We caught up with Monty Cook, who was named the next editor of The Baltimore Sun on Monday. Cook takes over on Jan. 1 from Tim Franklin, who will start a sports journalism center at Indiana University, his alma mater, and hold an endowed chair. Cook talked with us about what it’s like to be a top newsroom leader with a visual journalism history, how that positions him for what’s ahead, and how things may look in Baltimore next year as the paper starts sharing content with The Washington Post. Full interview follows…
SND: Congratulations. It’s always great when a visual journalist gets the top editor spot. Did you see it coming?
Cook: It’s fair to say that I’ve not traveled the traditional route, and to say that I imagined myself as editor when my career began 22 years ago would be a stretch.
When I left college, I just needed a job. So I took a job writing sports for a small newspaper in Morganton, N.C. The sports editor left roughly a week or so after I’d been hired. All of a sudden it wasn’t just a reporting job: I had to learn editing and page layout. Not knowing where to turn, I went to the town’s library. They carried five or six newspapers from around the state, including larger cities like Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh. But after each day’s newspaper was racked, they were tossed in a pile to be thrown out (these were the days before recycling). The librarian told me I could go down in the basement anytime and take whatever newspapers I wanted. So I did. And studying those 1980s designs taught me basic page layout.
It also forced me to think differently about the job. I was having to write the story, the headline, choose photographs and write captions and fit everything into a fixed space. That meant I had to think how each discipline affected the other. And since that time, I’ve always been a curious worker and wanted to understand as much as I could about all jobs — not just in the newsroom but across the company. Understanding how my job fit as part of the larger puzzle helped me perform better. It’s not just me. I can think of a lot of visual journalists who have had that exact same experience.
SND: What are the unique challenges facing The Baltimore Sun? Does your design background position you differently for that work?
Cook: All newspaper companies are feeling similar economic pressures, so in that respect no newspaper has a unique challenge. We’re all finding the way forward. I told our staff a few days ago that they will never hear me utter the phrase “We must do more with less.” Everyone’s weary. Everyone’s working harder. I think we have to work smarter. And that means we can no longer do everything. You prioritize. You make choices. You commit what resources you have to the type of coverage, beats and stories that mean the most to your readers and will have the greatest impact on their lives.
A perfect example of working smarter is the content sharing agreement that we announced this week with The Washington Post. Sharing coverage of the Baltimore and Washington suburbs — as well as coverage of the federal government and sports — will allow us to spend more of our resources on the stories that are unique to The Baltimore Sun and the backbone of our daily report.
As to your second question, I wouldn’t say that the visual journalist part of my background solely positions me to be editor. In 22 years, I have experience at most every job in a newsroom. All first-time editors have areas of strength and areas for growth. You surround yourself with the best people, and The Baltimore Sun has a top-notch staff of reporters and editors. So I’m extremely fortunate in that respect. I’m equal parts idealist, realist and pragmatist. You just try and look at issues broadly. On initiatives, you set your goals and then connect the dots forward until you reach that goal.
SND: How do you hope to tackle those issues and expand the brand across platforms?
Cook: Well, it’s early and there’s much to be learned as we keep moving forward. The “It” book for me in 2008 was finally reading Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail.” What it taught me is that journalism can learn from 21st century companies and how they embrace diverse consumer habits.
Print is a great platform. It’s been around for nearly 600 years now. Print withstood the disruptive technology of radio and television. It’s still a dominant platform but certainly has less dominance because of the Internet. But because of the Internet and our online sites, our stories, audio, video and photographs have many destinations. Crowd-sourcing sites, mobile media, social media networks, micromedia sites and dozens of other platforms can extend the reach of our work and expand our audience.
Newspaper companies are now media companies, and we must continue to embrace these and other emerging platforms. We must create niche products when we see a market segment that is underserved for readers and advertisers. There is still great demand for journalism, news and information. It’s our job to keep delivering that locally and wherever audience can be found.
SND: Do you anticipate a rethinking or reorganization of The Sun as you take the helm in 2009?
Cook: We’ll be looking at a lot of things, including structure. It wouldn’t be smart if we weren’t regularly evaluating ourselves against our competitors, as well as for our readers and our online audience.
Matt Mansfield is vice president of SND and an associate professor for the Medill School of Journalism.
You prioritize. You make choices. You commit what resources you have to the type of coverage, beats and stories that mean the most to your readers and will have the greatest impact on their lives.
And yet 99.9 percent of design dolts are still drooling and chanting about how everything can stay the same.
In many of these discussions, some moron always runs forward to proclaim: “We can have good copy and still obsess about design! One doesn’t eliminate the other.” The stupidity is astounding.
Newspapers don’t have the resources for designer games any longer. We’re going to see very soon which newspapers are serious about covering news and which ones simply want to have picture pages and lists.
The Tribune Co. appears to have made its choice. And it’s not a good one. But maybe the company will fail soon.
The problem with the Sun’s redesigns under Cook over the past few years is that they have masked a loss of real content that readers need. Maybe they don’t “want” all the bad news of our times, but readers need to know the community: The good. The bad. The ugly. Colorful design, big illustrations and photos grace the Sun’s section fronts. Meanwhile, Baltimore is experiencing a spike in homicides—yet again—and political corruption while the newsroom has lost the cultural diversity and talent pool it needs to connect with the majority of its readership which is lower middle class and lower class, most of which disadvantaged in ways the nearly all middle-aged white male editing staff cannot identify with or understand. Readers here don’t care about consumer oriented stories when they can barely afford the groceries and the rent, or when their children are being gunned down in the streets.
Let’s not shortchange the importance of good design. Like streets and highways that are well-planned, built and maintained, good design should be clean, subtle and allow a fluid experience for the reader in the daily digesting of the day’s news just a car merges safely and smoothly into freeway traffic in a morning commute. Bad design is like traffic with unsynchronized traffic lights, pot holes and horns blasting, on a highway to nowhere but more of the same drama that emptied the cubicles this past summer. Sadly, that is the Sun these days.