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          Davids and Goliaths Kay Fanning knew that a newspaper is a public trust, and she published hers in an unrelenting quest for the public good. I don’t know if she was a student of James Madison, but I know she embraced the ethic of which he spoke when he observed, “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” —Howard Weaver, McClatchy Co. vice president/news jho doesn’t love the story of the pathetic ninety-pound weakling thumping the muscle-bound bully; of the overmatched Rocky Balboa humbling the hulking Russian Ivan Drago, or the scrawny David felling the mighty Goliath with his meager stone? Journalists certainly do. After all, they all grew up in a profession where “man bites dog” is a three-word definition of news. And it’s bigger news when the dog is a pit bull. The increasing popularity of investigative reporting fostered several classic David-and-Goliath battles involving smaller press organs in the s. If relentless Post journalists were a match for a secretive Nixon White House, so too were some small-town scribes taking on major adversaries in the far reaches of Alaska and rural east Texas. In a way, another big-versus-small contest took place at Columbia University as Pulitzer jurors and board members weighed epic public service efforts by the Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and New York Daily News against the work from those pint-sized Alaska and Texas papers. There, too, the little guys won. Bob Woodward proposes that “degree of difficulty” should be factored into the standards used for the Public Service Prize—the way Olympic judges add points  for a dive or floor exercise. To some degree the Pulitzer board already does that when it considers the long odds faced by a small newspaper. On the frontiers of journalism, where a newspaper may lack a battery of in-house lawyers, or even a security guard at the door, challenging wrongdoing is a risky undertaking. The adversary may have the power—legally or illegally—to shut down well-meaning journalists in an instant. Or to do even worse. Bringing Gold to Alaska Howard Weaver was twenty-five when his editors at the Anchorage Daily News teamed him with relative veteran Bob Porterfield in pursuit of a story on the mightiest institution in Alaska: Teamsters Union Local . Unlike the kinds of teamformation decisions being made at larger, investigation-minded papers, the choices were fairly simple for executive editor Stan Abbott and managing editor Tom Gibbony . There were only a dozen staffers. Compared to mainstream American newspapers there was also a sense of remoteness in the forty-ninth state, which was literally a place apart in . “You could not watch Walter Cronkite live in Alaska,” says Weaver. “They videotaped it in Seattle, flew it up, and showed it at  at night.” The Anchorage-born Weaver felt close to the latest trends in investigative journalism , though. A year earlier he had attended a ten-day American Press Institute reporting seminar at Columbia. Inspired, he did not see a story on theTeamsters as particularly daunting. After all, he had been exposed to New York Times reporter David Burnham, whose stories had covered Frank Serpico, the cop who blew the whistle on widespread payoffs in the New York Police Department. Weaver had read the Newsday stories of Bob Greene from just across Long Island Sound, considering that paper “a well-oiled machine that could get to the bottom of things.” And Watergate stories , reflecting the best of recent investigative journalism, were still in the news. Looking back now, he sees that he probably should have been a bit daunted. The Daily News was the number-two paper in Anchorage. Its thirteen thousand subscribers gave it less than a third the circulation of the Anchorage Times, which owned the building and leased its smaller rival space under a joint operating agreement . As for Teamsters in Alaska, there were twenty-three thousand of them— more than the number of registered Republicans in the state. The News did have something special going for it: publisher Kay Fanning, whose idea it had been to throw the paper’s resources into finding out what made the Teamsters tick. She had also authorized Weaver to attend the Columbia investigative seminar. To her, Weaver was a logical choice for the Teamster assignment .                 [18.119.132.223] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 08...

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