Lecture: Cornelia Grumman and James Warren

By Marie Iida

Cornelia Grumman and James Warren, holding Blair at NYU.
Photo: Hazuki Aikawa.

The chubby-cheeked, blue-eyed Blair doesn't have a clue that his parents, James Warren, deputy managing editor of The Chicago Tribune, and Cornelia Grumman, editorial writer in charge of political endorsements for the same newspaper, are journalists of some note. But the students and faculty who, along with the one-year-old Blair, attended Warren and Grumman's lunchtime talk at the NYU Department of Journalism knew full well that Blair's parents were accomplished reporters.

Because the toddler insisted on exploring the department, Warren and Grumman took turns speaking. Warren spoke first, while Grumman attempted—-futilely—-to keep Blair settled on her lap.

Warren, who joined the Chicago Tribune in 1984, is now its deputy managing editor, in charge of the paper's 12 feature sections, including the Sunday magazine and the daily section "Tempo."

It was The Chicago Tribune that brought him and Grumman, his wife of three years, together.

After a newsroom romance at one of the newspapers he worked for as a young reporter turned sour, Warren vowed to avoid relationships with officemates. "But I fell in love with the editorial writer at the Tribune," he confessed. "Part of the success may be that she works on the fourth floor and I work on the fifth floor and we have nothing to do with each other professionally."

Before his marriage in 2001, Warren worked as chief of the Tribune's Washington bureau. He called the period from 1993 to 2001, during which he oversaw the paper's 16-person D.C. team, a "grueling eight years."

Washington, in Warren's opinion, is a small, self-absorbed town where only the big, obvious political issues receive coverage, while the smaller agencies that actually affect most peoples' lives are largely ignored. The Washington media are one "big echo chamber," he said. Instead of doing shoe-leather reporting, running around the FDA or the HSS and putting in the extra legwork needed to really run the truth to ground, said Warren, too many reporters sleepwalk through the role of "White House Guy"—going to dinner parties, being herded into planes like cattle, and getting fed lies by the White House press secretary.

In such a culture, said Warren, some reporters succumb to the temptation of becoming celebrity pundits, appearing frequently on TV news talk shows.

"I did a ton of TV shows, in part because I liked it and because it was clear that it is the coin of the realm there, especially if you work for an out-of-town newspaper," he said. "Part of my frustration came from the fact that people got to know me for being on TV instead of what I was writing about."

Recently, in an article entitled "What Ailes Us," in the September, 2004 issue of The Washington Weekly, Warren noted the increase of right-leaning sentiment in American media, charting it through the rise of media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch, the power behind The Fox News Channel. Ironically, the article sparked nonstop offers from Fox producers to appear on the network's shows, said Warren.

Yet that wasn't the first time Warren was invited to play the role of attacking head, on talk shows.

"I wish one could come up with a different broadcasting cable paradigm to discuss public issues rather then folks yelling at one another," he said. "It's absurd, particularly since these issues are so complex."

Warren also touched on the fear of declining readership and the ascendancy of the Internet, two factors he believes are inspiring too many print publications to embrace a short, stripped-down article format in the mistaken belief that quick hits of information, long on images and short on historical background or political context, will appeal to time-starved readers.

"I think it's a huge mistake," he said. In his opinion, there is a huge discrepancy between what today's readers actually want to read and newspaper publishers' and editors' assumptions about what they want to read.

Warren believes that the "just-the-facts" tone that characterizes hard news stories—-traditionally, the lifeblood of print journalism—-no longer strikes a responsive chord with readers. Today's readers are looking for news that engages them on a humanistic level, he suggested—-hard news that is as emotionally eloquent and stylistically fluent as it is factually accurate.

As an example, Warren cited the Tribune's coverage of a tornado that caused devastating damage in Utica, Illinois on April 20, 2004. Many reporters left town after covering the disaster's aftermath. By contrast, Warren sent out the Tribune's single best writer, Julia Keller, assigning her to live in Utica long enough to piece together the night disaster struck from the multiple perspectives of various sources, as well as the deeper story of the tornado's aftermath—-how people tried to cope, and how tragedy changed the town. The Tribune ran a three-part series on the storm, the first of which was titled, "A Wicked Wind Takes Aim" (December 5, 2004). "The opening [of the article] was very evocative," said Warren. "It was about how just 10 seconds can change your life."

Also, Warren laments the fact that the public no longer associates investigative journalism with newspaper journalism. Instead, he claims, news consumers turn to local television for consumer-affairs exposés on everything from government scandals to food safety-related issues.

"And why is that? Because of all those incessant, moronic, hyped-up ads that we get all day," he said, in the voice of a TV anchor hyping one of those breaking news reports that pepper the Fox News Channel's evening shows. "That stuff has had a tremendous effect on people, [creating the widespread impression] that there's no difference between cheapo consumer stories and long-form, heavily reported investigative stories that we may spend a year or year and a half on."

"It doesn't matter where you're doing journalism; there are always good stories," says Grumman. "It's all a matter of how well you tell them."

Depth and breadth can only come out of painstaking research and a reporter's personal passion for a story, Warren insisted—the kind of reporting that is exemplified, it just so happens, by the work of his wife, Cornelia Grumman.

Grumman took the stage after Warren, who took over the job of chasing after Blair.

Grumman, a graduate of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (where she earned a master's in public policy), started at The Chicago Tribune as a metropolitan, state government, and Internet reporter. In the year 2000, she joined the editorial board, where she focused on social policy, education, juvenile justice, and the death penalty.

On joining the paper's editorial board, Grumman realized that she had never really read the editorial page as carefully as she did the other pages. One reason for that, she confessed, was that the section struck her as unreadably dull.

"So I ended up doing what I knew how to do, which was report," she said. "I had no idea how to write an editorial. So I thought, 'The only way I'll have any authority [is] to report this to death and really know what the hell [I'm] talking about, and couple that with some lively writing.'"

Grumman also noticed that social policy issues, one of her personal passions, were not being covered well, if at all, on the editorial page. In her opinion, many papers neglect such issues, a sin of omission she finds unfortunate, since the main reason people became journalists, when she joined the profession, was to right social wrongs by writing about them.

"The bread and butter of journalism, no matter what you're writing in the future, are the bond issues," said Grumman, "going to bars with cops and finding out what their lives are like, [investigating] school board issues and the politics behind [them]. Journalists are such important watchdogs of our government. [They] make sure those who have public trust act accordingly."

Their interest sparked by a 1998 story in which a convicted murderer, Anthony Porter, won a reprieve from the Illinois Supreme Court 50 hours before he was due to be executed, Grumman and a team of Tribune investigative reporters started focusing on the Illinois capital punishment system. They began by devoting a year to looking at every single case on Illinois' death row. Grumman followed up the reporters' investigations with "Restoring Justice, a five-part series of editorials that won a Pulitzer prize.

"I wanted to follow up on the editorial page," she said, "not just saying 'Amen!' to what the reporters wrote, but taking it to the next step. We've identified the problems of judges not knowing the law, prosecutors overstepping their bounds, crime lab technicians testifying falsely, and defense lawyers falling asleep during the trials, so I wanted to look at how we can reform the system."

From the moment she joined the editorial board in 2000, said Grumman, she started writing editorials that pressed for solutions to what ailed Illinois's justice system. She advocated the videotaping of interrogations and confessions, and the creation of commissions to examine breakdowns in the criminal justice system so that the same mistakes will not be repeated—"sort of like the NTBC (National Transportation Safety Board) that goes in after a plane crash," she said. Grumman said that the years of investigations and reporting by the Tribune team paid off when the Illinois state legislature passed legislation implementing nearly all of her suggestions.

She called the influence that a piece of editorial writing can have, in changing laws and institutions for the better, "cathartic." Her favorite editorial, she said, was a piece on Heidi, a four-year-old girl with gums so damaged after years of neglect and abuse that she was restricted to a liquid diet. The day after her article on Heidi appeared, Grumman received 50 phone calls, all of them from people wanting to pay for Heidi's dental work. By the third day after the article ran, a dental insurer had agreed to cover Heidi's dental care.

During the question-and-answer section that followed the couple's lecture, Warren was asked how the economics of the newspaper industry affect newspapers' relationships with their readers.

Today, Warren said, television media never hesitate to spend a huge percentage of their budgets on marketing and promotion. As a result, he argued, they have a significant impact on the public's perceptions of them. By contrast, he said, the newspaper industry has looked the other way when it comes to marketing, helping to foster a perception of newspapers as self-righteous and condescending.

"I think the passion, the personal connection that people had to their local papers, has changed recently, and that is a tremendous challenge to our traditional value system," he said.

Warren is concerned that newspapers are seen as boring, a career dead-end for ambitious young reporters. "Something tells me that we have not made a strong enough case to young, talented people," he said, that a newspaper job can be exciting as well as emotionally rewarding. For his money, Warren believes that, for a talented, hard-working newspaper reporter, the possibilities for career advancement and job satisfaction are almost unlimited. From personality profiles to even the home and garden section, he said, there's no dearth of opportunities for good writers at the Tribune.

Grumman was asked whether the transition from being a reporter to a member of the editorial board has changed her stance at work.

Grumman answered that for other newspapers, such as The New York Times, an "absolute iron wall" exists between reporters and the editorial board. But such firewalls don't exist at smaller newspapers, such as the Tribune, she said, where it would be unrealistic to expect its small, 10-person editorial board to not speak with reporters. "I often ask the reporters to read [my editorial piece] for accuracy," she said. "I don't ask for their opinion, but I want to know if I got all my facts correct. Moreover, she notes, asking reporters to vet her op-eds has helped her "gain a perspective on how journalists only get to use about 10% of what's in their notebooks. They usually know so much more than whatever gets in the paper."

At the end of the discussion, Grumman was asked how being a mother has changed her perspective as a journalist.

"I don't think it has necessarily changed my perspective," she said. "I have always been committed to writing about child warfare and education. I've always had the mindset that it's not about the parents, the teachers, the policymakers; it's about the kids."

In terms of family life, however, Grumman said she is at a point where she is ready to go part-time and spend more time with her son. She might try to write a book while working part-time, she speculated.

"The hours are tough," added Warren. "But maybe the little guy will force us to change our workaholic ways."