THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 12, 1997 TAG: 9701100026
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LYNN FEIGENBAUM
LENGTH: 119 lines
Two months ago, Kay Tucker Addis was named editor of The Virginian-Pilot. Although she's still busy getting re-immersed in newsroom routine, I asked if she would take time out to talk to readers about the newspaper and her outlook for the future.
A capsule history: Addis (then Kay McGraw) began her career here in 1974, as a reporter with The Ledger-Star, working her way up to deputy managing editor of the combined Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star in 1984.
During that time she served in a variety of other positions, including editor of The Daily Break. In fact, she hired me as her assistant in 1980 and we worked together again, years later, when she headed the Ledger news team. For the past five years, she led the newspapers' human resources department.
As editor of The Pilot, Addis now oversees the news-gathering operation (the editorial pages are the domain of Keith Monroe). Here are some of her views of the newspaper, both as an editor and - equally important - as a reader.
What are your priorities for the newspaper?
I have loved newspapers since I was a 12-year-old correspondent for the little weekly newspaper in my hometown of Altavista, out in the foothills of Virginia. If I had one goal, it would be to make every reader of The Pilot love newspapers the way I did then, and have ever since.
In a little town like that, the paper was indispensable to a family's life. Things have changed, sure, and the competition for people's time is a lot tougher, but my biggest priority will be to try to regain that feeling among readers that they cannot get through their day without reading The Virginian-Pilot.
Newspaper readers have high expectations. How will you do that?
I know it takes a lot more than emotion to make that happen. Many, many dedicated people at the Pilot have spent the last several years conducting and analyzing research and developing well-thought-out strategies to make our paper more relevant and more useful.
Every day of the week, we have to give readers news and information they need, they want, they can rely on, they can look forward to. We want to provide, every day, a true and compelling picture of what life is like in Hampton Roads.
We want to help readers understand how world and national events affect them - their safety, their health, their pocketbooks. We want readers to see themselves, their neighbors and their friends in our pages.
We want to help make life a little easier for our readers and help them better understand the community in which they live.
Do you have other priorities for newspaper content?
I also care deeply about what I believe are the fundamentals of good journalism - accuracy, fairness, urgency and good writing. Those all are important to me.
I encourage our readers to let you know, Lynn, when we have fallen down in these areas. I want readers to trust The Virginian-Pilot and to rely on it as their hometown paper.
What changes will readers see in the months ahead?
Beginning in mid-February, we will make dozens of improvements to The Pilot. . . The changes will be outlined in more detail early next month.
In general, though, we will increase staff and news space to provide even better and more thorough local news, so folks in each Hampton Roads city can find news of their city in that day's paper. We will add several items geared to readers who want information but don't have a lot of time to spend with the newspaper.
We also will provide other changes designed for readers who want more detail and greater depth on a hot story.
Over the past five years, what bothered you most as a reader?
As a working mother, I often didn't have time to read the entire paper before leaving home. I wanted some information in a hurry - the weather, for instance, or my daily dose of Dilbert.
I was frustrated with annoying errors in the paper - incorrect headlines, people I knew whose names were misspelled, stories that jumped from one page to oblivion, incorrect grammar.
It bothered me when a story was packaged in such a colorful and intricate design that I couldn't read the type.
And, I remember feeling my daughter's disappointment when the high school field hockey game in which she had scored two goals didn't show up in the next morning's paper.
What are the biggest changes in journalism you've seen over the past five years?
The single biggest change is - not surprisingly - technology. Designers create section-front pages on Macintosh computers enabling them to switch layouts rapidly and to see on their screens what the actual page will look like. Pages are transmitted directly from newsroom computers to our production plant nine miles away.
Reporters use the Internet and databases for research. The newspaper now offers an on-line version, Pilot Online.
There are many other dramatic changes. In News, as throughout The Virginian-Pilot, people now are organized into teams to share expertise and improve performance. News teams are organized around topics of coverage, such as public life, criminal justice, education, culture and, believe it or not, ``body and soul,'' which covers health, medicine and religion.
Thanks in part to technology but primarily to our extraordinarily talented team of designers, artists and photographers, the newspaper is much more exciting visually, with more color and better graphics.
And, in many different ways, the newspaper is more reader-centered. That shows up in the extra effort to use headlines, graphics and other type to give readers at-a-glance a lot of information, even if they never read the story.
From a broader perspective, we're relying much more heavily on data and research about Hampton Roads and our readers in making decisions about what to put in each day's paper, instead of relying on instinct, our own personal preferences or what other papers are planning.
We've begun quarterly surveys to gauge readers' satisfaction with The Pilot, and teams will use that information to make more informed decisions.
Many readers say they want news, not opinion, in reporting. Yet journalism has become more analytical as people get their headlines off TV. How do you see resolving this?
I see room for both news and analysis. Different people have different needs for news and information.
Some people just want the headlines, so they can carry on casual conversations at the office water cooler.
At the same time, many people want much more than a headline or news summary. They want to know the background, the key players, why something happened, how it could affect them, what's likely to happen next. They want to understand the news.
And, of course, some folks are most interested in shopping information, comics, recipes, puzzles or TV and movie listings.
No matter what kind of information our readers want, we believe The Pilot can provide that.