GR EXTRA!

Deborah Howell, a tenacious, feisty, caring leader

Bruce Nelson, Guild Sector Rep.

03 Jan 2010

newsguild.org

The tenacity and feistiness that marked Deborah Howell’s career in newsroom management also served her well as a Guild leader. She could pound on the table and cuss a blue streak in defense of an issue that was important to her. But because belligerence alone doesn’t always work, Deborah made sure her strategic repertoire was always well stocked. 

She led a Guild bargaining committee during testy negotiations at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune back in the 1970s.  It was 3 a.m. and a settlement was beginning to emerge. There was only one unresolved matter. The Guild wanted higher raises for a small group of low paid clerical workers.  Management was resisting, betting the farm – correctly – that the Guild wouldn’t strike over that issue.  Deborah was crestfallen. She had championed this cause for months, her voice hoarse from flinging endless arguments that seemed to go nowhere.  

As dawn approached, the company negotiators sat patiently waiting for the Guild’s surrender on this final issue.  Deborah’s hands slowly brought her head to rest on the bargaining table. A conference room that only minutes earlier had been filled with her amazingly versatile conjugation of the f-word was now enveloped in an eerie silence.  

Deborah slowly raised her head to the full upright position.  She just sat there for a minute or two, playing to the power of uncomfortable silence as she made eye contact with every member of the management committee. When she finally spoke, her voice was so soft that company negotiators had to lean their heads forward to hear. Each word was delivered at a slow, measured clip. 

“There,” she said, “is. . . nothing. . .left. . .for. . .me. . .to. . .do. . .but. . .cry.”  She said nothing else. The management representatives watched a tear or two trickle down Deborah’s face before they got up and left the room.  They came back 30 minutes later and agreed to the higher raises for the lower paid workers.  

This was hardly a seminal moment in a career comprised of executive editorial leadership roles at Knight-Ridder, Newhouse and the Washington Post.  But it was vintage Deborah Howell – always focused on the goal, comfortable with her true grit persona, but equally in touch with a softer side. 

Her tragic death is being met with an outpouring of grief from literally hundreds of journalists whose lives she so vitally affected and shaped.  They weren’t simply “content providers” or “FTEs” to Deborah.  She called them “friends” and “family” and she meant it.  It was a simple formula to her – you get good journalism by hiring good people and working with each of them to make them even better, the best that they can be.  That strategic repertoire of hers was always filled, from harangues to hugs.  

I was working for the Guild in Minnesota during the early 1980s when Deborah was Executive Editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Every once in a while, I’d get a complaint about her from one of our members.  I made it a practice to do nothing for at least 48 hours because I knew there was a good chance that she would reach further into her bag of strategies. It was not at all unusual for Editor Howell to call an underperforming reporter’s story a “piece of shit,” and then show up at her house the next morning with a tin of hot muffins and an idea or two on how to improve her work. So I did what I always did when I worked with Deborah – threw away the old rules and wrote new ones.  In this case: Never file a grievance before the muffins come. 

No, the newspaper business isn’t what it once was and there is no turning back.  But Deborah Howell left a couple of important lessons for those struggling to create the new business model: manage people, not just budgets, and have more than one strategy.