My formative years

by Mike Reilly

I am prone to move forward and not look back. And, as some of you know, I am not good at keeping in touch with people I care about. But I can’t help but be nostalgic when I look at the names on the email string for this gathering.

Andy Maykuth put in a good word for me and helped get me hired at the Tribune as a GA reporter in the summer of 1982.

Paul Roberts, Mary Ann Gwinn, Forrest Rose, Jeff Truesdell and others welcomed me as an equal even though I was green and mistake prone. They helped me understand that newspaper writing should be artful as well as informative. 

One day Mike Jenner sent me north of town where police dispatch had said a body was found. (I think it was mid-afternoon and every other reporter was shooting pool downtown. But I like to think Mike had confidence in me, too.)  I managed to sneak into the victim’s autopsy later that day and listened to the coroner and detective talk for 20-25 minutes before I got kicked out. Mike helped me use what I heard to bargain for more information from the cops.

Virginia Young was my most formative teacher about the nitty-gritty of hard-nosed government reporting. How will you advance that story factually, Mike? It was something I prided myself on for the rest of my career.

John Trotter, David Rees, Jim Curley and Tom Reese were among those who taught me the value of having a photo partner with a thoughtfulness, gentleness and fabulous eye for detail.

John Schneller showed me that environmental reporting should be hard-nosed too. He also taught me a simple question I used throughout my career when, as an editor, I had a reporter dumping a notebook on my head: “So,” John would ask, “What’s the news?”

Kirk Wessler gave me one of my all-time favorite compliments once when I was down on myself. “I wish I had 12 Mike Reillys,” he said.  As an editor, I used versions of that compliment a number of times to buck up a good employee.

Jim Robertson showed me time and again that nurturing relationships is as important in management as completing tasks, even urgent, vital 1A-story tasks. This was a hard lesson for me, as Jim probably remembers.  I was a good story editor as city editor, but I struggled with the human interaction piece. Jim helped me get better.

As city hall reporter in 1985, I remember filing the first installment of my series on Mayor John Westlund questionable spending of public funds on travel. It already had been edited when I noticed a careless error I had made in the third or fourth graph.

For a moment, I was afraid to say anything. As I gathered myself, though, I went and found Jim. He was in paste-up proofing and trimming stories. Jim listened to me, calmly came back to the newsroom, got the error fixed and the story reflowed. 

He congratulated me on the story and the catch. He didn’t scold for the error.

I don’t remember if the pages closed late. I do remember going to bathroom after deadline and crying. An emotional release. Relief that it was caught in time. I had made some bonehead errors at Tribune in my first summer in 1982. I was grateful that eventually I got hired again in December 1983.

Lee Strobel gave me another chance. It made a huge difference in my career. I only learned later in life that the Tribune’s talent depth and supportive culture were not a given in the work world, not something to take for granted.

A tidbit of note from my post Tribune career:

For my first 18 years at the Omaha World-Herald, the publisher was a guy named John Gottschalk. Yes, John was Phil’s son.

John was a consistent advocate for me at The World-Herald, especially for my investigative journalism reporting and editing. He barely batted an eye when a team I led cost the paper hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue from cattle auctioneers. It was over a report exposing sanitary problems in the beef industry that contributed to E.coli deaths.  This was the mid-1990s, back when the paper was brimming with advertising, back when industry’s business model still worked.

In 1990, Phil helped persuade me to accept the job offer in Omaha. I had left the Tribune in fall 1989 and worked in St. Louis covering city hall for the entire lifespan of the St. Louis Sun, which was less than one year. I had bought a house, had a new wife and brand new daughter. I was unemployed but hoping the St. Louis Post Dispatch would hire me.

Phil called me and said something like, “Why are you holding out for that liberal rag that only pretends to cover the state when you can go work for a real, statewide paper.”  I think there was a goddammit or two in the sentence somewhere.