Saluting Doug Feaver

Proving a good man can be a great one - and the best in journalism

Long before he was executive editor at washingtonpost.com, Doug Feaver was something of a legend as a tenacious reporter covering aviation and transportation. During one of our bi-weekly lunches I asked him what he thought most often caused plane crashes. He looked at me for a long hard moment - not skipping a beat, but for effect — and said, “get-home-itis.”

In fact, the desire to just land a craft despite weather or skill when one is close to home is the number one cause of crashes. But I knew whenever he looked at me with a pause, he was making a bigger point. What was true for pilots was true for journalists and publishers. The rush to land a story might feel good, but risked the very reason journalism exists: to get it right. Better to turn back or make another spin around than get it wrong.

Coming through the go-go period of web 3 and in the breath-taking pace of rising AI, it may be hard to remember that a similar dynamic existed in the rise of web 2. In some respects, it might have been more so. Back then old school editors and sales executives often seemed to at best think of the internet as an “additional printing press” or something to be fought against at worst. A rising generation wanted to move at “internet speed” and saw tech companies without any legacy to defend eating away at the very business model of news.

Doug understood this but prophetically believed in whatever might come technologically, the North Star of great journalism was getting it right. He was plenty competitive, and he would grit his teeth ever so perceptively if some competition beat us to a story. At the same time, and perhaps the only time, he growled at me was when I pressed him on articles during a crisis I saw on other sites. He barked: “I don’t care about them. They are out ahead of the facts.” He was invariably right.

I’ve never seen him better on this front than on September 11 where rumor and misinformation was the difference between panic and sober decision making. We had two missions that day: get it right and not let the site go down.

Doug and his team, in partnership with the extraordinary journalists at headquarters, ensured the former. And Doug, in co-authorship of every function at our enterprise – design, tech, classifieds, sales and more - immediately stripped anything heavy in graphics and photos unrelated to the day and even built a separate home page, ensured the latter. He OKed the great photo legend Tom Kennedy, a pioneer in videography, to send some young stars to head immediately to the Pentagon and New York City. It was in his calm and determined leadership that washingtonpost.com, hammered by traffic around the globe, never went down and helped usher in a new era of news coverage.

In many moving remembrances of Doug, the word “curmudgeon” is often used. At one level, I think he could be that way, but sometimes also used the image. We had an offsite where among other activities every senior manager took a Meyers Briggs test. It was not surprising that our irrepressible, enthusiastic, and often brilliant head of sales was the greatest “E” and Doug was by far and away the greatest “I.” With perfect timing when our E ran over to Doug with his hand in the air and shouted, “High-five! We’re number one!” He turned on his heels and grumbled, with a wry smile and said just loud enough for the team to hear, “get away from me….” 

I had to keep from laughing when the two of them, with mutual respect but deeply dug in, would argue back and forth about where and how ads were reflected on a page. “Over my dead body will washingtonpost.com become an advertorial!” Part and parcel of getting a story right for Doug was unquestionable clarity that readers knew what was paid for and what was independent. But he was a supporter of washingtonpost.com being one of the first publishing partners with Google AdWords and was a great partner to online classifieds. He knew to get it right meant to get a business model right. Or else…

Doug was a deeply spiritual and faithful man, and though active in his church and the son of a Presbyterian minister, he lived it as much in action as word. On two occasions when I had some particularly grueling run-ins with some newspaper executives, I sought solace in a lovely, historic church around the corner. At the far end on both occasions sat Doug in prayer. He had to have seen me also, but we never said anything about it. That Christmas he gave me a wonderful book by Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, and inscribed it simply “with great affection and thanks.” I later asked him if he’d enjoy seeing the Passion of the Christ with me, a very brutal and controversial depiction of the crucifixion. He told me he might one day but wasn’t interested at the moment. “I think we all have our own experience with that story, and I’m not sure about seeing someone else’s.”

He and his equally remarkable and grounded wife Judy faced the greatest challenge life can give when one of his sons lost his battle with schizophrenia and took his own life. Doug was every inch the minister’s son in eulogizing this beautiful young man. He was poignant and even funny in describing watching his son as a little boy going in and out of waves and wondering what life would bring him, how later in life his son would master all kinds of sports statistics and correct even the greatest sports writers they knew. But then he captured something special in what he said was one of his father’s rare moments of lucidity - who also lost his life to Alzheimer’s. Doug was visiting him at the hospital and reported the challenges of his son, and his father rose up in his bed and said: “Never give up on that boy!”

He and Judy never did. And this captures my greatest reflection on Doug.

For all his desire to get the story right, for having no tolerance for bull shit, for wanting to keep leadership accountable - he was at the same time very understanding of human frailty. I’ve known many journalists who judge, who even think they are above the fray of humanness. This was not Doug. He may have been the most human man I met in the industry. Perhaps anywhere.

His commitment to the cause and human connection explains in large part why so many who worked for him felt like they lost a family member. He not only shaped a new era of news, but a generation who have continued in the field, or have taken his lessons to a new field, or teaching the next generation at university. Doug Feaver will be in them all.

I cannot know what he would have made of what has happened to journalism in the last decade. He never had patience for journalists who made themselves part of the story - he once told me he admired The Economist which for years had no bi-lines. The story was what mattered. I can’t imagine him tweeting how he felt about a figure he was covering. He believed that being an activist in journalism meant you were in the wrong field. For him “activism” wasn’t about a view on a politician or political issue or your political identity - activism was getting the story and getting it right. That for him was the best way to serve the readers but also our democracy.

This might sound trite in the world we are now in, and maybe “driving down the middle” of a story as he called it was never as real as it appeared.

But in where we have come to today and the apparent trends coming, it is worth remembering what Doug Feaver stood for.