Chris

Ison: University of Minnesota Professor and Former Star Tribune investigative Editor
This interview was conducted in Ison's office in Murphy Hall on Jan 13, 2011. Jon Collins: So I guess I want to talk about your experiences in journalism. Because its oral history we look for a lot more answers that tell anecdotes or talk about people and actual experiences than always, journalism is a boring job or something like that. So can you tell me how you first got involved in or how it first appealed to you? Chris Ison: Well, I kind of grew up through the Watergate era so I would watch those stories and listen to the radio reporting on Watergate stories when I was in high school. I think that got me excited about what journalism can do and I could write and I didnt know what else to do with my life so I decided I was going to college and I decided I should try journalism. I didnt really know what I was doing but I found that I could do it in college actually. And I really learned to love what newspapers were about. I think it was very much influenced by that age that when investigative reporting became kind of popular and respected and cool. And I loved that kind of work and what it was about and what it was for and I got a job here at the University of MN at the MN Daily, the student newspaper and it was a pretty darn good paper. And youre surrounded by all these young people that are trying to figure it out just like you are and we all worked all the time and we never went to class and we got bad grades but we were producing a daily newspaper and having a lot of fun. And it kind of sneaks up on you that you are really learning how to be a journalist and so it kind of took off from there. Collins: What was the atmosphere like at the Daily? Ison: The Daily was in the basement in Murphy Hall in the Journalism school. It was kind of a dump down there. And back then, its a little different now, but back then there was some rule like you had to at least take a class every other semester or something. So we spent a lot of time down there not going to class and writing stories and everybody was doing it. Everybody was pretty much just spending all their time at the Daily and trying to get a degree somewhere along the way. It took me about eight years to graduate, actually, with a four year degree. So we were just working all the time. And everybody was dating everybody else in the office and that was kind of the only life we knew. But we were writing a lot of reasonably good stories and really learning the business. Collins: What was the relationship with the administration, for instance, when you all were running the paper? Ison: Well the Minnesota Daily was going through an interesting time about the time I was there. In 1979 at the end of every school year they would put out a special edition

for finals week and that year they put out a humor edition. And it was the famous Christ Speaks edition at the Minnesota Daily. The cover of the newspaper had a picture of, it was shortly after the Jonestown Massacre and it had a picture of a bunch of people who were of course Daily employees, laying on the ground out on the mall in front of Northrop Auditorium with Kool-Aid cups in their hands, dead. And it had an interview with Jesus Christ in it that offended everybody. The Catholic Church denounced it. The Regents denounced it. It really created a stir. And it was pretty offensive stuff. Parts of it were pretty funny, but it didnt go over well, to put it mildly. Collins: How would it stand up? Ison: I think the humor edition would create a stir today too. Maybe not quite so much. In part because of the fact, I guess, that the Universitys already been through it. Because of the 1979 edition. There was stuff in there that was pretty offensive to a lot of people. But in the wake of that the Regents actually, the Minnesota Daily gets a student fee, has always gotten a student fee. Thats it one way that it remains financially viable. And in the wake of the humor edition the board of Regents voted to make the fee no longer mandatory, you could check off and not pay that part of your student fee if you were a student. And the Daily sued the University on First Amendment grounds, saying that the Regents had created a chilling effect for penalizing the Daily for basically speech. And we lost that lawsuit in federal court but then the year that I was the editor it finally got to court and we lost but we appealed and won the case before the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals the next year. It was really quite a case. So the Dailys gone through a very tumultuous time there. Collins: How did that change the direction the Daily took. Ison: I dont think it changed it too much. Well, I think it might have made us a little more careful. At least thoughtful. But at least we havent seen another humor edition like that one. But I dont know that it changed things a lot. The Daily changes every year based on who becomes the editor. And theres so much turnover. It goes through ups and downs. I would say its a little more professionally run in some ways, but I wouldnt say that its necessarily that the stories are more professionally done or the quality is a lot better or worse. Collins: I was always astounded by the size of the HR and Marketing departments at the Daily when I worked there. Ison: Yeah, I think the way the Daily has changed is like everybody they have a large HR department. And we didnt have an HR department when I was at the Daily and I dont recall that we ever needed one. Ive seen the HR department be pretty active in recent years. So its changed in that way. I wouldnt say when it comes to the journalism that its changed much over decades. I mean journalism changes and the techniques for getting stories changes and of course everybody has an online presence, thats very

important now, and the Daily does too, of course. But I wouldnt say that quality has necessarily changed a lot. Collins: Would you say that most your colleagues at the Daily at that time were idealist in the same way, following on this idea that you might be able to shine some light. Ison: Yeah, I think the idea that the importance and value of investigative reporting had a bigger influence on us back in the 70s and 80s than it does now. Not to say that people at the Daily dont want to dig into good investigative stories. In fact the Daily has for several years now had an investigative projects desk devoted to more in-depth pieces. But I do think that here on campus, in the journalism school and at the Daily a lot of the people that worked there tend to be a little less edgy. I think that the demands of putting journalism online and using social media has changed the focus a little bit of what we do. Has made us have to multitask a lot more, just as it has at professional news organizations. Everybodys trying to do more. And we spend generally less time digging as deep as we used to. And I think thats true at student newspapers and in professional newspapers. Collins: Just the whole industry. So when you found yourself with a degree in hand, what was your first thought about where to take it? Ison: I graduated in 1983 and I got my first job in Duluth at the Duluth News Tribune. Which at the time was a pretty good-sized paper. I was happy to have that kind of job. It was at a time when fewer student journalists were getting internships. Now if you dont get an internship youre not going to get a job. Back then if you got an internship you were pretty special and I didnt cause I was working at the Daily all the time. I had been the managing editor and the editor in chief of the Daily and I think that helped me get a job. And it certainly, of course, then because it took me eight years to graduate because of all the time I spent at the Daily I think I was a little more mature than some students. And that helped me get a job. And I went to Duluth, which was a pretty robust newspaper and its penetration in the market was incredible at the time. And they needed a reporter to cover Superior, Wisconsin across the bridge from Duluth and nobody at the Duluth paper wanted that beat. And to me that looked like a great beat. I said Id take that in a second. And I got the job. And the Superior beat was great. I loved covering Superior. There were stories everywhere. It was under covered. I got to do a little bit of quasi-investigative stuff and I got to cover City Hall and cops and businesses. So it was a great beat for me. I was writing every day. Maybe a couple stories some days and I was working weekend shifts all the time. Of course thats how you learn. And it was a great experience for me. Collins: What sort of stories would come up in Superior that were distinctive? Its a little scrappier town in some ways, isnt it? Ison: The story in Superior, I dont know if its true or not, if you went down Tower

Avenue, I think its Tower Avenue and wanted to have a beer in every bar you couldnt do it in a 24 hour time frame. There was a lot of drinking and carousing that went on in Superior. And it was always considered kind of the little sister of the Twin Ports I guess. And it didnt get a lot of coverage like Duluth did in the media and so there were a lot of stories that you could undercover there. So a trip to the courthouse seemed to always bring you a good story about somebody committing some crazy crime or some interesting lawsuit or something like that. The police department wasnt used to scrutiny very much. And I remember getting the paper to sue the police department to allow us access to records that were supposed to be public by law. And so I wasnt very well liked there. Of course I was a brash young kid from the University of Minnesota, I didnt care if they liked me or not and Im sure I wasnt real smooth with how I dealt with sources, but it was fun. And I got decent stories I guess. And I spent about a year doing that and then I got the City Hall beat in Duluth and that was a great beat. Collins: What was the culture change like from the Daily to the Duluth News Tribune? Ison: Well, you know, I think that of course going from a college newspaper to a kind of a midsize metro paper was quite a challenge for me. I remember getting a couple stories early in my time that I didnt know if I could do. I remember getting one on workers compensation or something and I couldnt figure the darn story out and I thought boy, Im in over my head. And one of the things that I love about journalism is that if youre in a newsroom youre surrounded by a lot of really smart people. No matter what newsroom youre in I think. And I learned that there are plenty of people in there smarter than me who could help me and it was an important thing for me to learn. The Duluth paper at that time and in most newspapers in the 80s, early 90s, were very robust, they were doing really well financially. People used the clich it was the license to print money if you owned a newspaper and so we had pretty big staffs and our beats were very specific cause we had plenty of people to cover all these different beats. And the newsroom was full. And it was fun. And you could count on having a lot of veterans around for a new guy like me who needed to watch how other people do their job and listen to how they do interviews and reach out for help for a complex story. It was a real blessing for me to be in a place like that. And I had good editors who kicked my butt and it was a good place. Collins: What were some of the old folks who were at the newspaper like? What was their approach? How was it different? Ison: There were some older, mostly guys as I recall, who had been reporting around Duluth for an awfully long time and they knew everybody. Its kind of a small town. I remember one guy who was the editorial page editor who just knew everybody and had seen it all come and go, the same stories over and over again through all the years and I used to love to sit in the office with him and just bounce ideas off him. This is what the city council is doing today and hed say, I remember when they did that 12 years ago, they did the same thing. But to be honest I think in the early 80s it was a time too when

a lot of newspapers, because they were pretty flush, they were hiring a lot and they were hiring a lot of young people. And I recall that my first year at Duluth we had at least three reporters that had come from the Daily from my era. Larry Oaks, who went onto being an award-winning reporter and now is an editor at the Star Tribune and another person I had worked with at the Daily and it was a fairly young newsroom, really. Collins: What was the approach with the sources, or what was the relationship like with the sources? Sometimes you hear about, especially earlier on in the 80s, about kind of cozy relationships with the sources and the people on the beats. Did you see that at all? Ison: I dont think I saw too much of that. I think I was too young and missed the days, those old days that you hear about all the time where all the reporters and editors had a bottle of whiskey in their desk drawers. I came in at a time when they had kind of cleaned that up and most of the professional newsrooms did had HR offices. And the craft really had become more, a little more professional, less of a trade. And the sense of ethics and objectivity and avoidance of conflict of interest really had taken hold of most newsrooms at the time I got into the business I think and we were pretty careful about that kind of thing. Collins: The newsroom at the time, obviously lots of newsrooms were connected to their printing places, or nearby. What was the layout portion of it like, what was the printing portion of it like? What was the smell in there? Ison: When I got there they had remodeled the newsroom not too long before I got to the Duluth newspaper, but the printing presses were right there in the building. And so wed go from this kind of remodeled newsroom with our cubicles and our computers. You could go down into the press area thats darker and dingier and a little more old school and smelly and dusty and feel like youre back in it. Really feel like youre still at a newspaper. I remember one of the editors, his coffee mug had been an old paste pot from when they used to paste the newsprint onto the page and send it to the presses. And I didnt know what a paste pot was when I got there and it just looked like a coffee cup to me. So I really missed it. When I really got in the business everything was computerized and was being started to be paginated on computers, things like that. Collins: Do you remember times that the newspaper took heat for stories that they did? For instance, from mayors or. Ison: Well, I worked at the Duluth paper at a time when we had a pretty colorful, aggressive mayor. And because City Hall was my beat for at least a couple years there I spent a lot of time chasing Mayor Fedo around. He alienated the city council a lot and he was pretty aggressive about trying to get done what he wanted to get done no matter how he got it done. So I remember I wrote a story about him buying Jeno Pauluccis house and Jeno Paulucci at the time was the big frozen pizza king and was

doing business with the city and the mayor ended up buying his house. And I looked at whether or not the mayor got a sweet deal on the house. I dont know that I ever showed that he got a great deal on it but it was certainly an interesting transaction at the time. The mayor was gone a lot and I was trying to figure out where he was all the time so I looked into his expense reports. I didnt know what I was doing, I just thought if I look at his expense reports Ill find where hes going out of town all the time. These days you would put that into a spreadsheet and analyze it. Back then I just bought a calendar and started writing down where he was every day based on his credit card expenditures. Turned out he was down here at the capitol all the time, ostensively for lobbying, although he did end up later marrying the receptionist in the governors office at the time. Somehow as I started to fill out this calendar Id find that hed buy all his meals, or a lot of his meals with the city credit card. But for the same days hed put in a per diem expenses request as if he were paying for the same meals out of his pocket. So it appeared he was double dipping. So that was a story that got a little pay and the state auditor at the time came up and investigated it and kind of said, well there could be another explanation for this but he didnt really explain what the other explanation could be. So there were little stories, there werent big corruption stories. But there was always stuff to report. There were always interesting stories. Collins: What are some of the stories that stand out to you from that period? Or just in general topics that were of interest at the time? Ison: Well the city of Duluth actually really changed during that period in the early 80s. Mayor Fedo for all his, kind of controversial moves, did have great vision for that city in many ways. And there were a lot of federal money available at the time for a lot of things. And if you look at that period youll see that Duluths changed a lot from a pretty blue collar town to a little of a tourist town. That we know now, if you go to Park Point now, Canal Park and Park Point and the boardwalk that are there now. Those ideas really came out of the early 80s when John Fedo was mayor, and through the planning department there. They had a good idea about how to really use the lakefront to make Duluth a destination for a lot of people. And its a beautiful place. Its a wonderful place to go spend a weekend. And its full of nice hotels now and great restaurants. And that boardwalk is beautiful. And it changed that town. So that was a pretty big deal. And the ports. The port has always been a big story up there and a lot of people are fascinated by the ore industry from the Iron Range and how it affects the shipping industry down at the lake. And so I mean there are always going to be big stories, important stories to Minnesota that come out of Duluth and thats what made it a great place to start a journalism career. And we dont cover it as well as we used to, to be honest. The Star Tribune had a reporter based in Duluth for at least 20, 25 years that I know about and it killed that position about, probably in about 2007 or 8. And thats too bad, because thats an important part of Minnesota. Collins: The Duluth newspaper itself is not that thick these days.

Ison: The Duluth paper like many paper has gone through a lot of hard times. The staff is smaller. It doesnt have the clout that it used to have. I dont think its as good of a place to work. But thats happening in a lot of places and you hope that it comes back because that newspapers a really important institution in that area. And theres plenty to cover. That hasnt changed. Collins: What was the influence that, how did it push politics, or push development, what was the actual influence the newspaper had on the community? Ison: The newspaper in Duluth had this tremendous penetration in the market. I dont remember what it was, but the number of people that lived in that area that got the paper was huge. And so it clearly had a lot of influence, it was the place. Duluth had three TV stations, too. But everybody got the paper. And they got it up on the Iron Range, and there were, I believe three reporters assigned to the Iron Range, during at least a portion of the time I was there. One of the best outdoors reporters around named Sam Cooke, who was very well read, and what a great place to be an outdoors reporter, covered northern Wisconsin. It had a very big influence. I would walk into a city council meeting and everybody had stories cut out of the Duluth News Tribune that theyre looking at and waving in front of the mayors face. And it had a big influence; it was kind of the something that brought the whole community together in discussion. When you turn on the radio in the morning theyre talking about stories that were in the paper. Constantly. So its one of the great advantages of being in a little bit smaller town with less competition, honestly. And it gave everyone kind of a common center of discussion that the whole community could engage with. And its a different era now everywhere. Now most newspapers dont have that same influence because everybodys on the internet and there are blogs and lot of different cable channels and radio stations and you can go a lot of different places to occupy your time and read whatever you want. And thats something that newspapers have lost. Obviously its hurt them financially, but its kind of hurt that fabric in the community, too. And I think thats especially true in smaller places like Duluth where they used to have so much influence and dont probably have quite as much anymore. Collins: How did, for instance, in Duluth did you all deal with questions of race? Where there a lot of women working in the newsroom at the time? Ison: We had quite a few women working in the newsroom when I was there. Some of the better reporters were women. Im trying to recall if there were many women editors. Now that you mention it Im not sure there were. That was a time when there came to be more and more women in the newsroom. So I dont think there were many people of color in the newsroom, though. That was always an issue that the paper was trying to deal with. And there were not a lot of people of color in Duluth. So we didnt do quite so well there. Collins: How would that impact how you guys would cover, for instance, something that

happens in the area? Or somethings that relevant to people that live in the area? Theres a pretty substantial American Indian population. Ison: I dont know how big a factor it was. I remember a reporter named Susan Stanich who was really interested in covering the Indian community there and did a really nice job with it. And she hadnt been a reporter very long. Shed kind of come up through the trenches doing different jobs in the newsroom. And started to cover, got a job reporting finally. And did a great job with it. She was quite a bit older than I was at the time and had worked really hard and finally became a reporter. And was a great writer and really took it seriously and did a great job. So I think a lot of coverage of a lot of issues at a smaller newspaper like that depended who was covering it and how aggressive they were and how energetic they were. Collins: Would you see someone being able to work their way up to a position like that right now? Ison: It doesnt happen that often that people can be, say a secretary or a news assistant, and work their way up to reporter. But it does happen. Ive seen it at the Star Tribune too. A lot of people who had almost clerical jobs for years, but eventually kept applying and applying and becoming reporters and theyre some of the better reporters and even, once in a while, an editor at the newspaper. So it still happens in the newspaper industry. And I think that s because so much of what makes somebody successful is hard work. Its like they say, whoever said it, 75% of the job is showing up. Its not that complex as skill. If youre willing to put your head down and talk to a lot of people and dig for the stuff that people want to know about, you can be pretty effective. Collins: So how long were you at Duluth for? C: Well, it seemed like a long time, but I was only at Duluth for three years. I left there in 1986. Got a job when the Star Tribune was opening its first St. Paul bureau, or the first one in at least in decades. Many decades. Joel Kramer was the editor of the paper and they made a decision to move into St. Paul and compete on St. Pauls turf. And they opened a bureau there, second floor of an office building, and put about eight reporters in there or so. And they had an editor who was there on site and they wanted to compete every day on the major beats with the Pioneer Press. And Id covered City Hall in Duluth and somehow got it, thanks in part to the fact that a couple of editors and at least one reporter from Duluth had already gotten here, so they knew of my work and must have lied for me and I got the job covering St. Paul City Hall and that was a wild time for the Star Tribune because it was very intense. They wanted to make a big impression and of course the Pioneer Press was ready and waiting. They had about three major investigative projects in the can, ready to go in the first weeks that the Star Tribune opened its bureau. And they had some really good stories and we spent about our first two months it seemed chasing their stories, which was not a lot of fun, but a

pretty good way to learn what was going on in St. Paul because we were running every day. Collins: Did you catch up? Ison: Yeah. Collins: And how long was that bureau around for? Ison: Well, they got rid of the big bureau for a whilethey never completely got rid of it. They still have reporters assigned to St. Paul. But the bureau went Gangbusters for at least four, five, six years. Maybe longer, more like ten years. And then it started to get smaller as the newspaper economy started to sour. So the St. Paul presence isnt as great now, but they still have some presence. For years, the unspoken rule was that Minneapolis left St. Paul alone and St. Paul left Minneapolis alone and we didnt really compete in each others backyards very much. Wed do the occasional story. Wed have maybe a reporter assigned to St. Paul and wed do the big stories there. But they kind of left each others cities alone, and that ended in the mid-80s when the Star Tribune opened a bureau there. Collins: Were there larger motivations at work as far as the Star Tribune wanting to expand and become the Twin Cities newspaper? Ison: A lot of those decisions of course are financial. Theres a sense that there was a good market there for advertising sales. Later the emphasis was on the suburbs of course because the suburbs and the Twin Cities were expanding and a lot of money, a lot of good markets for advertisers were in the suburbs and so the emphasis was on the Eagan and Lakeville and Woodbury areas and Washington County and western Twin Cities and northern suburbs. So both papers were trying to figure out how to captivate those markets and beat each other in those areas. Collins: Is it a different culture down here than it was in Duluth as far as the newsroom. Ison: Yeah, down here, when I got to the Twin Cities I realized how much I didnt know about reporting. I thought I knew it all by then. It was tough. I learned how much competition there is here. I learned how important it is to have good sources who nobody else had and how important it is to take people to lunch. In Duluth its one paper in town and the TV stations were ok, they werent great. And if you worked pretty hard you could pretty much have all the sources. Down here, everybody had good sources and they knew how to use them and there was a big emphasis on TV stations beating the newspapers to a story. And the two papers beating each other to stories. And it was an eye-opener for me. I really learned how important it was to be well sourced and to cultivate those sources. And I felt thrown into it in a way that was difficult. I really had to learn fast again a lot of things I thought I probably knew but

didnt know as well as I needed to. So the competition here was fierce. The TV stations were aggressive. It was at a time when, for instance, WCCO TV still had a pretty good reputation for investigative reporting, and other stations too had reporters that were pretty good diggers and trying to do investigative work and breaking stories. Both of the newspapers had investigative units with investigative editors whose job was to break big stories. Some of them theyd work on for months and months and months. It was a time when the news coverage was very robust and very competitive and in the St. Paul bureau we were right in the middle of it and we worked pretty much day and night trying to keep up. It was busy. Collins: Are there any stories that stand out to you from that time? Ison: Well, in 1989 another reporter and I had come across an old investigative file in St. Paul about hidden liquor license ownerships stemming from a time some years previously when you could only own one liquor license. And of course that meant that a lot of folks who wanted to own two or three would just put them in other peoples names, and so there was a big investigation into that. Some source had told us about this and that it was interesting if you wanted to understand St. Paul you had to go look at this old file because itd tell you who kind of ran the nightlife and the bar scene in St. Paul. It was a lot of the movers and shakers in this town. It was called the biggest small town in America. Or the smallest big town in America, I should say. So we went and looked at that and we got pretty interested in some of the stuff that was in these file cabinets full of old investigative reports that never really turned into anything back when the police were looking at it, but we saw a few little tidbits in there. We started actually looking at a gambling story that had to do with bookmaking. And then we saw some shenanigans going on with bar owners and a prostitution investigation with police. And of course because its the smallest big town in America, a lot of these bar owners who were accused with having a lot of prostitutes around at their bars were tight with the police chief at the time and this prostitution investigation didnt go anywhere and it seemed there was a lot of evidence that it could have gone somewhere. And another reporter and I in the St. Paul bureau pitched that story at a time that the Star Tribune had just hired this really good investigative reporter from Denver named Lou Kilzer. And the editor of the Star Tribune at the time, Joel Kramer, had decided to really put a big emphasis on investigative reporting and he created what we called the projects office. And we had a projects editor named John Halmond who had some real expertise in running projects and some very good reporters, Tom Hamburger, who went on to work at the Los Angeles times and other major newspapers, was at that office. And we pitched this story and they liked it but they decided we were rookies and they gave it to the big shots in the projects office, which drove us crazy. But they turned it into some pretty good stories. And I remember that towards the end they realized that, when they were about to published, they realized that there was going to be a lot of controversy about the story and someone was going to have to cover all the controversy and they decided that the reporters shouldnt cover the fallout from the story because they might be covering some criticism of themselves so they called over to the bureau and they

asked, or ordered me to come over to cover the fallout from these stories. And I probably had only been there, at the Star Tribune a year, but this was not a smart thing to do, but of course I didnt think before I spoke and I kind of lashed out and I said, I pitched this story and you took it away from me and now you want me to clean up the mess. And they said, yeah, but there could be some other good investigative stories that come out of this, and if it works out maybe well keep you around to help out on those. Collins: In hindsight it was kind of not a good thing to say, right? Ison: Not that I had any say in it. So I went over to work on the fallout from that story, and in the meantime we started to look at this gambling thing again. And that didnt work out but we did find a little paragraph in one of those old investigative reports about the fire chief and some of his buddies who had had some suspicious fires. And we started to look at that and this Lou Kilzer from Denver, who had been at the Star Tribune for about a year at this time, and I got a chance to look into that and we started to find some interesting stuff. And we ended up working for a year on that story, actually, we dont admit it but it was a little more than a year, and produced a story in arson in St. Paul and connections between the St. Paul Fire Department and suspicious fires and profits from suspicious fires and that turned into a big project that won a Pulitzer in 1990 so that was my big break. Collins: And then you left the St. Paul bureau by this time. Ison: Yeah, I was still officially assigned to the St. Paul bureau but I wasnt spending any time there, because I was working out of the Minneapolis office. And I never really went back to the bureau. We kind of found that project, and then we found another project that we worked on after that for about a year, which never turned out actually. Its enough to get you, I dont know, reassigned or at least if not fired at some newspapers but to work on a story for a year and not publish anything, but I think we had a little political capital left from the Pulitzer that they let us get away with that. Collins: What was the reception in the newsroom on the Pulitzer? Ison: Well, actually the Star Tribune hadnt won a Pulitzer since the 50s when a photographer won a Pulitzer. So people were pretty excited. I have to give the leadership at the Star Tribune a lot of credit. Joel Kramer, the editor, was a very good news guy. He worked hands-on on the arson stories. And, I mean I remember a day when we were struggling with the lead of that story and started helping write it, and you just dont see much of that. You never see that anymore. It seems like at a big newspaper. But he had been a really good editor for years. I mean a copyeditor on a Pulitzer Prize piece at News Day in New York. I mean, he knew what he was doing. And he saw the value in that story as we were working on it. And he recognized something that Ive learned is very important that you can work on a lot of different projects, but when you see one that you think can be great, you have to throw everything at it that

you can. And he saw that. And he gave us the time that it took to do it. He didnt put any arbitrary deadlines in our way. He made sure we were working hard, and we were working hard. Cause we were pretty young and pretty hungry. And Lou Kilzer had already won a Pulitzer in Denver. And knew what he was doing. And it was great for me, I was a young guy, I was learned a lot from these people. And the story worked out. And Joel knew how to run it and John Ullman, the projects editor, knew how to make sure it was iron clad. We had lawyers involved, they took everything seriously. And the story worked out. And I think, Joel often says, this is the best story Ive ever been a part of. I dont know if he really meant it, but it got me excited. And be darned if it didnt win a Pulitzer, so he knew what he was talking about. So when it happened, they made a pretty big deal out of it. Every early April when the Pulitzers are announced, the newspaper gets a little heads-up, but theyre not supposed to say anything until the announcement is made, but the night before the Pulitzers were announced, Joel dragged us down to his office and gave us the news and then said, you should probably leave the building because we dont want this leaking out before tomorrow. So we did, we got out of there. And then the next morning it started to leak out anyway, and everyone was sending messages, is it true, is it true? And there was an announcement that people should gather around a main desk in the newsroom at about, I dont know, eleven in the morning, or whatever it was, for the announcement of this years Pulitzer prizes. Well, that hadnt happen before, to my knowledge, so everybody started to figure it out. So it was a pretty big deal. Collins: In the days before that, did you have an idea that there was even a possibility that this was about to happen? Ison: Well we knew we were a finalist, which was pretty exciting for me. I think for Lou whos kind of an old pro, probably, well he may have understood the significance more than me, actually. I was just going along, happy to hear it. I never really know what I thought what to think of it, to be honest. And to tell you the truth I was so exhausted from the project, Im not sure I had a lot of time to think about it. Collins: Were there times, especially as a projects sort of person, who has to make your own stories, or dig out your own stories, that you clashed with editors or you clashed with the editorial judgment that they had? Ison: Oh yeah, we had a lot of clashes. Yeah. There were a lot of fights back then. I think in newsrooms in general, certainly in our newsroom, that you dont see anymore. We all have to be more professional now, it seems like. But we used to yell and scream at each other all the time. Lou and I used to yell at each other, and we used to yell at our editor, and Lou would yell at the executive editor, which I didnt do too much of that, but he had a lot more capital than I had. Yeah, it was a feisty time. I mean, youd hear people yelling at each other across the newsroom pretty regularly in those days. And you almost never hear that anymore. I kind of miss those days.

Collins: Did you ever win those arguments, or did you did you ever get people, for instance, editors to concede some points on them? Ison: I dont remember winning a lot of arguments, I remember having a lot of arguments. It was late on the arson story. We expected to publish soon. Wed expected to publish by the end. And we were having one of these big meetings in the late afternoon and I was exhausted. I remember we were going through a period where for a month we worked seven days a week, and I remember being there. I wasnt as experienced as my partner Lou so I had to try to make up for it by just working more. And I remember working until three in the morning night after night after night. And luckily I was pretty young, I was in my thirties and I could do it. Id never be able to do it anymore. And Joel Kramer was back in the office one day and they had a little issue with the story and I dont remember what it was, but Joel was standing right at my desk and I remember looking up at him and just started to yell at him. I thought no body does that to Kramer. Lou did it a little bit. He was pretty good, he looked at me and said, well I dont know what that was about, but I still think in paragraph three here, we gotta fix this one phrase. And I think it dawned on me maybe the next day that he really gave me a break on that. But we used to do that a lot. I used to fight with a later editor quite often. He might have let us win a few. The good thing was he let us do it. He let us fight and yell and he understood, most those editors back then understood, that if youre working hard, that stuffs going to happen. And they wanted reporters who would challenge them and they were willing to overlook it if you had some rough edges. And that was lucky for me cause I had a lot of rough edges, and to be honest a lot of the best reporters Ive ever worked with had rough edges and would do battle with anybody, including the editor, the managing editor. And I came up in a time when that was the case and it was ok. You might get in a little trouble, but not in big trouble. To be honest after Joel Kramer and his successor, Tim McGuire left; found you couldnt do that very much anymore. You had to be a little more careful and some of the fun went out of the newsroom when that happened. It got a little more corporate. Collins: Was that part of the process? Ison: Well it was part of the accountability process, I think, being able to challenge editors. Ive always thought its the reporters that really know whats going on because theyre out on the street. And its the editors who are eventually accountable for what goes in the paper, and their heads are going to roll, you know, probably if you make a big mistake or something. But Ive never cared for editors who think that they know the stories before they hear what their reporters are telling them, because theyre not doing the stories. And to be honest I think part of why Im not at a newspaper anymore is a small part of it, but its a part of it, is that newspapers became more editor-driven in the 90s and in the past decade. The emphasis on graphics and looks and planning the newspaper are a bigger part of the production cycle. And so things are planned earlier in the day so that you can prepare this display. What that means is that you lose part of the reporting cycle. Its harder to be a reporter that works hard, being out on the street

all day and comes in at six o clock at night and says, Ive got a great story here. Well, theyve already planned the front page. I mean they can tear it up and get your story in there but they frown on that a little bit and its harder to do. And its harder to argue, frankly, because these big newspapers are more corporate now. So I think the environment has changed. The tone in newsrooms has changed. Its more antiseptic. Its more quote unquote professional. And its lost something. And I think its part of our problem. I think the pages dont look as spontaneous as they used to. And I liked that kind of rough edge on the news page. That looked like someone was cranking something out and getting it on the page at midnight because they reported it all day and its a good breaking story. Those planned stories I think sit on the page and look different and arent as lively. Collins: I wanted to talk to you about this too. Is that partly due to a shift in American culture to a certain degree? Because your students, you know when theyre reporting for instance, they talk to a lot of public relations people, a lot of communications people. Did you have that to the same degree during your time at the Star Tribune or earlier on? Ison: Im not sure I understand that question. Collins: Im saying every City Hall has whos in charge of communications, and every business has someone in charge of communication. You cant talk to direct sources very often. Was this always the case? Ison: How we report has changed especially how we cover government has changed, because there are so many spokespeople there. Ive actually pitched the idea of doing a project on how many spokespeople our tax money pays because every department in every level of government seems to have a spokesperson. And it is harder to get access to people who actually know things as opposed to the spokespeople who go get some information from people who know things and then spin it for you. Its true here at the University of Minnesota; its true at the police department. Thats been a real problem I think. Its been a very difficult obstacle to overcome in reporting. Cops dont talk to reporters anymore, hardly. Not on the record anyway. Because theres s spokesperson in every police department. Ill never forget sitting in the St. Paul bureau I think in one of my first years at the Star Tribune. The St. Paul Police Department had a pretty good spokesperson named Paul Adelman. He came from a TV station in town and the police reporter was sitting in the office and the editor said, whats going on at the police department today. And the reporter said, not much going on, Adelmans on vacation, it was as if the spokesperson was on vacation so that meant there was no more crime in town. And the editor jumped all over the reporter and said, get down to the police department and find out whats going on. Thats smart by government, but its really lazy by a journalist to count on spokespeople to give them the news all the time. So its gotten to be so if youre really good with sources and youre skilled in getting past those people and developing good sources behind the scenes youre going to get better

stories. And youre going to get the stories that other people dont have. But this is the reason that if you pick up the Pioneer Press and you pick up the Star Tribune you see the same stories a lot. Youre getting them from the same people. Thats a problem. Thats changed. Collins: And when you were at the Star Tribune, as you moved into the later 90s how did the newsroom and the newspaper change? Ison: Well the Star Tribune had been a family owned newspaper owned by the Cowles family for decades, many decades. And in, Im going to forget the year now, in about 1998 I believe it was purchased by the McClatchy Corporation which was based in California and owned a lot of medium sized newspapers all over the country and bought the Star Tribune for, I should know this number, I believe 1.2 billion dollars. It became the biggest paper in the chain. And for the first time we were corporate owned, publically traded company. And you know we felt pretty lucky actually because when McClatchy had and has a pretty good reputation for high quality journalism. But it didnt take too long, in part because the newspaper industry started to go into this deep recession because of mostly the rise of the internet and so much advertising, especially classified advertising going to the internet. Before then newspapers were making tremendous amounts of money. Their profit margins were in the 25 to 35% range. TV stations were doing even better. They were tin the 40% range for profit margins. They didnt know what to do with all the money and of course as it turns out they should have been investing it to figure out what the Internet was going to do to them. But once we were owned by a publicly traded corporation, and a lot of that ad revenue started to go anyway, the newsroom started to get cut. And its only in the past year or so here in 2009, 2010 has that begun to bottom out, hopefully. Seems to be. So the newsrooms got cut. Reporting staff started to get cut. Copyediting staff has been butchered. Thats why we so many typos in newspapers today. The Star Tribune got a new editor who was from out of town, new publisher from out o town. It became a little more corporate. We were now responsible to shareholders who want to see a return on that and Ill tell you for a long time it wasnt going to happen because the industry was in so much trouble. You know, I think journalists are generally bad business people and Im a great example. When McClatchy bought us we could get a certain number of shares at a 50% discount. And for the first couple of years McClatchy stock was doing great. I think I started to buy it and it was, I think I could use like 6% of my salary to buy McClatchy stock and I was buying up, didnt amount to be a lot, didnt amount to a lot of stock, but I was buying it. And the share price went up from 25 or 35 dollars a share to 70 some dollars a share and I just kept buying it. And I didnt pay much attention and then the newspaper industry started to go in the tank and I still wasnt paying much attention unfortunately and I will tell you I still have my McClatchy stock today. At one point it was at 40 cents or 43 cents a share. I think its up to five bucks or so now. Suffice it to say I dont think its every going to be 70 again, so Ill be taking a tax write off someday. The industry changed. The whole industry changed. And the industry is still different today and it will never be the same. It will never be the same.

 Collins: What led to you deciding to leave, or deciding to pursue other opportunities? Ison: Well, I wrote a piece for he Columbia Journalism Review, its the only time that Ive publicly tried to articulate why I left, but I left in part because I got an opportunity here at the University of Minnesota to teach journalism and I had been doing that as an adjunct faculty member, just teaching one class a semester for a long time and I really enjoyed it and I enjoyed working with students. And trying to inspire them to love the news business for the reasons I loved it. And still love it. But another reason that I left was because I really felt that the institution had changed a lot. I found that I was spending more and more time trying to convince an editor that a story was good. Or that the way we were doing the story made sense. And sitting in committees in the newsroom trying to accomplish tasks that had very little to do with covering the news. And its not what Im good at and its not what Im interested in. And I found that the work was still hard. The work of doing good investigative work was just as hard as ever if not harder and you had to find time around the edges to do the best stories. And what I wrote in that place for the Columbia Journalism Review was that many people like me werent leaving the institution as the institution had left us. The focus was different. So much of the focus was on redesign. Redesigns of the papers and listening to what we thought we could sell to readers and things like that. Its become a little bit of a clich and theres still great journalism going on at the Star Tribune. Theres a lot of great journalism going on at newspapers everywhere and TV stations all over the country. But Id been doing it for a long time and probably just wasnt as tolerant anymore of the wasted time that I felt was getting in the way. And so that was a part of it. And I think a lot of the energy has been sapped from a lot of newsrooms. In recent years I think its been more because of the economy and the cuts have been made. And if you listen to the discussion about the journalism business the past five, six, seven years, its been all about the business of news. And very little about the journalism. And reporters and editors that I know and that I like dont care about the business part. I mean I know we have to care, but its not what we got into the business for and its not what were interested in. Were interested in how to cover stuff better and how to get better stories. And it got so that was almost an afterthought because so much of the discussion inside and around newsrooms was about the business and that is an energy drainer in newsrooms. To me, thats not fun. And that work is too hard to not have fun. And so the rewards were diminishing for me. And then I got an opportunity to teach which is energizing again to me. And the students, and maybe this is bad because maybe were setting them up to be shocked when they get out there, but I dont care because I want them to be inspired about what journalism can do and have high ideals. And so I enjoy teaching them. We have to prepare them for the reality of the marketplace too. You have to hope that young people are getting into the business are getting into it for the right reasons. And I enjoy teaching the craft now. Collins: Do you see that they are getting into it for these right reasons, high journalistic integrity?

 Ison: The best ones I think are still the ones that want to be journalists because they believe in the importance in waking up the town and telling them whats going on. Those are the ones I care about. A lot of them want to be, you know, feature writers or news anchors immediately or run Cosmopolitan Magazine or something. And those are legitimate jobs too, those dont happen to be the ones that I care as much about. But I find that the best journalists that come out of this journalism school, and Im sure this is true everywhere, are the ones who really care about finding stories people need to care about. Thats still an energizing kind of work to be involved in. And they want to do it ethically and that inspires them. The ethics of the business still inspire people. And I think those are the people who work the hardest, and because of that those are the ones that are the most successful. And its not all the students, but its the best students. Collins: And in newspapers and in online media, have you seen slippage in terms of how ethical of reporting it is, or how much of a stretch. Ive noticed, especially with this Arizona shooting, theres a lot of stretches that are going on in especially feature writing sort of stuff. Ison: Well, what Ive seen is that its harder to define media. I listened to Sarah Palin yesterday blaming the media for creating this ugly political discourse. But who is the media? Whats really different today is you cant just talk about media. Its too broad. Theres Twitter and there are blogs and there are newspapers and there are cable TV stations that have almost all conservative pundits or liberal pundits. There is the National Inquirer and People Magazine and theres the Washington Post and the New York Times. Media is so broad that I think the challenge is filtering the good stuff from the bad stuff and identifying whats legitimate and whats not and thats our biggest challenge. Its the biggest challenge to the reputation of legitimate news media, legitimate newspapers or TV stations or radio stations or blogs. How do we know who has an axe to grind or who at least tries to be fair and objective? How do we know if this blogger actually abides by anything close to a code of ethics that most news organization, mainstream news organizations for decades felt was important to follow? Its just hard to know, its more challenging to know for the consumer to filter out the bad media. The inaccurate media and the biased media and the bad reporting from the good reporting, so I think thats the biggest problem right now. Collins: Can media organizations distinguish themselves from providing ethical responsible reporting regularly? Ison: Well I think for the business to work, good news organizations are going to have to market their product in a way that makes it clearer that theyre responsible. And that theyre legitimate. And that theyre reporting is good. And that they try to deal with bias and report accurately and fairly and a lot of people think that objectivity as an obsolete ideal because its impossible and I understand its impossible if you use Websters

definition of objectivity. But I think its an important thing to strive for and it think maybe we should call it fairness instead of objectivity or something like that. But I think most people really want to be informed about importation things and they want to feel that theyre getting it from organizations that are trying to be fair and unbiased and give them the real picture of whats happening and not be manipulated. And not be given news just because it sells or just because its provocative, because its important and they should care about it. I do think people really want that. But I think its hard for them to know if theyre really getting it. And I think we have to do a better job of promoting those kinds of ideals rather than just chasing readers. And I think we do a little too much chasing readers and trying to give them all this stuff we think they want. But it may also be that the time of having this huge, mass audience is over. Because they have too many choices they can make. And thats one of the problems too. They can listen to the news station that reinforces their point of view all the time. And they dont have to listen to anyone else, and thats the consequence of having all these cable stations, and all these blogs. If id figured that out Id be running a news organization and Id be rich by now, but I havent figured out how to fix that. Collins: Whats the implication for American society and democracy if journalism continues to be not as productive as it was in the past? Or as influential? Ison: Well, I think that its a hard problem. Were all talking, everyones talking about it. Once again youre talking a little bit about the business and how to create a good business model that sells and yet inform responsibly. And its not really my area of expertise. My area of expertise is more how to get a story. Im not the best thinker in this area, but I like to think that, you know when the telegraph and radio came out it changed how news was delivered. And different technologies have changed media throughout history and the democracy didnt fall apart. And well get through these changes too; they just come a lot quicker now because of how quickly technology advances. But I have faith in readers and in the community and I think that the people who really are going to be active in shaping democracy are still going to want good information and they will figure out a way to filter out all the crap. But can I say why I think thats going to be true? Im not sure. Im not sure I have great faith. But the discourse is a problem right now. And I tend to blame that on us, on media or on the legitimate media for not selling itself better or not figuring out ways to do a better job and to be more credible, but I dont know that thats fair. I dont have the answer for how to, Im a believer in mainstream media and the importance of the times when creditable news organizations. But I think were pretty credible news organizations. We had our problems, we didnt do things perfectly and we screwed stuff up a lot, but when there a few central news organizations that most of the community could look to as a starting point for having this shared discussion about whats important. I think its important to have variety and diversity in the kinds of things that people can read and watch so that they can have different perspectives, but I think the audience gets so segmented now that its hard for there to be enough shared discussion. Because again, people can only read or watch the ideas that reinforce their positions. And not have to

consider other points of view and I dont know how thats going to get fixed. I dont have the answer for that one. Collins: One last question. I really appreciate you sitting down to talk with me and taking time out of the holiday to do that. What are the characteristics that you think made you successful as a journalist when you worked in the industry, and people around you successful, and is there still a place for these sorts of people in the industry? And where? Ison: One of the things that hasnt changed about journalism is that its not rocket science. Its going out and getting people to tell you whats going on. And writing it clearly. The advantage for me, Im not a great writer by any stretch, Im a pretty mediocre writer, but the beauty for me is that journalism is mostly about clarity and getting information and writing it clearly. And that also means its mostly about hard work. So I dont think thats ever going to change and in some ways it makes this business really simple, which is lucky for me. And I think that theres always going to be a market for good, clear information. And that means basic journalism should have a long long life. Its not going to go away ever, I dont think. The ways that we disseminate the information and package it and distribute it are changing every day, it seems like. And figuring out how to fund it, get people to pay for it the right way is the big issue right now in 2011. But well figure that out because theres going to be a market for it. So I think the fundamentals of journalism really arent very different. Collins: Is there a place for that edgy journalist whos willing to talk back in this industry though? Ison: Yeah, I mean if you believe that people want to know what truly is going on out there, then youve got to believe that the reporters that have the guts to dig it out are gonna have a place. We all complain about where the industry is going and the problems with journalism, but if you look at it there are a lot of good stories out there. Theres some real digging thats going on out there in newsrooms all over the place. And at places that are web-only sites. All over the country there are good local site and national web-only sites that are doing good reporting. And there are good traditional newspapers that are doing it. There might be a little less at each place but when you look at the big picture theres still a lot of good journalism. So I dont think its going away anytime soon. Collins: Any closing comments? Ison: I dont know. I probably talked too much. Collins: Well think you so much for talking to me, I really appreciate it.