Stepping aside, but column stays put

June 10, 2007
Chris Satullo
Inquirer Editorial Page Editor

Some news:

I am stepping down as editorial page editor of The Inquirer.

When Brian P. Tierney, CEO and publisher of the paper, chooses my replacement, I'll move into a new role. In essence, I'll get more time to do two of my favorite parts of the old role.

I'll write this column, "Center Square," twice a week. I'll join the chattering online throng and do a blog version, too. And I'll continue and extend my work as the director of Citizen Voices, the much-acclaimed program of civic engagement I helped found in 1996. This will include carrying forward Great Expectations, the ambitious civic conversation about the future of the
Philadelphia region that we've pursued in this mayoral election year.

Being an editorial page editor is one of the great jobs in the known universe. I've loved my seven years in the chair, and the six before that as deputy to Jane Eisner. This job lets you lead a group of journalists, the Editorial Board, who are unusually dedicated, talented and collegial. It puts you smack in the middle of the rolling, raucous and occasionally reasonable conversation known as American democracy. It gives you a chance to take the measure of the powerful, and to use your pages to hold them to account. Even better, it enables you to get to know thousands of your fellow citizens in all their variety, sincerity and quirks.

So, why leave all that?

This decision flows from a convergence of factors. The easiest way to sum it up is this: Thirteen years is a long time to do any one demanding thing.

Let me address the likely speculation: This move happens entirely at my instigation. No ideological putsch is occurring in the big white building on Broad Street. In my time on the board, I've been fortunate to work for three publishers - Bob Hall, Joe Natoli and now Brian Tierney - who took a lively, appropriate interest in what is, after all, the publisher's page, but who also gave the journalists on the Editorial Board the freedom to do their jobs.

So, by and large, I'm responsible for what has appeared on the Editorial and Commentary pages of the paper these last seven years, and in the Sunday Currents section that I started in 2003.

That covers a lot of words, images and activities of which I'm proud - and some stray moments I regret.

First, regrets. A big one: endorsing Jim McGreevey over Christine Whitman in 1997. I was deputy then, and supported Whitman, but I lost that discussion. Jim McGreevey. Good Lord.

We should have come out strongly against stand-alone casinos in Pennsylvania. Slots at racetracks seemed a plausible, limited gambit to raise needed money for schools, but we should have seen that, in corrupt and secretive Harrisburg, casinos would metastasize.

We should have come out sooner against the Iraq invasion. I will say this: We opposed the war at the last minute for a very good reason, because we'd concluded the Bush White House was clueless about Iraqi society and the demands of occupation.

Now, the good stuff.

Over the last 13 years, this Editorial Board has received national notice for its innovations in opening up its pages to readers. Before the fiscal convulsions of the last two years forced some painful cuts, we published more pages of outside commentary and letters than any other American newspaper. This included three different local Commentary pages each weekday, and eight
grassroots Community Voices pages on Sunday.

Earlier than most journalists, we put our phone numbers and e-mail addresses in the paper; we spent hours responding to those messages, sometimes fostering friendly dialogues with readers that have endured for years, despite origins in rancor.

The Citizen Voices program moved that listening impulse into the community. In projects such as the Penn's Landing Forums of 2003 and the Franklin Conference on School Design in 2005, we honed techniques of civic dialogue that produced clear principles for how public money should be spent and public assets treated. This program aims to amplify the voices of ordinary citizens, and to
help them propose smart solutions to public problems. Great Expectations is our most ambitious effort yet. Stay tuned.

On the Editorial Page, we have tried to be clear and strong, to try to get things done, not merely wring our hands. But we've also tried to keep a middle course, just left of center, avoiding pat, partisan answers - as well as the raging venom that has so stained the times. We've tried to be consistent in values, but never wholly predictable. We've favored experiments in school choice, while insisting on the moral imperative of well-funded public schools.
We've crusaded for tax cuts where they made fiscal and moral sense, such as in Philadelphia, and against them when they made no sense.

We endorsed Bill Clinton twice - the right call each time - but were also the first paper that had endorsed him to call upon him to resign once he had betrayed his supporters and his oath. (To make the point one last time: If Clinton had resigned, Al Gore would have won in 2000.)

We've tried to offer intelligent commentary on national and international news while maintaining a vivid focus on the issues closest to our home base. We've expanded our palette of issues, writing often about popular culture, science, faith, family issues and sports. We've written editorials in the form of poems, movie scripts, Socratic dialogues and crossword puzzles.

As too many people hunker down in ideological silos, we've tried to produce commentary pages and letters packages that show the value of a varied, robust and respectful forum.

We've tried to swing the big bat, making major statements. Going back to 1995, the Common Ground series warned the Philadelphia region about the wages of sprawl and parochialism, and argued for regional cooperation in an age of globalization. Seems like solid advice today. Around that time, we came out against the death penalty, for moral and practical reasons that seem
unassailable in this era of DNA testing.

Our 2001 series on reparations for slavery and segregation made The Inquirer the first major newspaper to support the concept of reparations, while redefining how it would work, so that it might be a vehicle of reconciliation, not endless recrimination.

We've tried to innovate in an age of rapid technological change. In late 2002, long before the terms blog or citizen journalism became common, we set up Reform Journal, online diaries through which students, staffers, teachers and observers tracked Philadelphia's first year of major school reform.

All Join Hands, our response to the plague of youth violence in our community, used every item in our tool kit to address a hideous problem: editorials, commentaries, blogs, town meetings, even helping to paint a huge antiviolence mural.

Finally, the thing that brought me the most heat (along with "Clinton must resign") and of which I'm most proud: "21 Reasons."

In 2004, we recognized what a watershed election America faced. Doing editorial business as usual would be failing the moment. So we took a risk. We did a 21-part series that brought the issues of Bush vs. Kerry into high relief. Every day, we wrote an editorial documenting the failures and mistakes of the Bush administration in a given area, from torture to fiscal policy to the environment. And every day - demonstrating the kind of fairness the other side never showed - we turned over our Commentary Page to an advocate of the Bush administration to make a contrary case.

All I can say now - as a disgusted public mourns Iraq, Katrina, deficits, a politicized Justice Department, congressional scandals, huge deficits and the rest of the wreckage - is this: We tried to warn you.

This job involves a lot of pushing rocks up hills. Some boulders we've never quite gotten to the summit: sane gun control, public financing of campaigns, merit selection of judges, statewide tax reforms.

But some things the skeptics said would never reach the top somehow did. The National Constitution Center got built. The USS New Jersey is berthed in Camden. Long before Jack Abramoff, Pennsylvania legislative pay raise and Ron White became familiar terms, we crusaded for ethics and campaign reform in national and state capitols, and city hall. The wise guys scoffed. And a lot of them are out of jobs after the last elections.

Sometimes, the good guys win. That's why you keep at it.

I wish my successor in this seat as much joy pushing the rocks up the hill as I have found in these 13 years. I'm not done pushing - just finding a new place to get some traction.