Zack of a New Trade

The long-time Daily News editor becomes a different kind of watchdog.

by Doron Taussig

With the embarrassing City Hall pay-for-play trial still making headlines, Philadelphia needs a protagonist to take on the monster that is government corruption. The anointed crusader is Zack Stalberg, the colorful former editor of the Daily News who recently took the reins of the Committee of Seventy, a nonpartisan watchdog dedicated to advancing good government in Philadelphia. On Monday, Stalberg had his first meeting with the committee's board of directors, in which he presented his vision for the future. City Paper spoke with him shortly afterward about what we can expect.

CP: Where do you want to take the committee?
ZS: It falls in kind of two categories. One is purely organizational. In the last several years, [the committee has] narrowed its focus to honest elections, and it's done that job very well, but there are other needs. So what I'm really trying to do is grow the organization so that it can tackle those things. It'll require raising more money and hiring more people and developing a much better Web site [and] making the board more diverse and the membership more diverse.

Then, there's the sort of substance bucket. My preference would be in some order to focus on pay-to-play, on the culture of politics in Philadelphia, and on making politics and government a more honorable calling once again. It looks like gambling has the potential to bring with it a great deal of corruption, so I hope in time that the Committee of Seventy has the will and the resources to focus on gaming and try to keep it as clean as possible.

CP: Is there something particular to Philadelphia that breeds corruption?
ZS: I don't think so. I think that most big cities in the country at one time or another experience dishonesty in their politics or their government. We may tolerate it a little bit more, but if you keep an eye on the Web you can see trouble in Chicago now, trouble in Los Angeles now. However, for the last few decades there hasn't been an aggressive counterbalance to that in Philadelphia.

CP: Is this mayoral administration a particular problem?
ZS: I don't think it's out of the ordinary other than the fact that they happened to get themselves in the middle of a federal corruption investigation. I'm not sure that the practices are wildly different than they have been in the past, but, in a sense, they got caught.

CP: How does corruption hurt the city?
ZS: It clearly hurts financially. These contracts that were essentially bought in return for campaign contributions and other favors all cost the taxpayers more because the buyer eventually works that into the price. That's the so-called graft-tax that's been referred to in the papers. But I think it costs in a much more damaging way that's much harder to measure and that's if you feel that the environment is corrupt or you feel even that it's inefficient, then you don't come here, or you leave, and that to me is the most devastating effect. Right now the Chamber of Commerce is raising $16 million to market the region, which I applaud. However, the negative publicity of the corruption trials, especially if the mayor testifies ... will be far more than $16 million.

CP: You often sold papers with fun stuff. Is the Committee of Seventy going to become more fun or more daring in order to put itself on the map? Is it going to take on issues like the price of beer at the Linc?
ZS: I hope so. I think if you take the fun out of human activities, they're not very much fun any longer. So I don't know what that'll be. But I walked in here and this office was decorated with some very serious crap on the walls, you know, pictures of people voting and so forth, and I thought, that's not exactly the image that we want to project all of the time. Because you've got to make it interesting for people. It's got to feel a little bit like it's fun to volunteer for the Committee of Seventy and help watch the polls, not just you're doing your civic duty, but you get to meet some people who are fun and you get to have a beer with them at the end of the day.

CP: Is one of the problems with fighting on the battleground of ethics that it's too boring?
ZS: A few weeks ago I would have said that … but a lot of people have come up to me on the street and thanked me for doing this. So that leaves me with the feeling that the public really does care, but I think we have to find ways to engage them. … It's a little more abstract an issue than, say, putting a bus depot in your neighborhood.

CP: You've said the biggest thing Philadelphia needs to change is "overwhelming cynicism." Wasn't your previous position perfect for combating that?
ZS: I hope we did try to do some of that through the old job … but I just made a personal decision that it was time for a change, and that it would be fun to take a more active role in influencing that. I was still living in the world of words and I was anxious to see whether I had any skill out here in the world of action.

CP: How are your responsibilities different (with the committee)?
ZS: Some of it seems quite familiar. I'm planning investigative projects I could have just as easily been planning in the newsroom. The difference here of course is that instead of being a carefully guarded advocate, now I get to be a much more aggressive advocate, because when I still had the cloak of a journalist, I could only go so far.

CP: [In a keynote address you gave at the Pew Center in 1999], you ended with a quote from Goethe ["It all amounts to this. In order to do something, you must be something."] and said you hoped no one in the room would reveal that you had quoted a German philosopher. Do you have an intellectual side that you kept quiet at the Daily News, and will this new position enable you to engage it more?
ZS: [Laughing] Not really. I don't where I came across the quote, but I don't have an intellectual side. I'm a pretty primitive guy and have in fact been accused of being anti-intellectual. I'm not sure what that means exactly, but I'm pretty much what you see is what you get, but I did think that the quote was pretty straightforward and meaningful.

CP: What tangible accomplishment should we watch for over the next year or two that if it happens you would point to and say, we're moving in the right direction now?
ZS: Honestly, it's a little early to say. What I hope to do is influence the culture of politics and government in Philadelphia by the time the next races roll around for mayor and city council, which would be 2007, and encourage people to run who wouldn't normally run. And that's a hard thing to measure but in my own mind, that's a measurement.

CP: Are you willing to make public any of the parting advice you gave to your successor at the Daily News?
ZS: I'm not sure I did offer any parting advice. We're very close, so whatever advice I had to offer he'd kind of already heard it. I just won the leadership award from the American Society of Newsaper Editors, so I'm getting that in a couple of weeks. I'm not sure exactly why they gave it to me but I'll be happy to take it, so that's made me think about what I might say to them. To me, I think, if you really care about the people that work for you, they will really do their best work. And leadership is that simple. I don't know if I said that to Michael [Days] on the way out the door, or whether we had just talked about that over and over again in different ways, but he definitely subscribes to that idea, and that's the strength of the Daily News, the people who run it tend to really care about the staff, and the staff has delivered with great work.