My successor has solid gold qualifications backed by integrity, fairness

The new executive editor of The Seattle Times seemed fazed by only one question I put to him. It's the one readers should care about the most.

"Where did you get your commitment to ethics and fair play?" I posed the question to David Boardman because the quality I admire most in him is his character. I wanted to know, and want you to know, the sources of his abiding integrity and fairness.

We were catching a quick, late lunch on Thursday so I could interview him for this column. The day before, Publisher Frank Blethen had announced that I'm moving into a newly created position of editor-at-large, and Boardman, 49, is stepping into the executive editor role.

I'll write more about my new opportunities in a couple of weeks, but today I want to tell you about the fellow who is taking on responsibility for the news content of The Times and seattletimes.com.

Boardman's professional qualifications for the job are solid gold. His résumé is filled with journalism's highest achievements. His 23 years at The Times, including the past three years as managing editor, have been a profile in leadership. After 20 years in this job, I couldn't wish for a more accomplished successor.

But it is the goodness of his character that gives me the greatest confidence in how he will handle himself in your service. The Blethen family and The Times are dedicated to independent journalism and community service, and no one here personifies that better than Boardman.

He is widely called upon in the newspaper industry to train others in how to make ethical decisions, treating people fairly and striving to do good. He practices what he teaches, but where did he learn it? That's what I wanted to know.

David Boardman


As an editor at The Seattle Times, David Boardman, 49, has directed two Pulitzer-Prize winning team projects and edited six other stories that were Pulitzer finalists. He has been the recipient of many other major national awards, including the Goldsmith Prize in Investigative Reporting from Harvard University, the Worth Bingham Prize in Investigative Reporting, the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) Award and the Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service Award.

He is a director and past president of IRE, co-chairman of the craft-development committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors; a member of the accreditation committee of the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication; has served as a board member of the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation, which promotes excellence and ethics in journalism; and has twice served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize.

He has conducted seminars for journalists in Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is president of the board of directors of the Center for Investigative Reporting in Bosnia.

Boardman paused reflectively before answering, and I could almost see the dots being connected backward through time.

"I guess it is rooted in growing up in a household with five boys and a strong mother who laid out the rules pretty clearly," he said. "Fair play was an expectation, not an option."

His professional ethics education came at the highly regarded Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, to which he added a graduate degree from the University of Washington. But the experience that brought the journalism lessons to life came with his first newspaper job, at the Anacortes American in Skagit County.

When you're the only news reporter at a 5,000-circulation weekly newspaper, you do everything from the police blotter to wedding announcements. You learn the importance of "getting it right and doing it fairly" in personal terms.

"If you got it wrong, you heard about it the next day at the lunch counter," Boardman recalled. The impact of journalism was measured not only in reporting stories in a timely and accurate manner but in how people were treated along the way.

This comes from one of the nation's best investigative editors, the epitome of hard-hitting journalism. But he also is a dedicated and active member of this community, a husband and father of two daughters who has volunteered as a youth basketball coach and has served on advisory boards supporting music and journalism programs in Seattle Public Schools.

He says he "enjoys kayaking, hiking, reading, cooking, travel, jazz, playing with his golden retriever and watching Ichiro Suzuki hit a baseball." But he works way too hard to enjoy them nearly as much as he deserves to.

He's the kind of person who worked for years in the ranks of The Times, turning down lucrative offers of prestigious jobs at the nation's biggest newspapers. Why? "Because the combination of this newspaper and this city is impossible to beat."

He fell in love with Seattle when he first lived here for a short time as a youngster. Growing up in Pennsylvania and Ohio, he always wanted to come back to the Northwest, and took that job in Anacortes at age 22. All these years later, he is poised to lead The Times to its greatest accomplishments.

On Aug. 10, The Times will mark its 110th anniversary under Blethen family ownership. Our anniversary slogan is, "The constant in a changing community," which is more about looking forward than looking back.

In that spirit and in the next couple of years, Boardman and Frank Blethen will build a newsroom-management team to provide continuity for decades to come. All of which is cause for celebration.

Inside The Times appears in the Sunday Seattle Times. If you have a comment on news coverage, write to Michael R. Fancher, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111, call 206-464-3310 or send e-mail to seattletimes.com">mfancher@seattletimes.com.

More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists