The News celebrated its 100th birthday on Saturday by welcoming distinguished graduates and former News reporters and editors for two afternoon panels, which were followed by a well-attended dinner hosted by current and recent masthead members. The News, which began in 1907 as the Choate Chronicle, took its current name the following year and has been a fixture in Choate life ever since.
The events were organized by Mr. Zachary Goodyear, who became the News faculty adviser ten years ago. Mr. Goodyear and former editors-in-chief Tom Kaplan ’06 and Corey Sherman ’07 began to plan Saturday’s events last spring, with the assistance of Ms. Hilary Burrell in the Development Office. The speakers of the day “have had this afternoon on their calendars for a long time,” said Mr. Goodyear.
The first panel, titled “Defending the First Amendment” featured Marian Burros RH’50, a food columnist for The New York Times; Lee Hockstader ’77, an editorial writer for The Washington Post; and Lee Smith ’80, a journalist for The Weekly Standard, a conservative online newspaper moderator. The moderator was Duby McDowell ’78, a former political reporter for WFSB Channel 3 in Hartford.
With close to one hundred students, faculty, and alumni in attendance in the Getz Auditorium, “Defending the First Amendment” explored the tensions between the Constitutional freedom of the press and the government’s desire to keep many facts and policies away from the public. The panel agreed that a free press is vital in a democracy, and discussed whether the government is inhibiting journalists as they attempt to exercise their First Amendment rights. There is, for example, no federal law that shields the press from having to identify their anonymous sources. Several panelists argued that for the press to play its role in American life, it needed to be in the position to receive information that powerful government officials would prefer not to make public.
Lee Smith ’80 asserted that we are at “robust moment for the First Amendment, given the multiple sources for information that technology has afforded us,” but he said that the Bush White House had treated the press “with paranoia and contempt.” But he said that there were “many roles for the press,” and did not seem troubled by the fact that the press did not challenge assertions by the Bush administration regarding the existence of weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
Lee Hockstader ’77 said he was quite pleased with the event and that it was “a lively exchange of views. Not everyone agreed, but that helped the discussion along. Lee Smith (’80) believed it wasn’t a journalist’s job to press the government for information, which really gave us something to talk about.”
The second panel was called “The Corporatization of the Media.” This panel included John Arthur ’66, an editor at The Los Angeles Times; Ed Kelly, the head of American Express Publishing (and parent of Grace Kelly ’07); and James Surowiecki ’84, who covers finance for The New Yorker. The moderator was Arthur Brisbane ’68, a senior editor of Knight-Ridder Inc.
This panel immediately focused on the future of print news: what will happen to newspapers as wealthier corporations buy them? Some fear that quality reporting will fall victim to cost cutting as newspapers work to satisfy stockholders. The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are still family-controlled and therefore, it was argued, more insulated from corporate pressures.
Attendee David Cushing ’80 said the crowd wished “the panel could go on even longer after it ended. We were hungry to talk about why it has been sad to see high quality journalism monetized.” The second panel also discussed the pros and cons of online journalism. While the panel agreed that online coverage is cheaper and instantaneous, they wondered if it might compromise the quality standards of traditional reporting and editing. In the earlier panel, Marian Burros has made effectively the same point when she said, “With no filter for information, and with an unlimited universe of opinion, the internet is a very mixed blessing.” On the other hand, as a result of the web, the total readership of so-called “mainstream papers” is going up. The question of how to channel new technology and re-capture revenues from a loss of print advertising, especially classified advertising, also got the panel’s attention.
Later in the day, the Humanities Rotunda was buzzing as alumni and News editors gathered for a celebratory dinner at 6:00. In his pre-dinner remarks, Mr. Goodyear described The News as the “labor of love” and the students who write for it as “keepers of an honorable flame.” The News produces an eight-page paper every week and circulates this paper throughout the school, as well as more than four hundred alumni, parents and friends of the school. Students also produce a weekly online edition of the paper. Mr. Goodyear noted that The News is produced on a completely extracurricular basis, and not as part of a journalism class like most other high school newspapers.
“Can we have any more tangible recognition?” joked an alumnus from the crowd. Mr. Goodyear responded that the greatest recognition The Choate News has is to embody the epigram of The New York Times: “To report the news without fear or favor.”
Prompted by the success of the earlier events of the day, which were “a great demonstration of the strong news community at the school,” according to Tony Smith ‘65, the alumni took great pleasure during the dinner in discussing their days on The News. Mr. Hockstader reminisced about the “news clique” he was part of while at Choate. “We would put the layout together on Sunday nights in the basement of Arch. There was no adult supervision, so things sometimes spiraled down into jelly doughnut fights, but my favorite part of being on The News was getting to watch the sun rise outside Arch after we would finally finish.”
Ms. McDowell was equally praiseworthy of her time on The News: “I was nervous before moderating this panel because I was laughing with my old News buddies only minutes before, and I was worried I would be giggling the whole time through the discussion.”
The dinner speakers included former editors-in-chief Kaplan and Sherman, and the keynote speaker was Geoff Cowan ’60, who is outgoing Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California. Cowan admitted that he was “excited to come back to Choate for The News Centennial because I sometimes ask myself why students would go into journalism when it’s unfortunately on the decline now. I find the answer here at Choate. To see fabulous students with talent and courage reporting for The News gives us all hope that we will have storytellers for the next generation.”
A recurring theme during the dinner discussions was how The News is Choate’s most dynamic extracurricular activity. The Choate News has clearly shaped the lives of students for the past century. Multiple generations of Choate alumni came together from all over the country to share their connections with the paper. And although the dinner guests might be biased, it did seem like The News had more than a long history to celebrate.
Mr. Goodyear, who participants thanked for making the celebration possible, summed up the day with a motivating farewell: “Onward to another one hundred years!”
