A woman's place is ... in the newsroom
By Brenda E. Rotherham
Rotherham is news recruiting and training coordinator for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis.
It's been 26 years since I last worked with Carl, but I still think of him often and with great admiration and gratitude. He hired me right out of college, he gave me important responsibilities, and he took time to teach me what I needed to know about working at the state's biggest newspaper.
Every so often, Carl would ask me to bring him the pile of stories I had edited that night - we still worked on paper back in 1972 - and he would go through them with me, telling me what was good or how I could have made something better.
Also relevant today is that I learned from Carl about the importance of newsroom diversity. In the early '70s, feminism was hotly debated. It's hard to believe now, but some people actually argued about whether or not women belonged in the workplace. Carl was devoted to the idea of hiring women in the newsroom and giving us a fair shake at all the assignments.
He even scheduled me into "makeup editor" shifts in the composing room, helping trim stories and moving things around at the last minute and coloring the hot-metal type to mark its edition start. The job involved working with a mostly male staff of printers, and some of them took a different view of "women's lib."
But Carl helped me survive a few pranks and in the process taught me something else: about building workplace relationships.
I cannot overestimate the value of Carl's contribution to my start in this business, first by giving me the job, then by helping me succeed in it and sending me off to the next paper with values, principles and practices that are still with me in my work.
