For 10 Years, Led St. Louis Post-Dispatch
William Woo, who as editor and editorial page editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was said to be the highest-ranking Asian American in newspaper journalism and the first to lead a major U.S. daily newspaper, died Wednesday at his home in Palo Alto. He was 69 and suffered from colo-rectal cancer, according to Vanessa Hua, reporting Thursday in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Hua called him an outspoken journalist who, as a Stanford University journalism professor, was known for his wisdom and generosity.
“Woo worked at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for more than 30 years beginning in 1962, rising from reporter to foreign correspondent, Washington columnist, editorial writer, editorial page editor, and serving as the newspaperâ??s editor for his last decade there,” the Asian American Journalists Association noted.
“Catalina Camia, Washington assignment editor for USA Today and past president of AAJA, said, ‘Bill Woo was a quiet and important trail blazer among Asian American journalists. He was a role model for everyone, and he encouraged us as individuals and as an organization to fight for the next generation of Asian American journalists’,” AAJA said. Camia is a 1998 alumna of the Maynard Institute’s Management Training Program and was a member of its 2001 faculty.
Woo’s father, a native of China and a newspaper editor in Shanghai, had met his mother, a white native of Kansas City, at the University of Missouri at Columbia, according to the Post-Dispatch. They “had to leave to marry because of the state’s anti-miscegenation laws. After World War II, he and his mother returned to the United States,” the Chronicle said.
“Mr. Woo graduated from the University of Kansas, where he received honors in English literature. He was a reporter for the Kansas City Star before joining the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1962, where he worked as a feature writer, special projects reporter, foreign correspondent, editorial writer and Washington, D.C., columnist.
“Over the years, he was a finalist for Pulitzer Prizes in national reporting, foreign correspondence and commentary.
“In 1986, Mr. Woo was named editor of the Post-Dispatch, appointed by the grandson of Joseph Pulitzer, the journalist and publisher who established the annual Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
“He liked to say that he was the first editor of the paper not named Joseph Pulitzer in more than 100 years, said his wife Martha Shirk, whom he married in 1981. Though very private, becoming a father turned Mr. Woo into a public person, Shirk said, including writing a column about family life.”
Woo had his detractors. A profile of Joseph Pulitzer IV last year in St. Louis’ alternative Riverfront Times said, “In 1976 he accompanied Pulitzer III on a fifteen-day trip to China, which was then largely closed to the West. The journey established Woo as Pulitzer III’s prodigy.
“‘Woo worked himself the old-fashioned way: He sucked up to the boss,’ cracks a longtime veteran at the paper.
“Another former scribe is a touch more diplomatic: ‘[Pulitzer III] liked elegant people, and Woo was both elegant and smart. Unfortunately, he was also a terrible editor.'”
In 1996, Woo resigned from the Post-Dispatch and joined the Stanford Graduate Journalism Program, where he mentored and taught hundreds of students, the Chronicle said. He was most recently the interim director of the journalism program.
Woo addressed the Asian American Journalists Association in 1996. Mark Fitzgerald wrote in Editor and Publisher: “Long regarded as one of newspapering’s leading skeptics about public journalism, Woo spoke just days before the Post-Dispatch announced it had hired his successor: the public journalism advocate Cole Campbell, who was editor of the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va.
“Woo said he had left the Post-Dispatch ‘of my own free will when otherwise I might have stayed in a company that itself was undergoing a fundamental change, from the values and philosophy that drove the late Joseph Pulitzer Jr., who was my chairman, to something quite different.’
“‘Whether I stayed or not,’ Woo added, ‘they were looking for something they called the leadership for the twenty-first century, which suggests that the qualities that make up leadership change with the years, like fashions. I happen to believe they do not . . . . I think the owners, with their eyes on the leadership of another century, were not sorry to see me go.’
“Woo also addressed something that has been a constant topic of discussion at AAJA over the years: whether the careers of Asian-American journalists suffer because they are seen as ‘too Asian,’ that is, quiet and deferential.
“‘Members of this organization have hinted to me that if only I had been a little less Asian, had only been a bit more assertive, all of this might not have come to pass . . . . In asking they are not suggesting anything so crude as racial discrimination.
“‘No,’ Woo continued, ‘they were referring, indirectly, to that haunting question of whether Asians can ascend to and survive at the summit of a business that has few Asians above the timberline.’
‘It is a question Woo said he has asked himself, concluding only ‘of course, there is no answer to that question.'”
- Obituary, selection of columns (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
- William F. Woo, journalism prof (Jessie Mangaliman, San Jose Mercury News)