Phyllis Fleming interview about journalism career, Iowa City, Iowa, October 20, 2004

Section 1: Q: I would like to know about the challenges you face as a woman in journalism? What obstacles did you face in the beginning and how do you think things have changed? A: Looking at this room, I’d say that’s a sure indication of change because we’ve got two young men and everybody else is female. That isn’t the way it would’ve been a long time ago when I was in journalism school. When I graduated from Iowa, in those days, the jobs that women frequently held were in what you’d call the society department. Today you might call them lifestyle and actually, they’re a lot more varied today. I went sight unseen for both me and them to the Gazette in Billings, Montana. I was hired over the phone. That paper then was opened by the Anaconda Copper Company. It was always a joke because you filled out an employment form. Everyone in the company filled out the same form and one of the questions was “Would you mind being sent to Chile?” They had a copper mine in Chile. The newspaper people owned all the papers in Montana at the time. So I went there to work as a general assignment reporter. There was one other reporter on the staff. Being a woman was not particularly significant there because the kinds of stories I was doing would have been equally done by a man. It didn’t make a lot of difference. That paper was not a very good paper. I was there a year and decided I was going to move on. I had a job at the Champaign Urbana paper an education reporter, but I was offered a job at the Gazette at the same time which was a combination reporting and editing job, which I took instead. At the Gazette, I was always the first woman in a particular job. That’s the way it was. There weren’t a lot of women on staff. If they were they were in the social department. I never particularly felt I was discriminated against. I don’t’ think my pay at the Gazette was any different than if a man had come into that job. Sometimes discrimination can be sort of an odd thing. I remember a male reporter telling me once—not at the Gazette, this was somebody in Des Moines—I was wearing a skirt so he didn’t know whether he should pass me this piece of information. If it had been a male reporter, he wouldn’t have, but because I was a woman, he was going to be gentlemanly and pass it along. It’s silly little stuff like that. I think there was discrimination frequently against women. I don’t think I felt it. At the Gazette, I don’t think I was discriminated against. There were some rules in those early years. If I had come onto the Gazette—instead of coming onto a combination editing/reporting job, where I was doing a variety of things including some night work—if I had some on as a general assignment reporter, the Gazette had a rule that they would not send a woman. There used to be a Saturday night shift and they wouldn’t assign a woman to it. The men ended up always doing these weekend rotations because they wouldn’t put women into it. In a way, the men came up on the short end of the stick. Eventually, that was changed and women eventually went into the rotation. Actually the attitude was pretty paternalistic. Once the Gazette had sent me to a meeting in New York and the guy who was then the city editor told me that I was never to ride the subway because it was dangerous. You went ahead and rode the subway and did what you were going to do. A lot of the older men reacted as though you were their daughter or their wife just in the way they dealt with you. As far as discrimination on the job and what I was assigned, I don’t think I was ever affected by that. Q: What’s the reasoning behind that rule of women not working the weekend shift? A: It might be dangerous. Q: Oh. A: Nights, right. It was a stereotype. I’m sure the Gazette was not unique in that. I’m sure every paper did it pretty much the same way. Except the time period they wouldn’t have done it that way was during World War II. Then they didn’t have a choice. Women filled all of those roles on newspapers. But once war ended and men came back, they went back to doing it pretty much the way they had. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense. Even then, this was in the 50s, it didn’t make sense then. It wasn’t that long before it changed. The men were real happy about when it was changed. -- <br><br> Section 2: A: I was born in Stewart, Iowa, which is not too far from Des Moines. I graduated from high school in Garner. I came to Iowa and graduated from here in 1956 and went to work in Billings [Montana] for a year. Q: Why? A: Why Billlings? That’s where the job was. Q: That’s where the job was? A: That’s where a job was. It was sort of exciting. I hadn’t been out of Iowa by that time. We’re talking in the 50s when you didn’t travel like you do now. It was interesting to be able to go to Billings. I hadn’t been in that area before. Q: Were you scared? A: No. It was a good place to start to work. Billings, at that time, wasn’t far from the frontier. That’s the way they still thought of themselves. The one woman who was on staff had been the police reporter during World War II before she went back to being the Society reporter. Billings was sort of a frontier kind of town. It was on the edge. The big three in Montana was the Union Pacific, Anaconda, and the oil companies. It was a different place to work and it was an interesting place to start. It just wasn’t a very good newspaper. Q: Before you go on with that, you say, “That’s where the job was.” How did you learn about that job? A: Through the school of journalism. They had contacted the school of journalism and they were looking for a general assignment reporter. Q: Were your parents concerned about you moving so far away? A: They perhaps were. I don’t remember any particular discussion about it. I had a car and I remember my mother rode out there with me and came back on the train. We found an apartment which was pretty utilitarian then. Of course, the weather in Montana can be fairly severe. I was within walking distance of the Billings Gazette – that was another Gazette. One night, a window in the apartment fell out and landed on the cement below. It was a good place to start. Q: Were your parents supportive of you going into journalism? A: Yes. Puzzled, but supportive. Q: Why puzzled? What did they want you to go into? A: To be a teacher. Nobody in the family had ever done anything like this. My father was a teacher and I had decided before I was done with high school that’s what I was going to do. They would have preferred that I had gone to Iowa State – that’s where my dad graduated from—and taken education. But they were supportive. I came to Iowa and graduated in journalism and went to work. Q: So now we’re leading to Phyllis Fleming, first job for the Billings Gazette. And your beat was? A: General assignment. Q: Since you said it was such a different environment, what kinds of different odd things did you cover there? What things made it a bad paper? A: They wouldn’t have done anything investigative. Since they were owned by Anaconda, that set the tone. They were very supportive of the state the way it was. The big three companies pretty much ruled out there. You didn’t do anything differently, perhaps, than you might have done someplace else, but there was certainly no idea that this was a paper that was going to break new ground. You were pretty much going to keep doing things the same way they had always done it. Many of the people had been there. I was the first new employee they’d had for a long time. Q: All the way from Iowa. A: Right. Q: Was there anything you remember in particular that caused you to shake your head and say, “No, this isn’t the journalism I want to do” ? A: No, I can’t think of any one thing. It obviously didn’t take me long to figure this out since I was only there for a year before I was starting to look around. But I can’t think of any one thing. Q: What was your salary? A: Sixty-five dollars a week. Q: Sixty-five dollars a week. O.K. So you come back. How do you secure the job at the Cedar Rapids Gazette? A: When I was looking for a job, I sent out resumes and I had a friend that was working at the Champaign Urbana paper and she had said there might be an opening coming up there. So I sent one there and I sent one to the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Again, I knew people at the Gazette and I actually had had the job in Champaign Urbana and then I interviewed at the Gazette and decided that the Gazette job, since it was a split job between editing and reporting, offered more variety. I ended up taking that instead. -- <br><br> Section 3: Q: Do you remember a favorite story you did at the Billings Gazette? A: Not because it was such a wonderful story, but mostly because it was something about the Red Cross. When I got all done with it, I decided I had really done a bang- up job because I had succeeded in making this an interesting story when, really, it wasn’t all that interesting to begin with. The things I was doing out there were pretty routine. Q: So you come back and you’re a reporter, editor for the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Q: How much editing did you do in that position? A: Actually a lot. Keep in mind, I hadn’t ever edited really before. When I’d been at the Daily Iowa, I was editor of the Editorial page, but that was editing in a different way. You were picking wider columns mostly and that kind of thing. At the Gazette, the job I came back to was called the Assistant State Editor. It meant you were making up pages for the Sunday paper and I started to work at the Gazette. I was there a week before the man who was my boss was suddenly gone on vacation because a new child born in his family. I was making up pages and I had never made up pages before. You learn real fast when you’re suddenly doing it. In those days, it wasn’t pages on a computer. You drew the outline on paper and it went out to the back shop where somebody with a line to type machine and, with little slugs of type, put them in a page. It was a wonderful experience. I learned how to make up pages. I was on my own. Nobody was helping me. I was the one doing the editing. I was the one writing the headlines. I was doing things like that that I had never done before. I got off to a good start on it and it’s probably a good way to do it. -- <br><br> Section 4: Q: At the Daily Iowan, do you recall other reporters who subsequently sought careers in journalism whom you would work with? A: There were several. Q: Who? A: A guy name Dan Hensen was at the Gazette at the time. A guy named Ira Capestein went onto the Milwaukee paper, the Milwaukee Journal. There was a woman whose name at the time was Ellie Bens. Flansburg was there as well. He was a year ahead of me. There were a couple others. Drake Mavery was there. He was a year ahead. There were several others there at the time. Q: What made you stay at the Gazette for so many years? How many years was that? A: 45. I didn’t intend to. I thought I’d be there for a couple of years and then move on. I guess there was enough variety in what I was doing that I ended up staying. For 12 years, I was the assistant State editor. That’s the job that was a combination reporting and editing. Then I moved to Sunday Editor and eventually to City Editor. Once I left that job, I never went back to reporting. Once I moved onto Sunday editor, I was always editing. The Gazette was trying a lot of things. There was one point where we were doing projects. I was editing on the projects as well. We sent two people to Brazil and Argentina basically to do a farm story. Brazil and Argentina are big competitors of Iowa with corn and soybeans. We’re doing projects and there were always enough different things going on that I ended up just staying. I’ve talked to other reporter and editors that moved around and I got the same kinds of experiences that they had, only I got it all in one place. Q: What kind of changes did you see in technology and did those changes change the dynamics of the newsroom and your job? A: For the first 25 years there were probably very few changes. You were still using manual typewriters. You were using pike-a-poles. They were still using linotypes out back, but then once they started to move towards computers, there was sort of an interim period where they had IBM Selectrics and punch tapes. It changed the dynamics a lot because you had to spend a lot more time with the technology and making all these changes than you used to have to. What’s interesting to me is when we were still what they’d call “hot metal.” We used to put down the paper. The Gazette had a 12:30 deadline and the paper came up at 1:00. This is when it was an afternoon paper. This was in the process of changing to a morning paper. In a half hour, the paper came up. No newspaper today can do that. You just can’t. You’re pledging buttons and everything’s supposed to be that much faster, but you can’t produce the paper that fast. It changed a lot of things. Some people would say it made it easier. You’ve got computer terminals with spell check and a lot of the chores that you would have had to do by yourself now you’ve got computers that do it for you. There are other things that didn’t change at all. Technology has not changed at all the necessity for you as a reporter or you as an editor, to have strong word skills. Spell check may check the spelling, but it still doesn’t tell you what the words are. In the written word, you’re forced to organize. Writing forces you to be disciplines about what you’re doing in a way that oral communication does not. The basics really haven’t changed that much. If you think you’re going to be a reporter or editor, the basics of what you need to do to accomplish that haven’t changed. The technology, the tools have changed drastically, but what you need to do hasn’t changed. You’ve heard Steve talk often about the need to have clips. That hasn’t changed at all. -- <br><br> Section 5: Q: Why do you prefer editing over reporting? A: At one time I’m not sure I would have said that I did, but I think in the long run I did because it offers you to have a broader role in a story or a project. The reporter has a very definite role and when I was a reporter I loved it. There was one point when I remember thinking, “Boy, I’m having a great time and they’re paying me for this.” And then you get a byline in the process. Editing is anonymous but still you end up shaping the whole project. If you’re the editor, you also have a role in what happens with the project once it’s done and moves onto the next phase. Some people don’t like editing. Some people choose deliberately to stay as a reporter and I think they should be able to do that. I don’t think they should force you into making a change. Sometimes at some companies, they would think if you’re good reporter that he/she should be your good editor. Q: As an editor, are you ever tempted or pressured to cut potentially controversial or biased material from the stories that could maybe put the paper in hot water depending on what the reporter is covering? A: If you’re saying it’s biased, you probably should have it there anyway. The reporter should have made some attempt to make sure you’re getting both sides of the issue. No, I’d have to say there isn’t any pressure. You as the editor need to know the community you’re serving. You need to know what you newspaper is like and who your readers are. There are some things that I, personally, might not find offensive, but because of my experience working at the Gazette, I can lead to the sure conclusion that many readers would find this offensive. So you either don’t use that picture or do something different with it. Newspapers have policies. For instance, the Gazette and many other newspapers would have had a policy that said if you had a fatal accident; the picture did not show bodies. You know what that set of rules are before you go into it. You also want to make sure that the story is fair and that you’re presenting as much as possible on both sides. Sometimes that isn’t possible. I think you use your own judgment. Q: We read that you’re currently working on a photo history book for the Gazette. We’re wondering what that is? A: When I worked at the Gazette before, they had done two books in which the public was encouraged to submit their own photos. Those were handled through the newsroom as a project and, actually, I did those. This one is being handled through the Gazette’s marketing department, but it’s the same kind of project. There were prompts in the papers asking the public to submit old pictures, mostly old pictures, showing people activities in early Cedar Rapids. Actually, that book is done. It’ll be coming out now in early November. The way they’re handling it this time is very much as a commercial project. It’s for sale. They all were, but for this one, they will print 5,000 and that’s all. And of course they hope this leads to many more books. I probably won’t be doing them. -- <br><br> Section 6: Q: What’s your definition of news? A: News, I think, is many things. It’s things other people are interested in. That’s the first thing an editor needs to figure out. The public is interested in things you might not be interested in. Again, you have to know the kind of readers you’re serving; what kinds of things you think they’re interested in. One thing that has changed a lot over the years is that the readers today have much shorter attention spans than they used to. Q: And how does that manifest itself in the newspaper? A: It certainly manifests itself in a drive to have shorter stories, shorter paragraphs, no jumps. A lot of newspapers have gone through this trend of having no jumps, which doesn’t really work. In fact, that’s something that reporters and editors always need to remember is how far do you think people are going to go with you? A lot of people simply don’t read jumps and that’s a fact of life, so you need to figure out how you’re writing the story or how you’re editing the story. That’s why you find a lot of technical devices to try to tell readers what else is down in the story without ever really reading the story. Things I may not think are news, other people find to be newsy. You mentioned crime. Almost universally, people would consider crime to be news. One of the types of news that affects most people in many ways is City Council. She finds it boring. A lot of people would agree with you, a lot of readers would agree with you. And yet those are the things that have potential to influence reader’s lives more than the crime news does. Q: You said, “News is what people are interested in.” Is news also what people ought to be interested in and are not interested in now? A: That would have always been the definition in earlier years. That was one of the reasons that newspapers existed because it was our role to make sure people knew what they needed to vote. One of the most disheartening things I ever remember is that prior to an election, you have short files on everybody running and many, many, many things. On election morning, a woman called up and said “Why haven’t you had anything in the paper about the election?” Well, she was ready to vote that day, so that was the first time she cared to find out who might be running. That’s real typical. It’s typical of exactly the kind of news you’re talking about. I think newspapers still have that ambition a little bit, but because of the way things have changed it’s not quite as strong as it used to be. Q: That’s an important difference. A: It’s a huge difference. Q: What Phyllis is suggesting is news is coverage of what people are interested in or should be interested in. What she’s suggesting is that news is coverage of what people are interested in. The role of the editor is no longer to tell you out there what you ought to know. A: No. Q: You don’t have that space and that freedom any longer. A: No. When you tell your reporters you don’t want anything longer than 10-15 inches for the bulk of stories they’re writing, until you get to something you judge has more magnitude than that. You can get a lot in 10-15 inches. Actually, that’s a real challenge for the reporter. Instead of viewing it one way – most of them tend to think they will have to cut all the good stuff out. For a writer, that’s a bigger challenge. With a 10-15 inch story, you can really do great things, but you have to work harder at it. Sometimes the 10-15 inch stories are better written than the ones that are 25. Frequently they are because you don’t have to spend as much time working on them. When you’re writing a 25-inch story, you keep throwing information in there until you think you’re done. Then you pass it along to the editor and let them take care of it. That’s one thing that reporters do all the time that they shouldn’t. They lose control of their own story. Instead of really working at it to come up with a legitimate 10-15 inches, they allow somebody else – the editor in this case – to make the decisions that they should’ve made in the first place. Reporters can lose control of their own stories and they’ll blame it on the editor when it comes back in the paper. But, really, the first responsibility is theirs. Q: How do you distinguish the difference between what people want to know and what people ought to know. A: A lot of it depends on how much time you spend with your sources. How much time have you spent with the people you’re getting the information from? How much background have you provided yourself with how important it is? If you’re dealing with a crime story, that’s one thing. If you’re dealing with a sports story, that’s something else. Sports stories – sports reporters would dispute this – but sports stories always been one of the easiest to write because they always have a conclusion: somebody won or lost. Other stories don’t have that obvious lead that you start out with. You really have to background yourself enough so that you have an idea of what’s important and what’s not important about what you’re trying to offer. Again, a lot of times reporters don’t do that. They expect to get all of their information from the person they’re talking to instead of having done any background on it themselves. That also means they can’t ask very good questions if they haven’t done enough background. None of this is new. These are the same kind of problems we could’ve talked about 30 years ago. You need to background yourself. You need to be able to ask the right questions. Reporters are always pretty much in control at a certain point. They’re the ones deciding how to ask the questions and what kind of questions to ask. Just the other day I was talking with somebody about objectivity. Really, fairness might be better word when you’re working on a story because a reporter, when they’re deciding what questions to ask, to a certain extent, unless the source brings other information in, you’re controlling what kind of information you get. If you’re lucky, you’ve asked all the right questions and have what you need. If not, you end up with a story that leaves a lot of holes and somebody finds the questions. You need to know enough about your topics so that you’re asking the person the right questions. -- <br><br> Section 7: Q: What are two or three stories, when you look back on your career, you really think these stories mean something to you-- that either effected some change or for some reason they’re favorites for you? A: I’ve worked on a lot of special projects. The Gazette did a special project after 9/11. As far as editing the stories and helping bringing it together, some of those sections were some of the more significant. First of all, there was a special section that was done after 9/11. The public, at that point, was really wanting information, so you knew that this special section was going to be paid attention to. You knew what you chose to do, for some people, was going to be summing up what had happened. Something like that would be one of the more significant things. As far as writing stories—this goes back a long way—the Amish in Iowa. It was a very uproarious time when we were trying to force them to have certified teachers. Those were interesting stories to do because it became a national issue. The 60s when the campus down here was in constant turmoil—for a reporter, those were exciting times because there was a lot going on. My first experience with tear gas was covering a story in the old memorial union. Charles Grassley was on the panel. He was a state legislator at the time. He’s much more moderate now then he was then. Not everybody would probably agree with that, but he is. It was something called the Free Speech Movement and we were all sitting and the place was packed. All of a sudden the doors on one side opened and something was thrown into the room. We didn’t know what it was right away, but it turned out to be tear gas. It drifted across the room and it didn’t take long before you could feel it and everybody had to evacuate. Q: What year was this? A: Oh I don’t remember. I’ve always had a lousy memory for years. Sandy Boyd was president. It was an uproarious time on campus. From a reporter’s standpoint, it was great because there a lot going on all of the time. TV was just starting to come into its element then, too. You could always tell if there was a TV camera around because you’d always see this little knot of people around on the corner, waiting to have their picture taken and the camera would leave and they’d all disappear and they’d all go to another corner. Q: Were there any people who inspired you to go into journalism or any influence you had early on in your career? A: I got interested because a friend of mine and her dad had a weekly paper. I know that’s the reason I got interested. When you think about it, it doesn’t make a lot of sense because somehow I just got interested and once I made the decision, I stayed with it. After I’d started to work, there were many people that I learned from. In those days, frequently you’d have to take dictation on the phone. Some people can dictate off the top of their heads and they’re extremely good at it. There was a man that worked at the Gazette – Frank Nigh. He could dictate 20-inch stories without any notes. You can learn from people that are able to do that. He was also a very ethical kind of man. There are things that you learn sometimes. You have to develop your own code of ethics. I’m sure that some part of mine came form him. Q: How about women mentors? Or were there no women mentors? A: I didn’t have one. I think now, if you would ask young women that, they would say that they did. I probably am for some of the younger women. When I started, there were a couple other women on the Gazette. There was one in Features and there were several women in the Society department. Since I decided I wasn’t going to go that direction, I didn’t consider them mentors. Q: Did you not want to go that direction because you didn’t think that was as significant as being a hard news reporter? A: I wasn’t interested in that kind of news. I think, actually, for many people, that was news. Society news was big news. If you go back into all the early papers, you can tell by looking at how much space was devoted to it. Now, we don’t call it society anymore. We call it lifestyle. Now, if I was coming up and looking for a job, I might consider it as an area to work in because it’s a lot more interesting. They’re doing more issue stories and it’s not defined as society.