Mark Zieman is editor and vice president of The Kansas City (Mo.) Star. Reach him at zieman@kcstar.com
ON A SUMMER MORNING IN 1930, A.D. Payne told his wife he felt like walking to work at his law office in Amarillo, Texas. He told her to drive his car that day for family errands.
Six blocks later the car exploded, killing Mrs. Payne and hurtling her body 40 feet through the roof and onto a nearby front lawn. Local authorities, believing Mr. Payne to be a virtuous man, were stymied by the blast. But Amarillo newspaper editor Gene Howe suspected Payne of murder. Lacking the skills or staff to investigate the case himself, Howe contacted The Kansas City (Mo.) Star and asked it to send a reporter.
Legendary investigative journalist A.B. Macdonald, then 69 years old, arrived by train Aug. 2. The next morning he sat down with the grieving widower and left convinced that Payne had planted the dynamite that killed his wife. In the next 24 hours he discovered that the prominent attorney was having an affair with his stenographer. Confronted with the truth, Payne broke down. He signed a 54-page confession. Macdonald wired his story home, got back on the train and won the Pulitzer Prize.
I love this story and retell it often, generally to remind my reporters that it took Macdonald only 48 hours to win his Pulitzer, so what's their excuse? But the broader lesson, I think, is one that newspapers historically have been extremely reluctant to accept: It's OK - even essential - to ask for help.
To be sure, we're generally a gracious group during natural (and man-made) disasters. Last summer we printed the Omaha World-Herald when their presses shorted out for a day. When a late-evening thunderstorm flooded the newspaper offices of The State, in Columbia, S.C., copy editors and designers jumped on a bus and sped up I-77 to Charlotte, where Observer journalists worked side-by-side with their southern colleagues to produce both papers on deadline.
And few acts of assistance are more inspiring than the caravan of journalists, food and portable toilets sent by Knight Ridder to our friends in Biloxi, Miss., who were knocked down - but never out - by Hurricane Katrina. Half the employees suffered extreme damage to their homes. But The Sun Herald never missed a day of publication, helped lead the community back onto its feet and, yes, also shared the Pulitzer Prize for public service.
"We knew we were not alone, and indeed our colleagues from every Knight Ridder newspaper - from sea to shining sea - came over the weeks ahead," Biloxi editor Stan Tiner said later.
Yet when it comes to covering the news itself, many newspapers refuse to ask for help or offer it. Maybe it's a lingering instinct from the days when towns boasted multiple papers and scoops meant survival. Maybe it's a genetic defect caused by our contest culture. Maybe it's just pride: When I worked for The Wall Street Journal, we never acknowledged a scoop from The New York Times - we either ignored the story or re-reported it ourselves later. The Times did the same.
Faced with a threat to our journalism or journalists, newspapers can come together. Many competing papers, working with ASNE and the Associated Press Managing Editors, have run joint freedom of information projects to test the openness of government agencies. And when Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was killed in a car explosion 30 years ago - and Oakland Post editor Chauncey Wendell Bailey Jr. was slain last year - teams of media rivals joined together to investigate the killings.
Those are notable examples. But threats against us are only mounting. We fight institutional shareholders who have given up on newspapers as public companies. We face smaller newsrooms, fewer travel dollars and less news hole. Our readers demand instant information, yet we can no longer depend on our traditional "wire services" for the very latest world news, or even for much regional and statehouse coverage.
It's time we finally abandoned the "go it alone" culture. It's time we shared: stories, Web applications, research, even revenue. Generally this is only happening within chains, if at all. But I hope it becomes a common occurrence, as unremarkable as helping out a paper with a broken printing press.
Gene Howe didn't win a Pulitzer for asking for help, but he did help solve a murder. If you lived in Amarillo in 1930, what mattered most to you?