I never had a better boss than Tom Gibboney, the publisher at a weekly in an Alaskan fishing village where I covered little league baseball, the boat harbor, and eccentric personalities.
He taught me a deep lesson: Write honestly, but be a good person.
In 1986, I had just graduated from Princeton with a degree in English and I had skills in a darkroom. Well qualified to work at the Homer News. But I also applied at the bank and the post office.
Gibboney had been editor at the Anchorage Daily News when it won its first Pulitzer Prize. His co-owners at the Homer News were at the Washington Post, including Howard Simons, the editor of the Watergate stories. My good luck was incredible.
In my first week, I was assigned to interview an old man about the death of his wife, because the couple had built an unusual house along East End Road. A classic small-town story—everyone knew that house, and that alone made this woman’s death news.
I was a shy young man and terrified to call a grieving husband. But I forced myself, and I learned from that call not to be afraid—a major asset for the rest of my life. Because this old gentleman with the strange-looking house wanted nothing more than for the newspaper to tell his late wife’s story.
We were writing to help people and the town.
The paper maintained high journalistic standards, with integrity and aggressiveness. Tom’s tiny newsroom turned out many successful writers who gained national success. Gibboney’s personality and commitment to the community made that possible.
Every Thursday, when the paper came out, he met the owner of each business on Pioneer Avenue, the main street, in their shops and offices, to explain why we had written what we did, and to collect their ads for the next week. He educated them about journalism and got their buy-in. That gave us space to do our hard-edged reporting.
Living in Homer with the subjects of our articles, who we saw every day, we had to be fair. Even when we wrote critically, these folks needed to recognize themselves in the paper and understand why.
I left after twenty-two months for the much larger Anchorage Daily News, the big league to the Homer News farm team. I heard Gibboney grousing to Anchorage editor Howard Weaver that he’d broken his promise to leave me in Homer a full two years.
I took with me a new sense of responsibility as a journalist. I had arrived in Homer thinking of writing as a way to project my ideas and personality—and to become bigger and more important. I left thinking of it as a way to do good.
The photo I’m posting with this newsletter shows the Homer News building Gibboney erected while I was there, paid for by savings accumulated over years of honest, small-town journalism. I remember helping push up the back wall.
Gibboney’s humility and humanity had built a newspaper and lot of good writers.
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