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Week of 26 February 1999 Vol. II, No. 25 Feature Article Training reporters for the 21st century Newspaper veteran takes reins as COM's journalism chair By Eric McHenry With nearly four decades of experience in the pressroom, the newsroom, and the boardroom, William Ketter is ready to help determine what happens in the classroom. Ketter, who on January 1 assumed the chairmanship of the COM journalism department, comes to BU from a 20-year stint as editor of the Patriot Ledger, a 90,000-circulation daily newspaper in Quincy. Ketter, whose dossier also includes 16 years in various reporting and editorial positions at United Press International, is a past president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and a current member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. He replaces outgoing department chairman C. Ranald Macdonald, who has accepted a position as director of the University's international program in London. "When you're the editor of a community newspaper like the Patriot Ledger, you oversee all the operations, both from the editorial side and the business side," COM Dean Brent Baker says of Ketter. "If we were just hiring a professor to teach journalism, we'd be looking primarily at reporting skills. For the position of chairman, we're looking for a leader. His working-level knowledge of journalism and his leadership credentials were very important to members of the search committee and to me." Baker and the committee were further impressed by the vision Ketter brings to the department. Experience has lent him an appreciation for the journalism profession's protean character. He plans to strengthen the department's curriculum in several emerging and evolving areas, including community, political, and international journalism, new media, and what he calls "expert journalism." Training in this last area entails specialized work in the department's Advanced Journalism Studies certificate program. A one-semester course of study for recent master's degree recipients and working journalists, AJS helps participants develop expertise in covering a particular beat, such as sports, religion, health, law, or the arts. Ketter hopes to add new areas of concentration and increase the enrollment of midcareer professionals. "When you have practicing journalists mixing with aspiring journalists, you get, obviously, an advantage for the aspiring journalists," he says. "The presence of more professionals on campus will be beneficial to the overall quality of the program." Ketter's arrival will also herald a greater BU presence in Washington, D.C. Beginning in the fall, students interested in political, international, and defense reporting will be able to spend a semester engaged in appropriate course work and internships at what Baker calls "a Washington bureau." The department will make use of an existing University-owned facility that has both residential and classroom space. "It's less than two miles from Capitol Hill," Ketter says. "We have to work out the curricular details, but the infrastructure is already in place." Community journalism is the point of emphasis in Ketter's plan for the department that most directly reflects his professional experience. As editor of the Patriot Ledger he made thorough, neighborhood-focused reporting a priority, and in doing so increased the paper's circulation by a quarter. "Community journalism is a growth industry," he says, noting that readership of weekly newspapers and niche publications continues to burgeon even as the demand slackens for print journalism generally. William Ketter Photo by Vernon Doucette "Nothing is more important to hometown folk than authoritative coverage of their community," he says. "Our success at the Patriot Ledger was directly tied to our coverage of the local communities. We became the largest evening newspaper in the six New England states, and we did it by spotting local trends, reporting them, and doing a lot of what I call preventive journalism: recognizing developing problems before they've exploded into community crises." The Patriot Ledger produced a sparkling example of preventive journalism, Ketter recalls, in the early 1980s, when a large number of immigrants from the Guangdong province of China began settling in Quincy. "We noticed this happening because we covered the neighborhoods," he says, "and we saw the changing scene. White people were moving out. Asian-Americans were moving in. And we also noticed that some fears were developing in the community." Ketter hired three Cantonese-speaking reporters and sent them into the new enclaves. They returned with the raw material of what would over the course of half a year become a 23-part series. It helped put a human face, he says, on a major demographic change, and it garnered the paper a number of prestigious public service awards. Its most important consequence, however, was "a model of minority assimilation into a basically white community." Ketter is a lifelong student of journalism and is eager to report what he's learned to the generation that will succeed his. "The opportunity to train journalists for the 21st century excites me," he says of his BU appointment. He views the ascendancy of electronic media as a definitive event, but does not foresee obsolescence for newspapers. They will endure, he says, although perhaps in a modified role. "There's a synergy, actually, between the traditional and the new media," says Ketter, "and most news organizations are developing that synergy by having their own electronic component to go with their print or broadcast component. "We're no longer in a newspaper world or a broadcast world," he says. "We're in an information world. And newspapers and TV stations and radio stations, if they're smart, no longer define themselves as such. They define themselves as information companies."