Community Involvement Is His Credo p.

By: Mark Fitzgerald

Incoming American Society of Newspaper Editors president Bill Hilliard believes in changing the system from within
IN SOME CIRCLES, the fear of even appearing to be pushing a private agenda leads many editors to limit their community involvement to little more than carrying a library card.
Then there is the incoming president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Portland Oregonian editor Bill Hilliard.
Hilliard has been on the boards of directors of the National Urban League, the Portland Urban League, the city's NAACP branch and Willamette University.
Right now he chairs the board of directors of the Portland branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
In working his way through the ASNE ranks since 1979, Hilliard has served on or chaired nearly all the committees in the organization including Literacy, International Communications, Minorities, Nominations, Credibility, Human Resources, Education for Journalism and Membership.
Hilliard has a simple explanation for his civic involvement.
"I think if more people had suffered the injustices in their lives as some of us experienced as individuals, they would see why you need to work so that others do not suffer the same injustices you had growing up," Hilliard said.
William Arthur Hilliard, the first black editor of the 330,000-circulation Oregonian, was once refused a delivery route by the same paper because of his race.
As a child during the Depression, Hilliard gleaned very few positive black images from radio or the newspapers.
Even as a 13-year-old in 1940, however, Hilliard was linking multicultural diversity with newspapers.
He and another neighborhood kid started the Copy Cat Gazette newspaper, selling the Ditto machine press run of 75 for a penny apiece.
In the Gazette, Hilliard could write about the achievements of African- Americans.
As he prepares to become the first black president of ASNE, Hilliard called for newspapers to reach out to all the potential Copy Cat Gazette child publishers in America today.
"I want to emphasize the need to work with younger people, especially in the middle schools and high schools, both private and public," he said in an interview. "Let them know how to use the newspaper . . . to prepare themselves for the multicultural society we have."
Hilliard gets out to schools fairly often, always guiding classroom discussions toward the necessity to exercise the discipline and restraint required by a free, open and democratic society.
It is a lesson all of America should take to heart, he says.
"I'm concerned with the lack of patience on the part of so many of our citizens . . . . I believe we have to go back to values. In exercising our liberty there is also a need to use some restraint."
Patience is indeed in short supply in many quarters when the newspaper industry's progress in diversifying the newsroom is measured.
Groups such as the National Association of Black Journalists have grown increasingly restive about diversity, contending that the industry's warm rhetoric about assembling a newsroom that reflects the population is belied by the relatively glacial pace of actual change.
Hilliard follows a long line of ASNE presidents who have declared diversity a top priority: Seymour Topping, Burl Osborne, David Lawrence, John Seigenthaler and Loren Ghiglione.
He has transformed his own newspaper to better reflect the larger community. Where Hilliard was once the only black editor, sharing supervisory slots with just one Hispanic and one woman, now the Oregonian has 25 women, three blacks and a Native American in newsroom management.
In the name of diversity, Hilliard also decreed a controversial editorial change that so far has not been duplicated by any other major paper: He banned "derogatory" sports team names such as the Washington Redskins.
However, Hilliard is unlikely to have any better news for minority journalists than any other ASNE president.
"It's a reality: We did not start soon enough in this country ? and it's not just in the newspaper industry ? to recognize all the talents we were ignoring," he said.
"I think it is going to take us into the next generation until we see this change. The white male has had a network of contacts for so long," Hilliard said.
That is why minorities and women need to be not only hired but aggressively promoted into management slots, Hilliard argues.
He also argues that journalists should not let themselves become divided by diversity.
"What I fear," he said, "is the impatience and anger ? which is there with justification ? of the various racial and ethnic journalism associations, Asian-American, black, Hispanic, Native American. We should also be working very closely to bring about a change so that this is not going to be disruptive but empowering.
"My hope is there is going to be no need for organizations based on color and ethnic lines. I think they were a necessity at the time to wake us up. But all people ? including the white male ? need to feel they are part of the newspaper," Hilliard said.