Tag: Bob Brooks

The Memo I Ignored

Bob Brooks, the managing editor of The News & Observer for most of my time there, sent the staff the most puzzling memo I had ever seen.  The memo said reporters could not promise to protect the identity of a source without his permission.

I can’t begin to tell you how nutty that edict was.  I talked to people off the record practically every day. Other reporters did, too. Any reporter  who says he or she never goes off the record must be covering, I don’t know, the school lunch menu?

Bob Brooks, at a news budget meeting in the early 1980's.
Bob Brooks, at a news budget meeting in the early 1980’s.

Bob was a good newspaperman. I respected him, I liked him, too. He couldn’t possibly be serious, could he?

So I went to his office, memo in hand, and asked him what it meant.  He said he meant what it said — end of discussion.  Bob had zero tolerance for anyone who challenged his authority.

I went back to my desk, sat down, and thought about it.   Until recently judges had been citing reporters for contempt and putting them in jail when they refused to reveal the identity of a confidential source.   But judges had finally wised up and realized that some reporters wanted to go to jail to protect a source.

So they quit jailing reporters and started fining their newspapers instead, up to $5,000 a day, a lot more in today’s money.  I figured that must have been the reason for crazy memo: If one of our reporters refused to reveal a confidential source, and they hadn’t gotten permission from Brooks, The N&O would claim that the reporter had acted outside the scope of his or her employment.  That’s the only explanation that made sense to me.

After that I didn’t worry about the crazy memo.   I ignored it.   I kept doing my job the way I had always done it.   And, as far as I know, so did everybody else.  

NOTE: By the way, “Off the record” and “Not for attribution” are not the same thing. Not for attribution meant I could use the information but I could  never identify the source. Off the record meant I couldn’t do anything with the information without further negotiation.  Most often the source would say I could use the information if I could find it somewhere else and he or she might tell me where I could find it.  Or I could use it, not for attribution, after a certain date. The N&O stopped using anonymous sources in investigative stories in the late 1970’s.

Coming Friday: Nuts!

 

Death By Obit

Bob Brooks, the managing editor of The New & Observer for most of the 1970’s and 1980’s, could not tolerate an error in an obituary.   It was the only time most people’s name appeared in the paper and Brooks hated it when we messed up their obit.

And if we lost an obit?

Unthinkable!

Bob Brooks, at a news budget meeting in the early 1980's.
Bob Brooks, at a news budget meeting in the early 1980’s.

I was the paper’s assistant metro editor for a l-o-n-g eight months and one of my duties was to edited the obits and then moved them from the Metro Desk to the Copy Desk. It was the most important thing I did every day because Bob Brooks told me it was the most important thing I did every day.  I handled obits like my life depended on them because, professionally speaking, it did.

One afternoon when I came to work my boss, Bob Gordon, the metro editor, looked at me like I was a dead man walking. In a quiet voice, almost a whisper, he told me that two Raleigh obituaries had been left out of the final edition that morning. They appeared to have been lost. Brooks wanted an explanation.

The metro editor and I both knew there would be hell to pay over those obits, and I was in the hot seat.

But maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t my fault, maybe it was the Copy Desk’s fault.  Every night I made a list of the obituaries I sent to the Copy Desk  so the first thing I did was check last night’s list. There was no help for me there.  The names of the dead men whose obits were not in the paper were not on the obit list either.  The Copy Desk was off the hook and I was firmly on it.

I looked everywhere for those obituaries. I checked with each obit writer. No one remembered handling them, they didn’t even remember seeing them.

And then a guy at Brown-Wynne Funeral Home called, told me about obits they would send over that evening and then he told me, almost as an afterthought: the obits they were going to bring would included two they should have dropped off yesterday.  Those two obits had been accidentally left on the seat of the car.

Brown-Wynne had not delivered the missing obits!  

Feeling a little too smug at my good fortune I went to Brooks’ office and told him what had happened: I didn’t lose those obits.  Nobody at The N&O had lost them. It was Brown-Wynne’s fault — they’ve admitted it — the funeral home didn’t deliver them.

That good news appeared to have no effect whatsoever on Bob Brooks. He stood up, walked around his desk, got in my face, and this is what he told me, word for word:

“Two people died in Raleigh yesterday and their obituaries were not in The News & Observer this morning. That is never going to happen again. Do you understand me?”

“Yes sir,” I said.

*  *  *

And that’s not all.

State Editor Kerry Sipe was responsible for all of the early edition obits and, on another occasion, I heard Brooks explain to Kerry how important they were.

Kerry was an excellent editor, had to be because he had a tough job. Every afternoon and evening he handled news called in by stringers, some of whom were barely literate in my opinion, from various towns across Eastern North Carolina.  He had to rewrite most of their copy.

One night after the first edition deadline –we called it the  “A” edition– he came over and slumped  in a chair beside my desk.  It had been one of those days, and he was mentally exhausted.

Brooks came over too, to have a word with Kerry.

“Two Raleigh obits got left out of the ‘A” edition,” Brooks said.  When a Raleigh resident had family Down East we ran their obituary in the early, out of town, editions.

Kerry replied, “Yea, I could foresee…

Brooks cut him off mid-sentence.

“Well, let me tell you what I can foresee,” our managing editor said to this man, who had just finished translating reams of gibberish into coherent stories –on deadline.  “I foresee that if that ever happens again we’re going to have a new state editor.”

* * *

Brooks was fine newspaperman, a straight arrow  who could spot a hole in a story from across the room.   I liked him a lot. But he had one blind spot — obituaries.

Coming Monday: You’re Not Bo!