When I looked across the table at the subject of my interview, Chicago Police Superintendent Jody Weis, I remembered a lesson I learned during my stormy tenure as editor of the Los Angeles Times: Every editor should be the subject of news coverage.
Just as Weis took over the police department in early 2008 from Phil Cline, who was popular in the ranks and known as a “cop’s cop,” I succeeded Dean Baquet, a highly popular editor at the Times. He had been fired in late 2006 by the company we both worked for at the time, the Tribune Company, which also owns the Chicago Tribune here on Michigan Avenue.
Baquet was popular for good reason; he’s a first-class journalist, a real gentleman and a good friend. Cline, too, was a great cop and a good leader. In the spirit of full disclosure, my sister, Ellen Scrivner, worked as a top deputy to Cline, and I can guarantee you that you don’t get anything better than my sister.
The journalists at the LA Times reacted to me, a career editor at the Chicago Tribune, just as the beat cops in Chicago, reacted to Weis, a 22-year veteran of the FBI. Both were suspicious of the new boss.
Beat cops in Chicago really don’t like the FBI. They feel that federal agents look down their noses at the people who get their hands dirty pursuing street crime and are too eager to launch investigations of police corruption. The reporters at the LA Times had good reason to be suspicious of me, too. Baquet had been fired for refusing to cut the budgets for news coverage. One friend at the Times welcomed me after I took the job to replace him, saying: ”I don’t care what you do at the LA Times, you will always be viewed in this newsroom ast a hatchet man from Chicago.”
In the ensuing months, I was the subject of much news coverage, most of it negative and some of it downright nasty. The Los Angeles Times was a great newspaper and I asked the journalists there to give me a chance to show what I could do. They did and I hope I earned their respect. In the maelstrom of news coverage, though, I gained a renewed appreciation of fairness, and I learned that the subjects of news coverage usually see things far differently than journalists. It’s not that either side is necessarily right or wrong, it’s just that two individuals looking at the same thing can have far different perceptions of “the truth.” I don’t get too excited about negative stories about me anymore. It’s too distracting and it comes with the territory.
Weis, too, has been the subject of a lot of news coverage, some of it quite negative and probably untrue. He’s earned some of it and some is undeserved. But I tried hard to be fair to him in the story we did for this Sunday’s Chicago pages of The New York Times produced by the Chicago News Cooperative. I don’t care whether the police chief likes my story. But I do care that he and you — the reader — think I was fair. He’s a controversial leader. The other day a former police officer publicly called him a “coward” for not rushing to a crime scene that developed when the chief was talking to reporters just a few blocks away. I won’t get into what I thought of the charges, but I do invite you to read about the chief and what he thinks of that allegation and many others in our story in Sunday’s New York Times.
One thing I deal with in the story is whether Weis will be reappointed by Mayor Richard M. Daley when his contract expires early next year. I wish him better luck than I had. The Tribune Company was kind enough to give me an opportunity to spend more time with my family 16 months into my two-year employment contract. I just didn’t see eye to eye on the future path and I didn’t want to diminish a great newspaper with a great staff. Now I’m writing a story off the police beat, which is where I started. And I’m happy to be here.
The Weis piece is only one of the stories in the Chicago pagesof Sunday’s Times, though. CNC Columnist Jim Warren is writing about a quietly effective man who goes into Chicago high schools to exterminate violence and promotes social justice the Muslim way. Dirk Johnson dropped by a great Chicago treasure – the Newberry Library – to look at a rare find – a 14th Century Codex that’s as old as the Inquisition. Take a look at the Pulse items, too.
The Chicago News Cooperative produces two pages of Chicago news for the Midwest edition of the The New York Times every Friday and Sunday. We report; we don’t just repeat and we love feedback and tips from readers.
Have a great weekend.