Betsy O'Donovan, a former Herald Sun editor and Neiman Fellow at Harvard University, is the incoming general manager for The Daily Tar Heel. Her position will be effective on August 8. University editor Jamie Gwaltney and summer editor Sofia Edelman spoke to O'Donovan about her love for writing and her vision for the paper.
The Daily Tar Heel: When you were the age most Daily Tar Heel staffers are now, did you think you would be going into print media?
Betsy O'Donovan: Actually, I was a, I wouldn’t say shiftless but I would definitely say aimless, undergraduate. I was not awesome at college. I was really curious. Actually, looking back at it, I was totally a young journalist in training, but I went to Wake Forest which at the time didn’t have a journalism major. It had a minor and there were two people teaching the department. So I was an english major and just sort of roving around campus...I didn’t really put the dots together until the last semester my senior year when I took a copy editing class and was like, ‘Wow, this journalism stuff is really cool.’ Everyone had always told me I would be a writer of some kind, it had just never occurred to me I could be an employed writer.
DTH: What special skill sets do you have that you’re excited to use here?
BO: I have a few skill sets that I think will be useful, but I think what I’ve been asked to do and what I’m excited to do there is less about skills and more about how I see things. I don’t think it’s necessarily a skill to see opportunity. I think The Daily Tar Heel has an incredibly exciting future. And I think it’s really well positioned right now to start doing some very cool things that not a lot of people are doing and certainly not very many people in college journalism are doing. The fact that I kind of see that and I have a really explicit vision of another hundred years of The Daily Tar Heel, another 500 years of The Daily Tar Heel...I’m pretty good at coalescing a team around a big goal and getting them to get there and I think we’re all going to be doing that at The Daily Tar Heel for the next several years, I mean we have to do some big things together.
DTH: What has been your favorite recent Daily Tar Heel article?
BO: It’s not actually a single article but it’s a lot of stuff that y’all were doing this spring...I think you guys absolutely crushed pretty much everybody else’s coverage (of Margaret Spellings taking office). You’re asking really important questions and I think the newsroom has just owned that in a significant way that has kind of become a trademark for The Daily Tar Heel...that you do ask really smart, provocative questions with great independence (from) the University.
DTH: How do you envision print journalism changing in the next five years?
BO: I think one thing that’s going to be very important for all of us who have ink in our veins is to think very carefully about what we mean when we say "print journalism"…When I look at what the average journalist does, a percentage of that is about the paper, and the daily paper, and that is an important anchor point, I think for all of us. But print journalists, we are at a time when distribution and all that is really a hard puzzle to figure out in terms of how do we pay for this higher expensive thing...and yet, as a reporter and a writer — I mean, I still free-lance — and it is still shocking to me to have the physical object in my hands that says, ‘Oh wow, not only did I write this thing but somebody else edited it and endorsed it,’ and it has this worth and weight of a physical object...But print journalism is going to have to find, we’re going to have to figure out what gives us that rush, what gives us that sense of power and force and meaning...I think print journalists are constantly challenged to be in a relationship with their audiences. People have so many options that it is, I think, absolutely crucial for a news organization to really not speak to or at its community but to invite its community in — to ask them what stories they’re interested in… So I think we’re going to think of more sophisticated ways about having conversations before we sit down to write.
