Alumnus Gilman reflects on newspaper career

A speaker for the banquet celebrating the 100th anniversary of UA student publications on Nov. 5 is UA journalism alumnus Richard H. Gilman. A former reporter and editor for the Arizona Daily Wildcat, Gilman is publisher of The Boston Globe, New England's largest newspaper, with a daily circulation of nearly 470,000. Gilman spent the previous 16 years working in operations, circulation, and systems and technology for The New York Times, the parent company of the Globe. His last position at the Times was senior vice president for operations.

Gilman went to The New York Times after earning a master's degree in business administration from Harvard Business School in 1983.

He decided to study the business side of newspapers after spending more than a decade as a reporter and editor. Gilman started his career at the Wildcat as a reporter when he was a freshman, and later became an editor. He accepted a job as a police beat reporter at The Arizona Daily Star his junior year. After graduation, he continued working at the Star, becoming assistant managing editor before leaving for Harvard.

Gilman recently talked with journalism student Daniel Bujanda about major issues facing the news business. The following are excerpts from that interview.

Q: Why do you think an independent student press is important?
A: The value of the student press is the same as the value of any newspaper. The student press is the glue that connects and holds the university community. There is such diversity of activity, diversity of opinion and diversity of curriculum at a big university; there really isn't much that can pile all of that together. I think one of the great vehicles for doing that, and for recording what happens, is the student newspaper. Everybody in the university community has to recognize the value of that.

Q: Have you ever encountered attempts to control news content-for example, from advertisers?
A: The practical problem of anyone who decides that they are going to monitor, or censor, any publication is that question of, "Where do you draw the line?" Once you take that burden of saying what's acceptable, what's not acceptable to me and what's not acceptable to someone else, it's a very slippery slope, and the only way to avoid that is to not even enter into it. Do not even begin to regulate what goes in the publication. In my experience, journalists are doing their very best to represent the facts as they see them. It's a noble undertaking that serves a great value to the community that the newspaper serves, including the university community. We all make mistakes every now and then, and we all do some great things. The only thing that a responsible party can do, both as a learning experience for those involved and as a means for allowing a newspaper to fulfill its responsibility, is to let the people in charge, like the editor of the newspaper, do his/her best to do what they are trying to accomplish. Yes, as far as advertisers are concerned, some have tried to control content. There are situations when an advertiser will request certain kinds of favorable coverage, and other situations when an advertiser will pull an ad because they don't like something that was said or written in the newspaper. Frankly, to give in to either one of those things is very bad. For the great majority of advertisers, they understand that they are going to have their good days and their bad days. And they have a very mature perspective about that. They know if something happens that doesn't reflect well on them, maybe they will take a hard knock at the newspaper. And every now and then, they are going to have some coverage that they regard as favorable, because they have done something that deserves that. This means that very few of them get around to threatening or cajoling the paper.

Q: Why did you decide to leave the reporting side for the business side of newspapers?
A: It was a gradual decision. I wanted to play as significant a role as possible in newspapering. I came to the conclusion that if I was to do that, I needed to be conversant with the language of business. When I was on the news side, and somebody said to me that they needed to crunch the numbers, which was pretty basic stuff, I didn't know what they were talking about. I figured if I was going to get ahead in the business of newspapering, I needed to know that. So, I went to business school. I think at that point I figured that I would return to editing. But in the process of being in school, I realized that it couldn't just be a short academic experience, that I was going to need to practice what I had learned if I was really going to be taken seriously. One thing led to another, and I went to work on the business side of The New York Times, and at some point recognized that I had crossed over the aisle, and there would not be any returning. The great thing about what I am doing now - about being publisher - you get to play a role in both the news side and the business side of the paper. To me, it is the best possible job.

Q: Would you ever want to be a reporter again?
A: One of my fantasies for the last 15 years is if I could just retire early, or leave what I was doing, and go off and be a metro columnist for one newspaper or another. Sometimes I would daydream about what various ideas for columns would be. I guess I've always held out the hope that at one point, maybe I would be able to do that. And, who knows? Maybe that will happen.

Q: What are some memorable experiences you have had on the business side?
A: I think one of the most significant experiences was to participate in the transformation of The New York Times from more of a local newspaper to a truly national newspaper. Early in my business career, I was involved in the initial development of the circulation of The New York Times national edition. More recently, I was involved in the expansion of the national printing and distributional networks, as well as with the logic behind making the Times a national newspaper.

Q: How did your experiences at the Wildcat prepare you for jobs in journalism?
A: I only worked for the Wildcat for a little over a year. I did some reporting late in my freshman year. I was night editor in my sophomore year, and I did some amount of writing. After that, I went to work for the Star. The best thing from working at the Wildcat was some amount of self-confidence that I could be both a reporter and do some editing. You can't get too carried away with yourself. But you do need to believe that you have the basic skills to be successful. It was very important that I worked for the Wildcat.

Q: As a reporter for the Star, which experiences were the most important?
A: My first job there. At that point, I was going to school during the day, and working like 4Ųp.m. to 1 a.m. covering night police. The best journalism that I did had to do with being at the county jail one night and seeing a guy being led out who was just a mess. His face was dripping blood, and he had bruises all over. He really was beaten up. I asked what happened to him, and I didn't get a very good answer. So the next day, I pursued it with people at the county hospital, and others who had been involved with him, and found that it was very apparent that the jailers had beaten the crap out of this guy. That was, in a way, one of my better stories during that period. But there were other times which were kind of fun. One night I was out covering a murder, and while I was at the murder scene, there was a report that there had been another murder about five miles away. So I jumped into the car to go to the second scene, and I was stopped for speeding. The cop walked up to the car, and he said, "What do you think you're doing?" And I said, "Well, I'm between murders." Of course that got his attention, and I had to explain my way out of that one.

Q: How has technology changed the newsroom since you worked at the Wildcat?
A: When I was working at the Wildcat, everything was written on typewriters, then edited with a pencil. If there were multiple pages in the story, then one page was glued to the bottom of the other. So you had this continuous flow of paper pasted to paper. Even when I went to work for the Star, the stories were written and edited on paper, and were set on linotype machines using rows of lead type.

Q: What are your opinions about the future of newspapers?
A: I'm very bullish on the future of newspapers because we are going to be the only mass-audience medium that is left. What's happening is that there has been a huge splintering of the audience, and newspapers are going to be the medium that readers and advertisers will want to continue to turn to, to get an overall sense of things. The afternoon papers really have been a dying breed. There are many cities that are one-newspaper cities or that have a main metropolitan newspaper and then some smaller suburban newspapers. That is going to continue to happen. I think that the major morning newspapers, if they're doing a half-decent job, are going to survive, and I think be successful in every city.