Word: mcmullan
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Cover: Illustration by James McMullan...
...local news, the paper has been as aggressive as Chicago's dailies were in the era of The Front Page. When a zoning series last year charged that planning principles were being subordinated to the desires of developers, the paper's unyielding executive editor John McMullan lamented that the articles did not result in indictments. Said he: "We are proud of explanatory journalism, but a couple of convictions is a wonderful way to explain the problem." Yet the Herald is compassionate: Associate Editor Gene Miller has won two Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting in murder cases, including...
...After McMullan retired last July, some observers claimed that the Herald went soft. His powers were divided between Publisher Richard Capen, 49, who favors a less accusatory approach, and Executive Editor Heath Meriwether, 40, who spends much of his time discussing journalistic ethics in columns and at public meetings. Coverage is increasingly featurish; staff members joke that they sometimes produce "Jell-O journalism," with the main point of a story buried beneath paragraphs of scene setting...
...McMullan has been with the Knight (now Knight-Ridder) newspaper chain ever since 1957. When he was assigned to liven up its Washington bureau, his eagerness produced an uneasy rebuke from the bureau chief: "John, you were sent here to fill a vacuum, not overflow it." In 1970 McMullan left to execute a wholesale purge of the chain's newly acquired Philadelphia Inquirer. In three years, McMullan replaced a third of the paper's reporting staff, including virtually every department head. The overhaul was to turn the Inquirer into one of the strongest newspapers...
...retains a keen appreciation of the maverick qualities of his adopted home town, which was only 30 years old when McMullan arrived with his family in 1926 at the age of four. "Miami is still trying to sort out its values," he says. "There was a time when if you had eliminated the ex-cons from the University of Miami's board of trustees, you would have taken off some of the best people in town." The McMullan style will be difficult to emulate. His successor, former Managing Editor Heath Meriwether, 39, will not try. Says he: "My approach...