No surprise, no nonsense:
Drake will run NPR NewsOriginally published in Current, Sept. 4, 2000
By Mike Janssen
NPR named Bruce Drake to the position of v.p. for news Aug. 25 [2000], picking a respected journalist whose seven-year tenure as the news division's No. 2 gave his colleagues and the public radio system a taste of what to expect in coming years.
Deputy Managing Editor Barbara Rehm has assumed Drake's old job of managing editor. The search for a new deputy is underway.
NPR President Kevin Klose called Drake "deeply experienced, with wide-ranging interests and a great instinct for radio journalism." Many of Drake's colleagues second Klose's blessing, praising him as "forthright," "devoted," "loyal," "no-nonsense" and highly skilled.
Drake came to NPR as Washington Desk senior editor in 1991 and was promoted to managing editor in 1993. He also served twice as acting v.p. for news — for five months after the departure of Bill Buzenberg and for six months since Jeffrey Dvorkin's move to ombudsman in February. He has already had a key role in steering the network's evolution into a primary news provider.
"Bruce is very close to the ground on the editorial process, and that helps him to be more aware of how to bring direction to the shows and to the presence of NPR," says Bob Ferrante, former executive producer of Morning Edition and now e.p. at The World. "He's got terrific news sense. . . . He's a damn good editor. The best."
Initiatives: training, new platforms
Drake takes charge of NPR's biggest division at a time when the network is jumpstarting two channels for Sirius Satellite Radio and crafting a strategy for expanding its Internet presence. The news operation's output is sure to play an important role in each.
"The news division and the core programming must remain strong," he says. "Over the course of the last few years, I think I've built up that strength.
"It needs to be strong, not only to insure the future of the core programming that's at the heart of NPR's business right now, but also because we need to be the source of high-quality content for all the other ventures that NPR is getting into."
Drake says training news staff will be his division's top priority. NPR will start a training unit next year headed by an e.p.-level staffer who will develop curricula for radio novices as well as in-house reporters. Eventually, Drake hopes to include member station news departments to complement the regional training workshops already underway.
Drake also wants to put more resources into reporting on economics and technology, and hire additional national reporters to widen NPR's scope. He told news directors at their July conference that, like Dvorkin, he values strong ties to member stations' newsrooms and will maintain the bureau system, an innovation of Dvorkin's that won strong support from news directors.
"I've got a strong sense that his goals are the same as ours," says Peter Iglinski, president of Public Radio News Directors, Inc. "He tells you exactly what he thinks. . . . That's valuable."
Drake takes his job at a time when NPR is trying to strike a balance between hard news and the creative features that are its trademark.
"This is always going to be, in some ways, a dysfunctional organization," says Pentagon Correspondent Steve Inskeep. "You have all these unusual people with different talents who turn up here, and we're all sitting here producing daily news, and a lot of us would rather be doing something unique. . . . At the same time, we're trying to be a basic, vanilla, deliver-the-daily-news, what-are-the-headlines news organization, and it's really hard to do both of those things at once with limited resources."
Drake "is kind of an old-style newspaper guy, and he'd probably be proud to be described that way," Inskeep adds. "That's a useful antidote to a lot of the things that go on around here. We pretend to be this hoity-toity, highfalutin', intellectual network."
Drake honed his news sense as a reporter and editor for the New York Daily News for over 20 years. He says he learned the most as a general assignment reporter in the early '70s, working for an editor who would assign him to cover a fire one night, and a feature story the next. Editor Dick Blood "was a very good line editor who helped me think and write clearly through a story," Drake says.
In 1975, Drake moved to the paper's Washington Bureau, where he covered national politics and Reagan's campaigns. He became the bureau's news editor in 1987, and stayed in that job until a bitter strike in 1991 prompted him to seek another job. It just so happened that a similar job opened at NPR, and he became senior editor at the network's Washington Desk.
Soon after, he edited Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg's coverage of Anita Hill's allegations against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.
"Bruce Drake is Lou Grant," Totenberg says, referring to Ed Asner's crusty character on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. "He's crochety, demanding, impossible, absolutely scrupulous, with the highest integrity, fabulous judgment, and he's a quintessentially decent person."
"I really miss him as my editor," she adds, and recalls when he edited her 17-minute profile of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Totenberg read him the entire story. Drake took no notes, and didn't look at a script.
"There was one section of the piece that I had rewritten, like, seven times," she says. "And I thought I had fixed it. He immediately zoomed in on that one section of the piece" and told her it was flawed. "I look at it, and I thought, 'Goddammit, he's right!' ... He had heard a very long piece, and immediately spotted the structural weak point in it and helped me fix it. That is just an incredible editing skill."
Well, maybe a little nonsense
Colleagues call Drake extremely devoted, pointing out that he often works long days, sometimes into the wee hours of the morning, as well as weekends. "My hopes for Bruce now getting some sort of life will be dashed, I'm afraid," said former NPR reporter Martha Raddatz to her colleagues, after learning of Drake's promotion.
They also say he is shy, modest and funny. He made a sign for Totenberg that now hangs in her cubicle: "Totenbunker."
"He's a great guy to drink with," Ferrante says.
Drake reportedly has a taste for practical jokes, though his colleagues recalled few specific examples, and he declined to comment. "I think I'll be vice presidential in this regard, and leave those uncelebrated," he said.
However, he was once the butt of a memorable joke, when Totenberg collected contributions from her colleagues to buy a doll made to look exactly like their managing editor.
One day Dvorkin called Drake into his office and, lying, told him the news budget had been cut by 5 percent. The execs stormed down the hall to find reporters gathered in the editorial conference room, pretending to argue with the miniature replica of Drake. "It was the ultimate practical joke on him," Totenberg says.
The doll has since disappeared from NPR. "I immediately took [the doll] home and left it there, not out of a lack of appreciation, but because I had visions of it being transported to every meeting in the company, or walking around the hall like a scene in The Twilight Zone," Drake says.
. To Current's home page . Earlier news: Interview with Drake's predecessor, Jeffrey Dvorkin, 1998. . Outside link: NPR News web site.
Web page posted Sept. 10, 2000
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