Leadership Lessons From A Mentor: Newsman Bob

“Somebody has to tell the mother her baby is ugly.”

With a gleam in his eye, that was the late editor Bob Fryer’s way of saying that a story needed work. He was an award-winning leader of local newsrooms in Western Pennsylvania who worked on the initial launch of USA Today, an internationally distributed Gannett paper.

In the late 1990s, Bob became an editor at Trib Total Media, building the Pittsburgh edition into an award-winning daily paper.  

His approach to producing journalism to hold the powerful accountable remains relevant today, as media outlets big and small shutter or slash staffs.

That’s why the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania each year awards a $5,000 scholarship in Bob’s name to a college student studying communications. Each year friends and family gather at River Forest Country Club — Bob’s favorite course — and raise money for the scholarship. His family leads the effort and donates the funds. Former coworkers and other journalists help. Counting this year, we’ll have raised more than $30,000 for seven scholarship recipients, since the outing began in 2012. Additional proceeds benefit cancer-related charities.

When Bob died in 2011 at the age of 64, the Press Club named a scholarship after him and boosted our efforts. Bob was my mentor, as he was for so many people.

The scholarship winners don’t really know much about him. So here goes:

“There will always be problems, distractions, and not enough people,” he’d tell me when I was a new editor in my 20s (which is to say, I knew nothing), working directly under him. “Your job is to work around it as best you can.

“Your job is to show people what can be.”

He required a thorough combing of the facts to strip a story down to a simple, compelling sentence. Here are a few:

The City of Pittsburgh is going bankrupt.

The Pennsylvania Lottery preys on those who can least afford it.

The nuclear plant in Apollo might cause cancer.

Facts were measurable, provable. Anything else was opinion or worse, speculation—these things didn’t belong in a news story.

He emphasized stories that illuminated the effects of a previously unreported problem, demanding that we clearly lay out to readers why that story mattered to them.

“We have to give voice to the voiceless,” he’d say. “We speak for people who can’t speak for themselves.”

He’d stroll through the newsroom, hair pointing in different directions, hand in one pocket of his rumpled, khaki suit, often looking down and muttering under his breath. Or, arms crossed, glasses perched on his head, at the Page 1 copy editor’s desk, working out headlines.

Most editors remain in the background, faceless and mostly nameless to readers. They save writers from their worst enemy—themselves.

Inside the newsroom, Bob spoke loudly in other ways.

“Why the hell am I reading this now, and why does it matter?” he’d say. “Come on, let’s fix this thing.”

His delivery after reading drafts often came in a sentence so direct it might take your breath away.

“Oh, there’s the lede….all the way down at the bottom,” he’d say, smiling mischievously and looking up through glasses perched on his nose.

“Periods are free,” he’d say, after reading a long-winded passage. “Use them often.”

Sometimes, Bob’s emotional exuberance manifested itself in a profanity-laced tirade. “I just care,” he might say later.

Some withered under these verbal razors. But reporting the news well was what mattered—not ego, not personal viewpoint…and certainly not feelings.

Sometimes, he offered praise but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get it right. He always had suggestions for how to “fix” the story. Perhaps surprisingly, his talks were often motivational and empowering.

And if deliberating over options, he’d argue for his choice and frame it thusly:

“Why do you do it?” he’d say. “You do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

Doing “the right thing” was an oft-heard refrain, one of many “Bob-isms” that come to me at certain times.

But as much as he loved a good story, he loved—perhaps just as much—helping people succeed. And that didn’t happen by just producing journalism — it started with being relentless about who he hired and how he put people together.

I was just one of many editors, photographers, designers, writers, and graphic artists who considered Bob a mentor.

Early on, I sat next to him while he edited, often one finger at a time. I watched. He’d ask me what I thought, then type what he wanted. Eventually, he told me to sit in his chair and edit while he sat next to me. It was terrifying.

I did not become the leader that Bob was, but I took in all I could.

Sometimes, he’d call me into his office and put his feet up on the desk.

“We’re not here to do people any favors. Just hire the best people you can find. Put your energy into those people. You have to protect them, take away all the distractions of the office so they can do their best work,” he’d say. “Show them you’d run through a wall for them. You have to take the blows. You worry about the little stuff that’s not so little. You stand up for them; at least, the ones who want to work. Solve their problems. Make sure they’re OK.

“They have to trust you. You have to be honest. Tell them as much as you can.

“If you can’t tell them, tell them that.”

Then, “Raise the bar. Show them what can be.”

Over several years, I was fortunate enough to take on more challenging roles: Managing a department, hiring, recruiting, reconfiguring a staff, starting publications, and more. Often, I was dispatched to consolidate or reconfigure an operation.

“Fix it,” he’d say. Or: “Make it better.”  

Note to students: Find your Bob Fryer.

We must count on ourselves to raise the bar. Because it’s never been about what can’t be — in journalism and in any profession. Focusing on what doesn’t work or isn’t here anymore rarely helps us innovate.

Moving forward is about imagining what can be and being unrelenting about finding a path to get there.

Kim is a past president and current board member of the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania. To learn more about the cholarship, please email kim.palmiero@pointpark.edu

To register for the golf outing click here.