Not a boss

Inever wanted to be anybody’s boss. It has been thrust upon me a couple of times, with mixed results. In my 20s I fired a reporter I didn’t have the authority to fire because he was a serial disappointer with a bad work ethic and a loud mouth who I was convinced was sabotaging an enterprise project we were working on.

In those days, I did serious stuff and dangerous people who whacked families apart with machetes were involved, so I felt I was justified in telling him to go home and take the rest of the decade off without pay.

My bosses backed me up on that one, in part because I hadn’t seriously meant to fire him, I only meant to get him off my investigative team. But he took the “you’re fired” part literally and left for Oklahoma or Florida, I forget which. I got a warning but I think my editor thought the incident was pretty funny.

And our 30-part series on cocaine trafficking went off without anyone getting murdered, though there was a spooky night in Red River Parish where we convinced ourselves Griselda Blanco’s boys were following us in a light blue Cutlass Ciera. I remember that detail because that’s what we told the Shreveport cops who we weren’t 100 percent sure were on our side.

Anyway, that one stayed fired, and didn’t even stay mad at me past the turn of the last century. He recently found out we were hiring and dropped me a note. I told him to send in a resumé. (After all, I’m not going to be his boss.) None of us are the same people we were 40 years ago, and he’s got some pretty good clips.

The next time I fired somebody it was a lot harder. It was in the six-month window when I was a big boss, in charge of the news operations of three podunk newspapers I didn’t want to be podunk. We were so podunk that we hired reporters without any experience (or any college) and got on-the-job training funds from the government to try to teach them how to ask people questions and come back to the office and type up their answers.

It worked out well for some of them—some of them made a career of it—but not for one young woman who had the misfortune of being poor and married to a troubled young man who got involved in some business that would have landed his name in the newspaper had not his devoted wife taken pains to excise it from the list of those arrested in the multi-agency task force’s county-wide drug sting.

I sat down and explained to her what she already knew, and she cried, and I nearly did, and in the end she went to hug me and I said she shouldn’t do that, that instead she should walk out with her head high and turn in an application at Piggly Wiggly, and that if she needed a reference I’d be happy to give her one.

By that time, I’d already decided I didn’t want to be anybody’s boss. It was too rough a business for me. So it wasn’t but a month or two later that I cut my salary by 80 percent and came to Arkansas to write for a pinko free alternative that, bless its heart, was determined not to be podunk. One thing led to another, and maybe I became something of a figurehead there, but I was never anyone’s boss.

I have avoided bossdom over the years; there was one opportunity about 20 years ago where I was approached about maybe going to New York City and editing the famous pinko weekly where a lot of my journalistic heroes had worked, and where some were still working.

But those talks didn’t go very far because it soon became apparent that were I to take this job I was going to have to sit in a room with a lot of good people—some of whom might even have been my journalistic heroes—and tell them there was no more room for them at the famous pinko weekly.

And I knew I was not the sort of tough-minded master of the universe who could do such a thing, so I decided to stay here and do the best I could not to be podunk.

I don’t regret it. A man’s got to know his limitations. I’d be a crummy boss.

I know this in part because I’ve had some good ones—I’m not going to name a whole lot of them, because I do not want to be seen as sucking up to the powers who sign off on my expense chits—but in the past I worked for some with vision. Michael Lacey, Stan Tiner and Griffin Smith never put a salary cap on the what they thought their staffs could accomplish, and all their staffs overachieved. They did not entertain podunk, they did not settle for getting the newspaper to bed so they could enjoy a cold beer. They were good bosses.

Lacey got into some trouble— you’ve all got Google, so if you’re wondering, you know how to find out—but when he was editor at Phoenix New Times he was also the newspaper’s best columnist and one hell of a reporter. Stan, an old Vietnam-era Marine, made you believe in yourself.

And Griffin, you knew he believed in you, and you didn’t want to let him down.

None of them were perfect; I think if I’d stayed at New Times five years I might have had a parking-lot fight with Lacey. Both Stan and Griffin seemed to wake up to brave new worlds every day (which isn’t a bad quality in a newspaper editor but probably makes it difficult for the people who have to manage the details of the day-to-day operations).

My point is they weren’t so much interested in being bosses as they were in producing something special. And it was their enthusiasm—always a mockable trait in my business, with its cult of Mencken and reflexive embrace of cynicism—that made them leaders.

A leader is not the same thing as a boss. In my business, a bad boss is not always the end of the world. Sometimes it’s safe to ignore them if you do good work and are in it for the right reasons. The Peter Principle applies, some people get promoted out of the way.

It’s an idiot’s game to say that there are two kinds of people in the world, but there are people who care an awful lot about titles and who reports to whom and whether policy permits this or that and whether we shouldn’t loop in the lawyers and their own boss too besides because they don’t know if this sets the right tone, and the people who get the work done.

I’m lucky to be in a place where you still get to be about as good as you can be most of the time. Without genuine leaders, newspapers perish. We’re still in the fight.

So, thanks, boss. I’m glad I’m not you.