Diversity at Work

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A group of us got together Sunday night to say goodbye to a colleague. We met at The Wine Therapist, a quiet bar in East Dallas. The bartender brought me a glass and poured a Grenache blend from South Australia. I inhaled the wine's aromas and thought of strawberries.

I looked around the room and recognized some of the talent we were losing, as more than 100 people in my newsroom had decided to take the buyout: two TV critics, the film critic, the books critic, the music editor and one of our best feature writers.

Bryan Woolley, the feature writer, had been on my staff. I admired him. He was past retirement age, but he was as driven as anybody to pursue good journalism. He was widely revered as the king of Texas journalism. He was a sixth-generation Texan and an expert in its history and culture. He had traveled to every nook and cranny of the state.

Yet I had always felt a distance between us. I think it was my fault. I had let the confines of my office and the stresses of my workload keep me from relaxing and opening up to him.

Now, in the bar, all of that was gone, and we fell easily into laughter and conversation.

I knew that Bryan had studied at Harvard Divinity School back in the 1960s. But as we talked, I discovered that Bryan was in Cambridge, Mass., the year that I was born there. It turned out that he had lived near Central Square, just off Massachusetts Avenue, not far from my parents' apartment.

I imagined Bryan, fresh from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, exploring Cambridge, wearing a tweed jacket and smoking a pipe, thinking deep thoughts about the New Testament. I could see him walk past two Chinese graduate students out for a stroll, pushing a baby carriage.

Could it be that Bryan's soul and mine had crossed paths several times before we ever knew each other? Could it be that the love of journalism and storytelling had descended upon us in those moments, shaping our identities, becoming something we shared despite our different paths and backgrounds?

I've been thinking about the identity that journalists have, ever since the buyout process started in my newsroom.

One of my biggest fears was that I would lose my identity if I ever left the newsroom or was forced to leave. For many of us, being a journalist is more than pulling a paycheck. It's who we are. Our passion to tell stories, to search for whatever truths are out there -- all of that is ingrained in us.

At the same time, I was worried that my fears would imprison me. I didn't want to be paralyzed by the fact that I couldn't imagine who I would be if I weren't a journalist. I also didn't want to be naďve. In the corporate culture that has enveloped our industry, what sense was it to hold onto some sentimental notion of journalism?

I could see this fear in many of my colleagues' eyes. Yet many decided to take the buyout. They wanted to leave on their own terms. They were open, if not fully prepared, to discover who they were outside the newsroom.

In the days leading up to the buyouts, I knew I would have to face loss. I would lose the company of friends and talented colleagues. I would eventually lose my staff, which my boss and I had spent years building into one of the best feature staffs in the country.

Seeking words to give me courage, I read "Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith," by Barbara Brown Taylor, an author and ordained minister. Taylor struggled with rediscovering who she was after she burned out and left a great job as a pastor at a rural church in Georgia. She now teaches religion at Piedmont College.

"You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart," she writes. "Do this, Jesus says, and you will live."

Loss, she continues, "is how we come to surrender our lives -- if not to God, then at least to the Great Beyond -- and even those who profess no faith in anything but the sap that makes the green blade rise may still confess that losing really has helped them find their ways again."

Standing in the bar, talking to Bryan, I was trying to find my way again.

I had decided to stay at the newspaper. I needed time to think clearly and to help my staff get through some, if not all, of the turbulence. Now I have a new role, overseeing the newspaper's Sunday and enterprise stories. Despite the difficult times, I am having fun and feeling challenged. It's as if I'm learning how to walk again.

I told Bryan that, in the weeks following the buyouts, I talked with several of our colleagues. To a person, they looked happier and younger, as if a great weight had been lifted. This gave me comfort.

Bryan looked happier and younger, too. The author of several books, he was preparing to write another one, based on a serial he had produced for the newspaper. 

He was involved with a state historical association, and they were talking about launching a new magazine.

Every morning, he said, he woke up with a refreshing question: "Well, what do I want to do today?"

You would think we were very different -- the West Texan who had participated in the civil rights marches of the '60s and the Chinese immigrants' son who had come of age in the Reagan era. And yet we weren't all that different.

In his eyes and in his voice, I could see and hear the spirit of the journalist: something irreverent, rebellious, curious and questioning -- qualities that I would always aspire to.

In good times and bad, Bryan's passion for journalism was a constant. And so, before he left the bar, I told him, "I've always thought of you as a timeless person." And I think he understood what I meant.