know how you'd get content into the paper that truly reflects a community or that is fair to a community or that is even accurate. That came out in the Los Angeles riot coverage, which will be dissected between now and doomsday, I'm sure, until the next riot, until the verdict comes in again, since we're going to go through the trial again, with people basically trying to put the best face on it, but, in effect, accusing each other of all kinds of things, basically sending out minority reporters, but having white editors do all the rewrites, of corralling minorities, no matter where they were or what they were doing, to suddenly send them into this maelstrom, which they would never have done under any other circumstances and then have their copy rewritten, or simply not having any kind of resources on hand, totally basically unprepared to cover the major story in the country for those particular days, and a major part of the city of Los Angeles that apparently had been totally under-covered in previous years, caught short because of a workforce and a mentality that were unprepared to deal with a city that had changed long before. And there you are. In a nutshell, in the end what you will have is the nightmare of every newspaper, which is that it's totally inaccurate and its stories don't reflect—reflect only one viewpoint. That's been true in the past, obviously, and newspapers often have only reflected one viewpoint, but recently we've decided that's terribly unfair. So there you are.

There's another answer to this, and that is you'd be surprised how boring newsrooms can be if they're not diverse. There is a fun factor, and there is a creativity factor involved, which is that basically if you've ever been in a newsroom that had a lot of different viewpoints, even though there can be a lot of tension, it's just also a lot more fun. It really is. Out of that mix of tension and creativity and different viewpoints meshing can come some wonderful things. Actually, the danger is that people in newsrooms these days, whether they're minority or not, come from the same middle-class backgrounds. Therefore, your black reporter in many ways is not so different from your Hispanic reporter or your Asian reporter, because they basically grew up in the suburbs. You know what I mean? So although they have different ethnic sensibilities, there is one way in which they have a lot in common and nothing in common with a large part of their readership. So I think there's a lack of income diversity that needs to be dealt with as much as a lack of ethnic and racial diversity.

Biagi: Your being in the job you have is unusual. What made you be interested in this kind of a job? Was it all happenstance and circumstance? Because almost in describing it, it's almost like this happened and then this happened and, "I just took this job and then this next job." Why do you think you're here at this particular job at this particular time?

Shen: Because certain opportunities opened at certain times of my life when I was ready to grab them, I think, and that's luck. There's no other word for that besides luck. Because I could have chosen at many given moments to stay where I was, at least for a longer time, and I didn't. I mentioned that I have a fairly low threshold of boredom, and that's partly the reason, and coupled with that, I'm not willing to be totally nomadic. Some journalists are. If you look at their résumés, you're astounded. "Gee, you haven't lived anywhere more than two years, and you're fifty-six!" [Laughter.] It's like that. I'm not willing to do that. I think fewer and fewer people are, whether they're male or female.

I think journalism is going to have a problem, actually, because I think younger people are not willing to be as nomadic, and I doubt if minorities in general are as willing to be as nomadic, because it's much harder. So I wonder about an industry that depends on shifting people around every two years. I think it's got to change or it will simply find that it doesn't get the best people.

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Biagi: Why newspapers, though? You could still be in book publishing.

Shen: Yes. That has to do with pace, actually, and now at this stage in my life, I actually think magazines are probably a good compromise. I was in book publishing. It was my first job, and I found the pace, not the day-to-day pace, it was certainly hectic enough, but when you're twenty-three or twenty-four, "Two years before I see this finished product?" It just seems forever! So I wanted a faster pace. Newspapers, you know, you get a new chance every single day for better or worse, and I like that. Now that I'm a little older, I think probably weekly is great and monthly is great. Daily is maybe too many chances. [Laughter.] I don't know if you need to have a daily. It's so relentless. But largely for the pace, not so much of the day itself, but for the pace of being able to start over and do it again and see the product and refine it, that's kind of nice.

Biagi: Since you've been here, that's been since fall of '89, do you feel you've made a difference, that your being here has made a difference in the newspaper?

Shen: I don't know. As associate publisher, you can't put your finger on it and say, "I did this and I did that." If I were to take an optimistic view, I would say I'm probably slightly more of a gadfly for new products and different ways to do things, perhaps.

Biagi: Such as?

Shen: I and other people—I'm certainly not alone in this—have been pushing for niche products that basically go beyond our current audience and that are very attuned to the interests that people have in their everyday lives. That will come to pass. Our total market coverage product, for example—there are two ways which we are revamping—is probably basically going to become an entertainment vehicle from those things.

We are starting in March a Friday "Living for the Weekend" tabloid. That right now is simply going to enlarge the "Lifestyle" section on Friday, but it's going to become a stand-alone tab. We're also moving it to Thursdays. After all, since we're an afternoon paper, "Living for the Weekend," and you get it at five on Friday in California is a little late. So people will get it Thursday and be able to count Friday, Saturday, and Sunday as their weekend. The Wilmington paper has a wonderful tab on the same idea, and it's a morning paper, so it comes out Friday morning. They call it "55 Hours." [Laughter.] You can probably count down from 6 p.m. on Friday to midnight on Sunday. I think that's a great idea. That concept I like a lot. Anyway, that's one area.

Biagi: So that's the kind of niche product you're talking about?

Shen: Yes, although we've done other things. They haven't costed out on a real bottom-line basis. I think we'll come back to them, do the cost a different way, take another look. One of them might be a health magazine, sort of geared not to seniors and not to youngsters, but the upper end of the baby boom, probably exactly where I am, probably people in their forties, fifties, early sixties, who, frankly, are these days extremely healthy, extremely fit, extremely active, but they're not twenty-five, and they're certainly far from retired. We had been talking last year about a health and fitness niche product, not called that, geared toward them and toward the advertisers, of course, who would want that audience. I think eventually we'll come back to that. We will go into alternate delivery slowly but eventually.

Biagi: Meaning?

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Shen: We have a wonderful distribution system. We use it to deliver one thing: the newspaper. It's a daily distribution system and it is extremely good, especially here. We get approximately one and a half complaints per thousand. That's an astonishingly low complaint rate. Yet we marshal all of these resources and deliver, as I said, one thing. There are lots of other things we could be [delivering]. Milk, I suppose, would be the far end. But we can be delivering, and we will be starting to, advertising inserts for other people, we can be delivering phone books, we can be delivering magazines. All of these can piggyback. Not every day, but different products each day can piggyback with the newspaper and that would just be a source of revenue, most of which would be profit, because we're already sending the people out. All our added expense will be storing the materials, labeling, more sorting. But the big expense, frankly, is sending out those people in their trucks and cars, and we've already paid for that. You pay them extra for each piece, but it's still a considerable source of profit if you do it right and you have enough ancillary pieces.

Biagi: All of this in the interest of making a 40,000-circulation newspaper much more profitable.

Shen: Much more profitable.

Biagi: And survivable.

Shen: Yes. I'm sure Green Bay [Wisconsin] doesn't have this problem. We have a paper in Green Bay, and our classified manager has just been promoted to ad manager there. I was talking with her about it. Green Bay basically has one paper with some shoppers and weeklies. Phone books and cable TV are probably its biggest competitors. Direct mail is not that aggressive there. It is a very stable community. People stay there all their lives. There is a real sense of community. A very nice house costs $90,000.

You compare this to Marin, which has a lot of competition from every form of communication possible, is basically a suburb of a much larger city, has a much more transient population, has an extremely high cost of living and a high cost of doing business. Given the population base, which is small, and the impossibility of growing as a newspaper into the ocean, south to San Francisco or running into the [Santa Rosa] Press-Democrat to the north, we're really bounded. We basically have to find ways to increase revenue in a population that's not growing, where the retail base is not growing, because Marinites don't want more business in Marin.

Biagi: Is any of the retail leaving?

Shen: Yes. Some of it is and has. Number one, Marin doesn't have that many buildable sites. Eighty-two percent of Marin is open space. There is active hostility on the parts of the voters and the city councils. They vote against any kind of growth. They're just anti-growth, period, whether it be a new jail, whether it be improved roads. They have defeated rail transit because of that. They defeated a water bond measure, even though we were starved for water last year. There's another one on the ballot, not as aggressive, which may pass this November. The environmental movement is very, very strong here.

So businesses have left and have threatened to leave because they can't expand. If they need a bigger facility, there is no facility. They consider the board of supervisors not that helpful. They certainly don't consider the community as that helpful. Lucasfilm, for example, which bought a lot of acres of ranchland in the middle of Marin, and has touted itself as basically saving all this land from development, wants to expand. It wants to build two more big office buildings so it can take all the workers it has in office buildings in San Rafael and consolidate

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them in one place. Well, the neighbors are up in arms over this. They just don't want this at all, because they're afraid of increased traffic along Lucas Valley Road, and a number of other concerns. There's one example. So that's been stalled for a long, long time.

Autodesk, which is a software manufacturer, very successful, again it wants to consolidate and wants to consolidate into a bigger facility, has had all kinds of problems, wanted to go into Hamilton Field, and that proposal is dead now, apparently. Indeed, if they can't find suitable quarters, they'll move. Fireman's Fund bought a large tract of land in north Novato. It actually has three facilities in Marin. It has a contract with the city of Novato signed and sealed over ten years ago to build two more buildings on that site. It's acres and acres. When it came up and they said, "Well, it's time. We want the new buildings now. We're ready to start building," the Novato City Council said, "Well, let's take another look at that. Why don't you put this in and that in? Maybe not." And finally Fireman's Fund got the right to continue simply because Novato's city attorney said, "If we break this contract, we are going to be sued. It's going to cost us a lot of money." And that was the only reason the city council backed down.

Biagi: So what does that mean for a newspaper in the middle of this area?

Shen: It means that to get new advertising and new readers is like digging ditches. It means you have to concentrate on the small- to medium-sized advertiser, Mom and Pops, small businesses under ten people, under twenty people, and that takes a lot more work, obviously, than dealing with Macy's, who aren't doing very well, anyway. In a way it's lucky, because we don't have the big pages to lose as much as the Chronicle does. So in order to basically maintain profitability in the long haul, we basically have to do other things and use our presses, use our delivery service, use all the things we do well, we have to bend to the service of things in addition to the newspaper.

Biagi: Is there any chance that the IJ wouldn't be here in thirty years?

Shen: Hard to say in thirty. It's definitely going to be here in fifteen. I would even say twenty. Thirty? I'm not sure what I'd say about the newspaper industry in thirty years, let alone the IJ.

Biagi: There are predictions of a paperless culture that come up every twenty years, that we're going to have a paperless culture. Do you think we're going to give up newspapers altogether?

Shen: No, I don't think they'll give up newspapers, but I think newspapers will become one of many sources of information. If you want to get information, you'll probably have four or five different ways to get it, and you can choose the way you want to get it. I certainly think newspapers as the dominant medium of imparting information, those are gone. Those are definitely gone.

When I was visiting my mother in Boston a year ago, she doesn't subscribe to the Boston Globe, even though she likes to read it. Get this. She lives in a condominium complex and she has a separate entrance, which is the reason she bought that condominium. He won't deliver it to her separate entrance. He'll only deliver it to the main entrance. She doesn't want to walk around to the main entrance to pick up the paper, so she refuses to subscribe. This is a case where a newspaper is slitting its own throat. I should write them a letter and say, "Listen. I have a suggestion for you."

Anyway, so I'm desperate to find out what the weather is, because I have my two-year-old and I don't know whether to put him in a jacket or sweater or whatever. I say, "I have to go down

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and get the paper." She said, "No. Just click on the Weather Channel." "It's not going to have the current—" "Yes, it is. It updates every half an hour." And she's right. She turned on the cable Weather Channel and it gives you the weather. I thought to myself, "Hmm." It's obviously much more convenient. Who doesn't have a TV? Rain, snow, or sleet, you can turn on the TV. It's updated. I'm not getting the weather forecast that somebody thought was right twelve hours ago. It was obviously a much superior way to get that information. Well, if you're twenty years old, you'd have to be some kind of fool to open your newspaper for the weather. My mother is eighty, and she doesn't!

Biagi: She figured it out. [Laughter.]

Shen: She figured it out. So there you have it.

Biagi: So what kinds of information is the newspaper going to be delivering?

Shen: It will be delivering analysis, because for the people who want it—and it will be a niche audience, let's face it—you want analysis. You want some way to put the events in context. For years you've known the plane crashed long before you get the newspaper. It's been on the radio, it's been on CNN. During Tiananmen Square, who was glued to the newspaper? [Laughter.] People were glued to their TV sets.* Or the Gulf War, were people glued to their newspapers? No, they were glued to CNN, but newspaper sales went up enormously because people basically wanted context. They wanted the follow-up. They wanted the graphic that showed them where the Patriot missiles were hitting the Scuds. They wanted that. That's a wonderful case, actually, where all the media support each other. You wouldn't want to get rid of any of them, would you? You wouldn't want to face the Persian Gulf War with only TV or only newspapers or only radio. You want them all if you're at all interested.

So, yes, I think that you'll always need newspapers, but they'll just be one of many. We gave up breaking news long ago. We still like to kid ourselves. I don't know who we think we're scooping. [Laughter.] Who are we scooping? Nobody.

Biagi: Certainly here it would be difficult, because you're a small coverage area. It would be difficult.

Shen: But our strength—and we get this from phone-ins—is that of local news. Somewhere, luckily for us, there is still a niche between the big metro and its regional coverage, it will cover the big Marin story, but nothing in between, and the weeklies, which are covering every little event in their ten-square-mile area, there is a niche for countywide news. There is a niche for more professional reporting of local news than the weeklies can give you and for daily reporting and for a newspaper that looks as good as we do. Not many suburban newspapers have the physical facility that we have. We're very lucky, because we print USA Today. It also means we have a good enough press to use for commercial printing, that we can make more money. So there you are.

I am quite optimistic about the future of newspapers, but not as vehicles with 25 percent profit margins by themselves or as the dominant means of information dissemination.

______________________ * April 19, 1989. Tens of thousands of Chinese students took over Beijing's central square in a rally for democracy.

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Biagi: We'll stop now and we'll resume tomorrow.

Shen: Great.