Lack of a journalism school has never kept the University of Vermont from taking a part in the education of fine journalists. Trace this heritage back to the nineteenth century and you’ll find New York Times founder Henry Jarvis Raymond, UVM Class of 1840, a man one expert called “the prophet and progenitor of the best of modern journalism.” In this issue, VQ checks in with three alumni and modern journalists of more recent vintage who have made their ways via different media paths. Tony Marro ’65 closed out a distinguished newspaper career with sixteen years as editor of one of the nation’s largest dailies. Dan Gillmor ’81 followed a fork in the road from newspaper work and has become a leading mind and voice for the grassroots journalism seeded by the Internet revolution. And Laura Bernardini ’95 has risen through the ranks at CNN, where as a senior producer working with reporter John King she helps to drive twenty-four-hour cable news coverage of a historic race for the White House.
photograph courtesy Tony Marro
TONY MARRO ’65
Retired editor of Newsday
Investigative reporter on two Pulitzer Prize winning teams
As a newspaper reporter focused on the U.S. Department of Justice, Tony Marro covered Watergate and the 1970s’ deep well of Washington scandal. In newspaper leadership roles, he spent six years as managing editor followed by sixteen years as editor of Newsday, Long Island’s dominant newspaper and one of the nation’s largest. Marro was a member of Newsday reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 1970 and 1974; during his years in editorial jobs, the paper collected another dozen Pulitzers. But when he’s considering the burden of responsibility on a journalist, he reaches beyond Washington and New York to his first job in the business, as a teenager covering sports for his hometown paper, Vermont’s Rutland Herald.
Recounting the cautionary tale, Marro sits in the living room of his home in Bennington, a remodeled 19th-century schoolhouse. He and his wife, Jackie (Cleary) Marro ’66, found quiet in this Vermont retreat for years. In retirement, they split time between Bennington and their home in Scituate, Rhode Island.
As Marro tells it, his reminder of just how much “words matter” came several years ago when he attended a farewell party for a Mount Saint Joseph Academy football coach. One of the longtime coaches at the school collared him to dredge up a sore point, a story Marro wrote about the MSJ-Brattleboro game in 1958. (He had questioned the coach’s decision to install a new defense three days before the game. Lightly prepared, the team executed poorly, lost.) “He was still simmering about it forty years later,” Marro says with wonder. “You would have thought the statute of limitations would have passed.”
“At the Herald you learned very quickly that people paid attention to what you wrote. Words could not only please people, but they could hurt people; they could embarrass people; they could make people angry.” Living in a small town, “you see people every day who make you realize that it’s important to get it as right as you can and be careful with it.”
Marro would apply the small town paper ethics to big city, national scope journalism in his work at Newsday, The New York Times, and Newsweek magazine. Don’t get him wrong, though—angering or embarrassing the subject of a story isn’t a bad thing if one’s facts are straight. (For the record, Marro stands by his criticism of MSJ’s hasty switch to a 4-4 defense.) In a farewell talk to the Newsday staff upon his retirement in August 2003, the veteran editor summed up the essence of journalism: “It’s still just a matter of men and women going out and finding out things that people don’t want them to know, and then telling all of the rest of us about it. With all the necessary care and balance and context and perspectives needed to make it an honest account.”
A reporter during a golden era for American investigative journalism, he learned much about his craft from Bob Greene, longtime head of Newsday’s investigative unit. As part of “The Greene Team,” Marro’s reporting contributed to Newsday’s public service Pulitzers for stories on Long Island land scandals and heroin trafficking. Every breakthrough was built upon days of chasing details and the inevitable dead-ends. After Sen. Edward Kennedy drove into the channel at Chappaquiddick, Marro jumped off the bridge to test the flow of the current. “It was not a great moment in investigative reporting,” he qualifies, yet the moment illustrates the intense “need to know” that drove all his work. Colleague Les Payne said that Marro’s curiosity and a measure of nerve made him a great reporter. “He asked questions no one else dared ask.”
When Marro moved up in the Newsday hierarchy, he was known as “a reporter’s editor,” something like a “player’s coach” in sports, the kind of guy who knows the game firsthand and gives his charges room to play it. “Some editors get angry a half dozen times before their second cup of coffee,” Payne said in a tribute upon Marro’s retirement. “In all the years I’ve known Tony, I’ve seen him deeply angry in the city room only once.” Marro was known as a listener, a moderator, a steady hand. Though his roots were in the newsroom, he had to balance the business needs, the space demands of advertising, the deadlines of production and circulation. “You’ve got to be able to anticipate demands, head them off, and decide which fight you’re going to fight,” Marro says.
When he made up his mind to retire, Marro says he was determined to make a clean break from the paper. He had no interest in being a former editor poring over each day’s paper with a litany of second-guessing. In rapid succession after retirement, the Marros sold their house, their sailboat, a successful shop Jackie started in Southport, and the 1970 Mach I Mustang. The day after his farewell party, the Marros were on the road for Bennington.
Gardening and writing are central pastimes for Marro these days. He’s disciplined about the latter, sitting down at his desk regularly to craft something more personal “after years of writing vaguely threatening memos about expense accounts.” Fiction, memoir, he doesn’t say exactly where his focus is, but adds, “it might be only for myself.”
After decades of pounding out copy on deadline and shepherding a newspaper read by hundreds of thousands, who could argue that Tony Marro has earned the right to a few words for himself.
photo by Elisabeth Fall
DAN GILLMOR ’81
Author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People
Director of the Center for Citizen Media
But for a 300 baud acoustic modem, Dan Gillmor’s career as a newspaperman and his guiding role in the rise of Internet-driven grassroots journalism might have never been. Gillmor was a fledgling reporter for a tiny Vermont weekly when he had the brass to call up the New York Times and offer his services as a stringer. When the paper began to give him assignments, Gillmor fired up his early-eighties PC and modem to send his stories from Vermont to Manhattan.
It was the first of many instances where Gillmor’s journalistic skills, technological bent, and a deep-rooted drive to continually learn would shape his path. While Gillmor spent the next several years writing occasional articles for the Times and the Boston Globe, he continued to hone his journalism skills as a reporter at Vermont newspapers, developing an affinity for digging into a complex, seemingly opaque story such as utility rate structure and making it accessible and human.
As a reporter focused on technology for the San Jose Mercury News in the 1990s, Gillmor covered the height of the dot-com boom from the heart of dot-com culture. The blog he wrote for SiliconValley.com during that era is widely credited as being the first by a journalist for a traditional media company. As Gillmor surfed out on the edge of that Internet wave, he made a realization that was both humbling—“my readers are smarter than I am”—and revolutionary—“the immediacy, reach, and opportunity for dialogue created by the Internet would change the way information moves through society.” Gillmor’s research and thinking on this quicksilver evolution were published in his 2004 book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People (O’Reilly Media).
If the name and face of Dan Gillmor have a vague familiarity to alumni of the seventies, it may be due to the fact that long before Gillmor was plugged into the Internet, he was plugging into an amp as a lead singer and guitarist for Road Apple, a popular Vermont-based band of the era. (Gillmor: “We were kind of a pre-Phish Phish—extended solos and played whatever we felt like.”) The native of upstate New York had originally begun his education at Middlebury College, but left school mid-year as a sophomore for life as a musician. Seven years later, he worked back into school part-time at UVM before a full return, eventually graduating Phi Beta Kappa with his bachelor’s in political science.
Gillmor credits Alan Broughton, professor emeritus of English, for being one of the first people “who convinced me I could actually write.” After graduation, a number of newspaper editors would provide similar support, helping Gillmor grow as a reporter and writer. “I had all these people through my career who said we’re going to take a chance with you and don’t screw up—or do screw up, but learn from it,” he says.
Gillmor’s career is moving many directions these days—asked where he lives, he deadpans, “United Airlines”—but his emphasis is on teaching. In January, he became director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications. He’s also director of the Center for Citizen Media, a joint project with ASU and Harvard University’s Berman Center for Internet & Society.
While journalists of Gillmor’s generation have learned about the Internet on-the-job, his work at Arizona State promises to bring the next generation into newsrooms better equipped to meet the challenges and opportunities. “We want to help students understand the frontiers of digital media as it applies to journalism and understand it in the context of risk taking—trying not just the things that work, but the things that don’t—seeing that this is hard, that it’s risky, but that risk is great.”
Future journalists, particularly those hoping to work for daily newspapers, must be open to change and comfortable with risk. The trajectory of newspaper economics is clearly troubling, Gillmor says. While he acknowledge transitions ahead will be difficult, he does see promise for what might emerge. “The fervor of development, the ease of experimenting, the ubiquity of tools and of access to what they create is creating a radically interesting time for experimentation and new models both on the journalism and on the business side,” he says.
While the future of journalism is in flux, one thing that is certain for journalists is the need to roll with the change. For Gillmor, the continual learning process at the core of a journalist’s work has always been the fundamental attraction. “I enjoy writing, but reporting is the cool part,” he says. “What other jobs let you call up people who either normally won’t talk to the public or charge $100 to $500 per hour to talk…and they spend hours with you? This is a gift.”
photo by David S. Holloway/Getty Images for CNN
LAURA BERNARDINI ’95
Senior producer, CNN
High-Profile Assignments:
2008 Presidential race; Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
As CNN’s ratings spike during the 2008 presidential primary season, one attraction to viewers might be that mesmerizing election map piloted by correspondent John King. Breaking news meets video game, with the tap of a finger, a slide of his hand, King uses the interactive technology to make plain the rural counties going Clinton or the urban areas surging Obama, and embark on hypothetical marches to the convention through that elusive delegate math.
In April, speaking on the phone during a relative calm in a whirlwind professional life, Laura Bernardini, CNN senior producer working with King, laughs and reveals, “I have actually touched the map.” She has high praise for how the gadget merges editorial and technology, and for all she has learned working with King over the past year.
A television news producer’s job is multi-faceted and often built on a strongly collaborative relationship with the on-air reporter. Working with King, Bernardini helps to develop story ideas, conducts research, and manages logistics. During the primary season, King and Bernardini teamed on covering Sen. John McCain’s successful run for the Republican presidential nomination.
Several weeks before speaking with VQ, Bernardini and King were with McCain on a trip to the Middle East. Getting a CNN team from Baghdad to Jordan to Israel typifies the situations Bernardini sorts through daily. “I had about three different plans in my head for how we were going to accomplish that,” she says. “The best producers in the world are the ones who can juggle the editorial, and the logistical, and the future planning. You’ve got to know what you’re doing today, what you’re doing tomorrow, and how that impacts what you’re going to be doing in a week or two.”
During her twelve years with CNN, easily the greatest test of Bernardini’s news sense and street smarts came when the network sent her to New Orleans a week after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. The first several weeks of what would turn into a months-long assignment were around-the-clock work. “It was eerie because we were the only people who were non-military, non-contractor, non-police who were allowed in the city after hours,” Bernardini recalls. “Everyone there just kept pinching themselves and saying, ‘This is the United States.’” The impact of the experience still lingers. “To see that suffering and the will of the human spirit was incredible. I still to this day stay in touch with people in New Orleans; it’s an amazing, amazing city.”
The ravenous news appetite of a twenty-four-hour cable network makes Bernardini’s job a demanding one, but she says she’s inspired by the opportunity to be eyewitness to history and driven by a journalist’s fundamental code “to be first, to be right.”
One place Bernardini’s work won’t take her is on camera. Behind-the-scenes is where she excels and where she wants to be. “If I end up on air,” she’s fond of saying, “something has gone dramatically wrong.”