Journalism History Made : A Woman Lands the Top Newsroom Job at Major Daily

To the personnel office, Janet Chusmir seemed a bad risk. She was a 33-year-old housewife with two adolescent kids and no job experience.

It was 1963, and even though the job was just women’s editor of the tiny Miami Beach Daily Sun, a community paper owned as a sideline by some executives of the Miami Herald, the word came down from personnel: Skip her.

The Sun failed to take that advice. And last week, at age 57, Chusmir took over as executive editor of the Miami Herald, becoming the first woman in the history of American journalism to be in charge of the newsroom at a major metropolitan daily newspaper.

“This is a landmark event,” said Katharine Fanning, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, previously the most prestigious U.S. newspaper to be edited by a woman.

Still a Minority

According to a 1986 survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 12.4% of the country’s senior newspaper editors are women, though only a fraction of those are top newsroom executives.

What’s more, most top women editors work at smaller, less-prestigious papers.

Until last week, only two papers with circulations more than 100,000 had a woman as top editor: Fanning’s Monitor (circulation 188,000) and the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat & Chronicle (circulation 222,637) owned by Gannett Co., whose editor is Barbara Henry.

From 1983 to 1985, the editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner was Mary Anne Dolan, now a syndicated columnist. However, the paper, whose circulation was then near 300,000, was failing financially and trailed substantially in influence behind the Los Angeles Times.

To a large degree, indeed, the woman’s place in newspapers is still the so-called style or society pages. A survey of 648 newspapers by Jean Gaddy Wilson of the University of Missouri School of Journalism showed that women account for 90% of the “life style” editors in America but only about 20% of city editors in charge of local “hard news.”

Several women have inherited publisherships, along with financial control, from their husbands and then have gone on to carve out distinguished careers of their own. They include Katharine Graham, chairman of Washington Post Co., and Helen K. Copley, chairman of the San Diego-based Copley Newspapers.

So Chusmir’s ascension is viewed by prominent journalists as a breakthrough, particularly due to the Herald’s size and prestige. The paper, flagship of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, is Florida’s largest daily (circulation of 493,823), has won nine Pulitzer Prizes and is commonly ranked among the 10 best papers in the country.

“Miami is too important for us to make a decision (about an editor) based on sex,” said Larry Jinks, senior vice president for news and operations at Miami-based Knight-Ridder, one of the nation’s largest newspaper groups. “We chose Janet because she was absolutely the best person for the job.”

Chusmir’s career path is anomalous. Generally, top editors come from hard news departments such as cityside, foreign news and politics, a tendency Chusmir called “a macho hangover” from bygone days.

Chusmir came up through the features sections, the so-called soft side of the paper.

Traditionally, many editors also start at their papers while young. Chusmir’s predecessor as executive editor in Miami, Heath Meriwether, began as an intern at the Herald after he graduated from college.

Joined Paper Late

Chusmir joined the Herald as a life-style reporter in 1968, when she was 38, after five years at the Miami Beach Daily Sun.

She soon became recognized, in the words of one former colleague, “as one of the best writers on the woman’s page.”

By 1975, Chusmir had become features editor on the city desk; a few months later, editor of the paper’s “Living Today” section; by 1977, assistant managing editor for all feature sections.

As she rose, she often used her experience as a wife and mother to advantage. Herald columnist Gail Meadows recalled that when a top editor asked how she expected to make deadlines, Chusmir shot back: “Did you ever give a dinner party for 60 people?”

Story ideas came from unusual sources, such as finding that her children were getting new sorts of vaccinations because the arrival of so many immigrants had introduced unfamiliar illnesses to Miami.

Chusmir became renowned for her dogged reporting. At the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami, for instance, she bluffed her way into a private party for Hubert H. Humphrey held on a yacht docked in Biscayne Bay by leaving the security guard with the impression that she was there as the date of a prominent banker she knew. When recognized as a reporter by party-goers, she was thrown off the yacht. “I still get mad about that,” she said. “It would have been a wonderful scoop.

“I’ve crawled under banquet tables,” Chusmir said. “I just can’t stand not getting (the story).”

First Woman Publisher

By the end of the decade, according to company sources, Knight-Ridder viewed Chusmir as one of its top women executives, and in 1982 named her its first woman publisher, putting her in charge of the Boulder (Colo.) Daily Camera.

Her husband, Leonard, a professor of management at the University of Miami, moved with her, and became an associate professor in the school of business at the University of Colorado at Denver.

At the Herald, Chusmir is inheriting a paper that has suffered financially and lost circulation in recent years, at least in part because of South Florida’s drastically changing demographics.

Today, the largest segment of the Dade County population is Cuban, Spanish-speaking and politically conservative. To much of that community, the Herald is a white, liberal institution.

Special Qualities

Some journalists, particularly women, said they believe that a woman can bring what the Monitor’s Fanning calls “special qualities of women: sensitive, participative management that will prove very effective in the Miami situation.”

Chusmir herself denied that any special qualities accompany women into the management ranks. “I like to say I put my panty hose on one leg at a time. . . . Some women are very participatory (in their management style) and some are very autocratic.”

Her own style, Chusmir said, was “consultative.” She seeks advice from employees, but “I know that I make the decision.”

Chusmir also said she agreed with her predecessor’s decision to stake out Gary Hart’s house in Washington and publish a story about his weekend there with Miami actress Donna Rice. The story eventually caused Hart to withdraw from the race.

“I think (Hart’s reputation for womanizing) had become a campaign issue, and it was a story that had to be covered and told,” she said.

Chusmir inspires divided reaction among her former employees, some of it passionately negative.

One former reporter of Chusmir’s criticized her for doing “whatever the men above her wanted her to do. She was no different than the climbing corporate men.”

Yet others who have worked for Chusmir said that, on the contrary, she brings a refreshing approach to news.

“She seemed to have a real curiosity about the human side of events, the stories that were intensely personal, in a way that wasn’t typical of the jaded, hard-bitten newspaper view of the world,” said Larry Bloom, editor of the Hartford (Conn.) Courant’s Northeast Magazine and a former Herald employee.

A tall woman with oversized glasses and a still-thick Boston accent, Chusmir is often described as tough and enthusiastic. “She lives and breathes the newspaper business,” said columnist Meadows.

A trademark, say both colleagues and competitors, was bringing a hard news toughness to features, “which is the only way to take the curse of being the ‘ladies section’ off them,” said Andrew Barnes, president and editor of the St. Petersburg Times, Florida’s second-largest paper.

When she wanted a new Living Today editor for the Herald in 1979, for instance, Chusmir sought out one of the two city editors of Newsday in Long Island, N.Y.--Meadows, who had no experience at all in features.

As publisher in Boulder, Chusmir also demonstrated a flair for the bottom line, which may have attracted Knight-Ridder managers. “I think she made budget 44 straight quarters,” said Knight-Ridder President James K. Batten.

May Prove More Adept

Privately, indeed, Herald staffers wonder how Chusmir will balance “the desire to improve journalistically with the need to improve financially,” in one reporter’s words. Optimists say Chusmir is considered more formidable than her male predecessor, Meriwether, and thus may prove more adept at bureaucratic infighting with upper management.

The other most common question is “the untested quality about her because she doesn’t really have any hard news side experience,” said Edward Wasserman, a former Herald staffer and now editor of Review Newspapers, a group of legal and business dailies in South Florida.

The Herald made its name in South Florida as one of the most aggressive hard newspapers in America. “The paper in Boulder was very lively, but a little soft,” said one former colleague and admirer.