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Malcolm Gibson
By Richard Stubbe
Brace yourselves.
I'm actually going to be raising hell, promised Malcolm
Gibson before his keynote speech Friday night at the ACES conference in
Long Beach.
Gibson, now a professor at the University of Kansas after
24 years in the news business, said he sees a complacency in the nation's
newsrooms.
We're not lazy, but we sure are relaxed, Gibson said.
I think copy editing is a part of the profession that can stir things
up and make things happen.
Gibson has seen the copy desk from all sides in his journalism
career. He has worked for the Associated Press and for eight newspapers,
including three stints at the Tampa Tribune and four at the Gainesville
Sun.
John Kellogg met Gibson in the middle 1990s and liked
him so well he hired him.
I met him at an ASNE meeting. We had some mutual friends,
said Kellogg, now executive editor of the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American.
I was looking for an ME for the Lowell (Mass.) Sun, and he was at the
ASNE meeting and we went out to dinnerr. I eventually invited him to Lowell
and hired him as the ME.
Kellogg said Gibson is not only loquacious but articulate
in discussing what it means to be an editor.
He's very positive. He likes what he does, Kellogg said.
He loves this business. If you want to talk shop, he'll talk with you
as long as you can hold your head up.
Anybody who has talked to Gibson can attest to that. It's
no challenge for him to stretch a 15-minute interview into an hour.
Gibson also has left behind a memorable impression
in other newsrooms. If you remember learning to juggle on the job from
Gibson in the late
1980s, you were at the Times-News in Hendersonville, N.C. So was Joy
Franklin, whom Gibson hired as a reporter in Hendersonville in 1980 and
who succeeded him in 1989. She is now the editorial page editor for the
Asheville Citizen-Times, not far from Hendersonville.
He is one of the highest-energy people I have ever met, let alone worked
for, Franklin said. I
Malcolm Gibson at KU.
dreaded following him as executive editor because he was so fun.
But working for Gibson was more than fun, Franklin said.
We did good work, she said. He really turned the newspaper around. He really made the newspaper a true independent community newspaper.
Gibson grew up in Norfolk, Va., and joined the Army so he could travel. Naturally, he was assigned to Fort Bragg, N.C., for three years.
The travel bug finally hit when Gibson was 25 and working on the copy desk at the Miami Herald. He wound up taking a Pan Am flight to Europe and Africa.
In those days it was great, Gibson said, because fliers could get off and back on again whenever they chose. He spent time in Ethiopia, Kenya, Zanzibar and Tanzania, where he climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. The trip sparked a lifelong interest in Africa, and Gibson now speaks passable Swahili. He also has created an informal exchange program for African journalists to work in this country.
Gibson had planned for years to move into teaching. He has been at KU since 1996.
I teach aggressive copy editing. I teach collaborative copy editing, he said. We've got to break through the stereotype of copy editors as
passive.
Gibson has no patience with the famous copy editor inferiority complex.
That's what I'm fighting this attitude where they go home grumbling, he said. They ought to do their grumbling at the paper. It's not raising your voice, it's not being an asshole, but it is being a pain in the ass.
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Richard Stubbe is metro editor at The State in Columbia, S.C. He can
be reached at rstubbe@thestate.com.