(This is linked out of the longer video of the whole ceremony. A story about the whole evening is here.)
Thanks to Katy Culver for nominating me.
Thanks to Paul Fanlund – editor and publisher of the Cap Times and Cap Times associate editor John Nichols - one of the best hires I ever made - for supporting my nomination.
Thanks to my best beloved, Ellen Reuter. She grew up with The Capital Times in her home, cheered me on, put up with the Barneveld tornado in 1984 blowing me out of our apartment for the last month of her pregnancy with son Michael. She thought she was marrying Clark Kent and she wound up being a minister’s wife.
And thanks to the WNA for adding me not only in a distinguished roster of Wisconsin journalists – including Elliott Maraniss, the man who hired me – and Dave Zweifel – who was my immediate boss throughout my career - but also including me with the class of 2021.
When I told friend I would be inducted into the Hall of Fame, he asked me If this meant my rookie card would increase in value.
Not sure a press card ever has a lot of value, but here it is – my rookie card from The Daily Cardinal in 1971/72. Fifty years ago, I never would have imagined I’d be standing here tonight joining some of Wisconsin’s stellar journalists in this place.
I had a sort of awkward beginning in my first year at the Cap Times. Yes, I got to cover Paul Soglin’s first election as mayor. But later in the year, in November, Elliott took me along to interview Gov. Pat Lucey on 10th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination.
Lucey had been very close to the Kennedy’s and he told some good stories. I dutifully recorded them on my tape recorder and then discovered, to my horror back in the newsroom, that the tape sounded like I had just interviewed Donald Duck. Fortunately, I also had taken notes and quickly constructed a story – with lots of paraphrases.
All of us have gone through lots of technological change over the past half-century. When I was in journalism school, I had a chance to learn how to use one of the first cathode ray tube word processors. That prepared me for stating to use them in 1975 at the Cap Times. (By the way, Katy, I also learned lots of other things in J-school as well.)
Twenty years later in 1995, I helped create this new thing called a web site for the Cap Times. I was so proud of that, this became my personalized license plate – TCT CYBR.
I am someone who is really comfortable doing things online, but I still love holding a newspaper in my hands.
One of the things I took great pleasure in at the Cap Times is going back to the press room and watching the press start up, increasing it pace like a space launch.
And then once, I got to have that classic moment of saying “stop the presses.” It was on March 30 1981 when President Reagan was shot. I was the city editor at the time and our final edition has just gone to press and the presses had just started rolling when the news came in. I asked Dave Zweifel, who was then managing editor, if we should stop the press. He said yes, so I picked up the phone, called the press room, and said, “Stop the presses, The president has just been shot.”
One other press room story – just a secret among us here. It was fun to go to the lower level of the press and ride on the skateboard-like carts for the rolls of newsprint.
As you well know, there is more to this business than technology and fun with the presses. We are in an era when we get labeled “Enemies of the people.” So sometimes I wear this tee-shirt with pride: “Journalism matters - #nottheenemy.”
Last month, the Nobel Peace Prize went to two journalists – one from Russia the other from the Philippines. This is the first time a journalist has been so honored since 1935 and only the third time in the history of the Nobel prizes.
One of those winners is the amazing Maria Ressa from the Philippines. She said this to TIME magazine in October when they interviewed her after the prize was announced:
“It is a battle for facts. And we’re at the front line, and it has gotten far more dangerous than it has been in the past. I think that also shows the role of the journalists in fixing this and fixing the mess that we’re in right now… Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. How can you have democracy without that? This is the fabric that holds us together.”
That’s one of the biggest challenges all of us in the world of journalism face right now. But it is not the only one.
You all know the economic perils in the news business. You know about the basic skepticism of many readers over the years, in part because of the way politicians sow the seeds of that distrust, but also in part because we can fall short of what we hope to be. One of the strengths of good journalism, though, is that when we fall short, we publicly correct our mistakes.
But let me offer a few thoughts on why I have hope in the future of journalism as it evolves to meet the challenges of a new era.
Let’s start with a documentary that was on PBS Wisconsin this past Monday. It was called simply Storm Lake and it was about the community newspaper in that northwest Iowa community. It received recognition when the editor, Art Cullen, won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017. While its editorials are powerful – something I surely appreciate – it also is a window into life in the community while, as Maria Ressa says, getting at the facts that lead to the truth that leads to trust and the undergirding of democracy.
We see that here tonight in the work over the decades of the Edgerton Reporter, where Harland and Helen Everson spent decades providing a voice and a watchdog for their community – a role their daughter Diane maintains so well to this day. And while I did not know Bill Hale and his work in southwest Wisconsin, he surely stands in that tradition as well.
There are newspapers all across the nation that are finding ways to meet the challenges of our times.
And one of those big challenges is dealing with the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of our nation and coming to terms with both the good and the bad of our past.
I am so glad to be in this class of honorees with J. Anthony Josey. You’ll hear more about him in a few minutes, but the fact that in 1916 – the year before The Capital Times was founded – he helped start Madison’s first black-run newspaper is so impressive. That he sustained it along with the one he started in Milwaukee for a quarter of a century is an amazing story.
I am proud that the early editions of the Cap Times recognized his important role in our community, that the Cap Times did not shy away from taking on the Ku Klux Klan here in the 1920s, and that it stood with the Civil Rights efforts of the 1950s and 1960s and that today it has put special emphasis on covering the diverse communities and hard issues of racial justice in Madison.
And I am glad that during my three decades at the Cap Times, I had a chance to continue that tradition of seeking racial justice in our community and, in fits and starts, trying to improve our coverage of that growing diversity in the Madison area.
But of course it was in fits and starts.
There was the time I was writing in the spring of 1981 about a local march responding to the murder of 20 Black children in Atlanta. I ended quoted someone I described as “Bowling Green, president of the Madison NAACP.”
When Bolling Smith called me the next day, he was not amused by my error – or by my ignorance of the leadership of the local black community. So then there was one of those public corrections of an error.
I learned not only about double checking names, but also about the need to spend more time in the Black community getting to know people.
And then on October 3, 1995, I learned how out of touch I was with some of the undercurrents of feeling among Black residents in our community and our nation. That was the day O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Like most white folks, I was shocked at the verdict.
But when the verdict was announced on the TV in our newsroom, one of our copy-editors, a stellar Black journalist named Linda Lockhart, stood up, raised her arms and cheered. I was stunned. And then I began to ask why our perceptions were so different.
It seems to me that is a vital characteristic of what journalism needs to do today – to seek out why people’s perspectives are so different. That does not mean ignoring facts or challenging deliberate attempts to mislead the public. But it does mean delving into the ways people’s views of the world are shaped and using the power we have to help provide places where in constructive ways, people can see across the barriers that separate us.
There are other signs of hope I see for our profession. I have had a chance to get to know some of the students working with the Center for Journalism Ethics and am continually impressed by the passion and dedication they bring to their work. And the Center for Journalism Ethics itself is helping journalists all across the nation grapple with some the tough dilemmas in our world today.
I am hearted by some of the new models for local journalism that emerged. There is the creativity of the Cap Times in adapting over the last decade by becoming primarily a digital news source and then bringing the community together in variety of ways to explore current issues.
There are newspapers in Little Rock, Arkansas and Chattanooga, Tenn. that are giving subscribers iPads – and training on how to use them – to replace the printed paper during the week. The Salt Lake City Tribune has switched to a non-profit status. The Philadelphia Inquirer, like the Cap Times, is owned by a foundation.
And speaking of the Inquirer, here’s another sign of hope for me. My daughter, Julia, just started working for them as their lead newsroom data analyst. Her husband, Justin Myers, is a data editor for the Associated Press. They are both on the leading edge of one of the ways journalism is changing by delving into how data can enhance stories and engage readers.
Given my dual status as journalist and preacher, I’d like to end with the recent words of one of the world’s current great spiritual leaders – Pope Francis.
Just last week, he was honoring two long-time journalists who had covered the Vatican across several decades. Now, like all public figures, Pope Francis had faced harsh news coverage at time. Would that others might have this attitude:
“I also thank you for what you tell us about what goes wrong in the Church, for helping us not to sweep it under the carpet, and for the voice you have given to the victims of abuse: thank you for this.”
But his words I’d like to leave you with are about what he called our mission as journalists to work “so that the evil in the world may be healed.” Our mission, he said, “is to explain the world, to make it less obscure, to make those who live in it less afraid of it and look at others with greater awareness, and also with more confidence.”
I am so honored and grateful to be part of a group this evening – and part of a roster of previous Hall of Famers – who have done the work of listening, investigating and reporting to make our communities better places for all.
Thank you so very much.
