After many years at the Valley News, I’m still reluctant to disclose to strangers where I work, perhaps out of fear that the information will prompt a complaint about some aspect of the paper over which I have no control. Or worse, some aspect that I do. In any case, my reluctance makes absolutely no sense because identifying my employer prompts many more compliments than complaints.
A subtext of many of the favorable reviews I receive is not simply that the Valley News is a good newspaper but that it is unexpectedly good. This is especially true for relative newcomers to the area who are comparing our paper with the ones they left behind. Stacking up the Valley News against both larger newspapers and ones that are similarly small often highlights how ambitious we are in any number of areas — enterprise reporting, photography, cultural coverage, and the selection and mix of local and national stories on our news and sports pages.
If you were to ask longtime Valley News staffers who in the newsroom is most responsible for this, there would be near-universal agreement that it is Jim Fox, the editor who retired this week after working nearly 30 years at the Valley News. It is safe to say that most of the strengths of the Valley News as a newspaper simply reflect the journalistic instincts of Fox. In fact, I must point out how uncomfortable I am in writing this piece because it is impossible to do so without sounding self-congratulatory about our newspaper, and one of Fox’s unspoken rules was to quietly go about your work and let the results speak for themselves. Adding to my discomfort is the fact that Fox is no great fan of attention; the best I can hope about his reaction to this piece is that he will grimace and bear it.
Another of Fox’s unwritten rules was to ask the right questions. I’m not talking about making sure a reporter gets all the necessary information from the people who are interviewed for a story, although that is surely important. Rather, a good editor or reporter knows that routine coverage lays the groundwork for truly significant reporting when journalists are encouraged to go beyond the facts of a story and search for connections and context. It’s easy enough to report what is superficially interesting and even surprising. And there’s nothing wrong with that approach; telling people what they don’t know is the essence of news, as Fox would say. But telling them how that came to be — why a town consistently miscalculated the cost of major projects, say, or why a person in desperate and obvious need was ignored until it was too late — allows readers to decide what they can do with the information we provide them. Nobody could read a newspaper like Fox and come up with more probing questions.
One time when I was talking with Fox about what was then the latest trend in journalism — an industry as prone to passing enthusiasms as any other — I recall him remarking that he wouldn’t know how to edit the copy this latest newspaper fad would produce. “I don’t know how to apply anybody’s standards but my own,” he said. That worked out quite well for Valley News readers over the years because the bedrock principle of his journalism was never to underestimate the intelligence of readers. Our coverage of sports, arts, municipal government, politics, education … all assume our readers are both curious and critical and that, like Fox, they have many questions they want answered. And they expect the information to be presented to them with clarity and in a way that doesn’t raise more questions than it answers.
The departure of a newsroom employee is usually an internal affair. A staffer says goodbye and the people left behind must deal with the loss of a valued colleague and his or her skills. If Fox were merely a good editor, his retirement would be an occasion for those who worked with him to reflect on the skill with which he practiced the various aspects of the craft — from headline writing to copy editing to line editing to page design to assignment editing to editorial writing to providing steady, wise and quiet leadership. But Fox’s departure (it won’t be total, fortunately; he’ll still be contributing some editorials) strikes me as being of concern to the larger community because of his oversized role in making the Valley News a newspaper that prompts newcomers and long-time subscribers to express their compliments with a combination of surprise and gratitude. It’s not simply that his colleagues have been lucky to have him around for such a long time; I think the Upper Valley has, too.
Martin Frank is the editor of the Valley News.