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BACK TO SAJA PETER BHATIA PAGE ASNE.org PETER
BHATIA: A Passion for Making a Difference By Norm
Maves Jr. Things were looking really, really good for Peter Bhatia at 9:30 on the morning of Oct. 7, 2001. He had just flipped a wedge up to the seventh green at Langdon Farms Golf Course and had about a 20-foot putt for a birdie. A threatening rain shower was keeping its distance over the tall Douglas Fir trees to the west. His golf cart whooshed to a halt by the green just as his cell phone started to ring. The executive editor of The Oregonian fished it out of his bag, flipped it open and listened for a moment. The Sunday day editor was on the other end of the line. Bhatia’s expression didn’t change as she talked. “I’ll be right in,” he said. He flipped his phone off and stuck it back in his bag. “Time to go to work,” he said. “We just started bombing Afghanistan.” With that, the little cart took a hard right into the parking lot, followed by three more (it was a company tournament). Bhatia threw his clubs into his car and took off up Interstate 5 toward downtown Portland. He wouldn’t make it back home until nearly midnight. Still in his golf clothes. And Peter Bhatia wouldn’t have life any other way. ~ ~ ~ The people who have worked alongside Peter Bhatia on his 28-year route through print journalism eventually get around to talking about his nerveless cool under the most intense pressure. The tougher the situation, the better he works. Nelson Lampe of the Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star, who worked with Bhatia at three different papers, summed him up this way: “Peter’s a hard-working SOB who’s loyal to his staff and friends, who loves his family and who lives our business — an epitaph anyone would envy. And that’s what makes Peter good at what he does daily.” His many pals also talk about his uncommon grace and dignity, unshakeable loyalty, cornball sense of humor, rock-solid dependability, love-hate relationship with golf and devotion to the principles his parents taught him a long time ago. But anybody who wants to know who he really is must understand that his heart still beats best in the eye of the daily newspaper hurricane. “After all these years,” he said recently, “there’s still nothing I like more than a big story, a big project.” The compulsion, combined with a monster work ethic known wherever he’s been, has taken Bhatia far from his boyhood home in Pullman, Wash. He’s practiced the craft in Spokane, Wash.; San Francisco (twice); Dallas (twice); York, Pa.; Sacramento; Fresno, Calif.; and, since 1993, in Portland at The Oregonian. He’s been a key part of six Pulitzer Prizes, including three at his current newspaper. On April 11, the passion to do it right will carry him to the presidency of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. “It’s not so much that I love what I do,” he says, “as I love what we do. We’re important to our communities’ understanding of what goes on in their world. “I am motivated by making a difference. I am no less passionate about journalism now than I was when I first started.” ~ ~ ~ Pullman, Wash., is the very definition of a college town. Washington State University is the center of just about everything. It’s a tiny dot in the southeast corner of Washington, surrounded by the fertile wheat country of the Palouse. Moscow, Idaho, is eight miles away. The big city is Spokane, less than two hours to the north. Vishnu Bhatia, a newly minted pharmacy professor, and his new bride, Ursula Dawson Bhatia, moved there in 1951 after their marriage in Vishnu’s native India. They never left. Peter Bhatia, born there on May 22, 1953, left when he was 18. But not before he lived a safe, happy boyhood filled with sports, family and friends. “He was always happy and busy and smart and cooperative,” says Ursula Bhatia. “He was interested in everything and always tried very, very hard at everything he did.” Vic — that’s how Pullman knows him — Bhatia, who would establish himself as the architect of WSU’s honors program, was mourned all over American academia when he died Jan. 16. He was central in his son’s upbringing. “Vic expected high standards, and set them by example,” Ursula Bhatia says. “To this day, Peter feels the influence of his father. He expected a lot from Peter because it was obvious he could do a lot.” At 10, Peter created his own first job in journalism: editor and publisher of the Bhatia Tribune — circulation 15. “My dad would take it to the mimeograph at WSU and run it off for me,” Peter says. “And I delivered it around the neighborhood. I wrote stories, and I broke some copyright laws by using stories from the Lewiston Tribune.” He always had pals. “He was one of the good guys,” says Steve Niemi, a classmate and friend from the fifth grade on. “He was not in the hard party crowd or the snobbish clique crowd. He was smart, but he would never show it off.” Niemi and Bhatia used to charge around the Palouse in Bhatia’s 1963 Chevrolet Bel-Air. Peter’s first dates with Liz Dahl, who was two years behind him at Pullman High School, were in the car everybody called “Son.” “You know,” said Niemi, “the son-of-gun is out of gas. The son-of-a-gun won’t run.” The son of a WSU professor could always get a ticket to a Cougar game, so Bhatia spent much of his growing-up years in Rogers Field, Bohler Gymnasium and Buck Bailey Field watching his boyhood heroes. He longed to be a star athlete. He didn’t have the speed, ultimately, but he certainly had the will. Niemi, the captain of the Greyhound football team, remembers that the football coach, Ray Hobbs, used to use Bhatia as an example. “Whenever the starters would slack off or get lazy,” says Niemi, who eventually went to Harvard, “Coach would point to Peter and say ‘Look at how hard Bhatia’s working. He’ll get your job eventually.’ It always worked.” When it came time for college, Bhatia wasn’t immediately sure where he would go to school, but he knew where he wouldn’t. “The biggest favor my dad did for me,” he says, “was to throw me out of town when I was 18." Bhatia chose Stanford over Dartmouth and other Ivy League options. “I’d never been to California,” he says, “but it was on the West coast, and I knew the weather was better down there. I also knew the school from when they played Washington State.” So off he went in the fall of 1971 to get a degree and form a lifelong relationship with his school. Bhatia is one of Stanford’s most devoted alumni. He almost never misses The Big Game between Stanford and cal (he never capitalizes the first letter of Stanford’s biggest rival), never wears blue and gold (cal’s colors) together and cried unashamedly at Stanford Stadium in 1999 when the Cardinal clinched its first Rose Bowl in 28 years, dating back to 1971 — the year he got there. True to form, he worked a graveyard shift in his office to see the year 2000 in, caught a dew-scraper flight from Portland International Airport to Pasadena in time to tailgate — with one hour of airborne sleep — before watching the game. Routine. Ever the alumnus, he served as a director of the Stanford Alumni Association’s board from 1998-2001. “In hindsight, going there was a fabulous decision,” he says. “Stanford is such a special place. You don’t just leave with a degree. My best friends in the world are the people I went to school with. The school puts a lot of intellectual demands on you and teaches you to succeed.” Bhatia was not the academic star he was in high school — “I didn’t work hard enough as a college student,” — but did get the full college experience. He was in a fraternity, broadcast games for the campus radio station, wrote a column for the Stanford Daily and once in a while gladly participated in college pranks. Make him tell you, for instance, how he orchestrated the theft of the papier-mâché head of the University of Oregon Duck mascot. After his junior year, he took a reporting internship at the Spokesman-Review in Spokane. He didn’t know it at the time, but his course was set. He picked up on the purpose of journalism right away. “I loved being in the position of telling people things they didn’t know,” Bhatia says. “I began to understand the notion of the public service aspect of a newspaper.” ~ ~ ~ One month after he graduated from Stanford in 1975 with a bachelor’s degree in history, the Spokesman-Review called back to make it permanent. Two years later, Bhatia moved back to the Bay area as a copy editor with the San Francisco Examiner. In 1980, he went to the Dallas Times Herald; a year later, it was back to the Examiner as news editor. Until he arrived at The Oregonian, it would be his longest stay in one place in the business. “I’ve always said,” he says now about his peregrinations in the newspaper life, “that I’ll go when I get a better opportunity or when I get fired.” His life took big leaps in his second run through San Francisco. On Sept. 27, 1981, he made the best decision of his life and married Liz Dahl. That led to daughter Megan in January of 1986. At the afternoon Examiner, he did battle with the morning Chronicle — and impressed everybody around him. “I was the night city editor, and he was the night news editor,” says John Arthur, now the night managing editor of the Los Angeles Times. “The Examiner was great basic training for him. We had some great people there, and we were unbelievably fast. We could jump on a story and turn it around faster than anybody you’ve ever seen. “Peter was a head-down kind of guy, always drawing his pages. He was well-organized and professional; he could mobilize a big staff to do what has to be done. I still have this image of him hunched over his desk, drawing up his pages.” Lampe insists that Bhatia mellowed in January of 1986 when his daughter was born. By now he had risen to deputy managing editor and found an opportunity to go back to Texas as managing editor of the Times Herald in 1987. That lasted about 18 months — nobody ever said newspapering was a stable business — and he took over as editor of The York (Pa.) Dispatch and Sunday News in the summer of 1988. It became a classic Bhatia operation — make the changes, do it right and do it right now — according to Bryan Denson, a reporter for The Oregonian who was at the rival Daily Record. “The Dispatch was pretty gray and conservative,” Denson says. “It had primarily six-inch stories. We were a lot better, but we knew it would get tougher when Peter, Tim Graham and Nelson Lampe — they called them the Texans — came to the Dispatch. “I went to The Houston Post that December, but when I came back for the Keystone Awards, the Dispatch was already winning awards for news coverage. That made the Daily Record better, so you can honestly say that Peter came to York and made print journalism substantially better for everybody.” There’s more to it than that. The ever-competitive Bhatia helped Denson hook up with The Houston Post, he says, “to get him out of town,” and out of the Dispatch’s face. In Sacramento, Gregory Favre took notice. The executive editor of the Bee had gone for half a decade without a managing editor, and he knew of Bhatia’s reputation for getting things accomplished quickly. “Peter is, first, a genuinely fine and brilliant editor as far as sitting down and helping with stories,” says Favre, now with the Poynter Institute. “Second, I liked that he was calm under pressure and extraordinarily dedicated. He drives himself to achieve perfection more than most of us.” Rick Rodriguez, who was deputy chief of the Bee’s statehouse bureau at the time, used to marvel at Bhatia’s work at clutch time. “Peter is one of the finest line editors I have ever met,” he says. “I don’t think it is any coincidence that Pulitzer Prizes seem to follow him around. He has a sharp mind, is very focused and very thorough and very conscious of being fair.” To a fault, sometimes. “He is definitely a workaholic and a worryaholic,” Rodriguez says. “He’s a perfectionist who has always been as demanding of himself as he is of others. “In fact, he would sometimes work himself into a lather over some relatively small thing in the scheme of life and be down in the dumps for hours or days. But he would spring back and be even more demanding of himself and just produce good journalism.” ~ ~ ~ Peter Bhatia came back to the Northwest because he needed a job. He came to Portland because Sandy Rowe needed him. A short move from The Sacramento Bee to The Fresno Bee didn’t work out, but the timing was fortunate. Sandra Mims Rowe had come to The Oregonian to replace retired William A. Hilliard as editor of The Oregonian, and she had some plans. She wanted it to become the best regional newspaper in the United States, and get better from there. She didn’t want to waste a lot of time getting there, either. “One thing I knew was that this was a newsroom that was hungry for upward mobility,” she says. “They had been battered pretty hard, and we needed someone like Peter. “I felt that he had a range of leadership that worked well with mine. The balance in our experience was important to me, and his drive for leadership was clear.” And, “He’s from the Northwest. I was not an Oregonian, and he knows the lifestyle here.” Bhatia was home. He hired on as the managing editor, then moved up to executive editor. “I knew what The Oregonian was about,” he says. “I’m here because I have a chance to make this paper better. “I’m as much a Californian as I am a Northwesterner, but I knew my kids could grow up well around here.” His children — son Jay Peter (J.P.) was born in 1989 — have added balance to his life. When he isn’t involved with The Oregonian or any of his other professional or volunteer duties, you can find him coaching youth basketball or baseball. He rarely misses a game. “I’m equally as passionate about my family and children now,” he says, “as I am about journalism. That wasn’t the case 20 years ago. It’s true that my daughter was born at 1 p.m., and when I saw everything was taken care of, I went to the office at 6.” The intense urge to do it right — in journalism, golf or anything else he takes seriously — is still there. “That’s just who I am,” Bhatia says. “I’m very much my father’s son. He worked hard far into his 70s. Some shrink somewhere might say that I do what I do to please him, and maybe it’s true. “But I like to think I do this because I love it.” In truth, Bhatia hasn’t had much time to think about it. The first thing that hit him when he arrived was the infamous Tonya Harding case. Since then it’s been the shootings at Thurston High School, the crash of the New Carissa on the Oregon Coast, 9/11 — and three more Pulitzers. It is, of course, the way he likes it. “I feel so blessed to work for a company,” he says, “that allows us to pursue great journalism. It’s one of the many great things about being here.” He’s as busy outside the paper as he ever was: board of the American Press Institute, advisory committees to the Murrow School of Communication at WSU, the New Media Program at Oregon State University and the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism. He’s still involved with the Asian American Journalists Associaton, the South Asian Journalists Association and, in Portland, the Albertina Kerr Centers (as chairman of the board) and St. John Fisher School (Megan went there; J.P. goes there). And the American Society of Newspaper Editors, of course. “This,” he says of his forthcoming presidency, “is my chance to give back to an industry that has given me so much.” |