Warren Goes to Washington
“Against the advice of a lot of people who said he had no experience in editing and was a quirky personality who wouldn’t be up to it and would cause trouble”–so Tyner recalls his decision today–he turned Tempo over to Jim Warren. We knew Warren as a brainy, sarcastic workhorse who covered labor and then media for the Tribune and also wrote a weekly column in Tempo on the media and another on magazines. Generally he held management in low regard.
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“Not without design,” says Tyner. This month Tyner appointed Warren to take over the bureau. Says Tyner, “He’s proven himself to be a marvelously sensitive manager of people, which is what the Washington bureau needs right now.”
Warren described the Washington bureau to us as “a group of talented people who have been beaten down emotionally, I think as a result of a very autocratic style of management and by conflicting signals from Chicago about what their collective purpose was. There’s no blueprint for any change. I want to see how they react to being treated like adult human beings.
“I think the Tempo staff is really crazy about him. We’re like little Moonies,” said Cheryl Lavin. “I don’t know if it was planned or not, but he came in with this attitude, “It’s us, the editors and writers, versus them, the big paper’s staff, all the other editors.’ We were like this little guerrilla band. He was very iconoclastic at the meetings. He was a real straight shooter. He talked about the management, what he thought about them, named names, bitched and moaned, and really seemed to be like he was on our side.”
“I think, overall, it’s clear that the bureau is not held in real high esteem there,” said Warren. “I think there is a realization, albeit an ego-deflating one, that we are just not a major player anymore in Washington, for reasons that do include things out of our control. I mean, we’re not read there–why leak to the Tribune? I think I’m going to suggest there are other ways to gain respect than by being one of the boys and girls on the bus, in the plane, and not having the nerve to put in the paper what you really discussed at the dinner party with your powerful friends. I don’t have any great craving to be accepted by the muckety-mucks there. I’d rather be respected for being tough-minded and accurate than sucking up.”
Howard Tyner announced a lot of staff appointments last week. Aside from Warren–no, counting Warren–the most interesting is Margaret Holt as assistant managing editor for sports.
