'Outrage, Passion & Uncommon Sense'

Michael Gartner won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1997 when he was editor and co-owner of The Daily Tribune in Ames, Iowa, a paper about the size of the Tracy Press. I met him shortly afterward when I took an editorial writing course at the Poynter Institute in Florida.

Today when I took my copy of his just-published book, "Outrage, Passion & Uncommon Sense," to get his autograph, I was stunned. He looked at my nametag and said he'd met me eight years ago.

I was only the student in his class who was an editor and also part-owner of a daily newspaper. He had taken me aside and lectured me about how I should be bold in my writing and never be afraid to show my passion.

The message he gave today at the Associated Press editors conference in San Jose was similar.

"Editorials are bland and boring today," he said. "That's too bad."

He went on to blame the large chain newspapers and decline of competition. Editorial writers are just too afraid to offend readers today, he said. They have no balls.

That's not how it was with Horace Greeley, Henry Watterson, William Allen White and Vermont Royster, the four greatest editorial writers in the history of this nation, he wrote in his book.

"They all reported thoroughly, wrote gracefully and argued passionately. They knew intimately their town — or their nation, or their world — and they were neither blind boosters nor common scolds."

You always knew where they stood, he said.

So tonight, thoroughly inspired, I'm staying up all night to read Gartner's book.