Glenda B. Claborne
Jour 205/3
November 5, 1997
Rewrite
Mark Kimble was lured into journalism by the best seats given to sportswriters but he is staying on because of the special access to people only journalism can provide.
"I enjoy talking to the wide variety of people that I can come in contact with working for a newspaper. You can be nosy and ask people questions that you can't otherwise," Kimble said.
Kimble brings more than three decades of journalism experience into teaching an advanced reporting class at the University of Arizona. He had been teaching, off and on, for the university's journalism department for 15 years.
His experience stretches back to his high school days at Salpointe Catholic High School where he started writing sports columns for and then becoming sports editor of the school paper in his senior year, 1969-70. He also covered high school sports for the Arizona Daily Star in 1968 and 1969.
After graduating from Salpointe in 1970, he went to the University of Arizona where he was sports editor of the Arizona Daily Wildcat for three years and then editor-in-chief in his last year in college. He graduated with a B.A in Journalism in 1974.
Kimble worked briefly for the Associated Press in Miami before joining the Tucson Citizen as a reporter in 1974. Since then he took on bigger responsibilities with the afternoon paper as assistant city editor, city editor, assistant managing editor and as associate editor, a position he has held for four years now.
The department had always preferred faculty with this kind of solid professional experience. Kimble said that the department does "a good job keeping a balance between the scholarly aspect of journalism and people who practice it still."
Kimble writes a weekly (Thursdays) column for the Citizen and also appears on Fridays on the Reporters' Roundtable segment of the "Arizona Illustrated" on KUAT-TV, Channel 6.
Some media pundits predict the death of the afternoon newspapers sometime soon. Kimble acknowledged that the trend has been that the number of evening papers dropping and that of morning papers going up.
"But," he said, "it's something that we can't sit around and worry about. All we can do is put out what we consider is the best paper we can do and give people a choice."
The Tucson Citizen and the Arizona Daily Star entered into a joint operating agreement in 1940 to share mechanical and business functions but to remain competitive in their editorial and news content.
While some people say this is bad for competition, Kimble said the agreement did not jeopardize the papers' independence and competitiveness. He added that the agreement with equal partnership between the two papers had actually made it possible for a morning paper and an evening paper to survive in a town the size of Tucson.
Many in the news business worry about the effects of ownership by large media and non-media corporations. Kimble and several Citizen employees worried too 20 years ago when the paper was bought by the Gannett Co. from a local owner.
He now says he has no horrible problem working for a paper owned by the largest national chain. While acknowledging that there are pressures to give good financial returns, more than the previous year, to stockholders of publicly-owned companies like Gannett, Kimble said the Citizen has kept its independence, editorially and in news content.
In addition to the benefits that one newspaper cannot have otherwise such as Washington coverage by a Gannett employee and training of staff by Gannett, Kimble said there is opportunity for advancement to another Gannett paper.
But Kimble has no intention of working anywhere else but Tucson where he lived most of his life.