Marc Klein is both content and intent to ride off quietly into the sunset after 28 years of guiding perhaps the best Jewish newspaper in the country. No special “Goodbye Marc Klein Edition.” No six-page autobiographical article recapping career milestones — such as his announcement earlier this year to step down Aug. 31 as the editor and publisher of j.
I’m not surprised. Being in the spotlight is simply not his style. Think about the hardcore, old-school newsmen you see in black-and-white movies from 60 years ago. Minus the bottle of whiskey in his desk drawer and the cigarette smoking, that’s Klein.
I first worked under Klein in 1999-2000 and didn’t really have a whole lot of interaction with him. My desk was far from his glassed-off office (see, just like in the movies), and as a roll-up-my-sleeves reporter buried in the six or seven stories I was always juggling, I dealt mostly with the newsroom editor and copy editors. Klein, a former reporter himself, left me alone because I did a better-than-average job and operated the way he once had — churning out copy, and making it good.
But since returning to j. in 2008 on the copy desk — after taking a buyout at the Oakland Tribune and ending many years in the sports department — I have worked much more closely with Klein, and have come to see someone with untold dedication to journalism in general, Jewish journalism in particular and the Bay Area Jewish community.
J.’s news coverage is the best of any Jewish newspaper in the country, or at least in the top three. I’ve seen dozens of Jewish papers, but only a handful I would call “real newspapers.” Some are thicker or slicker than our paper, but j. rarely if ever peddles fluff the way most other Jewish papers do.
And that philosophy comes back to Klein.
Routinely, for example, Klein would leave the office and spend most of his off-hours trolling the Internet for Jewish news stories. Or checking his work email. Or sending emails to the staff whenever good ideas popped into his head. He worked on j. most of his waking hours, even while watching TV or on vacation.
As a former daily reporter and editor for the Evening Bulletin in Philadelphia, Klein never lost his nose for news. Every week, he’d stockpile every story he could find for our three wire sections (U.S., Mideast, World), and give me as many as 10 potential opinion pieces for our op-ed pages. Together, we’d read through all of them and choose two.
Klein ran j. like a daily, even though it was a weekly. On our deadline day, when we’d be ready to “put the paper to bed,” a late-breaking item (be it local or in Israel) would send Klein into a frenzied gotta-get-it-in mode. Others might have been content to let the paper go to print as it was, but not Klein the newsman.
I’ve always felt that in any given week, a reader could be completely out of touch with what was going on in the Jewish world, from around the corner to around the globe. No newspapers, no Internet, no cable TV. And then, if you read j., you’d be perfectly up to date.
I think that is Klein’s greatest contribution to j. and the Jewish Bulletin (as j. was called until 2003). He took over a shmoozy throwaway and turned it into a hearty, real newspaper.
More often than not, it wasn’t easy. He had to deal with staff cuts and economic hardships, and a stream of meddling voices from different corners of the community, often from its leaders. “Your paper is too negative on Israel!” “Why do you always support Israel?” “You’re no friend to the Jewish people.” “You’re an apologist for Jews!”
Through it all, even movements to oust him, Klein persevered.
Klein wasn’t perfect. He tended to drape the newsroom with a level of anxiety, didn’t close his office door during loud arguments and sometimes pestered single women staffers to “meet a nice Jewish boy.”
But at the end of every workday, like clockwork, he’d ask us if we were done with the copy machine. “Yes, Marc,” we’d say. Then, just before leaving, he’d turn it off. That might not sound like much, but I can see it in black and white, the signature move of a classic newsman — in an emotional final scene before “The End.”
Andy Altman-Ohr lives in Oakland. Reach him at [email protected].