An Interview with Ben Bradlee by Alison Beard

[Guest guest]

Life’s Work: Ben BradleeAn Interview with Ben Bradlee

by Alison Beard

Ben Bradlee wrote his first newspaper article at age 15, while working as a summer copy boy at the Beverly Evening Times in Massachusetts. He went on to become one of the world’s most famous newspaper editors, steering the Washington Post through Watergate

coverage and into the 1990s. During his tenure, the newsroom staff doubled to 600, circulation climbed from about 450,000 to 800,000, and the paper’s reporters won 23 Pulitzer Prizes.

HBR: Why did you let Woodward and Bernstein, two cub reporters, run with the Watergate story?

Bradlee: They were right. In the whole series, except for one small fact error, nobody stood up and said, “That’s a lie, that’s a lie, that’s a lieâ€â€”which is remarkable. We reexamined the reporting day after day, and we felt more and more confident. And maybe some senior reporters wondered why the Bobbsey twins had the story and they didn’t. But I told them to screw off. I said, “It’s their story. The time to change that will be when they’re wrong.â€How was it a team effort?You

can't write hundreds of stories over a prolonged period of time and have two people and one editor claim all the credit. That’s not how life

goes at a newspaper. That’s why the paper got the Pulitzer Prize for work performed by Woodward and Bernstein. That seemed to be the right thing to do.What made Katharine Graham a great publisher?She

loved the newsroom. She was down two, three, four times a day. She couldn’t go home at night without coming down and saying, “Whaddya got? Whaddya got?†That is a wonderful thing for reporters—to see the superboss down there. I think we disagreed on something once for 20 seconds. We both cared about getting the paper out and being right, and not waiting for the New York Times, which is what everyone else was doing at the time.What’s your management style?

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