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Departing ‘Indy Star’ M.E.: “It’s Gotten Harder” To Do Good Work
By Joe Strupp
Published: March 07, 2008 10:30 AM ET
NEW YORK Pam Fine, who is leaving her post as managing editor of The Indianapolis Star to teach at the University of Kansas, said she has heard from numerous other editors who say they want to make a similar move.
“I’ve gotten dozens and dozens of notes, which I really appreciate, including some from editors who seem to convey their own interest in possibly leaving their own newsrooms for academic jobs,” she told E&P. “That sentiment is the result of perhaps both a life stage, but also because these are very difficult times to manage.”
Fine, 50, said budget cuts and other industry-wide problems also played a role in her decision. “It is hard and it has gotten harder to do the kind of work here we want to do,” she explained. “The demands have grown and the staff hasn’t.”
Asked if she believed more top editors would take the jump to teaching and non-newsroom jobs, Fine said: “I don’t know. I think people are thinking about their careers and where they’d be happy. Most of my colleagues still want to be in their day to day.”
Fine announced that she would leave the Star in April to become Knight Chair for News, Leadership and Community at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications in Lawrence, Kans.
She admits she could spend more years in a newsroom and still loves the job. But with the economy and the news business facing tough times, the teaching option had more appeal. She said she had begun working on a master’s degree in recent years with an eye toward eventually teaching. When the KU search committee contacted her, the change came sooner than expected.
“I had given thought to teaching, but I wasn’t anticipating it so soon,” said Fine, who spent four years at the Star and had previously served as managing editor of The Star Tribune in Minneapolis. “But I am leaving because I saw a very creative opportunity ahead.”
Still, Fine believes her new post will allow her to remain involved in newspapers and other media. “I don’t feel like I am leaving the biz, I will be in the thick of things,” she said. “That is the way I look at it. I hope I can bridge the two worlds.”
Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.
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"Newspapers are getting rid of cartoonists at an alarming rate. They're trying to make themselves as irrelevant to readers as possible," said Milt Priggee, former cartoonist for Crain’s Chicago Business. ...
"The owners of newspapers have changed our job description," said Priggee, whose work has appeared in Newsweek, the Washington Post and the New York Times. "Before, the rule was to editorialize and provoke. Now it's to address and entertain. Don't take a position, don't editorialize, don't create any grief."
that poignantly illustrates conservative New Media marginalizing yet another propaganda tool of The Powers that Be.
Herbert Block was something else, a Herblock cartoon was not deniable, it hung there in the atmosphere, a permanent vision: Nixon taking the low road, Nixon needing a shave, Nixon as a kind of political thug. Herblock had seized on all the visual vulnerabilities of Nixon, the beard, the jowls, the nose, and had, as all cartoonists do, accentuated them and somehow created a figure that exactly matched the liberals' vision of Nixon. It was as if Herblock with his pen had caught the liberal view of Nixon as no print journalist or editorial writer ever did: the fake piety, the mawkishness, the disregard of civil liberties, the ability to exploit passions while pretending that he was only trying to calm them. It stemmed from those earlier years when Nixon was the connection between the McCarthy wing and the center of the party, a role that Nixon liked to exploit and then deny, and Herblock caught it and made it permanent. If television was something new journalistically, an instrument that politicians loved because it had no memory, then Herblock was the direct opposite, his memory was enduring, the past always lived for him.