UPDATE – July 11, 2014: John Seigenthaler has passed away at home, surrounded by family, according to his son.
Original Post:
There’s a good chance John Seigenthaler started this day the way he has for more than six decades.
He retired from The Tennessean in 1991, after a long career as reporter, editor and publisher. But the paper remains part of his daily routine.
“I do read The Tennessean every day. Every day,” he says emphatically in a May interview, at his office in the First Amendment Center on the edge of Vanderbilt’s campus.
The Tennessean has defined John Seigenthaler’s life. Even in retirement, he still looks at stories in the paper with the sharp eyes of a tough editor.
“If the flow is an easy read, I probably won’t stop,” he says. “But if there’s a 60-word lede I have to struggle through, it upsets my morning a little bit in the same way it did when I was the editor.”
If he’s really riled up, Seigenthaler says, he’ll call to complain. But he’ll just as often call to compliment a reporter, or hand off a tip on something he thinks might make a good story.
Seigenthaler says he doesn’t want to cast a shadow on The Tennessean building, but those who are there now don’t mind hearing his “war stories.”
Tennessee, Texas, Washington And Back
He has many such stories, like the time he went to Texas to track down a wealthy Nashville businessman who had been missing for 22 years. Seigenthaler found him in a small town, living under an alias with an ex-secretary and five children.
In the late 50s, Seigenthaler’s reporting on corruption in the Teamsters union led to the impeachment of a Chattanooga judge.
And then there was the time he was beaten while helping Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Ala. That incident happened in the early ’60s, when Seigenthaler left The Tennessean to work for U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Eventually, the paper’s publisher asked him to return to Nashville and serve as editor.
“You know, you begin to think of yourself as being just about perfect,” he says. “You’ve been the attorney general’s administrative assistant. You’ve had a seat, number of times, right beside the President of the United States. You’ve been part of the effort in the Civil Rights movement. So, you come back, and you think you know everything and you think you’ve done everything. And you suddenly look at that newsroom and it’s lily white.”
Changing The Complexion
Seigenthaler knew he had to change that. The first thing he did was to promote a talented black reporter, William A. Reed Jr, to religion editor.
Not long after, Seigenthaler went to speak to a group of Fisk students. He realized that single step wasn’t nearly enough. After his remarks, a senior wanted to know why The Tennessean would not allow her photo in the Sunday engagement section.
“And it suddenly dawns on me, ‘You dumbass!’ You’re out here beating your breast about what a downright upright liberal you are on civil rights and you’re not even looking at your own newspaper.”
That young woman’s picture got into the paper, but Seigenthaler says it took years of work to change the complexion of the newsroom to something more reflective of Nashville as a whole.
From Print To Online
These days, the man who cut his teeth in the days of typewriters and newspapers put together by hand now reads The Tennessean on his computer most mornings.
He says he’s not worried about the shift away from newspapers to online sources of news, as long as reporters stick to values of accuracy, fairness and depth.
Seigenthaler says he’s even okay with a world where physical newspapers don’t exist.
“I feel very good about this!” he says. “Journalism is going to live — if it’s accountable, and if it’s credible. And if journalists look upon their credibility with the same concern that we looked upon it in my time, I think journalism is safe and the world of communication is going to be safe.”
John Seigenthaler Through The Years
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Correction: An earlier version of this post said that Mr. Seigenthaler was 87. He would have been so later in July, but was in fact 86 at the time of this interview, just weeks before he passed away on July 11th, 2014
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