Backgrounder: James Warren

By Marie Iida

James Warren
James Warren at NYU.
Photo: Hazuki Aikawa.

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Lecture: Cornelia Grumman and James Warren

"For those who really and truly want to be successes in this business, I don't think you could do anything better than to get yourself in a position [...] where you will have to work our butt off, doing tons of stories, talking to enough politicians so you wind up with a pretty good bullshit detector so you know when they're lying, [...] or waiting in some cold hotel lobby until three in the morning so you can get one of the negotiators in a big labor dispute to tell you what's going on. It's very old-fashioned."  That was the advice James Warren, Deputy Managing Editor of the Chicago Tribune wrote in the book, The Business of Journalism (ed. William Serrin, 2000).

True to his own words of wisdom, James Warren's rise to Journalistic fame was old-fashioned—he started from the bottom up, working like a dog and writing a zillion stories in the process.

When he graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts as an English major, Warren had never written a serious news story, or had any newspaper experience.  Yet after a year abroad in Europe where he studied German, he decided to use the contacts he had at the Newark Star Ledger, in New Jersey. In the three years that ensued, Warren diligently learned the business by covering everything from garden parties to murders.  

"To the extent I had any overarching desire in going to Washington, it was that our then 16-person contingent should inspect the town more as if we were foreign correspondents, reporting back to folks in the Midwest on an important place with a particular, even peculiar, culture and set of mores."

In 1977, in search of better pay and better working conditions, he applied and landed a job in the financial section of the Chicago Sun-Times.  In the seven years at the newspaper, Warren was a business reporter, general assignment reporter, legal affairs reporter, and labor writer.

Warren then went on to become a labor and legal affairs writer at the Chicago Tribune in 1984.  After yet again being switched to a media writer, "in an odd move they made me editor-in-chief of their feature section called 'Tempo'" he said in an interview for Wolverton Mountain Enterprises in 2002.

It was in the mid-December of 1993 that Warren got the nod from the editor in chief of the Tribune to become the Washington bureau chief of the paper.  Though the editor had no blueprints of renovation for the very traditional, newspaper-only bureau, Warren had his own set of ambition for Washington.

"To the extent I had any overarching desire in going to Washington, it was that our then 16-person contingent should inspect the town more as if we were foreign correspondents, reporting back to folks in the Midwest on an important place with a particular, even peculiar, culture and set of mores," he wrote in The Business of Journalism.

Yet at the Washington post, Warren quickly learned that he had stepped into a culture he later indicted in the November/December 1994 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review as "a world in which access becomes a god" and "the rule is sucking up to power."  In such a world, Warren found many of his fellow journalists falling prey to a pernicious practice of self-censorship—"the many subtle and not-so-subtle ways we may protect sources, protect people we want to stay friendly with," he wrote in The Business of Journalism.

Refusing to turn a blind eye on the press's own ethical lapses, Warren first overhauled the bureau's beat structure, which had previously focused on Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon, and shifted its focus toward lobbyists and other power brokers.  He also turned his Sunday column into a bully pulpit, exposing the clubby ways of the D.C.'s star journalists—most of whom worked for television networks with large public visibility.  He campaigned against these celebrity journalists who accept fat paychecks for giving speeches to the very organizations they cover. His targets included Lesley Stahl of CBS' 60 Minutes; Tim Russert, the host of NBC's Meet the Press; Jack Nelson, veteran reporter and then chief of the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times.

His number one target however, was Cokie Roberts, an ABC News commentator and senior news analyst for NPR.  Dubbing her as "a doyenne of Washington's mediatocracy," Warren chronicled Robert's speechifying in his regular column, "Cokie Watch."

"Cokie Roberts [...] who in Washington is as close to social media aristocracy as one gets and also queen of the moonlighters, took twenty thousand dollars form one health-care association right smack in the middle of the very health-care debate she was covering as the network's congressional reporter," he wrote in one installment. 

Warren's criticism led number of news organizations such as Time Magazine to draft new policies to regulate the practice of honoraria. Yet others were highly critical of his work. "Here's a guy who came to Washington, knows nothing about these reporters, and smarts off a lot," said Jack Nelson in the Columbia Journalism Review.

When he wasn't excoriating A-list D.C. journalists for sucking up to power, Warren busied himself organizing the Tribune's multimedia news bureau, the first in the newspaper industry. In 1995, Tribune's Media Center opened in Washington, D.C., which brought together the newsgathering operations of Tribune's newspapers and television stations.  Warren also orchestrated a weekly "D.C.Journal" for ChicagoLand TV, or CLTV, the Chicago area's first and only 24-hour all-news cable channel. 

Though Warren often ridiculed Washington talk shows such as CNN's The McLaughlin Group, he is aware of the benefits that TV exposure can have on a journalist. "Fewer people see newspapers as an essential part of their lives, and that's unfortunate.  They turn toward the T.V. and the internet," he said in the interview for the Wolverton Mountain Enterprises. "I think it is both inevitable and fraught with certain perils when it comes to informing the populace in a democratic society."

In what may be seen as his ironic concession to a world in which newspaper circulation continues to dwindle, Warren himself appeared as a regular panelist on Capital Gang Sunday, a CNN's political talk show that aired from 1995 to 1998.

"For me, the important thing was seeing if I could avoid the premeditated combative silliness of it all by being prepared and at least trying to be thoughtful," he wrote, in The Business of Journalism. "I'd like to think I've accomplished that, but I don't doubt that some will cry 'Hypocrisy!'"

For now,  Warren is focusing on his position as the Deputy Managing Editor of the Tribune—a position that requires him to oversee about 130 people and manage the Sunday magazine, the daily feature, the health and living, women's news, travel and many other sections in the newspaper.  "Now I am in the position where I can actually change things," he said in the interview. "My first target consideration was our main feature section, Tempo. My goal is to turn it into the best daily feature section in the country."

Known and even feared as a media watchdog, respected as an innovative bureau chief, James Warren has left an indelible mark in the industry. 

"The days when the press corps was led by Midwestern newspaper legends like Peter Lisagor and Marquis Childs are gone," wrote Kim Isaac Eisler, in The Washingtonian Magazine, which chose Warren as one of the 50 best and most influential journalists in 2001. "But the best of those left is the Chicago Tribune's Jim Warren."

Marie Iida is a junior at NYU, where she is majoring in print journalism.

SOURCES

RELATED LINKS

Rieder, Rem. "Both Sides of the Street." American Journalism Review. http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=2808 (Mar. 2003).
* Warren, James. "More Nixon Tapes." The Atlantic Monthly. Sept. 2004: 101+
* Warren, James. "What Ailes Us." The Washington Monthly. Sept. 2004: 49+

 


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