Caring for communities with values and integrity
JOHN NEIBERGALL PRIZED INTEGRITY AND ETHICS ABOVE ALL ELSE DURING HIS TIME MANAGING FOUR NEWSPAPERS. THOUGH SMALL TOWN PAPERS ARE A DIFFERENT ANIMAL, HE LOVED THE BUSINESS AND CHALLENGES THAT CAME WITH THE JOB.
By SARAH NELSON | Copy Editor
John Neibergall, senior development officer at Bethel University, spent most of his life managing multiple newspapers in small corners of IA and KS. As a member of a small newspaper, he and his team were responsible for several aspects in the paper, making his job busy but satisfying.
How did you get into journalism?
Well, like an awful lot of people that do, I started out on my high school newspaper. And that lead to first an internship and then a job at my local community daily in a small town in IA. And I did that all the way through high school summers and during the school year I did a lot of sports coverage on nights and weekends and decided to major in journalism. In the course of 13 years I published four weekly community newspapers in IA. My undergraduate degree was journalism and it was from the University of IA. After 13 years as a publisher in a small newspaper, I sold the papers. And I decided to go to Iowa State to get a masters in journalism. I taught at IA State during that time and got a job teaching at Kansas State University in the journalism program. After that we decided we’d move back to Iowa and I was the executive director of the Iowa Newspaper Foundation for another six and a half years. Then from there I came from Bethel.
“It is a 24/7 job in a very small newspaper but I loved it. I love the business.”
What did a typical day look like?
A day in the life of is an interesting thing in a small paper. You are the editor, you are the advertising director and sales person, you are also in a sense a proof reader, you are the chief reporter. I mean you do it all. Even if you have help. There is no sense in which you can just dedicate your time to editing. That’s just one of the seven or eight hats you wear in a small newspaper. I was very hands-on and so my week would usually start on Sunday evenings and I would work until midnight on Sunday nights. And then I would get to work on Monday and work from seven until two or three in the morning. Wednesday would be 7 am until 4:30 pm and by then the paper was out. And then I had a couple of normal days and Saturdays covering things. It is a 24/7 job in a very small newspaper but I loved it. I love the business.
Did you have a mentor? How did they impact you?
Yeah, one of the guys who most influenced me was the editor of my hometown newspaper. That was the Daily Freeman-Journal in Webster City, IA. His name was Max Maxon. We called him Maxie. He knew the whole community, he could cover a story like nobody’s business. But I worked for him and with him and I learned an awful lot from him. He’s a great guy. Mostly I learned how important it is to know the community and to absolutely get the facts right.
“You feel like you’ve accomplished something when you’ve united the community and provided leadership in a way that produces a great asset for the community.”
What was the best part of your job?
The satisfaction of seeing what a voice of integrity, what an impact that can make on a small community. Whether it’s an editorial voice, the voice of a reporter who reports accurately and without an agenda. But people in our small communities really responded to journalists with integrity. You feel like you’ve accomplished something when you’ve united the community and provided leadership in a way that produces a great asset for the community. That’s what my life was about in small town journalism.
What was the worst part of your job?
The hours. It really was almost 24/7 and I just poured my life into that. That was when my wife and I had our first child. It was hectic. The hours were tough but the business was everything I wanted to do in life. I enjoyed it.
Do you have a memorable editing horror story?
In this first little town where we had our newspaper, the city wanted to pave a street that was in the center of town. The city would never pay for a new street until the property owners on either side all agreed to pay their part of the paving. So all of the property owners signed except one guy (Sam) who lived on that street who was a member of the city council. It’s late October, they wanted to get started on this project before the snow fell. And he stubbornly refused to sign. The mayor of the town was also the foreman of the paving company that paved the roads in town. He decides we’ve got to go ahead with that project. So he builds forms in front of Sam’s property. I grabbed a neighbor and we ran to the mayor who’s running the paving machine. We wrote a check for Sam’s assessment. We said here’s Sam’s assessment, take this and pave the whole street. And the mayor said, just as stubborn as the councilman, I won’t accept that check until Sam hands me the check. So he literally went ahead and paved around Sam’s property. And I took a picture of it and ran a four-column picture of the mayor paving the street around Sam’s property and I ran it under the headline in the Editorial page, Monument to Poor Judgement. And the paper went out and it hadn’t been on the street for more than thirty minutes when I get a call from the mayor. He said “I just got the paper, I want to see you right now.” It was sort of a threatening tone. So I called the superintendent of the schools who lives across the street from the mayor. I said listen, you’re going to see my car in front of your neighbor’s house. If it’s there in 15 minutes, I’ve been there too long. Somebody needs to check to make sure I’m still alive. So I park in front of his house and he unlocks the door, and as I walk in he crushes the Pepsi can in his hands and deadbolts the door behind me. And we sat down and he said I didn’t like what you wrote. And I said well I didn’t expect you to like what I wrote. We may have to agree to disagree over this. We did agree to disagree and it was about 15 minutes before he let me out. You begin to understand why people who have been away from a free nation come back and they kiss the ground when they get back to freedom, I felt that way I got back to my car.
Do you have a favorite memory?
I had just taken my car to get the oil changed when a fire whistle sounded. So I grab my camera, and I literally found out as I was running there had been a school bus accident on the edge of town. I ran to that edge of town and when I got there I could see the school bus was turned on its side, hanging precariously from a bridge over a ravine in a creek below. There were bodies of children, some were sitting up and crying. Three of those children died at the scene. As I was running up with my camera, here’s what was running through my head: Okay, you can have a Pulitzer-winning photo of the pathos, the grief. But this is a small town. That couldn’t be the way I handled that picture. So I did capture the scene from a distance. But we ran the picture that I took and along with it, the school pictures of the three little kids who died. I looked at that and said, it was not worth sacrificing my own human values for the sake of a sensational photograph. I always felt like that was a moment of integrity. And it gave me the opportunity on my editorial page to express care for the community and to even offer a prayer for the community. I felt like that was a moment of satisfaction. I felt like I was in ministry with the community.
What would you and your staff look for in interns?
I hired primarily journalism interns from Iowa State University because they had a good, pragmatic program. I gave those students tremendous responsibilities because of budget reasons I couldn’t afford the type of editor I wanted. They were the editor of the paper. Part of that was also to have a sense of organizing their work. Probably the people that I hired had a better sense of that than I did. They could manage the news desk. The fact they were organized was really hugely important. It gave us all some cushion to get the paper done. I looked for people who had empathy for the community, who cared about the community. I wanted a paper that was obviously caring, obviously had the integrity to tell a story well and therefore earn the right to lead the community editorially.
John Neibergall clearly loves stories and journalism. He is a big believer in ethics and integrity, which are important values to have when applying for future internships and jobs. Though I don’t see myself working for small town newspapers, I still learned a lot about the business and how to write a story well.
