Inheriting “The Chair”: a Q&A with Seth Prince
My dad has a saying that he loves to live by: Who you know gets you in the door, what you know keeps you there. That notion is especially pertinent in the field of journalism. Someone who certainly knows a lot about what it takes to be a journalist — and a damn good one at that — is Seth Prince.
Prince has worked as both a copy editor and reporter, as an editor and an advisor. He’s worked at the Oregonian, one of the most respected large-market newspapers in the country, and helped mold young journalists at one of the most decorated student newspapers around, the Oklahoma Daily.
Prince sat down to talk about copy editing a Pulitzer Prize winning project, inheriting “The Chair” and managing work with life.
Derek Peterson: So you copy edited the project that led the winning entry for the 2001 Pulitzer for Public Service, can you just talk about your part in that project and what that whole experience was like?
Seth Prince: “It was my first summer in Portland. I graduated from OU, left the Daily in May, got there in June, and prior to my arrival the paper had been covering that issue and it was one of those things, almost in the spirit of SAE here, that was one of those stories that wasn’t gonna go away. There was going to be a lot of things written about it over months and months and months. At some point, late summer, I was there for two weeks and went from an internship to a job and then, once I knew I was going to be staying there and the summer progressed, it became clear that that was going to become a project, that there was going to be a team of reporters dispatched to work on that on an extended leave, you know, like go do whatever you need to do.
“It was in an era where you could get on a plane to go anywhere at a moment’s notice to go get whatever they needed to get in terms of a story and in that context, somewhere late summer, maybe early fall, I was tapped and said ‘hey you’re going to be the copy editor on a project,’ and I was like ‘okay, I don’t know what that means, sounds cool.’
“It ended up coming together late December. It was a five or six-day project, I can’t remember off the top of my head, I want to say six, and it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my career. I got to work with some of the coolest, amazing writers, the most talented people.”
DP: What was the project about?
SP: “Basically the project investigated misdeeds in the INS. It started with, Portland being on the West Coast is a city through which a lot of people from foreign countries will enter and there was somehow, someway, the policies of how you police the border were getting interpreted in a way where people were getting detained for really long periods of time for things that shouldn’t have been snags. And so that was kind of the nexus of the story.
“So, I got to copy edit it, it was five, six days; it was a time in journalism where we were still primarily focused on print so every day it was the majority of the front page coupled with usually two open-inside pages, sometimes a third open-inside page. I don’t think there was anything I’ve ever edited in my life that was bigger or more ambitious and to have that fall into your lap at however old I was — I think I had maybe just turned 23 or something. It’s one of those moments in your career where shit just kind of falls into your lap and you’re like ‘we’re gonna make the most of this.’”
DP: Was copy editing something you wanted to do from the get-go or was that something they asked you to do?
SP: “When I was here at the Daily, I started as a reporter and then I made the turn to copy editing. I did that in part because my class schedule didn’t allow me to keep working dayside in the newsroom and my personality had been certainly, and even to a degree now, a bit more quiet and reserved and so copy editing allowed me to just kind of work behind the scenes, which I really liked, helping make other people’s stuff better. So I went hard after copy editing, I made the calculation that there was probably a better career start as a copy editor at that time — it’s quite different now — there were many more copy editing… there were fewer people competing for the copy editing jobs then there were the reporting jobs and I thought my hand was going to be stronger going after the copy editing job.
“That got me to Portland, and somehow that project falls into my lap. So yeah, so April of 2001, which would have been the spring if I had been here (at Oklahoma) another year I would have been at the Daily, the paper wins two Pulitzers and I’m just like ‘holy sh… wow.” My first year in the newsroom I got to see some of the highest highs you can ever see in journalism, kind of a cool start to the business.”
DP: Yeah, I was going to say, what was that like when you walk in the front door and you get to work with some of the best pieces, some of the best writers you can work with?
SP: “To me, I think everything you do in editing anybody else’s stuff is a real privilege, you know you guys, as reporters, pour so much into what you create and so how as an editor do you do it justice and make it better without taking away that sense of ownership that a writer has in it. In Portland it was just like walking into an All-Star team, you know? It was like, ‘wow, look at the people all around you.’ And so how do you play around with that and not… I’m a big believer that everything you do in journalism is about trust and so how do you, from day one in any place you’re working, build that trust. It was never then, and certainly now isn’t a thing where I’m trying to build trust for this goal of ‘well if I do this it’s going to lead to that,’ I just think it’s the right way to handle your business.
“For whatever reason my boss… and he and I talked about it years later and I was like ‘you know, Jerry you could have given that to anybody.’ Right? Literally, every other person on the team had more experience, why did you hand it to me? I had people pull me aside afterwards and say ‘hey remember this, it may happen again later in your career, it may never happen again in your career,’ but to me the beauty of it was it was just doing good work that mattered with a great team.
“I try not to attach too much to it, but what I love most about journalism, and I’ve said it to you guys at the Daily, are those moments when a team of people come together and do something that no one person could do by him or herself. To me those great big projects are kind of that in a nutshell and that was one of those moments. In the end they shut down INS after that, after those stories ran.”
DP: So you start out with such a big project like that, then you move around a bit with the paper and do some different things. Then you’re the Sports Editor in 2012. What was it like heading up that section in one of the largest media outlets in that kind of market?
SP: “At first it was intimidating, you know, I mean I was… I don’t remember how old I was, maybe 34, 35, something like that, and I distinctly felt a sense that I was probably pretty young for a job like that. There’s not a ton of people that age doing that across the country, at a paper that size. The biggest thing I ever felt about working in Portland was kind of what I was getting at earlier with the talent and the reputation and the heights that they worked at, that we worked at, there was just that sense of don’t fuck it up. You know? Like, you inherit something, I had the good fortune of one of my original mentors in there had been the sports editor in the early 80’s and 90’s and he was this old guy who was still around and he and I still message to this day — I mean I’ve talked to him in the past two weeks — and we described it as ‘The Chair.’ You’ve inherited ‘The Chair,’ and there’s a long lot of people that have held it before you and there’s many people that will hold it after you. Collectively they’ve carved out this reputation associated with it and your job is to, and I think this is the case for any editor of anything, you’re a caretaker. How do you preserve the reputation and maybe build on it a little bit?
“One of the other guys I worked with there for years who also had worked in sports for a long time, he used to give me these baseball metaphors all the time when I was writing headlines and I was trying to write the greatest freaking headline you’ve ever seen and he was like ‘dude, you’re trying to hit a home run, just make contact.’ Like in baseball, don’t swing for the fence every time you come to the plate because you’re going to strike out, or you’re gonna foul it off, you’re gonna look stupid. While I think I had a little bit of that first ‘ugh, I’m in charge now,’ at some point you just have to set it aside and just do the job.”
DP: Did you want to leave your own mark or were you more interested in preserving that reputation that you talked about?
SP: “I mean they had a good reputation that you wanted to protect but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t room for change. I don’t know that I viewed it so much as making my mark, so to speak, it was more what does this room, what does this team need at that point in time. You know, what they needed in 2012 was very different than what they needed in 1992, which is very different from what they need now. Through meeting Rob (King) and a couple other people I kind of got comfortable with the idea that my job was to make change. Not that I was going to upend what the history and tradition of the Oregonian sports department was but it needed to be different in my era than it was in my predecessor’s era.
“My mark was ‘what is the right change at the right time?’ I think that’s kind of how I’ve tried to view the rest of my career, I’ve seen enough in this business — and I don’t think of myself as an old, old man yet — but the people I know who are inflexible are unemployed at some point and so how do you evolve at the right speed at the right time for your audience.”
DP: So you have a family?
SP: “Mhmm.”
DP: You have three kids?
SP: “Mhmm.”
DP: How do you manage time as a journalist, a job that never sleeps, and being a father and a husband? Is there something to be said for finding a balance?
SP: “That’s a big reason why I’m here (back in Oklahoma).
“If I were to go back and be the sports editor again I would do it differently than I did before and I think I would be better at it. There was a lot of stuff in my life that was very chaotic at one time. I would get up at 5:30 in the morning and start working at home and then I would work pretty much through breakfast and then I would get on my bike and go to work and I would work from 8:30 or 9 until usually, if I was lucky, maybe be home by 8:30. I’d get home, choke down some dinner if I hadn’t grabbed some garbage at work and then probably end up working some more. The tipping point for me was…There’s one night where I literally can’t get my heart to stop racing and I’m like, something’s not right. I think I’d ridden my bike home, and I’d felt it on and off throughout the day and I was like ‘something’s not right but I got more shit to do so I’m just gonna keep working.’ I got home at night and it just wouldn’t stop, I would lay down and I would try to really focus on my breathing and I was just like, ‘let’s go to the hospital.’ They end up running all these tests — I was 35 when this happened — they run all these test, CAT scans, the whole nine yards, and my wife is freaking out and I’m kind of alarmed and at the end they’re like ‘it’s probably just stress.’
“I’m 35 years old, I have a pretty cool job and I have three kids and I don’t want to die, you know? I need to not be this absorbed with it. And you guys know here, because I ping you at all hours of the day and night with stuff, that I’ve not really let it go but I’m a lot less whatever you want to describe it as than I used to be. I’ve found a much better balance.
“There’s so much less stress in my life. I mean, everybody’s got some stress and I personally like to have some stress, it gets me out of bed and gives me something to do. But I didn’t want to wake up and have my kids be in middle school or high school and feel like I missed that.”
