Jerome Merle Ceppos' Obituary
Jerry Ceppos, a top editor at one of the nation’s foremost newspaper
companies and later dean of two major journalism schools, died Friday
evening, July 29. He was 75.
The cause of death was sepsis brought on by a severe infection, said his
wife, Karen Ceppos.
In a journalism career spanning more than 50 years, Jerry Ceppos led the
San Jose Mercury News when California’s Silicon Valley was exploding
with innovation, including the birth of digital media that would ultimately
undermine the traditional newspaper business. As an editor and later an
educator, he drove a focus on the new technology and its remaking of
society. He also championed diversity in the newsroom and the classroom.
“Jerry Ceppos was a wonderful journalist — talented, principled,
industrious, committed to accuracy and fairness,” said Larry Jinks, former
publisher of the Mercury News.
The paper won its only two Pulitzer Prizes while Ceppos was managing
editor. As executive editor, he endured heavy criticism for the publication of
a flawed investigative series implicating the CIA in illegal drug dealing, but
later earned widespread praise for acknowledging problems with the
articles, accepting personal responsibility on the front page and fixing the
paper’s editing process.
He would rise to be the top news officer of Knight Ridder, owner of the
Mercury News, The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Detroit Free
Press, The Charlotte Observer, The Kansas City Star and 26 other daily
papers, making it the second largest publisher of newspapers in the United
States.
Ceppos was an early and relentless driver of diversity in an industry long
dominated by white men. He took pride in the fact that he increased the
racial and ethnic diversity of the Mercury News staff roughly threefold
during his tenure as executive editor.
Arlene Morgan, assistant dean of external affairs at Temple University’s
School of Media and Communications, said that when she was an editor in
charge of recruiting and hiring at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Ceppos was
“my partner, confidant and friend in the quest to make newspapers reflect
all Americans.”
That didn’t just mean staff diversity. David Yarnold, who succeeded
Ceppos as executive editor in San Jose, said, “Jerry did something that
only great editors do: In the mid-90’s, he understood the story we were
sitting on, the making of Silicon Valley in the context of a majority minority
community, and he challenged his newsroom to see the big picture.” That
meant creating new beats and reporting teams to cover previously
overlooked populations. He also helped establish Nuevo Mundo and Viet
Mercury, making the Mercury News perhaps the only newspaper in the
nation published in three languages — English, Spanish and Vietnamese.
Susan Goldberg, who succeeded Yarnold and was later editor in chief of
National Geographic, said Ceppos was unfailingly encouraging. “He
assured you, in detailed ways, why you were qualified for roles you
assumed were out of reach,” she said. “You always felt better after talking
with Jerry. What a gift.”
In a profession noted for large egos, Ceppos was praised by former
colleagues as kind and self-effacing, giving credit to others, even as he
challenged them to do better. “After a career that some may describe as
legendary, he’s one of the most sincerely humble people I’ve ever met,”
said Stephanie Ryan Malin, who worked with Ceppos at the Manship
School of Mass Communications at Louisiana State University.
As dean of the Manship School, Ceppos started a news service to help fill a
void left by declining mainstream news outlets, assigning student
journalists to cover state government and undertake investigative projects.
He urged them to dig into unsolved murders by Ku Klux Klansmen during
the civil rights era, and 90 news sites in Louisiana and Mississippi have run
stories by Manship students, said Christopher Drew, a former New York
Times investigative reporter who directs the service.
Drew, a professor recruited to the Manship School by Ceppos, said Ceppos
believed the students’ efforts “brought more news to readers and helped
struggling news sites survive. He saw it as a way to provide a public
service and help keep this field that he loved so much alive.” And it gave
the students a leg up when they entered the job market.
Jerome Merle Ceppos was born in Washington, D.C., on October 14, 1946,
the only child of Harry and Florence (Epstein) Ceppos. His father was a
small businessman who ran Famous Delicatessen in Silver Spring,
Maryland, where young Jerry grew up. His mother, known as Lolly, was a
homemaker.
Journalism ran in the family. His mother’s brother, Sidney Epstein, was a
legendary Washington newsman, the nattily attired city editor of the
afternoon Washington Star when it was the city’s dominant paper, and an
inspiration to his nephew. Epstein became publisher and editor of The Star
before it folded in 1981. Many years later, when Ceppos, now a major
news executive himself, came to town, he and Uncle Sid would lunch at
Epstein’s favorite restaurant, The Prime Rib. Epstein would reminisce
about mentoring Carl Bernstein before he went on to Watergate fame with
Bob Woodward or reluctantly hiring an inexperienced young Jacqueline
Bouvier as a roving photographer, long before she would become First
Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.
As a self-described “geeky” student at Northwood High School in Silver
Spring, Ceppos edited the school paper, The Red and Black. At the
University of Maryland, he edited The Diamondback and graduated in 1969
with a degree in journalism.
After college, Ceppos was a reporter and editor at the Rochester Democrat
and Chronicle in New York for three years. In 1972, he moved south to
become an editor at The Miami Herald, the beginning of a long career with
Knight Newspapers, later Knight Ridder.
A former Herald colleague, Mary Jean Connors, recalls that, on her first day
as an assistant city editor, she accidentally hung up on the paper’s
famously hot-tempered executive editor as he was ranting about an error in
that day’s edition. “It was Jerry who comforted me,” she said. “Many of us
have wanted to do that,” he told her. “You did it on your first day!” “It was
the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” said Connors, who would go on to
become Knight Ridder’s top human resources executive.
“Jerry was a fine journalist who led with a good heart and clear judgment,”
Connors said. “For me, he also was a reliable, funny and, when needed,
forgiving friend.”
Another Herald colleague, Marcie Ersoff, introduced Ceppos to her kid
sister, Karen. They married in 1982 and had two children, Matthew, who
lives in Reno, Nevada, and Robin, of Washington, D.C. In addition to
family and work, Ceppos’ passions included fine wines and collecting pens.
No trip back to his hometown was complete without a visit to Fahrney’s
Pens, a boutique specializing in high-end writing instruments.
In 1981, Ceppos moved to San Jose, where he quickly rose through the
editing ranks. Its Pulitzer Prizes when he was managing editor were for
reporting on massive transfers of personal wealth by President Ferdinand
Marcos of the Philippines out of his country, and for coverage of the 1989
Loma Prieta earthquake.
In 1996, a year after Ceppos became executive editor, the Mercury News
published a three-part investigative series, Dark Alliance, which made the
sensational charge that the crack epidemic raging in Los Angeles was
largely sparked by two Nicaraguan emigres selling huge amounts of
cocaine to raise funds for a CIA-backed rebel army in their home country.
An illustration accompanying the stories showed a person smoking crack,
superimposed over the logo of the CIA.
When three newspapers, The New York Times, The Washington Post and
The Los Angeles Times, published major pieces calling into question the
reporting in Dark Alliance, Ceppos assigned a reporter and editors
uninvolved in the original stories to re-report them.
On May 11, 1997, he published a front-page column, saying that the Dark
Alliance series had “oversimplified the complex issues of how the crack
epidemic in America grew” and “did not include information that
contradicted a central assertion of the series.” He took personal
responsibility for the flawed work, saying, “Few things in life are harder than
owning up to one’s shortcomings.” He said the paper had failed to meet its
own high standards and would overhaul some of its editing processes.
Though Ceppos faced complaints that he had caved to pressure, he was
widely praised for accepting criticism and acting transparently. “His candor
and self-criticism set a high standard for cases in which journalists make
egregious errors,” said The New York Times in an editorial. He would later
receive an award from the Society of Professional Journalists for his
“superior ethical conduct” in handling the aftermath of the series.
In 1999, Ceppos was promoted to vice president for news of Knight Ridder,
a role in which, for six years, he identified and recruited top editors, set
quality and ethical standards, oversaw the company’s Washington and
foreign bureaus and, as he put it, “led sometimes recalcitrant newsrooms
into the digital age.”
“Jerry was one of the most thoughtful and considerate people I knew,” said
Tony Ridder, the CEO. “He always managed to be upbeat and positive
when things were difficult.”
Ceppos left Knight Ridder in 2005, just before the publicly-traded company
was sold and broken up. After consulting for several years, he began a
new career as an educator, telling friends he always failed at retirement.
Appointed dean of the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of
Nevada/Reno in 2008, Ceppos raised the funds to renovate the school’s
building and update its technology for the digital age, said Kristin Ghiggeri
Burgarello, then director of development and alumni relations.
After three years at Reynolds, Ceppos moved in 2011 to the Manship
School, where he was dean for seven years before transitioning into a fulltime teaching role, giving courses on media ethics, American media history
and a seminar on fairness in journalism.
Len Apcar, another New York Times alumnus Ceppos recruited to the
Manship faculty, said “Jerry didn’t push people around. He had an agenda.
It was subtle. He knew how to get great work out of students and faculty,
which is not easy to do. He understood journalism at all levels because
he’d climbed every ladder and he could inspire students with that example
and with his own easy manner.”
Apcar said Ceppos diversified the faculty and found the resources to
endow a chair in race, media and cultural literacy.
Ceppos’ very last published piece of work appeared three weeks ago in
The Inter Mountain, a newspaper in Elkins, West Virginia. It was an
appreciation of his high school newspaper adviser, Mary Lee Ruddle, a
West Virginia native who died at 95 in June. She had recently told Ceppos
how proud she was of his accomplishments. “That’s how Miss Ruddle —
to this day, none of us dares call her anything other than ‘Miss Ruddle’ —
was, an unrelenting coach who demanded high standards but, importantly,
assured us that we could meet her requirements. Her confidence was
important for a geeky high-school boy.”
And it provided a lifelong model for Ceppos to emulate.
Aydin Virga, a rising senior at the Manship School, said she enrolled last
fall in a multiculturalism class Ceppos was teaching via Zoom because of
the COVID-19 pandemic. She said he took a special interest in every
student, making each one feel important. “From the moment he learned of
my plans to pursue a career in law, he reached out to me separately. He
asked to hold a Zoom meeting where he spent a great deal of time
discussing my anxieties and ambitions.” It was “incredibly influential to me
because I finally felt belonging and security in my path.”
She added, “I hope I can live up to the potential that he saw in me.”
Ceppos will be buried in Miami during a private family service. A public
celebration of his life will be held later. Friends are asked to contribute to
the Manship School or the charity of their choice. Arrangements by Levitt
Weinstein Blasberg Rubin Zilbert (305) 932-2700.
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