Newsroom will miss its 'Chief'

In this summer's latest reincarnation of Superman movies, character actor Frank Langella was cast in the role of Perry White, the crusty newspaper editor who Lois and Jimmy and the rest of the staff at the Daily Planet call "Chief."

And while you had to suspend belief a time or two during the movie — Clark and Lois having a kid out of wedlock?, a man in a cape leaping tall buildings in a single bound? — there was nothing hard to believe about the white-haired grizzled newspaper editor who was tough but fair, demanding, unflinching and wore a shirt and tie like it was part of his skin.

They cast the newspaper editor right, all right.

He looked and talked just like John Hughes.

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John Hughes was the primary reason I got back into newspapering. I had been "retired" for four years, working as a freelance writer in California, when he called in 1998 and brought up the idea of writing a city column.

I was sure I was finished with the newspaper phase of my life after my sportswriting phase. I'd been to 15 Super Bowls. I'd gotten used to life without deadlines.

But then I met a man who thought he was through, too, but had been persuaded to come back from a cush and short-lived life as a journalism professor to accept a challenge to lead the Deseret News — its middle name wasn't "Morning" yet — to greater heights and sunrise delivery.

Mr. Hughes inspired me to join him.

(In full disclosure, the offer of a steady salary also helped. I was pretty sure MasterCard wasn't going to keep paying me forever.)

So we've been twins, sort of, Mr. Hughes and me, for the past nine years, providing you don't look at our resumes.

There is that little detail of his winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1965 when he was working for the Christian Science Monitor, and his later term as editor and publisher of the Monitor, and the syndicated column he's written since 1985, and the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, and the Overseas Press Club award, and his term as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and ....

Although to my knowledge, he never covered a Super Bowl.

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Maybe the coolest part of the story — at least to us idealistic, objective newspaper types — is the fact that he became the first non-LDS editor of a newspaper owned by the LDS Church.

And in the process delivered what turned out to be a decadelong lesson in objectivity.

In editorials and opinion pieces, he allowed the owner's voice to be heard, as it should be, and he judiciously oversaw the daily selection of stories that would appeal to a majority LDS readership.