Newstradamus

Ward Bushee

Hardly any time elapsed after my blog about a former colleague, Jim O'Shea, being bounced as editor of the Los Angeles Times than another — Ward Bushee — was tapped to be editor at the San Francisco Chronicle.

At one time, Ward and I were editors in the Gannett group, and in fact he was my predecessor as editor of the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, S.D. Interesting story: Ward editorialized that National Guard maneuvers were dangerous, and was persuaded to go along on a training flight so he could see how safe it was. The pilots, who I suspect were showboating, clipped wings and crashed. Ward — strapped in his seat — was catapulted through the canopy and a ball of flame. He survived, but had severe burns and a neck injury.

The incident prompted Gannett to institute what came to be called the Bushee Rule, which was that (for liability reasons) Gannett employees had to get permission from the corporate offices before flying on military aircraft. Some years later, when I was working in Honolulu, this was a bit of a pain in the butt because reporters and photographers often hitched rides with Coast Guard choppers on rescue missions.

Ward has been editor at a lot of papers since then, including Reno, Cincinnati and — most recently — Phoenix. But his return to the Bay Area is a homecoming. His dad was a longtime editor of the Watsonville paper, which has one of the strangest names — the Register-Pajaronian. (I know what an Argus is, but have no clue about a Pajaronian.)

In fact, his father, Ward Bushee Jr. (the son is Ward III) became the youngest daily newspaper editor at Watsonville in 1951, and under his leadership the paper won a Pulitzer Prize for public service for exposing a corrupt district attorney — the smallest paper ever to win the prize up to that time. The elder Bushee died in 2002.

The younger Ward, a graduate of San Jose State, also worked for the Salinas Californian and the Marin Independent Journal. He replaces Phil Bronstein, who moved into a corporate job with the parent Hearst company. Phil was most famous for being married to the actress Sharon Stone, and for having his foot chewed on by a 10-foot-long Komodo dragon at the L.A. Zoo.

Another interesting side story: Randy Lovely replaced Ward as editor of the Arizona Republic, making him the only openly gay editor of a major U.S. newspaper, and the first one to be appointed while out of the closet. (Roy Aarons, who died in 2004 of cancer, came out in 1990 after he had been editor of the Oakland Trib for seven years. Bill Cox, who was managing editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin a couple of years before I joined that paper, revealed he was gay in a column in 1986. He died of complications of AIDS in 1988.)

Bushee has his work cut out for him at the Chronicle. It is the poster child for newspaper circulation decline, with a drop of about 20% since 2004 to less than 370,000 weekdays. In response, staff cuts have been severe (more than a quarter of its newsroom was let go last year).

Part of that is due to increased competition from the San Jose Mercury News to the south and the Contra Costa Times and the Oakland Tribune in the East Bay, not to mention the Internet. Yet the Chron remains the second-largest paper on the West Coast after the L.A. Times, and there are some who say the circulation drop has a profit motive, at least in part. (With a fewer but more upscale readers, a paper can earn more advertising dollars.) Plus, SFGate is a strong newspaper Web site.

San Francisco is still a great city for a news organization, and I know first-hand that Ward is an innovative editor. (Ironically, considering the Chron is in serious competition with the MediaNews papers that surround it, Ward was a featured speaker at last summer's conference of MediaNews editors in Colorado. He talked about what Gannett and the Arizona Republic were doing with their Information Center concept. (The Times-Standard is a MediaNews paper.)

It will be interesting to watch the changes he will bring to the Chron.