Seattle Post-Intelligencer
J.D. Alexander
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Editor's note: Former Seattle Post-Intelligencer editor and publisher J.D. Alexander died June 14 at a hospital near his home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. This article was originally published by Seattle Weekly on Aug. 9, 1995.
He smokes, and, on an even healthier note, he drinks.
An old-school editor and unreformed Tarheel such as J.D. Alexander might be pleased to see that in the lead. Except, dang it boy, he's a big-city publisher now. How's that going to look in print?
"Don't start the rumor I drink a lot," Alexander growls from across the table in the back of Il Bistro, a glass of Bombay rocks, two onions, in hand. "I don't know where that comes from. I have a few, I relax, that's it."
Over at the bar, Mur the Blur, fastest ginslinger in the West, is keeping an eye on our table. "He's a big guy," Murray Stenson says of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's hefty publisher, described by one of his faithful reporters as Jabba the Hutt, the squat Star Wars character. "So I'm giving him the big glasses."
Lightly bearded, sporting black-rimmed glasses, the executive editor of the Hearst-owned P-I since 1986 and editor-publisher since August 1993, Jasper D. Alexander (named for his dad, with a middle initial but no middle name) slips another Carlton 100 from his pack. He pauses to watch the late afternoon crowd drift in from Pike Place Market. It's sunny outside and the bar is cool, cast in amber. Music trickles from the sound system. Alexander likes to take his time before he answers a question, sittin' and suckin' a bit as they do back home in cigarette capital Winston-Salem, where you can smoke on the public buses and send your kids to the Tobaccoville Child Development Center.
He's been called J.D. since the first grade there, as in "Now J.D., leave Mary Jo be and read your Hearst Credo if you want to grow up and be publisher." Some of his pauses stretch into the next time zone, and so you go on with another question. That's usually when he answers the first one.
"If you ..."
"When I broke in, we used to ride around with the cops, hang out with the older reporters, drinking, staying out late, talking about women, stories we missed, stories we've done," he says with a rasp that seems to rise from the grave. "The best journalism is being there, being out on the story. You don't get the good stories staring at the walls. Used to be, anyway."
There really is, or was, a Hearst Credo, The Credo of William Randolph Hearst, a how-to guide regularly issued to top editors of the then far-flung Hearst empire. It contained Hearst's words of wisdom on what made journalism great if not yellow. Alexander hadn't heard about the booklet until recently, but he is impressed, particularly with the Old Man's long-ago notion that your daily front page carry one truly original story no one else had. "He said that?" Alexander asks. "It's absolutely true today as well, even more so with TV skimming off the top."
If others want to forget those and other hallowed notions of newspapering, Alexander—heavy on the editor, light on the publisher—is an exception. Nothing beats old-fashioned legwork, and while some publishers might think that means a good rubdown at the club, Alexander can talk about it firsthand. He makes no pretense at having been anything other than mostly a deskman in his nearly 40 years of newspapering. But he had his day, sitting on the hood of a car for four hours, waiting for a Watergate figure to emerge from a Washington Redskins game, then leaving with an exclusive for the editing/writing national staff of The Washington Post. As a reporter he also covered the riots that followed Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination and learned an empirical lesson about newsroom diversity: "That's when papers first understood that whites couldn't go into ghetto areas and get the stories we needed." He knows enough to tell you to chase a few ladder trucks or slip around a homicide scene—then go be publisher.
Start, he suggests, as he did at ground zero, a twice-a-week teenage sportswriter taking ball scores on the phone for his hometown paper, the Winston-Salem Journal. He wrote his way through school (hometown university Wake Forest, '61 ) and ascended to the Post, 1967-74. (His desk job included the daunting task of editing political pundit Joseph Alsop, where changing a word required a little kneeling and crossing before striking out any references about the mood in Washington.) He then went to the San Diego Union, where he was editor and managing editor, 1974-86. He came to the P-I as executive editor in 1986 and was named publisher upon Virgil Fassio's retirement in 1993. In an age when most editor-publishers are masters of the art of delegation (sandwiching an occasional editorial board meeting between their civic rounds), Alexander is an exceptional, hands-on, and heavily involved editor, perhaps the last of his kind in Seattle journalism. The world "relic" comes to mind. But Alexander is giving it a good reputation.
