Ellen Soeteber, editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch since January 2001, surprised her newsroom earlier this month by announcing that, after working in “high-stress, all-consuming jobs for 18 straight years,” it was time for her to move on. Her resignation follows a lengthy journalism career that has included stints at Chicago Today, the Chicago Tribune, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, where Soeteber was managing editor from 1994 to early 2001. As metro editor at the Tribune, Soeteber led an investigation of corruption at City Hall that brought the paper a Pulitzer Prize in 1988. At the Post-Dispatch she emphasized local news and investigative reporting, and the paper unveiled a major redesign in September. Soeteber’s last day on the job is Nov. 30.
Edward B. Colby: How hard was it to make the decision to leave?
Ellen Soeteber: Oh, it was very difficult. It was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever experienced. My whole career’s been in newspapers since I started 35 years ago as a copy boy at the old Chicago Daily News. That was the official job title — copy boy. Yeah, copy boy. They called me ‘Ms. Boy.’ So it was an extremely difficult decision for me.
EBC: You said you were unable to come to terms with management on issues involving newspaper resources that would have encouraged you to stay. What was the root of your disagreement?
ES: Personal financial considerations as well as newspaper resources. But as I also went on to note, I don’t want to dwell on those aspects — [that is] to say they were not the only factors in this decision. We had some private conversations that are going to remain private, and as I did note in my resignation statement, they were far from the only reasons that led me to make this decision.
EBC: In your goodbye memo you said, “I am confident that the recent repositioning of the Post-Dispatch gives you a strong base and a great opportunity to maintain this forward movement, to be creative and enterprising and muckraking, and to create journalism of high quality, impact, and meaning.” But how will the editorial staff be able to do all that when it will soon shrink 12 percent in size?
ES: Well, the publisher says we’re going to be able to hire back, to replace, approximately 30 percent of those positions that we lost, so that way we’ll be able to rebuild in some key areas where we took a real hit, particularly in metro and on the copy desk. So the staff will not end up at that 12 percent reduction. So it will be more of a challenge, but we still have a lot of talent, we think we still have a goodly amount of resources, and we’ve got great people here. …
When you do that, you have to reset some priorities. We’ve had to do that the whole time I’ve been here. The whole time I’ve been here, the advertising market for newspapers has been wobbly. So believe me, we’ve gotten very good at figuring out how to keep moving forward, even when we’re not being showered with resources. Arnie Robbins, who will succeed me as editor, will do a great job at that, too. It’s not like we’re going to be starving here.
EBC: What are you most proud of accomplishing during your time as editor?
ES: One, I think we got the Post-Disptach very much on track in terms of being a really serious, credible news organization.
Two, I’m very proud of the improvement we made in diversifying our staff. Our minority staff representation went up by 30 percent during my time here, and that in turn led to a much greater diversity in our coverage, which was very important in the St. Louis region and to our readers. So both what we are able to do in terms of diversifying the coverage and diversifying the staff were very important to me. In fact, I was honored on Saturday night by the St. Louis Association of Black Journalists for that, and I was very pleased about that, because that was a goal that was extremely important to me.
And I think that we made some real critical changes in the culture in the newsroom. I think that the Post-Dispatch had gotten, for whatever reason … a little bit too self-absorbed, and we really encouraged a change in the culture that made [journalists] much more focused on readers than on themselves, and also looking more to the future than to the past. And it sounds very management guru-like to talk about changing the culture, but that’s how you change the newspaper. And if your staff becomes reader-focused and forward-thinking, then you’re going to be able to improve the newspaper, by making it more creative, more innovative, more forward-thinking and more focused on readers. And I think we’ve made huge strides in that regard.
EBC: What have been the most exhilarating stories you’ve worked on in your journalism career?
ES: Well, I was metro editor in Chicago when Harold Washington dropped dead the day before Thanksgiving. That was 1987. And we literally had a three-ring circus after that ’cause the city was grieving for Harold — the mayor in [Chicago] — but then there was also all this incredible Byzantine and fierce jockeying going on for who was going to succeed him. … We all worked eight days in a row, 16-hour days — it felt like eight marathons in a row. That was really exhilarating.
My last year in Florida, which was the year 2000, was incredibly busy too. We had both the Elian Gonzalez saga — I was in Ft. Lauderdale before I came here — so that was this huge international story that we were right in the center of, and then later that year, of course, was the disputed presidential election in Florida, and I’m very, very proud of the fact that my newspaper there, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, was the only major paper in Florida that did not prematurely call the election for George Bush that night. We maintained all through the night that it was too close to call, while all the other major newspapers in the state first declared for Bush and then said, ‘Oops!’ And I was very proud of our paper for really crunching the numbers constantly throughout the night.
EBC: You’re not the only editor to be worn down by financial pressures. Meanwhile, papers keep responding to declining circulation and a tough economic climate by cutting back on their staff. Do you think that a broad rethinking of the financial approach that papers take with newsroom investment is needed?
ES: Yes, I do. Actually our readership has remained constant over the past few years. I’m proud of that. And also with the new strategic initiative that we launched at the Post-Dispatch in September, we’ve sold more than 10,000 new home delivery subscriptions just since mid-September. So I think that we can turn things around, or at least hold the line, if we really focus on what our readers need at this point in time, as well as investing in new media. I don’t think that newspapers are going to be able to cut themselves into future success.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.