The reporters worked on ancient Royal and Underwood typewriters. The ad sales people, salaried and with no incentive to sell, “sat around and drank a lot of coffee.”
The paper itself was “very small” and contained “no flavor” of the Bay Area Jewish community.
“San Francisco could have just as well been in the Midwest,” said Klein, 53. “There was so much more that could have been done.”
The first thing he did as editor and publisher was replace the typewriters with computers and bring in “some new blood.” It “didn’t take long,” he said, before the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California and its staff of more than 20 produced “a dramatically different paper that attempted to cover the entire Bay Area and much of Northern California.”
For his accomplishments, Klein will get special recognition this week from the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation. He will receive the agency executive manager of the year award during a 2002 distinguished service awards of excellence ceremony at 4:30 p.m. Thursday at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. The event will take place during the federation’s annual meeting.
Other honorees include Josh Smith, receiving the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel award for young leadership; Peter Haas, the Robert Sinton extraordinary leader of the year; Barry Cohn, volunteer of the year; Chaim Heller, agency staff person of the year; and Lisa Gurwitch, JCF staff person of the year.
The Helen and Sanford Diller Awards for excellence in Jewish education will go to Linda Levine of Congregation Shir Hadash; Vivian Joseph, Brandeis Hillel Day School; Tamar Bittelman, Oakland Hebrew Day School; and Todd Braman, Peninsula Jewish Community Center. The Holocaust Center of Northern California’s Survivors Speakers’ Bureau has been selected as program of the year.
Klein, in his 18th year at the Bulletin, said he is gratified to receive the award during “my chai year.”
Calling the paper’s coverage of the current intifada “the most dramatic of stories to stay in my mind” during his tenure so far, Klein said he is proud to be able to help give “the Jewish community here a better understanding” of what’s involved in the crisis.
“In my mind, this is what a Jewish newspaper is all about. This is when we have to shine.”
Klein has not always worked in the world of Jewish journalism. He started out as a reporter at the Courier-Post, a daily in Southern New Jersey, and by the age of 30 was assistant managing editor for the now-defunct Philadelphia Bulletin.
In the early 1980s, when the Philadelphia Bulletin was failing, Klein left the world of dailies to take a job as editor of the Jewish Exponent, a weekly newspaper in Philadelphia. His wife was pregnant with their second child, “and as a young family, I didn’t want to move around the country looking for dailies.”
During his two years at the Exponent, Klein took his first trip to Israel, which he described as “a spiritual experience [that] affirmed in my mind that Jewish journalism was right for me. It felt comfortable.”
He was offered the job at the Bulletin, formerly the San Francisco Jewish Bulletin, in 1983. Most Philadelphians “don’t leave their city their whole lives,” said Klein, but “I felt if there was ever a place I’d leave for, it would be the Bay Area.” His family settled in Alameda, where he is a past president and member of Temple Israel.
Soon after taking the reins at the Bulletin, Klein hired the Bulletin’s associate publisher, Nora Contini, and its managing editor, Woody Weingarten.
But it was years earlier, at the Courier-Post, where Klein first met Weingarten. He was assigned to work for Weingarten, surburban editor of the paper, for a short time.
Weingarten remembers Klein as “an enthusiastic, bright college graduate who had a good sense of how to differentiate between hard news and features.”
During their almost two decades together at the Bulletin, Weingarten said, “Marc has supported me fully in the quest to make the paper the best Jewish newspaper in the country — with the emphasis on the word ‘news’ — and has supported my vision of a product that’s accessible to the entire gamut of Jews.”
Contini said the combination of Klein’s “commitment to the Jewish community as a whole and his commitment to journalistic integrity” make him “an excellent editor of a community paper.”
As an executive, she said, “he’s hands-on. He gets involved in both the larger management decisions and the day-to-day details” of producing the paper.
Klein said he doubts that any of the three expected they’d stay at the Bulletin for so long, but found “this is not just a job, but a way of life. I guess I love my job here too much” to leave.
“This is not a job you do for the money,” he added, “but a job you do because of your dedication to the Jewish world.”