Changing of the guard

By: Lucia Moses Bosley takes over as director of 'healthy' ASNE

Scott Bosley is often asked about the day in 1993 when the World Trade Center bombing forced him and other employees of The Journal of Commerce to evacuate their offices in the New York building.
The experience was one that the veteran newsman won't forget.
"It is hard to get too rattled after that," says Bosley, 56. "It's a bit of a wake-up call of what's important."
That lesson will continue to serve him in his new job
as executive director of the Reston, Va.-based American Society of Newspaper Editors, a job he started in March. His predecessor, Lee Stinnett, says running the 875-member organization didn't get any easier over the 16 years he held the job.
"It's a challenge for the staff to keep up with the editors," Stinnett says. "They are type-A personalities, you have to run pretty fast to keep up with them."
Stinnett, 60, is credited with contributing to newsroom diversity, newspaper readership, press freedom, and the acceptance of gay and lesbian journalists. He is retiring and moving to Asheville, N.C.
N. Christian Anderson III, current ASNE president and publisher of
The Orange County (Calif.) Register, expressed appreciation for Stinnett's contribution. "It's hard to imagine ASNE without him," he says.
Bosley, who was plucked from about 50 candidates, impressed the search committee with his diverse and extensive experience. During a 33-year career at Knight Ridder, he worked at Knight Ridder Tribune Information Services in Washington, D.C., and was publisher of the Gary, Ind., Post-Tribune until it was sold. He also was managing editor of the Detroit Free Press for four years. He started his career at the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, where he later became managing editor.
The ASNE Bosley takes over has healthy finances, steady membership, and a legacy of promoting diversity, readership, and freedom-of-information issues.
The budget has doubled from $548,000 in 1983 when Stinnett instituted the first budget. Over the same period, the ASNE Foundation, which is supported by sales of ASNE reports and donations, has grown from $200,000 to $2.4 million. Membership, while down from its high of 1,010 in 1988, has wavered little over the past two decades.
The executive director leads an eight-person staff and provides stability in the 76-year-old organization whose president changes every year. Bosley's job is to work with members to carry out the agenda set by the 20-member board of directors and its president. He is ASNE's fourth executive director.
Bosley takes over projects passed on by previous administrations: a readership initiative with the Newspaper Association of America, Associated Press Managing Editors Association, and other industry groups; promotion of newsroom diversity and freedom of information; and a newspaper credibility study. ASNE also wants to increase funds and membership.
"I think we know the issues," Bosley says. "We have opportunities in credibility, which the society has been working on . . . Another area, of course, is diversity, where we have a mountain to climb . . . We have a readership challenge."
This year, he wants ASNE to devise ideas for new programs and ways to add members, especially editors from small- to medium-sized newspapers; set diversity benchmarks; report on credibility test projects at eight newspapers; and get the readership project running.
"We want to move the ball significantly on diversity, readership, credibility," he says.
Scott Bosley (top) replaces Lee
Stinnett (bottom) as executive director
of ASNE.
?(Editor & Publisher Web Site:http:www.mediainfo.com) [Caption]
?(copyright: Editor & Publisher May 22, 1999) [Caption]