Balancing acts

“Publishers to meet in Pasadena,” stated the Star-News headline on a blurb that caught my eye the other day, unleashing a career’s worth of memories. “The West Coast Black Publishers Association will hold its 25th annual conference Thursday through Saturday at the Pasadena Hilton, 168 S. Los Robles Ave.,” the three-graph story began.

Except perhaps for those involved with the growing black publishing trade, like Pasadena attorney Joe Hopkins and his wife, Ruthie, publishers and editors of the play-it-as-it-lays Pasadena Journal, few may have even noticed that little item buried inside the local daily.

While it is noteworthy that Joe is now president of the association — a fact omitted in the brief — that’s not why this otherwise innocuous item attracted my attention. The fact is, when I was starting out in journalism a quarter-century ago, and a few years before Joe and Ruthie started up the Journal in Pasadena, I was part of that venerable organization as the editor of a newspaper owned by an association founding member, Joe Coley.

Mr. Coley, as Ruthie Hopkins calls him, has been dead for some time now. As I recall, he had some type of problem, throat cancer I assumed, which required him to speak by holding a buzzbox up to his neck. At the time, Coley already owned the Bakersfield News Observer and was looking to expand that operation into Los Angeles. He set up The Bay News Observer in an old office in the Crenshaw Mall that had been used as a campaign headquarters for former LA City Councilman Nate Holden during his successful bid for the state Senate. Through a friend, I learned of the opening in the summer of 1986 and got the job — a white editor of a black-owned newspaper. Unheard of, then and now.

Joe was not shy about what he wanted: chamber of commerce news, more business stories, more positive stories, more light and brights, or warm and fuzzies, as they are called — news aimed at creating a perception of calm and prosperity in a place that was really fraught with danger, violence and dispair; a place that rarely got coverage from the major papers for anything but its violent side.

Here, I found, people were seeking some type of voice of their own to vent the frustration and feelings of loss they had experienced as a result of all that violence and neglect by not just the media but also the local political machinery.

I soon was able to do everything that Joe wanted, or so I thought. Probably not well, but I did them. But I really wanted to do other things, and who could blame me? Gang violence and public shootings in that neighborhood were fairly commonplace back then. Plus, there was a serial killer running amok, credited with strangling 14 women over the course of just a few years. A Sheriff’s Department and LAPD task force had put together a $25,000 reward for the arrest of the so-called South Side Slayer.

After awhile, I was staying very late at the office, hanging up maps to pinpoint the locations where police found the remains of the Slayer’s victims and calling for help from a friend who worked as a private investigator for insurance companies. After turning in my umpteenth story on another grieving relative of another victim of this guy, Joe decided to pull the plug.

“What is this shit?” he buzz-yelled at me over the phone one day.

“Oh, so all that I’m giving you is shit, is it?” I retorted defensively.

“No, it’s not shit. It’s actually pretty good,” he said, his scratchy voice suddenly falling a decibel or two with resignation. “But it’s not what I need you to do.”

I took what he said as a declaration of war and not as the words of a guy who was only trying to help me help him run a business, one that he believed was being hurt by all of these depressing stories that I was writing. That’s because back then I had no concept of what his end of the business entailed. I didn’t know what it took to sell an ad around a picture of a dead person or a police composite sketch of a suspected murderer. Back then, I didn’t think light and brights had any place in journalism. And he drove to the office the following Friday — all as police were closing off Crenshaw Boulevard following another shooting death in the street earlier that day — and fired me with a handshake.

But you know what? I was wrong. He was too, only not as much. The way I see things now, a newspaper’s place in any community requires it to be the voice of reason and calm in times of crisis, and not a continuously ranting oracle of doom. In short, a newspaper needs to be balanced if it is to be believed and trusted. And warm and fuzzies — love ‘em or hate ‘em — are sometimes necessary to ensure readers that you really are on their side.

Until recently, I never had the opportunity or the inclination to thank Joe for that little life lesson.
Thanks, Joe C. Have a great convention, everyone.

For more on the convention, call (626) 798-3972.