Interview with J. Todd Foster
By Michelle Skeen

            J. Todd Foster is the managing editor for The News Virginian, a city newspaper in Waynesboro, Va. Previously he worked for People magazine and other larger papers, but has since directed his talents as a writer and reporter to transforming this local paper into an award-winning media institution. Recently Foster sat down to a personal interview in his office to discuss his start, success, and passion for journalism.

Q: Where did you get your interest and start in media writing and journalism?
Foster: I made my career choice when I was 12 years old, which is very unusual. I wanted to be a professional baseball player, but I had the self-awareness that I couldn’t hit a curve ball, so I would write about it. At 14 I hooked up with my high school paper. I had a very good high school paper and a wonderful faculty advisor who was also the wife of the principal. To this day she’s probably the most endearing person I’ve met in journalism, and stands out more than any editor I’ve ever had. Now I’ve worked with some of the biggest papers in the country, but I’ve had some lousy editors. I’ve had some decent ones, but she was a role model and someone I still communicate with today occasionally.

Q: I know you used to work for People magazine. How did you get started there and how long did you work there?
Foster: I still actually work there; I still freelance. I freelanced full-time from January 1999 until I took this job in February 2003. We moved to DC from Portland, Oregon, where I was at the Oregonian. I interviewed at the Washington Post, and they were going to stick me some bureau with a three-hour commute. So I didn’t show a lot of interest, and I needed a job, so I called People magazine’s Washington bureau. There you have it.

Q: What type of stories did you usually write for them?
Foster: A lot of breaking news and disasters. I covered the West Virginia mine accident in January two months ago. In the summer of 1999- remember the day trader in Atlanta that killed 10 people? He went on a shooting rampage. I covered that. It was unusual because Atlanta is not in our territory and they don’t usually send you out of the region, but with my breaking news background I got to do that.

Q: What was the most exciting or favorite piece of work that you covered while working there?
Foster: Well let me go back. I covered Ruby Ridge. Ruby Ridge is a mountain in Idaho where a white separatist who was wanted on federal firearm violations kind of exiled himself. The marshal service sent a half dozen members of their team to surveil him. His dog found them, and so they killed the dog. Then his little son killed one of the marshals, and a marshal killed the son. There was an 11-day standoff. This was in august of 1992; we were a Pulitzer finalist at the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington. We lost to the Los Angeles Times on the Rodney King riot coverage so it was kind of a back breaker for us, but it was a wonderful experience. We were a tenth the size of the Los Angeles Times. [The circulation] was about 100,000- about the size of the Roanoke paper. So that’s one of my favorite stories. I’ve done three school shootings and plane crashes and stuff. Those are difficult stories but I still like them. There’s just a lot of adrenaline doing those. My favorite story for people magazine…I’ve got two favorites. My favorite story was on a CIA retiree. His job at the CIA was to disguise foreign agents to keep them alive. I mean disguised as in like a few minutes to get them out of the country. He retired from the agency and went into his own business building prosthetics for cancer victims, including children who’ve lost noses and ears and so forth. These things were so lifelike they were stunning...It was a guy that had been in China and all these different situations, you know the makings of a movie, and he had devoted his life to building prosthetics for burn victims and cancer victims. It took a ton of time and he would work in his little laboratory in his home for 20 hours a day. Very intense guy too, not the easiest guy to interview, or to like, but fascinating. The weirdest story I’ve ever done for People, and one of my favorites, is when I profiled a guy in northern Virginia who has eaten at 15,000 McDonald’s restaurants…He’s a strange guy, but I love passionate people even if I disagree with the passion. I think McDonald’s sucks but he loves them and he eats there twice a day…After my story came out he got approached by book companies and movie companies. It’s just bizarre. I don’t think anything became of it. He’s kind of a private guy. The worst thing is that the headline writer had this huge headline, “Burger King,” and had him surrounded by McDonald’s stuff. I mean it was a clever headline but this guy hated burger king- he was a McDonald’s guy.

Q: What brought you to Waynesboro from People magazine?
Foster: My wife and I were living in D.C. …We had a little boy, and we weren’t going to raise him there. So around Christmas of 2002 I did a search of JournalismJobs.com and found this job. My wife gave up her law career to be a stay-at-home mother and we now have two children. So we came here for quality of life. I inherited a god-awful newspaper that just won 35 state awards last week. We’ve come a long way, we’re in a new building, and we have a convergence relationship with the Charlottesville TV station, which has a studio right back here and an active bureau with 6 employees. We’ve won 79 VPA awards, or Virginia Press Association awards, in three years. It’s just been a lot of fun to take what was really a woeful product and mold it and do it within the confines of the budget that I have. These people don’t make a ton of money. I inherited a very bad staff, but half of the staff was very good. Usually staffs at this level are very young. I had an experienced staff but I had some people who never deserved to be in journalism, so they’re gone. So I’ve been able to keep what I had and add to it. I just sent one of my reporters to the Winston-Salem paper, which is a metro in our chain, and I’m sending a copy editor to a bigger paper. It’s a double-edge sword. I want to field the best team I can but I also want to move people up. But that’s how I got here. It’s one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. It was very scary. It was a huge pay cut. The week before I actually got here I interviewed Henry Kissinger, John McCain, Alexander Haig and Ruth Westheimer in one week, for People magazine. And the next week I’m here interviewing city council people. I actually get a bigger thrill out of that than dealing with celebrities. It’s been the best job I’ve ever had and I’ve worked at some of the best papers in the country…

Q: Did you have any transitions from being a freelance write to being a managing editor?
Foster: The transition was not from the freelance aspect. I’ve always been an investigative reporter, a writer, but management was different. I was a managing editor at a weekly paper 20 years ago in Tennessee-22 years ago. But I fell right into it. It’s something I knew I would excel at, and I wanted to be the kind of editor I thought I never had. So I let my people write. I don’t give them lengths, and they write the story as long as it needs to be. We have a lot of fun in the newsroom, but we are pretty damn serious about what we do.

Q: What are some of the biggest challenges in managing a smaller community based paper?
Foster: The biggest challenge for me was not imposing my standards on a staff that hadn’t been where I’d been and didn’t have the experience. We are here in Waynesboro versus the big city. I’m a very demanding person and I’m a perfectionist, but I could not impose that entirely on them. I mean I wanted them to get better and they knew that, but I had to be careful and walk that fine line. But that was the biggest challenge from an employment standpoint. Dealing with readers was a big thing because I’ve got a temper. I’ve got a lot of patience too, but to readers at this level, we’re just not the newspaper-we’re their newspaper. Readers are very tough; they will scream at you if you miss their kid’s little league game. I came and I shook things up. We hadn’t had an editor here in a year, we had no local editorials…I ruffled some feathers. I got a lot of angry mail. Readers enjoy reading about my experience with readers, so I do a weekly column called the Occasional Ombudson on Sundays in which I take reader complaints. If we’re wrong I say we’re wrong, but it’s a pretty spirited column and I don’t mind dishing it back to readers. So I’ve had to learn to be more patient with readers and let things slide, and it’s not my nature.

Q: Do you have any opinions about the recent controversy over the political cartoons depicting Muhammad?
A: I do have opinions; mine are different than most journalists. I think we should run the cartoons. I haven’t yet, and I’m debating whether to do that. I’ve seen the cartoons, and I thought they were pretty tame. My take is, and I’ve written this, if a band of zealot southern Baptists went out and started beheading people of the Muslim faith, and some Muslim newspaper cartoonist started drawing negative pictures of Jesus Christ, I think that would be valid. Just like I think it’s pretty valid to have Muhammad standing at the pearly gates greeting his suicide bombers with “stop, we’re running out of virgins.” I thought that was a great cartoon. I don’t agree necessarily with the circumstances surrounding the production of the cartoons...This all happened last fall and didn’t make a ripple. There was a lot of planning and travel to foreign countries by Muslim clerics and they set this whole thing up. I totally disagree with that. Let’s face it- innocent Americans are being killed in the name of Allah, which gives a bad name to every Muslim in the world. It’s certainly fair game as far as editorial cartoons are concerned…I think this is very anti-Muslim what they are doing.

Q: What features do you use in you paper to reflect the community instead of more broad topics?
Foster: We just published a three-part series a week or two ago called Crossroads. We visited every community in Augusta county and northern Nelson county. Mint Spring, Deerfield, West Augusta- and we wrote these really nice features revolving around important people there, or interesting people there, or institutions like the Purple Cow. It was very well received and it exposed a lot of people to our readers who have never made the paper before…I’ve read every letter to the editor. Since I’ve been here our letters have gone up probably 500 percent. We get five times the letters we got before I got here. We have guidelines of 300 words, and they have to be tasteful, but we run every letter regardless of the position it takes. We don’t care. We provide the opportunity on the editorial page for people to write guest columns, controversial or not. We don’t shy away from controversy at all. We are very aggressive as a watchdog newspaper that does investigative reporting, and that generates a lot of reader interest too. It generates a lot of anger depending on whose ox is being gored. Two days ago we had a story about a pilot that crashed on Interstate 81…We reported the pilot was on a cell phone. We called his widow and asked her if she wanted to talk, and that created some controversy because people thought we were being insensitive. But that’s standard journalism. You call people. We don’t like calling widows, but that’s our job. When the community sees watchdog reporting they begin to rely on you and the tips come flooding in, so I think that’s a big community service…Since our new publisher came on board a year and a half ago we do a lot more community service-type stuff. We sponsor events.

Q: What major changes did you try to make in the paper here?
Foster: Everything. Just wholesale. We were infamous for typos so my first job was to get those out. It meant staying to one or two in the morning and reading everything in the paper, and it was very difficult. I inherited three copy editors, two of whom were diagnosed dyslexics. I mean it’s like a bad sitcom. So that was the first order of business. The next was improving the news content; our front page is virtually all local news, even though I had only three news reporters. After that we worked on design. We did a complete redesign in the spring of 2004. It took nine months, and everything from how we are going to do promo boxes to headline fonts…About a year ago I completely revamped the editorial page...We are getting to revamp the entertainment section. We do a lot of special sections. Before I got here this paper won 35 state awards in 10 years. We won 35 this year. That’s pretty telling. But we redid everything, everything in the paper.

Q: Do you have any future goals to try to improve the paper in the coming years?
Foster: There is only one small daily in Virginia that wins more awards than us. They are four times our staff and twice our circulation; they’re in Strasburg. We were second last year because they beat us by 70 points and we are second again this year. We don’t know how close it is but we’ve been told we put a good scare into them. So obviously I’d like to beat them one year. It would be difficult. I’d like to see us win a couple national or regional awards to go with our state awards. Quite frankly our goal here, it’s broad, but it’s to be the best paper our size in America. That’s our goal. We’re not there, but the competition is a lot slimmer than it used to be in terms of people above us. So we’re getting there.