Tim J. McGuire's speech to AASFE members on October 4

My official charge for this speech today was to inspire and challenge you. Inspire is an intimidating word and I’m not sure I’m up to it. I am reminded of the young man who asked God how long a million years was to him.

A million years is just like a single second in your time, God responded. Then the young man asked God what a million dollars was to him. God replied, "A million dollars to me is like a single penny to you." Then the young man got his courage up and asked, "God, could I have one of your pennies?"

God smiled gently and replied, "Certainly, just a second."

With me at the podium, inspiration may prove as elusive for you as the penny was for the young man. Since I’m up here anyway, I will share some musings with you about these difficult times and how we might survive and even prosper.

I don’t mean to mince words.

This conference begins with newspapers and our country facing the most difficult time in my memory and I’ve been around a couple of years. In the three short weeks since September 11th, our nation has scrambled to make sense of the senseless. It has struggled mightily to mount a defense against the indefensible. The national mood and identity is unlike anything most of us have seen in our lifetimes. This tragic event has changed the way we look at our country. It has changed our lives on a very personal and spiritual basis. This transformational event came at a time when economic conditions at our newspapers were approaching the worst in history then they went south.

My company was off budget for the month of September by a number I can’t even utter without stuttering. Many of you in this room come from newspapers which have had to cope with the personal pain of layoffs. Or your newsrooms have sustained dramatic reductions in workforce through attrition, hiring freezes and those euphemistic "time-off-from work" programs.

Most of you have seen efforts to cut news hole, features costs and every other cost item that isn’t bolted to the floor. The newspaper economic upheaval and the tragedy of men willing to commit suicide to cause mass damage to the United States, have made our reality very different than it once was.

Hell, this speech is different than it was going to be. I was prepared to come in here and tell you that as long as we begin the process of rethinking our business and appreciate that the digital age requires us to do that rethinking, then we’ll be fine.

We’re now at a point where caution seems far more appropriate. But how should we think about our future? There’s a fundamental dilemma here. Do we wallow in our difficulties? Do we pontificate on every bad cloud on the horizon? Do we whine and complain about how we’ve been dealt a bad hand, and wish that things were different? Or do we strike out in a new direction with new enthusiasm and new determination, intent upon creating an exciting new future for ourselves and our industry?

I obviously am going to argue for striking out in a positive new direction. Whining is a fool’s game. My first version of this speech had a whole litany of our troubles. The hell with that. We know about the troubles, what we need is hope.

The Chicken Littles who say readership has been declining for years, circulation is struggling and help wanted will never return to what it once was are getting all the press and they are definitely getting on my nerves. Their hopelessness drives me bonkers.

I believe with every fiber of my chubby little body that the newspaper industry must have hope. Our industry is not like just any other industry. It’s a business, sure. It’s a profession, absolutely. But it is more than a business and a profession. Journalism is a craft. It is a way of life.

Journalism is a passion. It is a passion for gathering facts, for explaining a complex world. It is a passion for the power of the written word. And, most importantly for me, Journalism is a "calling." A calling, according to Robert Bellah in his book Habits of the Heart, "links a person to a whole in which the calling of each is a contribution to all." That is the common good.

Perhaps some of us had forgotten what a "calling" this journalism gig really is, but September 11 changed all that.

I dearly wish September 11th would never have happened, but for all of its tragedy and horror, I will treasure it for many reasons. The week reminded me I could cry. It reminded me I could worry for my country at its most horrible moment. And, it reminded me that America rallies around its own like no other.

That tragic week reminded me too, that if we bother to look, we can find heroes in places other than athletic fields and movie screens. But as I’ve told my staff several times in the last three weeks, I will also treasure that week because of their sensational performance. And, I will treasure forever, how September 11 and the following days have reinvigorated my sense of calling. For many of us our view of our journalistic craft has been transformed.

One of the Star Tribune’s assistant managing editors, Roger Buoen, was just one of scores of people on my staff who performed heroically after the tragedy. He and many others worked with only short rest periods for four days.

As we reflected on the Saturday after the attacks, Roger fretted about how difficult it had been for him to leave the office at 8:00 p.m. on Friday. "I hated to be away even for that short amount of time. I felt like I ought to be here at the paper." Roger then leaned toward me and confided, "You know Tim, what we do feels so much more important now. Journalism matters in a way that it never mattered before."

Roger has captured a truth. What we did during the horrible hours following the attacks of September 11th does seem more important than anything we did before.

The question before us is, how do we continue to practice our "calling" in ways that rise above the mundane way we did things on September 10th. How do we capture that sense of "importance" Roger talked about and infuse it into our daily work?

I do not pretend to have all the answers. I do not intend to offer myself as a paragon of anything. I do bring the perspective afforded to me by almost 30 years of leadership in newsrooms. That 30 years of experience has allowed me to make thousands of mistakes. I've even learned from some of them.

I believe we have to start thinking in different ways than we've thought before. I think we need to think differently about the substance of what we do and we need to think differently about how we get it done.

I would like to suggest that there are five things that we can do to very specifically energize our features section or our features coverage.

Those five are:

We must look to the Readership Institute’s Readership Study for important guidance on covering health, home, fashion and food. We must reinvest in utility and usefulness. We have to look for new journalistic models to present our information. We must invest heavily in the Readership Institute’s call to cover ordinary people and we have to rely on more storytelling to do that. We must think carefully about what September 11 means for celebrity versus substance in our features pages.

I believe the Readership Study does give us hope. It gives us a lot of powerful indicators about what we need to do and things we need to think about. We intuitively know that home, fashion, food and health are essential parts of what attracts readers to our newspapers. We have to make those the cornerstone of our features section.

But we must reinvigorate our coverage of those areas. We must find new ways to present that information. We must provide more depth of story for readers. We must become more sophisticated. We need to develop better experts.

The second area we need to strengthen is utility and usefulness. We would do well to stress utility in the areas of health, home, fashion and food.The Readership Study tells us we need to emphasize go and do information, which is what utility is all about.It’s how these subjects apply to people’s lives and how readers can make that information actionable. So rather than a pedantic, traditional presentation on diabetes we must tell people how they can optimistically fight diabetes, how they can take action to avoid getting diabetes or how they can cook for loved ones with diabetes. Go and do information. Utility. Usefulness.It’s all the same thing.It’s making everything we do incredibly relevant to people’s lives. We have to do that with words, we have to do that with graphics, and we have to do it with design and pictures. And, we have to be willing to try video, online and audio presentations.

Third, we have to look for new journalistic models and new information frameworks. For example, I think we need to think about a segmented audience model that addresses the fragmentation of our society. We must address in new creative ways, the generational, gender and race splits with which we’re all struggling. We have to appreciate that we’ve exploited a one-size-fits-all model for 40 or 50 years now. That model is tearing apart at the seams.

Perhaps we should consider an expert model like the Wall Street Journal. We could develop true experts on home, fashion, food and health. Readers would look to our newspapers for true expertise on these subjects.

Another viable model we might want to consider is the star model. It would make our journalists the essential deliverers of information. That kind of model would require a lot more promotion and probably more pay for our best people.

A model we’re playing around with at the Star Tribune is what I call the Guide and Direct Model. Access magazine was onto a part of that model. They were guiding readers to information on the Web from a print product. I recently saw that the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News does that very well with a Web guide.

But I’m talking about something even deeper. Out there in the wild blue yonder there is an incredible amount of information about subjects such as health, home, fashion and food. Why shouldn’t newspapers become indispensable by being the ultimate source of where you find stuff? Using my diabetes example, we could list the top ten books on diabetes, we could list recent magazine articles, we could list all the hot Web sites and all the hot discussion areas related to diabetes.

Amazon.com is a master of Guide and Direct and they are a perfect example of the willingness to explore new, out of the box information models. We must worship at the altar of creativity, innovation and risk.

The fourth thing we need to do to improve our features sections is, we must respond aggressively to the Readership Institute’s Readership Study which tells us that local news, particularly news about ordinary people is one of the eight imperatives to growing readership.

In many ways, I think this imperative to better cover ordinary people is going to be one of the most difficult challenges we face among all the imperatives of the Readership Study. Ordinary is a word that most editors have spent their lives trying to avoid. Most of us think of ourselves as being above the crowd.

The fact is we will all become better editors if we connect to the real people in our readership area -- the people who make our society go.

Ordinary people in ordinary situations make for incredibly dramatic stories if we tell them right. I’ll never forget the intro to a long ago television show. The four or five 50 pluses here will remember. "There are 8 million stories in the Naked City."

I’ve never forgotten the message of that introduction. Every one of us has a story and is a story. All of us need to push our newspapers off the margins and do more stories about people who are in the mainstream. We need to find those ordinary people who live hard lives, people who have big joys and horrible hurts.

In mid-August, the Star Tribune ran one of those precious stories that you know immediately will touch readers in a special way.

Jon Tevlin, a feature writer on our paper, recounted the horrible odyssey when his wife went into the hospital for routine ankle surgery and almost died of ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome) in the spring of 2000.

Tevlin told the story of their struggles in sparse, dramatic language. He told of the incredible efforts exerted by the medical staff, from doctors to respiratory therapists to nurses. His tale was an everyman tale that showed the angst and the pathos involved in a life and death situation.

Tevlin’s love story touched a phenomenal chord in our community. In 30 years I have never seen such reaction to a newspaper story. The newspaper got close to a thousand emails and about three hundred phone calls.

At one morning news meeting one of our designers, Denise Reagan, made the profound observation that, "This is just another example of how the very ordinary can become the universal if the story is told right."

And, if we had any doubts about the power of the stories of ordinary people please reflect on the remarkable stories that flowed from the aftermath of the September 11 attacks: The story of the man who died because he stopped to stay with a pregnant woman. The heroic stories of the men on the Pennsylvania flight who saved us from more destruction. Nothing is more compelling than the tales of ordinary folks doing extraordinary things.

Once we start paying more attention to the ordinary folks we have to concentrate on telling the stories of those people with empathy and understanding. We need to think more about telling stories as serials, as novellas with a beginning, middle and an end. We need to think about short, quick pieces which show readers true drama exists in the lives of all "ordinary people."

Tevlin’s wife, Ellen Hatfield, survived three weeks in a coma, but our readers did not know that until day four of the five-part series because of the dramatic way Tevlin wrote his serial.

Storytelling is at the root of our craft. We need to explore those roots. We need to become more traditional in our storytelling at the same time we use new media tools for more creative storytelling. Telling stories is why we exist. Let’s show it.

The fifth important thing for us to think about as we develop features sections for the coming decade, is how we decide what September 11 means for celebrity versus substance in our features pages. I’m posing a question here more than I’m providing answers. It is clear that that the trivial seems ridiculous now and the mildly interesting seems trivial.

We now know what real heroes look like. They don’t look like sports figures or movie stars. Depending on what you read, Time Magazine or Graydon Carter, the Vanity Fair Editor, or some bloke on the corner of Michigan and Ohio, says “the age of Irony” is over. Irony is at least on vacation. We have to decide what that means for our pages.

At the Star Tribune in the days following September 11, Susie Hopper and her staff ripped up our features section plans and 10 of the first 11 covers after the tragedy had a least one aftermath story. There was more depth and substance on our pages during that period than we’ve had for some time.

It’s too early to say this is the way of the future, but it was clear enough to us that times are changing that we put on hold our plans to remodel our features section. Any future plans must consider how September 11 changed our readership.

Those are some of my thoughts about the mechanics of what we need to do to build our new future. But even more important is how we do that.

Since ASNE made leadership its focus last year during Rich Oppel’s presidency, everybody in the industry seems to have focused on leadership. It seems to me though, we’re making leadership more complicated than it needs to be.

Leadership has just two elements -- you and the person you are trying to lead. It’s as simple as that. Let’s toss the baggage and focus on those two players.

Let’s start with you. If you are stoop-shouldered, depressed and chaotic your staff will be too. Helen Keller said, “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” If you are going to effectively lead a rethink of your features operation you must take personal responsibility for your mood, your attitude, and for the persona you project.

A lot of you want to blame the boss, your staff, the readers or the bad economy for everything that goes wrong. That won’t work, and you can’t blame your parents, your siblings, your potty training or that little bitty childhood bedroom for every mistake you make. Accept personal responsibility and accountability.

I have a delightful Down Syndrome son named Jason. He's 22, but he's often 22 and 4 at the same time. Recently he lost control of the door on my new car and it gently bumped into the car next to us. I said, "Jason, you need to be more careful. You can't bump my car door into the other cars." Jason said, "The wind caught it." I said, "Jason, the wind didn't catch that door." He said, "Oh yeah, it was my arm. Bad arm." I said, "Jason, it was not the wind and it wasn't your arm. It was you. You bumped that door into the other car. You're a big boy now and you have to take personal responsibility. Adults have to take responsibility for their actions." Jason looked at me straight on and said, "Did you read that in a book?

I really didn't read it in a book. I know it intuitively. Good people and good leaders will take personal responsibility. You have to believe you are the person who can make exciting things happen. You have to be the catalyst. You have to excite. You have to energize.

As the leader, you're the person with the power to affect lives. You're the key person in the lives of most of those people who work for you.

You can't wish for things to be different. You can't wish that people would understand how to serve readers. You can't wish that people would be more conscious of your vision. You can't be the woe-is-me victim who complains that people won't listen or won't follow. The physics thing says that for every action there is a reaction. You are that action. You are the proximate cause of change and success in your newsroom. You need to act like the proximate cause.

As editors we need to hold ourselves to a high standard of performance and accomplishment before we can expect others to achieve the same.

We spend so much of our lives expecting big things of others, telling others how they ought to do things, imposing our own opinions on how people work and what they accomplish. We criticize with abandon. But how good are we at turning those same critical powers on ourselves? Oh, sometimes we beat ourselves up or say I wish I'd done this or I wish I'd done that, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about an honest assessment of each day. How did I do on my list of things to accomplish? How did I do against a list of things I believe are important? Did I get sucked in by all the little things or did I do first things first, as Stephen Covey would say. Did I address the major themes which I want to be known for? Do I even know what those major themes are?

You need to think about those themes and you need to think about your personal mission. You need to be about SOMETHING. You need to stand for SOMETHING. You need to be writing your epitaph every day of your life. Think about the things you want to be known for. Think about the things that you need to do that will cause the people at your funeral to say all the things you want them to say about you.

I hope that at the end of this session you will take a few minutes to write out a personal work code on a small piece of paper that you can slide into your wallet. It should be 5 or 6 sentences about the major things you want to stand for at work. It should describe your values, your inspirational behaviors, and your desired effect on other people. Each day or every few days you can pull that personal code out of your wallet and see how you're doing.

Okay, you’ve stepped up to the accountability. You know you are the key to change and success in your department. Now what’s your next step?

It’s a big step. You must recognize the importance of people.

No, I don’t mean lip service. We have to come to fundamental grips with the fact that our success and our organization’s success begins and ends with the success of our people.

How many times have you heard managers, and I call them managers because those folks aren't leaders, say, "This job would be great if it weren't for the people." The people are what this job is all about. The people are what leadership is all about.

People are your only hope; they are not your curse.

We've got to toss the concept that some people we're trying to lead are bad people, or that there are groups of people who are just there to screw us up. We have to understand and believe that all people want to succeed. Every worker wants to be part of something exciting. They want to be part of the rebirth of newspapers. We have to tap into that desire to succeed, understand it, and exploit it.

We've got to honestly admit that if people are reticent to follow, hard to get along with and myopic, I as the leader own a big part of that. All of us as leaders own a big part of that reticence to follow.

It is our job to excite our followers. It is our responsibility to facilitate their ownership of what we're doing. We all know that unless our people own the most important ideas we won't succeed. People have to believe they are part of the solution. Look around your newsroom and think about all the original ideas your staff came up with, without your input. The trick is to get them to come up with ideas to solve the problems you believe in, as much as the ones they believe in.

So how do we make our people our partners? This may be a radical thought for you. The key to success is recognizing that the person you are dealing with is the most important person in the world. That is, when I am dealing with Steve Doyle, I must understand that to Steve, Steve is the most important person in the world.

When I talk altruism and I talk team and I talk good of the order, all that's going to work for Steve, only if Steve benefits from that. That doesn't make Steve a bad guy. It makes him normal, just like you and me. That's the way we're made. We’re all selfish and we all do things out of a basic self-interest.

We also tend to think a lot of ourselves. A terrifically challenging part of leadership is the recognition that the following statistic is absolutely true. 83 percent of American workers think they are above average. Now some of you seem stuck on the math there. I’ll help you out; the math does not work.

People do not inherently think of themselves as average or below average. They are all special. Understanding that will make you more effective. It will force you to try to come up with ways to appeal to people's special skills and special talents and special leanings. It should make it obvious to you that power games won't work. Special people won’t be pushed around!

I bore my managers at the Star Tribune with my Coke can game. I hold this can up to you and you describe what you see. You'll describe a red can with white letters that say Coke. But my response to you will be, you're nuts. Can't you see this can is not red with white Coke lettering on it? This can has a nutritional label on it. It is silver, clearly silver and it tells me how many calories are in this Coke.

The problem in American newsrooms is that all of us stare at our own side of the Coke can and very seldom do we turn the can around to appreciate the other person's perspective. We must turn our Coke cans around constantly.

One of our great sins in newsrooms is the fact that we judge people quickly, harshly and forever. We consign people. We know exactly what they will do and what they can't do. We're very reluctant to change our views of a person's ability to grow and improve.

But has John always been a poor performer? Is Judy doomed to mediocrity? Will Jack never meet our objectives? Or, can we help our staffers grow?

Anthony DeMello, the late Jesuit priest from India, told the story of a young boy who picked up a golden eagle egg and put it in the chicken house. The hens sat on the egg until it hatched and then they raised the eagle as a chicken. One day the eagle saw a beautiful golden eagle flying through the sky. He asked the chicken next to him, what kind of bird was flying so gracefully. The chicken said, that's an eagle. We could never fly like that. The eagle wistfully agreed. That eagle lived and died thinking like a chicken. Nobody ever told him he could fly.

We judge people to be chickens all the time. We never release them to be the eagles they would love to be.

DeMello tells another story about an American research study in which I.Q. tests were administered to all the kids in a certain school. The researchers then told the teachers that a certain 10 kids were gifted at the genius or near genius level. In fact, the students were randomly chosen and not really gifted at all. But at the end of the year the I.Q. of each of those 10 kids had risen 10 points, and some had risen as much as 36 points. The teachers believed in those kids and invested a lot of special effort in them. They treated them like geniuses and they flew like eagles.

How many people on your staff could be eagles if you stopped treating them like chickens? This is an especially big problem with people of color in our newsrooms. They are leaving our newsrooms much faster than whites are and the top reason is they don’t feel they are given the opportunities to grow that they believe they need and deserve.

Now before you think I dated both Polly and Anna, I am not saying that everyone on your staff will be Pulitzer material if you lead better. I am saying that everyone can be a better contributor if you see the eagle in them. If you recognize their individual skills and interests they will become better contributors. Focus on what they want for themselves and how that will make your product better.

From the looks on your faces it appears I haven’t scored real big on the ol’ inspiration meter. But I’d consider this morning a success if you would remember and contemplate these messages.

Journalism is a calling -- a calling to serve the common good. You have a personal responsibility to respond to that calling with respect and dignity.

Whining is a fool’s game. Keep your shoulders straight, brim with confidence and stop the damn complaining.

Develop a course of action. Think about what your section should be. Think creatively and take some risks as you think about new ways to do journalism. And, perfect the traditional ways, like storytelling about ordinary people.

When you think about fixing people, fix yourself first. Everyone else will follow.

People are your hope not your curse. Everyone who works for you deserves to be treated like the most important person in the world.

Most important: Believe in people. Let the eagles fly.