Tom Shine holds court in the cavernous dining room of B&C Barbecue. Surrounded by four of his former Wichita Eagle colleagues, Shine tell tales of their time together at the venerable newspaper. The journalists have a particularly hearty laugh about a colleague who once misquoted first lady Barbara Bush as saying she had grown three “breast sizes” instead of the correct “dress sizes.” There is a palpable deference shown to Shine, one born not simply of his authority as their former editor, but of professional respect and personal admiration. Shine’s impressive height and sometimes deadpan expression might seem intimidating on a different man. But with a twinkle in his eye and a dry, biting wit, his charm is disarming. There’s little doubt it came in handy during his 37 years as a reporter and editor with the Wichita Eagle.
Shine’s tenure encompassed the glory days of American newspapers and the painful contraction they later suffered. His experience ran the gamut from sports to news to business. He saw the birth and death of a variety of Wichita institutions and figures. Shine’s career itself mirrors the life of the American newspaper: with a rapid rise, glory years and ending with radical change. But his attitude toward his profession, and the perseverance with which he pursues it, show that despite the setbacks that the newspaper business faces, newspapermen will continue to seek out the truth and tell it to the people.
The name Shine carries weight among journalists in Detroit. Tom’s dad Neal, while city editor of the Detroit Free Press, shepherded a news team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the riots of 1967. Though he started out as a lowly copy boy, Neal would later go on to become publisher of the paper. Tom’s two brothers and his son also became journalists. It can be hard to escape destiny.
“I did an internship my junior year at the San Jose Mercury News and just loved it. This was the greatest thing ever. They are going pay you to do this? This is unbelievable! … And then I came back and graduated and applied to 32 papers. 31 of them said, ‘No,’ and Wichita said, ‘Yes.’ So I said, ‘I guess I’m going to Wichita.’ But l liked it here. I mean, I’m still here,” Shine quipped.
It takes a while for Shine to list his many jobs at the Eagle: police reporter, prep sports reporter, Wichita Wings professional soccer reporter, Wichita Wind minor league hockey reporter, Wichita State basketball, football and baseball reporter, assistant sports editor, sports editor, news editor, night news editor, night assistant managing editor, dayside assistant managing editor, business editor and deputy editor. When he started in 1980, around 140 people worked in the newsroom. To brand-new journalists like Shine and Eagle fashion reporter Bonnie Bing, that room shocked the senses.
“First of all, there was a lot of smoke because you could smoke then. I didn’t smoke, but everybody else did,” Shine said.
“It was so much fun! Everybody had their beat, but we helped each other. People would get their story finished and walk around and see who was not on deadline and chat it up with them. … It took me awhile to adjust to concentrate and write in the middle of chaos. When I first started, we had electric typewriters. When everybody was typing, it was loud!” Bing said.
Shine started out as a “cop” reporter alongside Susan Edgerley, his mentor and eventual New York Times metro editor. He had no grace period. With Edgerley on another story, the editors sent Shine to the site of a drowning of two brothers.
“It was my second day on the job. Oh my God, I was petrified. TV had shown up and the cops were there and I thought, ‘Here you go, either you go talk to somebody or this is the shortest career ever in journalism,’” Shine said.
Talking to the family of the dead boys took courage, but Shine passed that first test. The paper published the story and his career didn’t flounder in that first week. As he continued to report, Shine gained practical experience. He concluded that to increase his skill as a reporter he needed to ask the right questions and truly listen to people.
“My dad, who taught forever, always insisted that journalism was a trade like welding or sheet-metal work. And you had to put your hands on it and do it. You couldn’t read about the theory of journalism. You had to go out and do it,” Shine said.
His longtime colleague at the Eagle’s sports department, Tom Seals, grew very familiar with Shine’s work over the years.
“He is even-keeled, has good news judgement. He’s a good journalist. He’s got good instincts. He’s a good guy too, so he’s easy to be around. He grew up in a journalism family, so he always knew what a good story was. He always read newspapers so he had a good idea of how to tell a story,” Seals remarked.
Though he enjoyed being a sports reporter, Shine grew weary of the travel.
“At the time I was covering Wichita State and traveling a fair amount, you know, to Carbondale and Terre Haute,” Shine laughs. “From the Wings beat it was terrible. … I was going to LA and now I’m going to Terre Haute in January, what the hell? My wife and I had been married two years at the time and we were starting to talk about starting a family. My wife said, ‘When you stop traveling, we’ll talk about a family,’” Shine said.
As luck would have it, Tom’s mentor and colleague, Sherry Johnson, became the first female sports editor at the Eagle. She prodded Shine to apply for one of the assistant editor positions. Thus began his career as an editor in the sports, news, and business departments of the Eagle.
“Good reporters don’t necessarily make good editors, but Tom’s temperament made him a good editor in addition to being a good reporter. For the sake of the reporters it was good that he was an editor,” Seals said.
Shine’s leadership style differed greatly from the stereotypical hard-nosed editor of yore.
Eagle business columnist Carrie Rengers said, “He’s like a parent. You want to do well for him.”
“He made me a better reporter because I wanted to do good for him,” former Eagle reporter Jerry Siebenmark said.
“I was so embarrassed. When I was first reporting, he was editing at night. … I screwed up beyond belief. There were a lot of kids and a lot of pictures of these kids. The first day it ran, they called and said that I’d identified this kid with the wrong name and they had to run a correction the next day. And then the next day, two people called and said I’d misidentified kids. Tom was so nice. I thought, ‘He is going to fire me or tell me I shouldn’t be in this job.’ But this is what he said, ‘Bonnie, Bonnie, Bonnie,’” Bing recalled as she clicked her tongue in imitation of Shine’s rebuke.
Shine held a great many positions of authority in the newsroom over the years. But he never made managing editor, despite a desire to hold that prestigious position. Bing believed he was perfect for the job. But not reaching that level taught Shine an important lesson on leadership.
“To be a leader in the newsroom or any building you don’t have to have a title. There are people leading all over the place without titles. And just because you have a title doesn’t mean you are a leader. I found that I could do good work, work that I liked and was proud of, I could have an influence on the paper and the people I worked with, and make them better, and didn’t need to be editor to do that. Actually, I was pretty certain that if I was editor I’d have less of an ability to do that,” Shine said in reference to the managing editor position.
A story about a longtime newspaper reporter nearing the end of his career in the second decade of this millennium often ends in familiar ways. Buyout. Early retirement. Career change. Such is the nature of the newspaper business in these times. According to Seals, the Eagle newsroom had shrunk to 35 people by 2017. That year, the Eagle laid off Shine.
“If you would have asked anybody there who was indispensable, it would have been Tom. He was in-charge of the room. He kept everybody in the room. He was part cheerleader, part editor, part institutional memory. He knows so much about the area. You would think there’s just no way that guy can be let go, and they let him go,” Seals said.
“When he was laid off, everybody said, ‘That’s it then. Anybody can go. There’s nobody safe. If they are going to let Tom Shine go, then it’s over. Anything can happen now,’” Bing said.
“I talked to him that afternoon and he was that same old Tom Shine. He came to work the next day, and the next month and a half after that was keeping things running and making decisions the same way he always did. The way he handled that situation is quintessential Tom Shine. That’s just who he is,” said Seals.
Tom Shine landed on his feet. As the news director of KMUW, Wichita’s NPR member station, he not only edits stories but also does some reporting again.
“Getting into reporting was a little different because I hadn’t done it in a while. It’s kind of fun when I do it. Nerve-wracking, but fun,” Shine said.
Shine knew not to make the mistake of coming into a new organization with an agenda of change before getting to know and understand the current operation.
“I told my boss Debra when we interviewed, ‘I don’t have the answers, but I have a lot of questions,’” Shine said.
A dusty brick sits in Tom Shine’s office at KMUW. At one time, that brick made up one small piece of the both homely and historic three-story building at 825 E. Douglas St. that housed the Wichita Eagle newspaper for 56 years. Like many facets of the modern American newspaper, that building no longer exists. It crumbled to the ground on July 5, 2017, the property sold off and the paper moved to more humble offices a few blocks away. Though the newspaper business may have crumbled around him, Shine keeps typing away, carrying on the family business of journalism.