It has become the post-September 11 cliché to say that the attacks on New York and Washington changed everything. But clichés have their kernels of truth. Journalists and industry-watchers say that the events are making newsroom managers more aware of the need for hard news. Coverage of foreign events, government agencies, and the like is suddenly in the forefront, and infotainment has receded, at least for now. But how permanent are the changes?
Through this series of windows, cjr takes a look at the various ways ten mid-sized and regional daily newspapers have been covering the crisis. Some have the resources to chase stories overseas. Others focus on the local impact, describing how the events affect their readers' lives. But each region, and each newspaper, experience the war on terrorism differently, and how they cover it reveals something about their respective cultures.
No matter whom we spoke to, one theme repeatedly emerged: September 11 re-energized journalists and re-instilled in many of them the sense that what they do matters. Whether that renewed sense of purpose translates into a long-term commitment to excellence remains to be seen. The ball is in the managers' court now.
MAXIMIZING THE WEB VERSION
The Seattle Times understands that you've got to play to your strengths. When terror hit and war broke out, the paper's resources were limited. There were no foreign correspondents on staff, so the paper relied on wire copy. But as the conflict came into focus, the Times editors saw an opportunity to provide context. And they saw their Web site as one important way to do that. "We aren't going to be the ones who are always on the scene," says editor Mike Fancher. "But we can do something that connects locally with our readers."
A little more than a week after the attacks, the editors held the first of a series of meetings to design a package that would deal with the hydra-headed stories that sprang up. They had done stories on Seattle-Tacoma airport's security and the effects of attacks on Muslims and Arab-Americans in the area, but they felt the events needed more than simply a day-by-day recounting of the previous day's developments. Culture, religion, history, local reactions, changes in the country's views of itself and the world -- these all needed to be dealt with in a more comprehensive fashion. "We were going through titles like mad: 'Terror in America,' 'America at War,'" says Joy Jernigan, a breaking-news producer for SeattleTimes.com. The meetings resulted in an October 15 twelve-page special print section titled "Understanding the Conflict," and an accompanying, enriched Web version (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/nation-world/crisis/).
"What ran in the newspaper special section was very limited compared to what we had on the Web," Jernigan says. And the section is periodically expanded. "It's a living project," she says. Server space is much less expensive than newsprint, and the designers and producers at SeattleTimes.com took advantage of that with interactive multimedia features, photos, and links. There's a section on U.S. foreign policy, focusing on the role that past American actions might have played in shaping the anti-American anger at the heart of much of the conflict. There's a section on the military, where you can click through to a feature on Washington state's role in national defense, with interactive maps that let readers zoom in on the attributes of local shipyards and military facilities. There are interactive maps of all of the countries involved in the conflict, from Iran to the Central Asian Republics, with highlights of their respective histories. There are features about the cultural role of turbans and veils, explaining the significance of the various types of head dressings and how to tell them apart. There are RealPlayer streaming videos of key events, and a storehouse of graphics from the pages of the newspaper. There's also a discussion guide to help parents and teachers explain the events to children, and a list of books and Web sites for readers looking to delve further into the issues. "Understanding the Conflict"'s tone is somber. There's no jingoistic "us versus them" aspect to the features. They are presented even-handedly, and serve as a quiet refutation of the notion that America need not examine itself in the wake of the attacks.
SeattleTimes.com has nine editors and producers located in the newsroom. Fancher says that the newspaper approached the Web version with the same dedication that the print version received. "The producers who are responsible for local news and nation/world news sit across the aisle from the news desk and the metro desk," says Stanley Farrar, the managing editor for SeattleTimes.com. "They're really very tightly integrated into the newsroom operation."
Almost all newspapers put together special sections on their Web sites that display material collected for the print version, but The Seattle Times appears to understand the possibilities of the Web better than most. It uses many multimedia features and often gathers all the larger stories -- such as those arising from the Microsoft antitrust trial, or a recent five-part investigative series about two deaths related to drug trials at a nearby cancer research facility -- into special Web sections that have added sidebars, graphics, and videos.
"The limitations of print are the daily newshole and the discontinuity of a long story that has many, many pieces," Farrar says in explaining the strengths of a Web site in a newsroom where print is still king. But The Seattle Times, by paying the requisite attention to the needs of its Web site staff, works around both the limitations of print and the paper's own limited resources. -- John Giuffo
FIGHTING BACKLASH
Since September 11, the San Jose Mercury News, like every other paper in the country, has been full of stories about the war in Afghanistan. But the Mercury News has also covered a second front, right in its own backyard.
The paper circulates in one of the more ethnically diverse areas in the country. By some measures, it is also a fairly well-integrated area. Chinese and Indo-American immigrants, for example, direct about 25 percent of Silicon Valley's high-tech companies. But the terror attacks and the ensuing war exposed how fragile this integration is.
In the wake of the attacks, a Yemeni immigrant in San Jose was shot and killed, the suspected victim of a hate crime; a mother of two from Iraq awoke to find the hallway in her Daly City apartment smeared with feces; the local Sikh community complains of harassment; some Middle Eastern immigrants say they are afraid to leave their homes; and 66 percent of those responding to a Mercury News poll said they favored heightened surveillance of Middle Eastern immigrants.
Thanks to the foundation laid by its Race & Demographics team, which was formed in the mid-1990s, the Mercury News was prepared to cover this backlash. "The idea was to continue covering the increasing diversity of the Bay Area," says Ben Stocking, who has edited the team since 2000. "What's different now is the people affected by backlash." Before September 11, the team consisted of Stocking and four reporters. Now reporters and editors throughout the paper pitch ideas and contribute stories. Stocking says this increased coordination and cross-pollination among the various parts of the paper has produced some noteworthy pieces.
For example, members of the R&D squad worked with reporters from a suburban bureau and enterprise team to write backlash hits home, a story about how some Bay Area residents, scared of becoming hate crime victims, have stopped wearing traditional clothing, such as veils and turbans. The paper's religion writer teamed up with an R&D reporter for a piece about young Muslims struggling to define their identity and religion in secular America.
The Mercury News complemented the team's coverage on its editorial page. "People are shouting at women who wear head scarves, frightening some into staying home," the editors wrote. "Children are being harassed; parents are afraid to let them walk to school." The editorial page also urged readers to express their support for those who feel maligned and to challenge those who stereotype. "International terrorists would love to see us turn against ourselves," the editors wrote. "Let's deny them that victory." -- Joshua Lipton
GIVING PEACE A CHANCE
Many of the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 the morning of September 11 were returning home to the San Francisco Bay area. So when editors at the San Francisco Chronicle learned that terrorists had crashed the airplane into the Pennsylvania countryside, they dispatched a reporter and photographer to the scene. The paper profiled the passengers, reported on their connections to northern California, and reconstructed the final minutes of the doomed flight.
The Bay Area's liberal credentials are legendary, however, and anger among the residents at the attacks was soon rivaled by frustration with the response of the United States government. The bombing campaign in Afghanistan sparked demonstrations in the San Francisco streets, and the Chronicle quickly found itself covering the most vocal anti-war movement in the country.
There were stories on a candlelight vigil in Lafayette, California, where people not only mourned the victims of September 11, but also worried about violent reprisals from the U.S. military; on a Berkeley city council resolution asking that the bombing in Afghanistan stop "as soon as possible"; on a 5,000-strong protest march in downtown San Francisco against the bombing campaign; and on a conscientious objector in the Air Force.
Columnist Stephanie Salter took up the cause of the protesters. "What we are doing in, above, and to Afghanistan is short-sighted, counterproductive, and immoral," she wrote on October 17. Salter received more than 1,500 e-mails from across the country, running about six to one in support of what she wrote.
The Chronicle's editorial page, though, is more hawkish than many of its readers. "We believe it will take military action -- a relentless but focused counterattack -- to wipe out the terrorist network that effectively declared war against us," a September 18 editorial argued. But the editors remain respectful of the dissenting views in their community. Barbara Lee, a Democratic congresswoman from Oakland, cast the only vote in the House against a resolution authorizing President Bush to use military force in Afghanistan. On the editorial page, the Chronicle took issue with Lee's decision, but supported her right to cast such a contentious vote: "To disagree with the government's approach at any given time as Lee did is not an act of betrayal. It's an affirmation of the democracy we're defending."
Managing editor Jerry Roberts says that covering all the anti-war rallies and protests means fewer resources and less time for other important stories. He says that the Chronicle did not, for instance, cover last fall's local elections with its usual care and investigative intensity.
But the tradeoff hasn't hurt sales. Since September 11, daily circulation has ballooned by about 10,000 copies. Bay Area readers seem to appreciate the Chronicle's coverage of the war, and of the peace movement that opposes it. -- J.L.
COMMITMENT PAYS OFF
Afew days after September 11, Tim McNulty, the Chicago Tribune's associate managing editor for foreign news, met in his office with two colleagues to plot the paper's war coverage. It was still early in the government's investigation, but all signs pointed to one part of the world. McNulty tacked up a National Geographic map of the Caspian region, and considered his options. He had many; the Tribune, with its staff of ten international correspondents, was ready.
Over the next few weeks, the paper sent Colin McMahon, its Moscow correspondent, to Uzbekistan. Mike Lev, based in Beijing, went to Pakistan. Liz Sly left London, also bound for Pakistan. Tom Hundley, the Rome correspondent, also hit Pakistan and was then in Iran for nearly two weeks. Paul Salopek, who won last year's Pulitzer for international reporting for his coverage of Africa, left South Africa and went to Saudi Arabia, where he tried to track down the hijackers' family members before the Saudi government "firmly suggested" that he leave. Then he went to Afghanistan, where, with photographer Pete Souza, he trekked over the Hindu Kush mountains in time to witness the liberation of Kabul.
"I've tried to keep up a rotation, depending on where they are," says McNulty, who says he wants to be careful not to burn out any of his foreign correspondents. So Uli Schmetzer, who is based in Tokyo, and Laurie Goering, who was covering Mexico and Central America from Mexico City, also went to Pakistan as part of the rotation. Patrice Jones, who is in Rio, is expected to head to the region soon.
But McNulty and other editors felt that the rotation left holes in some important areas, so they sent Stephen Franklin, who covers labor in Chicago but who has often reported overseas, to Tajikistan and then into Afghanistan (see page 32). Noreen Ahmed-Ullah, a metro reporter who speaks Urdu, was sent to the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Metro reporter Ernie Torriero went to Cairo to cover Arab reactions to the investigation and the war. Photographers Souza and John Lee landed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, respectively.
The U.S. government's investigation of the attacks also got extensive attention overseas. Investigative reporter John Crewdson went to Prague, Geneva, and Madrid as terror suspects were rounded up. Stephen Hedges left the Washington bureau for London to get the British angle. And Cam Simpson, from the metro desk, went to Germany and reported on the arrests and investigations there.
The Tribune is able to invest so much in the story, according to editors and others at the paper, because management recognizes the need for a strong international staff. "If you look at our newspaper over the last decade, we've had as many or more foreign stories on page one as local stories," says George De Lama, the deputy managing editor for news. So far, he says, "we have not had one person, not one time, even raise the issue of what it's been costing us to cover this."
It's uncertain to what extent the excesses of today will force the belt-tightening of tomorrow. "My information is that yeah, somewhere down the line, we have to pay for it," says Don Wycliff, the public editor, the Tribune's version of an ombudsman.
But the Tribune newsroom doesn't seem too worried. Plans to reopen a bureau in Delhi remain on track. "These events have underscored a point I suspect the editors and a lot of other people here on the news side have been making, which is that foreign news is as important as local news," Wycliff says.
The result is foreign wartime coverage that Chicago Reader media columnist Michael Miner calls "impressively comprehensive." -- J.G.
POOLING GLOBAL EFFORTS
On September 3, local stories -- one on a proposed lakefront development in Branson, Missouri, and another on a plan to overhaul I-70 -- anchored the front-page of The Kansas City Star. International news filled just four pages inside the paper, a compilation of wire-service articles from the AP, Knight Ridder, and The New York Times.
But when the journalistic landscape shifted on September 11, it was the ability of Knight Ridder to go global that proved so helpful to the Star. On a few big stories in the past, Knight Ridder coordinated the efforts of its various papers. The idea is to avoid duplication of effort, and also to share the wealth, so that the chain's smaller papers get access to international and national coverage they would not get otherwise.
For this new war on terrorism, the idea of a chainwide team has been extended. Coverage is channeled through Knight Ridder's Washington, D.C., bureau where editors and reporters from the Star, The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the San Jose Mercury News were drafted to work together on stories, including one on aviation safety (see Laurels, page 19).
Knight Ridder also dispatched eight reporters and three photographers -- drawn from different papers -- to Central Asia to supplement the chain's three full-time foreign correspondents, normally based in Jerusalem, Berlin, and London. Copy and photos are wired to the D.C. bureau, where stories are edited and packaged for Knight Ridder papers all over the country.
So the Star gets breaking national news on the attack and investigation, sometimes tailored to the interests of Missouri readers, without having to send its own reporters to New York, Florida, and elsewhere. "There are editors in D.C. who remember that a story has a good Kansas City connection so they'll write it that way or tell us about it," says Darryl Levings, the Star's assistant managing editor for national news.
A bigger deal at the Star, though, is that two of its reporters were among the eight that Knight Ridder sent to Central Asia. Scott Canon got to Kandahar and Malcolm Garcia has been covering news from Kabul. Garcia was sent, in part, because he had recently reported from Sierra Leone, and so he had his requisite medical shots as well as some seasoning. The Star has no foreign correspondents of its own, says Levings, so the Knight Ridder system is a cost-effective way for reporters to get experience abroad.
Back in Kansas City, Star editors and reporters found ways to complement the broadened reach of their coverage. They wrote about Chiefs' fans cheering the New York Giants when they took the field at Arrowhead Stadium. They chronicled the plight of Folu Oladipo, a young Kenyan immigrant living in Fayette, Missouri, who was jailed as part of the federal roundup in the wake of the attacks. And when anthrax spores turned up in a Kansas City post office, the Star ran a detailed report on the decontamination process.
Matt Stearns, who wrote the September 3 piece on the lakefront development, traveled to New York after the attack. Stearns and another reporter followed a Missouri search and rescue team as they assisted authorities at the World Trade Center. He accompanied a young woman, a Kansas City native, as she returned to the apartment downtown from which she had been evacuated on September 11.
When Stearns returned to the Star, he saw how his paper had adjusted its priorities while he was away. He recently wrote a story about a depressed town in southwestern Missouri lobbying for a casino. "In another time," he says, "that would have had a shot at the front page." --J.L.
WEATHERING THE CRITICS
Three days after three suicide bombers killed twenty-five Israelis and injured almost two hundred more, President George W. Bush went after a Texas-based Islamic charity suspected of funding the group that claimed responsibility for the bombings. "Hamas has obtained much of the money that it pays for murder abroad right here in the United States," Bush said from the White House's Rose Garden on December 4. "Money originally raised by the Holy Land Foundation." He announced that the administration had seized the assets of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. The decision capped an eight-year investigation of the group by the FBI, which charged that Holy Land money went to compensate the families of suicide bombers.
The announcement was also a vindication of sorts for The Dallas Morning News, which had published a controversial series of stories since 1996 about the investigation into the country's largest Muslim charity.
The Holy Land Foundation first came to the Morning News's attention five years ago when Israel outlawed it and seized all its local assets, claiming that it funneled money to Hamas. The editors sent Steve McGonigle, a twenty-one-year veteran, to nearby Richardson to look into the group.
McGonigle found some troubling connections between Holy Land and Hamas, and over the next few years, he continued to report on the charity as the government examined and reexamined its activities. He reported that the FBI and the Treasury Department had been investigating the foundation almost since the ban by Israel, and that the government, having been frustrated by a lack of progress against the group, deported four immigrant employees who were said to have lied to obtain special work visas. His stories also raised questions about the connections of Mousa Abu Marzook, the political leader of Hamas, to Holy Land. In early 2001, the Morning News ran a few stories about an Internet company that was located across the street from Holy Land and whose officers had very close business and familial connections to the charity. The FBI suspected it of illegally shipping computer technology to Libya and Syria.
Local Muslim groups were angered by McGonigle's series and what they called the paper's "biased coverage" of Holy Land. "Dallas Morning News is a mouthpiece for Israel," read the banners at an April 1996 protest by a group that called itself Muslims Against Defamation. "When they first started, there would be three or four hundred people out there carrying signs that were very personal about one of the reporters," says Pam Maples, the editor who worked with McGonigle on the later Holy Land stories. Some protest supporters created a Web site, DallasNotNews.com, to launch criticisms of the newspaper. It included photos of McGonigle that labeled him "Public Enemy Number One," she says. The first round of protests died down after less than a year, but they flared up again in 2000, when McGonigle followed up with more stories on Holy Land. The local chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations joined in organizing the second round of protests. In April 2000, Holy Land sued the paper for defamation, but dropped the suit after the December seizure. Representatives from the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Holy Land did not respond to requests for comment, but have said in the past that the foundation aids the families of Palestinians jailed, killed, or deported by Israel but does not fund Hamas or terrorist activities.
The editors say they remained receptive to protesters' claims, and wanted to reassure local Muslims that they were investigating a group, not a religion. "The newspaper has had a series of meetings with a broad base of Muslims in this area," Maples says. But through it all, The Dallas Morning News remained confident of the accuracy of McGonigle's reporting, she says.
Even one of the Morning News's usual critics praised the stories. "By and large, I'd say that these are good, solid reports," says Eric Celeste, an editor who writes a media column called "Filler" for the Dallas Observer, a free weekly paper. "They've really been out in front in showing how these groups are funded." -- J.G.
HAVE BEARD, WILL TRAVEL
When metro reporter Mark Bixler got the internal memo that asked for volunteers for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's new international "Go Team," he jumped at the chance to fly around the world to report a story at a moment's notice, and began to make preparations. Passport in order? Check. Up to date on immunizations? Check. Break news to -- and ask for understanding from -- new girlfriend? Check. Grow beard? Check. He was set.
Bixler wasn't the only "Go Team" member with facial hair foresight -- editor Bill Steiden also stopped shaving. Steiden and Bixler don't think growing a beard will fool anyone, but friends and colleagues who had been to the region told them beards made fitting in a bit easier.
But Bixler's eagerness to change jobs, meanwhile, mirrors the Journal-Constitution's willingness to change its structure to meet the demands of the Big Story. A week after the attacks on New York and Washington, senior editors met and reorganized the newsroom staff. They formed a new "Crisis Team," composed of three smaller teams, each focused on one aspect of the conflict. Keith Graham, who was the world editor, steers the general terrorism coverage. Bill Sanders, who was a metro editor, manages the reporting on homeland defense and the military. Michele Foust left her assignment as aviation editor to oversee economic coverage. And Scott Thurston came from the business desk to direct the aviation-related coverage. The Crisis Team also runs two "Go Teams" -- one domestic, one international. These are groups of reporters who are ready to fly off and cover big developments as they spring up.
The shifts came on the heels of another reorganization last summer, when the then-new managing editor Julia Wallace cut the number of editors, re-thought some beats, and reassigned 20 percent of the staff to new or newly configured positions. "We needed to: number one, build expertise, number two, devote resources to it, number three, coordinate it," Wallace says. "We understood that we have a different landscape that we have to cover. We made those changes not knowing how long we'd have to make them for." She credits the reorganization with allowing the Journal-Constitution to get more in-depth stories about the conflict than it might otherwise have been able to get. For example, Wallace says that the new structure allowed them to more aggressively cover the Centers for Disease Control, and to supply the Cox chain with an important aspect of their national coverage.
The Journal-Constitution has no full-time foreign correspondents (it uses foreign stories reported by Cox correspondents), but five reporters were dispatched on a staggered basis to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bixler went to Egypt to report on a joint Egyptian-American military exercise and to assess the Egyptian take on the war. When, on November 12, American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in the Rockaways, in New York City, members of the domestic "Go Team" were soon on a plane to New York to report on the latest aviation disaster, which was first suspected to be linked to terrorism. Wallace says the speed and size of that mobilization would have been impossible before the reorganization.
At least some of the editors at the Journal-Constitution think that, while the current structure won't remain in place indefinitely, the paper has experienced a re-awakening to the importance of hard news, both domestic and international. "My sense is that we're going to be interested in trying to maintain a level of explanatory journalism for quite a while," says Bert Roughton, Jr., who left his post as the growth and development editor to head the Crisis Team. "I think it's been an exercise in broadening everyone's horizons somewhat, and I think it will stick." -- J.G.
SPREADING THE HERALD THIN
It is both a blessing and a curse for The Miami Herald that the eyes of the country have been so frequently focused on South Florida lately. First, there was a little boy named Elián, then came last year's election debacle.
But those were just a prelude. In the days after the attacks, when it was learned that Mohammed Atta and his posse lived and learned how to fly airplanes in the region, the national media swarmed once again to the Herald's backyard. And when the first case of anthrax was discovered at a publishing company in Boca Raton, it was as if the story were playing out according to some absurd script. Here was an area of the country with more strange events than all the Maines of Stephen King's nightmares. "We've sort of been in news hell, if you will, since Thanksgiving of 1999," says Mark Seibel, the managing editor.
But the Herald's experience scrambling for leads on a national story in an environment cluttered with competitors served the paper well. Twenty reporters -- nearly the entire metro staff -- fanned out across South Florida in a mad zig-zag with competing journalists and federal investigators. "We have good sources, a good CAR team, and, with Florida's public records laws, we were able to get access to information that helped us find some of these guys," says David Wilson, the night assistant managing editor. For instance, it was the Herald that broke the story about Mohammed Atta's night of drunken belligerence at the Shuckums, a Polynesian-themed bar in Hollywood, in Broward County. "We knew Mohammed Atta's movements and were able to put much of that together. They were living in Hollywood and Daytona and going to school there," Seibel says.
When the Florida legislature recently debated an attempt to weaken Florida's famously strong sunshine laws in light of the way details about the terror investigation were reported on, "one of the things they cited," Wilson says, "was that, oft times, reporters were beating investigators to suspects."
Meeting the challenges of the big stories has come at a price that can't be measured on the balance sheet. Some other, less explosive, stories fell through the cracks. "During the pursuit of local angles on the hijackings, somewhere in there the county commission approved the purchase of touch-screen voting machines," Seibel says. "We missed it, and we only reported it a couple weeks late. That was last year's big story, and we couldn't keep track of it, so we do have a resource crunch."
In the last couple of years, Seibel says, ten city-desk reporters have lost their jobs because of Knight Ridder cutbacks. During that same period, Knight Ridder reported a profit margin of just over 20 percent in 2000, up from 13.6 percent in 1991.
But despite the cutbacks, staffers remain committed to doing the best job possible with the resources available. "This is a big-story place," Wilson says. "Whether it's a hurricane or a crooked mayoral election. It's one of the things that makes doing daily journalism in South Florida so challenging and so interesting. And we're used to it." -- J.G.
COVERING FOR MARYLAND
Since September 11, a platoon of Baltimore Sun reporters has roamed through conflict-weary Afghan villages and impoverished Pakistani towns, covering the war for their Maryland readers. Dan Fesperman interviewed Afghan exiles living in Pakistan, anxious about returning to their liberated homeland. John Murphy wrote about child labor among the Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Frank Langfitt profiled a Pakistani Islamic school that preaches militant fundamentalism. Will Englund penned a piece about his visit to Kunduz and an unexpected encounter with a Taliban soldier.
For most U.S. dailies with 300,000 circulation, such an effort would be extraordinary. But the Sun's commitment to global coverage has long been a central part of the paper's mission. While the media scaled back foreign coverage over the last twenty years -- citing high costs and a lack of reader interest -- the Sun maintained five full-time correspondents normally stationed in London, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Moscow, and Beijing. "The editors here know that covering city hall is important," says foreign editor Robert Ruby. "But they've known that covering the world is also something a paper should do."
Another reason the Sun devotes so much money and resources to international coverage is the competitive market in which it operates. "Most papers our size don't have to compete with The Washington Post," says Tony Barbieri, the Sun's managing editor. "We can't go to our readers with anything less than a complete newspaper. We have to be as good as we can possibly be."
Conventional wisdom has it that readers don't care about foreign news. Barbieri disagrees. A former foreign correspondent for the Sun, he believes that readers are interested in events overseas as long as those foreign people and places are covered in the same thoughtful, analytical, and creative way that journalists cover news at home. -- J.L.
BARON'S MOMENT
In choosing a successor to editor Matthew V. Storin, Boston Globe publisher Richard Gilman broke tradition and hired from outside the paper's own ranks. Gilman selected Marty Baron, the forty-six-year-old executive editor of The Miami Herald, who in his eighteen months at the helm in South Florida earned sterling reviews. Editor & Publisher had named him editor of the year in April 2001. Within six weeks of assuming his new post in Boston, those celebrated credentials were tested.
Baron responded to the chain of events that began on September 11 by mobilizing his new employees to report on every dimension of the story. Education editor Marilyn Garateix oversaw the writing of obituaries for the Boston residents killed on the hijacked airplanes. Neil Swidey and Marcella Bombardieri interviewed Abdullah Mohammed Binladin, Osama bin Laden's brother, who lives in Boston. The science and health reporters investigated the anthrax attacks. The Hong Kong and Canada correspondents went to Pakistan, while other reporters were sent to Europe.
"He imposed a sense of discipline, really making sure everything got covered," says David Beard, a suburban editor, of Baron. "It was a chance for him to direct."
Beard says that Globe readers were especially frustrated by the failed security at Logan International Airport, where hijackers boarded the two planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. The Globe responded with a series of articles that exposed the inept security at Logan: the low-wage, poorly trained security guards; the X-ray machines that routinely failed to detect weapons; the lack of professionalism among airport personnel. As a result of those reports, the executive director of the Massachusetts Port Authority resigned and the security chief at Logan was demoted.
Readers noticed this aggressive reporting, and daily circulation rose in October by 30,000 copies. More important, Baron's handling of the paper bolstered the relationship between the new editor and his staff. "I think one of the things you realize is how focused a leader he is," says Swidey, the Sunday metro editor. "What September 11 did was allow everyone to see how important it was to have someone with that focus, someone capable of harnessing all of the talent in the newsroom."
Baron felt some scrutiny when he first stepped into the Globe's newsroom. "I knew the staff was looking at me, seeing whether the Globe had selected the right editor," he says. The September 11 attack eased that transition. Reporters learned to trust Baron, and he says he learned to believe in them. "I think we've got a very capable staff that can react extremely well to a news story from many different angles." -- J.L.
