Finding the News

by Peter Copeland

  Every night I dreamed of Somalia. I was with the Marines, and I needed to go on a mission. The commander said it would not be possible. But I had to go. The frustration was almost a physical barrier. At once I understood that expression about banging your head against a wall. The dreams were about being trapped, which was how I felt in Somalia. I wrote about the dreams in my journal. The notes were just for me, but this was the kind of writing I enjoyed. Dale said I could write something more personal about Somalia for the wire, but it didn’t feel right to use so much suffering to satisfy my need to be creative.

  Another editor, calling with judgmental disappointment in his voice, asked why I had written so much about the Marines and not about average Somalis. He either didn’t know that was my assignment, or he had forgotten. I squeezed the phone in frustration but did not respond.

  Washington had moved on. US troops were still arriving in Africa, but Somalia was old news. The desk told me people in the office were asking why I wasn’t in Iraq, which was being bombed again. Or, since I was in Florida, I could run over to Central Command in Tampa to cover the Iraq story from there.

  I felt myself tighten up. If someone had ordered me back into trouble when I finally was on vacation with my parents, my wife, and my new baby, I would have quit. But then what would I do? There was nothing that interested me except journalism. I could not be without a job because our savings would last only a couple of months. Now with the baby, we also needed the health insurance and the life insurance.

  As it turned out, the desk kindly looked the other way to let me keep my vacation days, and then some. Their only assignment: enjoy the time off.

  I started to relax. Every morning I picked up the New York Times and the Miami Herald. My parents took the Wall Street Journal and the Sun-Sentinel from Fort Lauderdale. Some days I also grabbed the Palm Beach Post or the New York Post. I loved the newspapers, all of them, each in its own way, like old friends. I knew the writers and photographers, and I knew the work behind the stories. I saw why the editors chose certain photos and how they played them. To me, a newspaper was no longer just a beautiful if imperfect portrait of the world on a single day, but now it was deeply engaging on many levels, the way a well-crafted building was appreciated by a seasoned architect.

  I wanted to work for an elite organization like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, but I no longer was sure I was willing to make the personal sacrifice. When I was in Mexico, the Times correspondent was Rich Meislin, an elegant writer. I teased him about having a car and driver. He said, “Sure, you give your life to the Times, and they give you a car.” He wasn’t being funny.

  I envied the impact he had, though. When he wrote something, it made things happen, even moved the stock market. I was not likely to move the market, but on the other hand, I didn’t have the pressure of that responsibility. I also didn’t have millions of people picking over my every word, ready to pounce on some error or perceived bias.

  I had the luxury of saying no to assignments, not always, but when it really mattered. My workplace was caring compared with the cutthroat environment at some news shops. I relished the freedom to travel and pick my own stories. A reporter friend from Mexico, who had been to our wedding, knew me well and was in the life himself, once gently but firmly chided me for daring to complain about my work. “If you’re unhappy, hermano, it’s not the job, it’s you.” I knew he was right.

  More than ever, I hungered to learn new things and to write about them, but at my own pace. Maybe now was the time to leave daily journalism to write books.

  In Florida, my new daughter happily pulled me away from thoughts of work. Isabella wasn’t interested in my ideas for books—she still chewed her books. The days were perfect, blue skies and warm sun. I couldn’t bear to visit the beach; the heat and sand flashed me back to Iraq and Somalia, but I happily stood in the cool water of the pool. Maru handed me the baby, and I held Isabella in her red and white bathing suit, floating in front of me like a bobber. We slipped water wings onto her arms and soon she was splashing around, laughing and shrieking with pleasure.

  One night we were relaxing after a day at the pool, and Isabella suddenly started to scream. Not just crying, but screaming. I ran for her, but she would not be consoled. I passed her to her mother. Still she didn’t stop crying. Maru talked to her, asked her what was wrong. Isabella didn’t speak yet, but Maru’s voice usually helped. This time, she kept bawling.

  My mind raced back over what had happened that day. The pool. An ear infection. Oh my God, and we were flying home on a plane soon. We would have to cancel the trip. What if her hearing were permanently damaged?

  Then Maru flipped Isabella over and rubbed her back. I didn’t know a baby could burp so loudly, but when she did, she stopped crying and fell contentedly asleep. False alarm. But I knew right then I was going to worry about my daughter for the rest of my life.

  Maru worked on the dance company while we were in Florida. I didn’t want to work at all. I was happy to nap with Isabella on my chest, drooling a puddle on my shirt. Maru walked through new choreography, coached her dancers over the phone, and tried to raise money. She wanted to invite Madonna to do a performance together. I thought that was a longshot.

  “Why do you doubt me?” she demanded, feelings hurt.

  Damn. I had stepped in it again.

  I proposed the three of us drive to Miami Beach for an art deco fair. I knew Maru would appreciate getting away on an adventure. The day was hot, and Isabella was sweaty and squirmy until we hit the pool. The art deco was nice, though, and it reminded us of our old neighborhood in Mexico City.

  We stopped by the post office to mail the letters I had written to foundations asking to support the dance company. And one invitation to Madonna.

  “Thank you, Pito,” Maru said.

  I just smiled.

  “We are so very happy,” Maru said. “Do you think something is going to happen to us?”

  “Something bad?”

  “Something really bad,” she said, nodding her head because she knew for sure it was coming.

  “You sound like your mother,” I said.

  “My mother was right about a lot of things.”

  Nothing bad happened on that trip, nothing that made us suffer the way we both thought maybe was inevitable. Would we be punished for having so much good fortune? For having meaningful work, and each other, and now this perfect child? When life was too good was when you were struck down. Still, nothing bad happened. We had to make do with worrying about the unknowable future.

  I did a few more overseas reporting trips, including three weeks in China and a month visiting four countries in South America to cover the drug war, but I was traveling less. I knew I had done my last foreign reporting when I didn’t want to cover the 1994 guerrilla conflict in southern Mexico, which should have been a good story for me because I knew Mexico and I knew war. I was positive the “uprising” wasn’t going anywhere, however, and I just didn’t have the interest or the energy. In my college days, I would have rooted for the rebels. Now I saw their leaders as clueless intellectuals dangerously acting out a romantic fantasy.

  Another reason for my reluctance to travel to war zones was our family’s financial security. We had a son, Lucas, almost three years after Isabella was born. When I tried to get extra life insurance in case something happened to me, every company turned me down unless I provided a letter from my employer saying I no longer would be sent on combat assignments.

  My boss Dan was not happy: “Are you nuts? You finally figure out something you’re good at and you don’t want to do it anymore!” He had four kids of his own, though, so he wrote the letter, and I got the insurance.

  Dan didn’t know what to do with me. I think he considered me unrealized potential. I had done all I ever dreamed of as a reporter, but he expected more. When the number-three person in the Washington bureau, the news editor, was promoted to run one of our papers in California, Dan wondered if I would be
interested in the job. I never had considered going into management. The idea of sitting in an office chained to a computer sounded like prison, but I was bored and needed a new challenge. I also knew there would be a pay raise and more regular hours.

  Maru said the decision was mine alone. I had tried to help her around the house, especially after Isabella and then Lucas were born, but Maru carried most of the work and responsibility for the children, even while she was running the dance company full-time. My older male bosses urged me to solve the problem by spending “quality time” at home when I wasn’t traveling, but I knew the family needed quantity time.

  Isabella was one of those kids who was a miniature adult, and we took her everywhere. Lucas was built like a bag of cement and had only one speed: full. He was so energetic and loud in the mornings, I hustled him outside to let Maru sleep. Many years later our lovely neighbor across the street admitted that she called Lucas the neighborhood alarm clock because his playful yelling woke her every morning. Lucas was ready for anything, and I wanted to be there for him and Isabella, so the kids were a good reason to take the management job.

  My old friend John from El Paso already had taken a desk job with AP photos, and he said being an editor wasn’t as bad as he had feared. Dale and others in the bureau were happy for me and thought it was the right career move.

  One person would be relieved if I stopped traveling: my mother. The problem wasn’t so much the travel as the destinations. When protesting French farmers blocked the roads to Paris with their tractors, I half-jokingly lobbied to cover the “conflict” (and take Maru along). I couldn’t convince the desk to send us, however.

  After listing the pros and cons—on an American Airlines cocktail napkin during a flight to somewhere—I accepted the editing job with a burst of energy and enthusiasm for work. I always had assumed I would be a reporter forever, but I did not regret going on the desk. I missed the travel and the clarity of a single consuming story, but I was happy to spend the nights at home with my family. Instead of taking pride only in the stories I wrote, I felt ownership of the one hundred stories and photos we provided every day to hundreds of papers around the globe. I imagined the wire itself flowing through my veins and into the world for millions of people to see.

  For the first time, I was working indoors every day and sitting in a comfy chair (at the Pentagon they called it “flying a desk”), but the pace could be fierce. I saw myself like an air-traffic controller: bringing in raw copy, sending out the finished stories, and trying not to allow—or make—a critical error.

  I also was excited to dig into the business side of news, because in 1996 we could see the nascent internet was going to change newspapers and our jobs, but we didn’t know how. We built our first website and created email addresses for the staff.

  I was happily awake and engaged at work. Once again, my career had taken an unexpected turn to the right place, with little direction from me.

  As part of my new position, I flew to the corporate headquarters to visit Bill Burleigh, the man who had sent me to Mexico, come up with my first book idea, and become the chief executive of the entire company.

  I confidently told Bill I could handle the journalism part of my new job—it wasn’t that difficult—but now I was fascinated by the economics of news. I had big hopes for making money with the news wire and launching innovative media products, especially digital ones. I thought he would be pleased, but he frowned and was silent for a minute. Then he said, “I’ve seen a lot of good editors ruined by the business side.” I tried to remember his well-meaning caution the first time I actually spoke the words “maximizing shareholder value.”

  And I didn’t really get the journalism, either, or how to be a good leader. In a single promotion, I had leapt over the fifty reporters and editors in the Washington bureau who had raised me from a cub. Now I was supposed to be their boss. As usual in the news business, no one formally taught me anything about how to do my new job. I was a good reporter, so my bosses assumed I would be a good editor, which—as all of us had witnessed many times—was not necessarily true.

  One of the first stories I edited was by the veteran White House reporter Ann McFeatters. Ann was technically now under my supervision, but she had the experience and the clout to do whatever she wanted.

  Her story, written on deadline, was not clear to me. I tried to improve the story, especially what I considered the tortured lede, and sent it on the wire. A few minutes later she was standing behind me, and I could feel the anger coming off her like heat. I swiveled around in my chair to face her.

  “In twenty-four years of journalism,” she said in a voice deliberately loud enough to rattle the entire newsroom, “I’ve never seen a story edited so poorly. You made it absolutely wrong, and we’ve got to send out a correction right now.”

  “The story was not clear,” I snapped back, “or I would not have made it wrong.” My defensiveness did not help. She was right. If I had just asked her before assuming I knew what she meant, I would have avoided making a mistake under her byline.

  Corrections were embarrassing, but the only thing worse was an error that went uncorrected. Every second mattered when an error had moved on the wire, because editors would be putting the story into their papers. We were petrified a paper would print one of our errors and make us all look bad to readers. Our credibility was like blood: if too much spilled, we would die. I quickly wrote the correction myself and sent it.

  That night I talked to Maru about what had happened. I had known since being a cub reporter that making mistakes was how we learned, but I felt awful about my careless editing and my graceless behavior as a rookie manager. Maru made me feel worse by reminding me that Ann had a leadership role in the office beyond her title or mine. More importantly, Maru said, Ann and her husband, Dale, had been good to us since the moment I joined the bureau. They even had me over for Thanksgiving dinner one year when I was alone in Washington. Their home on a leafy street, filled with books and three children, was the model for how I wanted us to live.

  The next morning, I went to see Ann at her desk. Humbled, I apologized for making her story wrong and promised to check with her the next time before making significant changes to a story. Then I asked for her help learning to run the bureau.

  She agreed—emphatically—that I needed help.

  16

  EPILOGUE

  ——— ON JOURNALISM ———

  By 2003, a decade after covering my last gunfight on foreign soil, I had become the old guy at a desk deciding which reporters would go to war.

  My boss for fifteen years, the venerable Dan Thomasson, had retired under company policy at age sixty-five. He was not ready to stop working, but he chose me to succeed him as Washington bureau chief and editor of a global news service. I did not always take his advice on how to run things, which was infuriating to him, but he didn’t realize how much of his spirit and teaching already were part of me. Most of his guidance proved to be wise, even when I wasn’t ready to hear it.

  The United States was preparing for a second war with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the same leader I had seen in action in 1991. This time the US president was George W. Bush, the son of the man who had led the first war against Saddam. I remembered the frustrated soldier during the first war who had told me he didn’t want his son going back to finish the job. His fear had come true.

  I wanted to return to Iraq myself, but there was too much to manage in Washington. Also, I would miss our daughter, Isabella, ten, and our son, Lucas, who was seven. If Saddam didn’t get me this time, I thought, Maru would kill me. That’s what I told myself, anyway.

  Some of our reporters had been in combat, including the invasion of Afghanistan two years earlier, but others never had covered anything more dangerous than a hearing on Capitol Hill, so we prepared them with the proper equipment and vaccinations. I delivered the speech about “no story being worth dying for,” but just in case, I promised they would have life insurance in a comba
t zone. We got satellite phones because, as I reminded them a dozen times, the story was worthless until they filed.

  Our Washington bureau now served more than newspapers, so the dozen men and women headed to the war zone also were expected to file for television and online, with words, photos, video, and continuous updates on social media. This made more work for the reporters but enabled them to share their experiences with an unlimited global audience.

  When I had slept on the same sandy ground during the first war with Iraq, I didn’t have a camera or a phone, and the internet did not exist. Since most of my career had been with a wire service, however, I always had reported in real time and around the clock.

  The team’s coverage of the invasion was excellent, but later in the conflict a writer and photographer from one of our papers were injured while riding in a military vehicle that was hit by a roadside bomb. I felt sick, worried for our guys and their families. I had been shot at, teargassed, and chased by thugs, but never got a scratch. After a series of calls, we were convinced the two colleagues were not hurt badly, but they were shaken.

  I advised their editor to order them home immediately, but to let them stay in Iraq if they insisted. The contradictory guidance was calculated. I knew from experience they would forever regret leaving too soon, but if they needed to come home, they could blame the boss. They finished their assignment and returned safely.

  During the fourteen years I was a bureau chief and news media executive, my greatest challenges were about money and technology rather than breaking news or foreign wars. My most important job was to help quality news coverage survive and prosper in the digital age. As our once secure newspaper business (aka monopoly) fragmented, I desperately chased new revenue, cut spending, and lashed the staff with inane corporate euphemisms such as “doing more with less.”

  Fortunately, Scripps had diversified into cable television, and despite the grumbling of some old-timers, we adapted the Washington bureau to support our rapidly growing channels HGTV and Food Network. I helped launch another lifestyle cable channel, developed magazines and websites, and experimented with business models for digital news. With a more diverse staff (and Maru and our kids as the focus group), we created magazines in Spanish for the growing Latino market.