Twilight and Dawn on the Globe

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

An effervescent editor makes way for a patrician protege

When Thomas Winship took over in 1965 as editor of the Boston Globe, the city was considered a journalistic backwater, and the paper was not rated as even the best of the six in town. Its news coverage had lost the crusading spirit of its early days as a "people's daily" fighting Brahmin interests. The editorial page featured wambling, civics-text platitudes. There were advertisements on Page One. Winship's arduous task was made more delicate by family diplomacy: his predecessor was his father, Laurence Winship, who had dominated the paper for 40 years.

Undeterred, the new editor hired young, iconoclastic writers whom he called "my city-room Weathermen," hailed the counterculture and turned the paper vehemently against the Viet Nam War. The Globe won its first Pulitzer Prize the year after he took over, for probing the credentials of a federal-judgeship nominee who was a Kennedy family retainer; it has since won ten more, the majority for reports on such issues as race relations and arms control. During Winship's tenure, circulation jumped about 40%, to 520,000 daily and 793,000 (eighth in the U.S.) on Sunday. Last week this era came to a scheduled close: Winship, 64, announced that he will retire in January to set up a program to train Third World journalists. Said he: "It is about time. I have had a lucky life, and this new project is a longtime dream, a useful way to help the less fortunate."

His successor is Sunday Managing Editor Michael Janeway, 44, who joined the paper in 1978 after a decade as a top editor at the Atlantic and a stint as an aide to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Said Publisher William Taylor, whose family has owned and run the Globe since its inception in 1872: "Mike shares Tom's strong commitment to tackle the problems of the city, and has a lot of his sense of outrage." Janeway triumphed in a two-year power struggle that divided the staff. When word circulated last year that he might be the heir apparent, some reporters protested directly to Taylor that they saw him as aloof, enigmatic and almost relentless in getting his own way. Put under orders by Winship and Taylor not to respond to attacks during what he calls "the year of gossiping dangerously," Janeway gradually won over his rivals and the staff, and at last week's announcement he was greeted with subdued but sustained applause.

The contrast in style between the two editors could hardly be more acute. Winship is elfin, effervescent, demonstrative and unassumingly rumpled. He tells stories of his financially modest youth and calls himself a "swamp Yankee." Janeway is shy, sardonic, reserved and elegant. He has the seigneurial manner befitting a son of Economics Columnist Eliot Janeway and Author Elizabeth Janeway (Powers of the Weak). Perhaps the only obvious characteristic the men share is that like dozens of their staffers they are graduates of Harvard, yet they agree on the problems the paper must correct.

The Globe hits exhilarating and exasperating extremes, by turns witty and influential, then erratic and arrogant. Its best quality is its dogged pursuit of corruption and injustice, even among liberal favorites: Winship says his most painful decision was to publish a probe of the personal finances of Edward Brooke--the only black elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction--which resulted in his electoral defeat. The seven-member Washington bureau and five foreign correspondents provide depth rather than routine wire-service-style stories, and the sports pages are perhaps the nation's best.

The Globe's foremost problem is self-righteousness and lack of restraint. When the paper campaigned for handgun control and a bottle bill, it ran hundreds of "news" stories that openly argued its views. Globe-endorsed candidates seem to receive more sympathetic news treatment than their rivals. Janeway concedes that the paper has a "cacophony of columnists" and undervalues reporting. Cultural and life-style coverage has sagged. On local news, the Globe is too often scooped by its sole surviving Boston rival, the Herald (circ. 344,000), which has been revivified since it was bought in December 1982 by Australian Press Baron Rupert Murdoch. Says Herald Editor Joe Robinowitz: "If something breaks late, they take forever to decide whether to put it into the paper." The Globe also tends toward the presumption that a story is not a story until it says so. Complains a senior aide to Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis: "We may do something that gets national pickup, and they won't carry a line about it."

One problem Janeway does not face is a lack of resources: the Globe's parent company has made a pretax profit of $40 million for the first nine months of 1984. He recognizes the paper's complex and imperfect character. "I want to nourish the traditions of individuality and crusading," he says, "but I may put greater emphasis on other flags we salute, such as consistency and keeping opinion out of the news columns." Adds Winship modestly: "Mike may be better at keeping the paper steady than I was."

--By William A. Henry III