Money Changes Everything
Two days later Tate fired contributing editor Mick Dumke. Dumke says he offered to resign if he could stay long enough to wrap up the project he was on. But Tate wanted him gone immediately. The following Monday she fired associate editor Brian Rogal when he came in to work, having called his mother to try to track him down beforehand. Reporter Rupa Shenoy soon quit. Reporter Sarah Karp went on maternity leave.
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A longtime benefactor, the McCormick Tribune Foundation, concluded in 2000 that the Reporter wasn’t reaching the right people, and for the next four years it gave the magazine $100,000 annually to spend on marketing and circulation. The lack of results dismayed the staff, and it didn’t thrill the foundation either. “We thought you were planning to do a steady drumbeat of mailings, using different lists, to expose people to the magazine and ask them to subscribe but we don’t see much evidence of that last quarter,” said a memo the foundation sent Tate and her manager of circulation and marketing last October. “As you know, this grant was conceived of as a one-time thing. We’ve now renewed it, despite lower-than-expected activity during the first grant. But in renewing it, we expected to see a real, aggressive push. We hope that’s coming.” The grant has since expired. Vivian Vahlberg, McCormick’s director of journalism programs, told me, “They made progress. They didn’t get as far as we wanted.”
A few weeks after 9/11 transformed the nation’s economy and priorities, Tate took over the Reporter. She was 29, the same age as the magazine, and she’d been a reporter there for three years. But Tate’s talents and ambition exceeded her managerial experience, and she found herself in the difficult position of supervising friends and colleagues. Yet Shenoy, an intern at the time, remembers, “That first year, it was the best place to work. It was like a living embodiment of the ideals it was supposed to espouse–a totally integrated place where everyone was equal, down to the interns. But very gradually a breach began to form between the management and the staff.” It widened in 2003, when CRS executive director Calvin Morris ordered cutbacks throughout his organization and Tate laid off two reporters.
Dumke was alarmed. He wrote back, “I spoke to you Wednesday as frankly as I could with the understanding that the discussion would be open and honest. I did not understand it to be part of a formal process of evaluation of my performance.”
The second time they met, Tate fired Dumke. Rogal went in next and, like Dumke, objected to the memo. “I felt it was written by someone who knows the words and not the music,” he says. “She gave me a cold, cold stare. ‘So you think it’s all my fault.’” Rogal walked out pretty certain he was history.
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