Ex-Observer editor: Journalism’s biggest mistake was failing to explain itself
Nearly a decade after retiring as executive editor of The Charlotte Observer, Rick Thames still shows up in the newsroom.
Just no longer literally.
“I still have dreams,” says Thames, 72, chuckling. “I wake up thinking I’m in the newsroom. I’m still there, we’re putting out a paper, doing different things. ... For the better part of my life — 40 years — I was in a newsroom.”
Those dreams helped inspire Thames’ new book, “Why Local News: A Memoir and Plea for an Endangered Form of Journalism,” due out later this summer from McFarland & Company.
At first glance, the title sounds like another lament for the decline of local newspapers. It isn’t.
Instead, Thames spends much of the book turning the lens on his own profession, arguing that journalists didn’t do enough to explain their work to readers.
“I think what we missed is — and at times I missed it, too — that we as journalists understand all too well how important our role is in society, and what difference we can make in a community,” he says. “We know it, we’re sold on it, we believe it, and we live by it. But we also assumed that the public understood it as well as we did.
“And it turns out they don’t.”
It’s a striking bit of self-reflection from someone who spent decades leading one of the South’s largest newsrooms.
‘Tell them why you’re reporting it’
Part memoir, part explanation of how reporting works and part defense of community journalism, “Why Local News” draws heavily from the first two decades of his career, beginning with a reporting internship at the Memphis Press-Scimitar in the summer of 1978 before moving to his first full-time reporting job at The Fayetteville Observer.
He recounts covering Memphis during the firefighter and police strikes; investigating Army parachute deaths that prompted policy changes; reporting on the Iran hostage rescue buildup at Fort Bragg; knocking on the door of Delta Force founder Charlie Beckwith; and covering the Jeffrey MacDonald murder trial.
But those stories aren’t really the point, Thames says. They’re the vehicle for a larger argument: helping readers understand the thinking behind the work.
The idea crystallized while he was editor of The Wichita Eagle in Kansas from 1997-2004, when he realized many readers weren’t really questioning the facts — they were questioning the motives.
“I began to understand then that journalists need to have a better, more-responsive relationship with the public,” he says.
“You’re going to have times when even though most people aren’t going to like what you’re reporting, it’s important still to report it. But you also could tell them why you’re reporting it, so they don’t think it’s just to be exploitative.”
He began writing occasional columns explaining why the newsroom made certain decisions and how stories were reported. Readers didn’t always agree, he says. But many appreciated understanding the thinking behind the work. “I would find that people would see us in a different light,” he says. “They would say, ‘OK, we’re going to disagree at times, but he sounds like his heart’s in the right place.’”
That experience convinced him transparency isn’t an add-on to journalism.
It is journalism.
Saving journalism — not newspapers
The challenge only grew during his years leading The Charlotte Observer, where Thames helped steer the newsroom through an era of shrinking staffs, a changing business model and rapidly changing reader habits. As executive editor from 2004 to 2017, he watched the profession wrestle not only with economic disruption but with declining public trust.
He still believes, however, that news organizations can help themselves by spending more time showing readers how reporting is done — explaining why stories were pursued, how information was verified and acknowledging mistakes when they occur.
And although the book chronicles the decline of local newspapers from his perspective, Thames insists it isn’t a plea to preserve print for nostalgia’s sake.
“I’m not advocating that we should keep printed newspapers, by any means,” he says. “But we do need to keep local journalists.”
To Thames, that’s the distinction that matters. Newspapers are a delivery system. Journalism is the public service.
He doesn’t particularly care whether those local reporters work for a legacy newspaper, a nonprofit newsroom, a digital startup or entirely on their own. What matters, he says, is that somebody is covering city hall, attending school board meetings, asking uncomfortable questions and telling the stories that otherwise would go untold.
Communities, he believes, still value accountability reporting. The question is whether they’ll choose to support it.
“A lot of people, when they talk to me, will say, ‘I just hate what happened to newspapers, and I miss the way The Charlotte Observer used to be,’” he says.
His answer has become remarkably simple: “Find that local journalist that you can trust,” he says.
“It may only be one person in your community. But you’ve got to support that journalist, because they can’t work for free.”
