How I got here: A tale from the TNT’s past, and a focus on the future of local news
I have a confession to make: When I started working for The News Tribune in 2000, I stole something from the newsroom and kept it. I still have it.
Maybe “stole” is the wrong word. “Reclaimed” might be better. I found a relic, a newspaper clipping tacked to an empty cubicle wall. In a way, it belonged to me.
The clipping was a 1991 editorial from The Federal Way News, the suburban weekly where my journalism career began, part of a chain of Puget Sound newspapers published for decades by my grandfather, Gerald S. Robinson, who died in 2014.
I recognized the editorial instantly and started laughing. The snotty words were mine, a screed aimed at the TNT, written a decade earlier in a fit of competitive rage. Brad Broberg, my first boss and editor, had smoothed the rough edges.
It was too weird: my first day on a job I’d fought for, and here was this artifact from my past, mocking my new employer.
“We’ll stand up to test from Tribune,” the headline read.
I had written the thing when The Federal Way News was locked in an old-school newspaper war. The TNT was the intruder, our sworn enemy, the bully on our block.
We were the smaller paper, publishing three days a week. They were the big daily, coming to seduce our readers with a shiny new product. We were fighting back.
“The Tacoma News Tribune has decided to put out a weekly newspaper in Federal Way,” the editorial began. “Why? It is mostly an admission that their other efforts have failed here.”
The rest carried on in a similar vein, like a terrier barking at a bear. I laughed harder when I realized the bear had noticed. In faded ink, next to the headline on the clipped editorial, some TNT staffer had scrawled a comment:
“FW NEWS — To all — ENJOY.”
That was a long time ago. Recently, I thought of my old editorial again, as two events converged in strange and personal ways. My family’s newspaper chain still exists in a smaller form online, but my uncles, still handling the business, recently made the difficult decision to stop printing hard copies.
A few days later, The News Tribune’s owners completed a difficult step of their own. As a prelude to relocating the newsroom to a different location, likely closer to downtown Tacoma, we closed the doors of the paper’s longtime headquarters on South State Street in the city’s Central District, where I’ve worked for 20 years with a parade of excellent journalists.
My boss, Stephanie Pedersen, President and Editor, recognized the significance of the moment, and invited current and former staffers to a send-off, a farewell to the old mother ship, complete with pizza and champagne on the company dime.
The party drew a crowd: So many friends and staffers, current and former, young and old, stopped by to take a last look, and reconnect with each other. It warmed my heart. More important, it affirmed my faith in the idea of a local newspaper dedicated to coverage of our communities.
As I walked around and mingled, laughing with friends and co-workers, I couldn’t help thinking of my grandfather, who believed in the same thing. My retired dad, Mike Robinson, who edited the family chain through the 1980s and early 1990s, called my grandfather “a hope merchant,” which seems fitting to me.
The formula at the family papers was simple: Write stories about local institutions and hold them accountable. Write stories about the people in our community, take pictures of them and run them big.
It worked. At its peak, the Federal Way News, one of five papers in the chain, employed about a dozen reporters, two editors and two photographers, along with a good-sized ad staff.
Some of those journalists in the chain moved on to bigger papers, including the TNT. I was a draft pick from that farm team. So were many of my friends.
I didn’t know everyone who filed through my family’s chain, so I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat is another alumnus.
Westneat wrote recently about my family’s decision to stop the presses, in a thoughtful column that extolled the virtues of locally driven journalism. He told part of the business side of the story, though he didn’t mention that The Seattle Times bought my family’s chain in 1991, and closed it down six years later. My family resurrected the chain after that, in a quiet business deal few noticed. Old rivalries die hard.
I thought about all this as I reminisced with TNT colleagues at the old building. When I was slogging in the old days as a local reporter for The Federal Way News, I dreamed of working for the TNT, the daily next door.
I wasn’t interested in a national career at some paper in another part of the country: I wanted to do good work in the community where I lived, close to my family and friends. I was lucky enough to realize that dream, and I don’t regret it. My TNT colleagues past and present are my heroes. We’ve done lots of good work, and we’re still doing it.
Now, after a brief hiatus, I’m an editor, older, and maybe wiser, chastened by developments in the journalism industry. The last few years have been hard for newspapers. When I arrived at the TNT in 2000, the newsroom had almost 50 journalists on staff, and a fistful of great photographers.
These days, the staff is smaller. It reminds me of my early days in Federal Way, when everyone pitched in on every task, from design to writing to editing.
In a funny way, that gives me hope. Recently, the TNT’s leaders have rediscovered the power of local news. When we write about local athletes and their achievements, you respond. When we write about local institutions and pursue accountability from our leaders, you respond.
We’re going to keep on doing that, and it feels right to me. I hope we can kick some ass along the way. Thank you for reading.
This story was originally published September 5, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
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