Editor’s note: This article is a special feature for the Tufts Daily Alumni Newsletter that does not represent the Daily’s standard journalistic practices.
Neal Shapiro (LA’80) is a 32-time Emmy-winning and 31-time Edward R. Murrow Award-winning journalist currently serving as president and CEO of WNET, the nation’s largest public media enterprise. A Tufts trustee, Shapiro was previously the president of NBC News — and editor in chief of The Tufts Observer. In October, he joined current Daily staff on campus for a roundtable discussion that spanned his time as a student journalist and decades spent leading major news organizations. Here is an excerpt from that conversation, featuring Shapiro’s reflections on working at the Observer, the lessons that stayed with him and how his pursuit of a story once led to a campus-wide pinball purge.
I began as a writer and I think the rhythm of a weekly was different. The thing that made the weekly different — at a time when we couldn’t even imagine we could produce a daily because it was so hard to produce a weekly — was that you would sort of work and work, and then on Fridays it was a big thing. You would show up in the dining halls and there was that moment of everybody reading the paper and reading stuff you’d written.
And my first big story is an example of how you often don’t know where stories will go, you should just follow them. So my first big story was, there had been stories in the local paper in Medford and Somerville, about pinball machines, and that gangs had been running them. And there was a way to extort money, either related to liquor licenses or the machines themselves, and so you had to license pinball machines. So I called up and said “hey, who licensed the pinball machines here [at Tufts]?” And they go “What do you mean?” I go, “you know, the licenses, who licensed them?” “Well, we don’t have any licenses.”
So it's illegal. So one day a truck turned up and they pulled out all the pinball machines out of campus in a single day. All the dorms made money on pinball machines. So, it was a huge deal. There was not much to do here, and there were pinball machines. So, they pulled them out, and I was not popular. But it turned out — you know how simple it is to get a license? You have to go in to apply. So the next week they applied and they were back.
I thought this was an example — of first, you don’t know where the story will take you. Second, I think it’s not good for the university to say we choose to ignore a law we should be following, and it turns out the law is incredibly easy to follow and we should have done it. Anyway, after that I became news editor. And then I became editor in chief.
What I loved about being editor — there were many things I loved — you know, it taught you multitasking before the word was coined. Working on the Observer was like having a job for 50 hours a week, right? And, we met Sunday night and then assigning stories Monday and editing them. And then we would work all night Thursday night, it was like, to see the sunrise in Curtis Hall. Friday morning, the paper would go out. And I still had to be a student on top of that.
And the other other thing which it taught me is about how you have to motivate people, because nobody got paid to be a journalist. So it had to be both the work was interesting and you had to make it so people learned and got better as they went along. And learned and got better in a way that was fun.
Because you can teach people in a way that’s not very fun and demeaning and that doesn’t work. So to get people to give you their time, the biggest treasure they have, to make it an atmosphere which can be fun and rewarding. And you know, we were all learning responsibility, and it’s a big responsibility that the stuff you write has a huge bearing on how people see the university. So it’s an awesome responsibility.
