From Governing’s
October 2007 issue

Subscribe to Governing

Here’s to 20 Years

When I think of how Governing started, the image that pops into my head is of Eugene Patterson, a larger-than-life figure in American journalism, thumping his hands down on the lunch table and exclaiming, “Well, by God, let’s do it!”

It was vintage Patterson, who was a young tank commander under General George Patton in World War II, won a Pulitzer Prize as editorial page editor of the Atlanta Constitution during the civil rights era and then become managing editor of the Washington Post. He was and is a man of brash enthusiasm and great clarity in his speech and his writing. And in 1987, he was the CEO of the Times Publishing Co., which owned the highly regarded St. Petersburg Times in Florida and the company I worked for.

That line so memorable to me was his reaction to a question posed to all the executives of Congressional Quarterly, a Washington information company that over more than four decades had established itself as the independent, authoritative source covering the U.S. Congress. I was its editor and deputy publisher.

Gene had asked each of us what the company ought to do that was new, that would help it grow and expand the franchise. My immediate answer, delivered almost by rote because I had said it so many times, was to follow the story — start covering the states, with a new publication. It wasn’t a particularly popular idea with the other execs.

But Gene was a print guy, and he loved ambitious, bold new projects. He knew state government from his days in Georgia. So he was enthusiastic, as only Gene Patterson could be. By God, let’s do it!

We then had to figure out what “it” was. I had my own ideas that were akin to the CQ formula — a weekly frequency, more of a report than a magazine, with a modest price tag of, say, $75 per year. We ended up with something quite different — monthly, good art and graphics, and high reliance on advertising to pay the bills.

Then we had to staff up. The key hire as executive editor was Eileen Shanahan, a highly regarded and well-known economics reporter for the Washington bureau of the New York Times, who was smart and as knowledgeable about government as any journalist around, a perfectionist, highly opinionated, a feminist leader among women in the Washington press corps, and sometimes — how to say it? — sharp tongued. She and I argued about everything, but we still worked well together.

One early argument that Eileen won was that we should cover cities and counties, as well as states, because you just couldn’t separate them. I thought it was too ambitious to keep up with not only 50 states but also some 3,400 counties and thousands of cities and towns. We would lose focus. I was wrong.

It took a year to find the right staff, publish a prototype (including a profile of Bill Clinton, then in his fourth term as governor of Arkansas) and print our first issue.

We adopted a design for the magazine that was clean, colorful and elegant. We used some of the industry’s best illustrators and photographers. We printed it on heavy paper. And we spent so much on art, production and postage that today our costs in all of those areas are actually lower than they were in 1989. Part of the savings is due to changing technology, but a lot of it also is because we were spending way too much money.

It makes me think of the quote from the late Edward Bennett Williams, then owner of the Washington Redskins, who said of his coach, George Allen, “I gave that SOB an unlimited budget, and he exceeded it.” That’s just what we — uh, I — did.

So we made mistakes but learned from them. We began to rely more on our own reporters and a small corps of correspondents instead of hiring freelancers. We cut the lengths of our feature stories by as much as half. They became sharper and better focused, with a greater sense of how and why we should approach a subject. We increased coverage of those topics that most of our disparate subscribers had in common — namely, management and technology.

Along with some design changes, the magazine had less of an academic, journal-like feel and a greater sense of immediacy, what in the publishing industry would be considered a business-to-business approach.

In 1991, Eileen left to become the Washington bureau chief for the St. Petersburg Times, and Alan Ehrenhalt was promoted to the top editorial position. Alan was a longtime colleague at CQ, the former political editor there, who had helped, without realizing it, shape my thinking about why we should launch Governing. He had written a column for CQ’s weekly magazine called “Congress and the Country” focusing on how what was happening outside the Beltway affected politics and policy making in Washington. It helped me realize that the country was more important than its capital, which is not a widely understood notion in this city.

Under Alan’s leadership, Governing has become a magazine that, although I’m obviously biased, can reasonably be called intelligent, interesting and sophisticated. We are proud to have been nominated four times for a National Magazine Award, the Pulitzer of the industry — once for general excellence, twice for reporting in the public interest, and once for columns and commentary.

But it hasn’t been easy. First, story selection — choosing what you cover — is like three-dimensional chess. You have to balance levels (state, city and county), size of jurisdiction (large, mid-sized or small), office (elected, appointed or career), branches (executive, legislative or judicial), geography and subjects — how much politics as opposed to management, and so on. We’ve gotten better at that.

Second, we are a management and policy magazine covering government in a manner not unlike how Forbes or Fortune reports on business. Yet we operate in a trade magazine atmosphere. I remember one day in our first year when I got a call from a public relations firm asking if they could submit a bylined article about one of their clients for publication. It took me a while to comprehend what this young woman was asking me to do. I’m a lot better at handling those calls today.

I think it’s fair to say that we’ve managed to keep our integrity intact. Most companies respect the church-state division between editorial and advertising, not that they don’t want you to know what they’re doing, which is fine since they are part of the overall picture. But with very few exceptions, they understand that they can’t write the stories.

That’s our job, and our hope is that what we write helps put into context the experiences of our readers in managing their departments, grappling with policy issues or facing various challenges, and that our stories about particular places or situations resonate in many more.

Two developments over the years have given us even more reason to believe we are connecting with our readers. The first is that we now meet with so many of them, face to face, through a conference program run by our deputy publisher, Elder Witt. And we launched a Web site in the mid-1990s, overseen by John Martin, which has grown exponentially, particularly in the past several years. Clearly, more people will be receiving information from Governing.com than from the print magazine in the near future.

From our point of view, the country is a great beat. It’s yeasty and vibrant, diverse and unpredictable. And clearly, despite all the new emphasis on internal security, the shift in importance away from Washington to state and local governments makes the story all the more compelling.

When Governing was only three months old, President Reagan said something interesting in his final State of the Union address: “There are a thousand sparks of genius in the 50 states and a thousand communities around the nation. It is time to nurture them and see which ones can catch fire and become guiding lights.”

That’s why we’re in business. Here’s to the next 20 years. By God, let’s do it!

© 2007, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are registered trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc.