Charlotte Grimes would hate these leads for this story:

– A newspaper reporter for more than 30 years, 20 of them at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Charlotte Grimes is allergic to newsprint. She wears latex gloves when she read the paper so the ink doesn’t pass from her hands to her mouth and swell her lips up like red balloons.

– Charlotte Grimes says a reporter needs only three things to survive any situation: a pencil, chocolate and Scotch.

– Charlotte Grimes teaches political reporting, but hasn’t voted since 1970, when she decided George Wallace wasn’t fit to be governor of Alabama. And she hasn’t been in a voting booth since: didn’t want it to cloud her judgment when she reported.

But if Grimes, the Knight Chair of Political Reporting at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, was editing this, you’d read four words slashed across the paper in red ink: Cut to the chase.

Charlotte Grimes knows a thing or two about leads. In her traditional journalist lingo, the kind she tries her damndest to spread daily, they’re ‘ledes.’

She’s written hundreds. Leads about George H.W. Bush’s futile fight for re-election. Leads about Bill Clinton’s fiascos with health care policy. Leads about living in Manuel Noriega’s Panama. Leads about dying in Charles Taylor’s Liberia.

And the point of a lead, she’ll say, is to get to the heart of the story.

This time, Grimes only has to walk outside her office on the second floor of Newhouse II and look out at the new building there to find the story.

It’s about those words etched out on Newhouse III, the First Amendment, and why she cares about them so much.

Advocacy journalism

‘We’ve tried to very much reach out across campus because we want everybody to realize that the First Amendment is not just about the Newhouse School. It’s symbolic that those words face outward, cause it’s not just for us here; it’s for the whole campus, the whole community, the whole country.’

Grimes likes talking about the First Amendment and the Newhouse School’s celebration of it this year. She cares about these freedoms.

The First Amendment grants five: religion, speech, press, right to assemble and freedom to petition the government. Newhouse will team with sister colleges such as the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and the College of Law to stage events in honor of each.

The events come at a time when the school is riding high, fresh off Wednesday’s dedication of its new building, Newhouse III.

Early on, Charlotte Grimes appointed herself as the celebration’s coordinator. Students across campus will have a chance to attend these events as the year goes on.

‘She really volunteered to be a person who would coordinate it, to work with other faculty in developing ideas to pull these things together,’ said David Rubin, dean of Newhouse. ‘She was the logical choice.’

Grimes has a passion for this, for journalism and for its freedom – the kind that’s carried her for years, the kind that makes it hard for her to stay in one place.

Before she settled at the Post-Dispatch, where she spent 12 years in the Washington bureau, that passion carried her from paper to paper across the South. Even then, she bounced across the globe searching for stories, writing about everything from Senators to Sandinistas.

That same enthusiasm carried her into teaching, where she’s trying to change the trends that alarmed her while in the field.

Now, set with tenure at Syracuse University, she spent the past year or so moving from office to office at Newhouse, trying to get other professors to schedule events.

Her colleagues respect her, Rubin said.

Being a Knight Chair means something, too.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation endows 23 Knight Chairs in different journalism specialties across the country.

Columbia University has Sylvia Nasar, author of ‘A Beautiful Mind.’ The University of Maryland has Haynes Johnson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the civil rights marches in Selma, Ala.

Syracuse has Grimes. She arrived in 2003, ending Newhouse’s four-year search to fill the position after securing the endowment. This is her second tour here – she was a visiting professor in 1996 and 1997.

‘We wanted to hire somebody who would focus on improving on the quality of the coverage of politics,’ said Rubin. ‘It was really in reaction to the fact that covering campaigns the way we do – horse race politics, fundraising, this kind of stuff – it’s not very enlightening.

‘So we wanted to hire someone who agreed with that.’

Grimes fit the bill. Students in her political reporting class, NEW 530, must provide a cover sheet for every story they turn in. They answer two questions: ‘This story is about . . .?’ and ‘The audience should care because . . .?’

This year, they’ve added a third: ‘This story helps voters by . . .?’

To Grimes, journalism and public service are one and the same. Reporters should inform their readers. Readers depend on reporters to help make decisions.

That’s why the First Amendment matters, keeping the freedom of citizens alive.

‘Aw, hell,’ she said. ‘You can’t have a democracy without a free press.’

Historical journalism

The smile in the framed photograph is so big that it almost blots out the rifle in her hand.

Other photographs hanging in Grimes’ office mean more to her – her old Post-Dispatch editor Jim Millstone looks over her shoulder at her desk – but this one catches the eye.

It’s Panama in January 1990, with U.S. soldiers blasting Van Halen to uproot dictator Manuel Noriega from his Catholic Church embassy hide-out. And there’s Grimes in her red jeans and ‘I Survived Operation Just Cause’ T-shirt, M16 in hand as she mugs for the camera with a few Marines.

The smile is so wide it makes you wonder how she could leave reporting in the first place. Their relationship worked so well.

‘She was one of those who didn’t settle for just the basics of a story,’ said David Lipman, Grimes’ editor while at the St. Louis bureau of the Post-Dispatch. ‘She was committed to getting going beyond the surface and getting at the real inner working of a person.’

Journalism drove her places, the kind of places most girls growing up in 1960s Alabama didn’t end up.

Like San Francisco in 1984, to see Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro at the Democratic National Convention – lambs for the slaughter against the Reagan re-election machine.

Or Washington, where she’d spend her days chasing people for quotes, and her nights sleeping on The Freelance, the house boat where she and her second husband Tom Whitford lived.

Or Liberia, to reconstruct the lives of five nuns killed by the rebels during the country’s civil war.

‘She’s a dogged reporter and a vivid and engaging writer,’ said Margie Frievogel, who served as a co-deputy bureau chief in the Post-Dispatch’s Washington bureau when Grimes was there. ‘She’s the kind of person who can handle all different kinds of stories and who always had the radar going for all kinds of things that she might observe or ask about.

‘So, if she would go to a foreign country or into a dangerous situation or into a sort of unpredictable situation, she could turn out a news story, she could turn out an analysis, she could turn out a feature, and each of them would be done in an excellent fashion.’

And sure, there were bumps along the way.

Grimes married young, 21, right around the last time she voted.

College was a travelogue. She kicked around with her first husband, from the University of Alabama to the University of Alabama-Birmingham to Indiana State, before she received her bachelor’s in sociology from East Carolina.

‘As Jimmy Buffet says, I married too early and it cost me much more than a ring,’ Grimes said.

Before she re-married with Whitford, Grimes kicked around a bunch of different papers, too. She wrote broadcast news for a radio station in a little North Carolina town called Rocky Mount: The town’s paper didn’t hire female reporters for the news section.

Then came stints at the Star News in Wilmington, N.C., and The Virginia Pilot. She met Whitford at The Daily Press in Newport News, Va. Whitford wrote features there.

They married in 1979, a year after the Post-Dispatch came calling. Whitford free-lanced around St. Louis for a time before he shifted into a new career as a painter – one of his works hangs in her office.

‘At the time when she came, women in the newsroom were not very prevalent,’ said Charlene Prost, a friend and fellow reporter at the Post-Dispatch. ‘So, as far we being women were concerned, she was a good, strong addition to help show the guys we could do it well, thank you.’

In 1986, Lipman, the St. Louis editor, sent her to Washington.

A decade of bylines, angry phone calls and letters, trips, interviewing and writing followed – the typical Washington reporter’s life.

After some time, though, things changed.

The new fads rubbed her the wrong way. Grimes loathed the idea of reporters as ‘content providers.’ She hated consultants in the newsroom, flaunting their readership surveys. To her, things just kept getting worse.

‘You reach a point where you say, ‘Is there a way I can do anything about this?” Grimes said. ‘And I knew I could either stay in a newsroom – and reporters, we’re chronic complainers, we carp and moan. And I could just keep carping and moaning or go try to start further back in the pipeline with young folks.’

Grimes sought refuge in academia, hoping to tap into the lifeblood of the press: young reporters.

She taught a reporting class for a semester as a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton in the fall of 1996, and then another two at SU.

She kept moving: A semester at Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, followed by one as director of the Semester in Washington internship program for the Scripps Howard Foundation.After that, she helped found the journalism school at Hampton University, the historically black college in Virginia.

And in 2003, she traveled back up Interstate 81 to SU.

Explanatory journalism

The meeting of the minds happens twice a week in room 152 of Link Hall.

That’s where Grimes and Robert McClure, professor of political science and policy affairs at Maxwell, hold their class PSC 300: ‘Press and the American Democracy.’

As the Knight Chair, Grimes acts as a bridge between Newhouse and other schools on campus. This class, which she and McClure have held since 2004, is that bridge. McClure will also hold a panel discussing the right to petition later this year.

They rotate class discussions. Both grade students tough. Both started off as reporters in the South, though McClure soon veered off into the political and academic worlds. Both grew up Southern: Grimes in Alabama, McClure with parents from Kentucky and Tennessee.

Mutual respect flows between them, the kind two Southerners might craft through years of argument and debate.

‘In the classroom, we have differences,’ McClure said. ‘Differences in emphasis, differences in assessments. But at bottom, the course is not about our disagreements, but about a shared understanding that we both embrace about democracy and these key players that are involved at the center of it.’

McClure, a former associate dean of Maxwell, runs his lectures with a flair for drama as reliable as the copy of the Constitution he keeps in his back-pocket.

Then there’s Grimes.

Her build is slight – she can’t be much taller than 5 feet. The biggest thing about her is the oversized glasses which occasionally slip down her from her eyes. Her hair is silvery and closely cropped. She favors pantsuits.

Grimes is a friendly intimidator in class, a combination of smiles and intent stares at her students. Her arms are cocked at her sides when she leads discussion, flashing out when she wants to emphasize a point, which is often.

Teaching is important to Grimes. She has no children, but her students will be her legacy.

‘I would like to be remembered for inspiring a few young folks to pursue good, kick-ass journalism,’ she said. ‘Journalism that is a powerful voice for the voiceless, journalism that speaks truth to power, journalism that gives us a way to continue being self-governing.’

The vortex where her students meet her first love, reporting, is the classroom.

The PSC 300 class discussed earlier this week the coverage of the civil rights movement, another Grimes favorite. The movement got her interested in journalism. Writers back then, she said, made a difference. She teaches to uphold that tradition.

In class, the talk shifts to the media’s coverage of the marches at Selma, and why the reporters there, like her fellow Knight Chair Haynes Johnson, were so important.

‘So if those folks had been crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and they didn’t have reporters there, what would’ve happened?’ Grimes asks the class.

‘No one would really know about it?’ a girl says after a beat.

Grimes echoes her.

‘Nobody would really know about it.’

So Grimes has settled again. She has time to get her message across to her students, and to the whole campus – if Newhouse’s First Amendment celebration goes as planned.

She just wants to inform.

‘I’ve always said, if I have to go rent a plane and sky-write my stories, I would do that,’ she said. ‘If I had to knock on the door of every home in Fayetteville and shout the news to people, I would do that. I don’t care what the platform is.’

Published on September 20, 2007 at 12:00 pm