Anne Saker: The Role of a Servant of the People
Anne Saker is a firecracker of a woman. In her line of work, you have to be. A self-proclaimed “servant of the people,” Anne has taken her role as a journalist with great pride and even greater dedication. She’s had an expansive career from North Carolina, to Portland, to Cincinnati. It was in Cincinnati that she chose to finish her years as an active journalist at the Enquirer.
There she covered topics related to health and medical news. Anne has covered stories such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the death of Neil Armstrong, and she was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team covering the heroin epidemic in Cincinnati. She does not shy away from the uncomfortable and is wickedly self-aware of what her work means. Anne talked to us about the role of women in the newsroom and how to bring warmth and empathy into the work you love.
Interview by Emma Segrest. Photography by Chelsie Walter.
What was your experience of being a woman in the newsroom? You got your start right around the end of the era when it was still mostly a male-dominated field.
I've been thinking about this recently. Looking back on my career, I thought about how hard women worked to become recognized as serious operators in the newsroom and not simply be packaged off to the garden club meeting or the fashion page. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but not very long before I joined journalism, that was often where women got slotted. If you got onto the paper at all, it would be to cover more womanly concerns or what was perceived as more womanly concerns at the time.
I often felt that I benefited immensely from the three decades of women who preceded me in journalism and fought very hard. Not just in the workplace but in the courts to ensure that women were treated fairly and that they were compensated equally to their male counterparts. That's a battle that I'm not sure has been won yet, but I think a lot of progress has been made. I never had big ambitions to climb the structural ladder in a journalism organization. I never aspired to be the top editor in the newsroom, a publisher, or even a top editor of a section. I was always determined to be the best reporter of my generation. To that degree, I never ever, ever had any editor refuse me an assignment or try to talk me out of the assignment because I was female.
Trust your gut as to what makes you spin faster and follow that.
Now, I will say that there was once in my career when I came up against discrimination because I could not look around it. Shortly before I got married, I went in to talk to my boss at the time. I was so nervous going in because I asked for a raise. And this boss replied that I didn't need a raise because I was getting married. And I remember at the moment, laughing nervously, and then when the importance of that remark finally hit me between the eyes, I stopped laughing. I got up and walked out of the room because that's not something that editors ever say to anybody.
The other element is that I did not have children. I'm married, and I was very happily married until my husband passed away, but I didn't have children. I never had to run up against the very significant hurdles that my colleagues experienced. You can be perceived differently once you have a child in the newsroom. Not that you were any less tough, but you might take yourself out of the game. You might be a hard-charging police reporter before you have a baby, and then afterward, you decide you want to do the family beat, which, again, nothing wrong with that, total respect for that. I noticed that many women felt they needed to make choices in their lives to accommodate their desires to have a family and to have this very demanding career.
Something I've noticed across the span of your career is that you know how to get stories and get them to the fullest extent they can be. I feel like sourcing is such a big part of that. How do you go about connecting with people and building this sort of relationship and trust with people?
Well, I guess the easy answer to that is practice. It touches me very deeply that you would observe my work because, as you know, in journalism, and frankly, in any kind of writing, the foundation is always the reporting you do. You can always tell when someone has not done the reporting because they throw out a lot of adjectives, and they try to make you ignore the fact that the topic is weaker by throwing around a lot of pretty language. I can always tell when someone's trying to cover up a hole in their reporting.
You can't be afraid to make a cold call. That's a hard thing to learn. You’re thinking about who's the person who can answer this question. I've never talked to this person before, but I found a phone number, and I'm going to make a call. It's not a natural gift, but once you get over the fear of making cold calls, then it's a pleasure. It's been my experience that 9,900 people are delighted and thrilled when a reporter calls with questions, so they call you back.
People just want to talk, they love to talk.
Exactly. Another thing journalists ignore about this or get frightened about is that people especially want to talk when they're in the throes of grief. As reporters, we become fearful about calling the grieving widow, the grieving mother, the grieving father, the grieving spouse because we're afraid to impose ourselves upon their grief.
What I have experienced is that you can go in there with guns blazing and say, you know, "I'm a reporter, and you better talk to me through your tears." Or you go knock on their door, you go buy them a dozen doughnuts, and you say, "Tell me about this person." They invite you into the house, give you a cup of coffee, and talk to you for three hours.
You did a lot of reporting on topics of health and the related fields, in a topic such as that there's a lot of empathy that's needed. What would you speak on to the idea of incorporating empathy into journalism?
Well, it's an interesting line to walk because you absolutely must have a deep core of empathy to do this work. It's through your empathy and understanding that the reader can accept the impact of your work. On the other hand, you don't want to be so porous that you become consumed by what you're doing and become emotionally and psychologically overwhelmed.
It can be very hard with stories like the pandemic, where all you're covering is a parade of caskets. The consequences of that are very hard. Very, very hard. It's hard not to feel gaslighted because you will have people telling you, "I'm not taking a vaccine. This is all an effort to control us as human beings."
I don't know what to say to that because that's not what's happening, but I can understand how that person sees the world that way. I like to think that that would be empathy, but it's hard. It's very hard to do that when you have these long-running stories, like a pandemic, where you have to come out every day with your open heart and mind.
How do you think journalists can take better care of their mental health when dealing with such hard topics?
[Journalists] don't do a very good job of that at all. An organization called the Dart Center was founded by and is run by journalists. It's all about reaching out to journalists and having journalists talk about how they manage the difficulty and the stress of this work and how to cover things like sexual assault or murder, suicides, or war. Some organizations have resources for that, but we don't really have much here; it's not quite like being a doctor – but it kind of is. To do this job, you have to bring your whole being to it.
I know we have this history and this romance with alcohol in our business. I certainly know it well, but I think we tend to meditate on things like that. That is a surefire path to burnout. I think journalists need to do good things for themselves – make sure you're eating well, drinking well, sleeping well, and seeing a therapist if you need to. I think a lot of these [news] organizations should keep a therapist on staff, frankly, at least during critical periods. If one person gets the help they need, it's all for good. This work is really hard, and I don't think journalism schools really prepare young people for how hard it can be. We kind of drop you into the ocean and say, "Good luck," and I think it's hard for kids.
What is some advice you would offer to women who are currently seeking journalism positions and trying to get out into the newsroom, into the journalism workforce?
Try and find something that you can see isn't being covered now; find an angle in that. A healthcare story – any component of a healthcare story that you want to bite off – you can never go wrong because we can't have enough of it; I would say that's the low-hanging fruit; grab that if you can.
I would also say take care of your body and mind as a hobby, and I don't mean drinking beer. Pick an art form that you have never experienced before – photography, watercolors, pottery; find something that nurtures your right brain. If your left brain is going to get a big workout, keep a journal. However, you do that on your phone or wherever. I have 42 years of little hardback calendars. I'm sure whoever has to clean out my house when I die, [the calendars] go right in the trash, but I have them. So if I wanted to know what day this certain thing happened, I have a record of it. Keep a record of your life and take care of your body and mind. Find something that you are passionate about and pursue that with all of your beings. It should be fun. Don't do something just because you think it'll make you more hireable. I think editors can see if you are engaged and curious by what you present. Your writing should present that about you.
So, the idea is you should live for your work, not work to live.
That's a great way to put it. It's easy to get consumed because the pace can be very addictive. I would have retired maybe three or four years ago, except there was always something interesting to do.
What is the topic in the world today that you feel is not being reported enough on or that you would like to see more journalists report on?
We need to pay a lot more attention to caregiving, the industry of caregiving, and the stress on family life that caregiving imposes because it really is overwhelmingly a female task. We don't compensate people properly for this work that they do. It drains us. And I don't think we measure it properly.
I don't mean caregiving in the sense of little kids. I mean, caring for sick adults, the whole infrastructure of giving care, now we're all living longer with more deadly diseases, we don't have the resources necessary. That's going to take on a whole new factor with long COVID. I think that will leave people very severely disabled and needing care. Maybe not immediately. In the long term, we're going to have a lot more cancer and heart disease because of the pandemic because people have been delaying care in that respect, which means we're going to have more people who need more care.
Not to mention the nursing industry, God knows what will happen with that. If a young journalist is looking for a topic that isn't covered very well and wants to develop a specialty, that is a subject where you can have an impact. Every time I wrote about caregiving, I got a big response. It's a great way to get stories because people say, "Come take a look at my situation."
It's all about family dynamics, and it's about money, and it's about where are we going to put all these sick people? In the same way, people talk about the student loan time bomb, I think we have a caregiving time bomb, and the fuse is getting shorter. Not to be a bummer about this, but I do think that's a really interesting subject that, if people wanted to dive into it, that would be the way to go.
How do you keep passion for your work?
You work really hard to be mindful of who you are serving. A friend of mine was a longtime columnist at the Seattle Times, and at the end of her emails was signed 'servant of the people.’ I used to tease her about that. I'm like, "What do you mean? What sort of people are you talking about?" And she said, "I serve the people. My work serves the people, our readers."
As long as you keep in mind that there's someone out there who needs what you are going to provide, there will be a new and creative way to deliver that information. A really exciting horizon in journalism is that we're doing things now with A.I., podcasts, comic books, and graphic novels. There are so many interesting genres and tools coming into journalism that I would never have imagined even 10 years ago.
It's important for you to feed your passion so that you don't get stuck on a beat because you think you have to do it to get your ticket punched. You will succeed if you find a subject you care about and want to tell the world about every day. Maybe that's covering the Cincinnati Police Department, or maybe that's covering the Bengals, or perhaps that's covering ballet, food or animals or interior design or your school board or whatever. Trust your gut as to what makes you spin faster and follow that.
You retired at the beginning of this year. What have you been working on since that?
I have been trying to maintain my routine. I work part-time for the pottery studio Core Clay in Norwood. I mainly help them with the books and sort of the upkeep of the building. I do my pottery work and my own artwork there. I've been writing things for the pleasure of writing instead of on a deadline, which is nice, kind of disorienting, but still very nice.
Every woman writing today – I don't care if you're doing a mommy blog or covering the White House – anytime a woman speaks up and uses her voice, you're my hero, girl because men have dominated the conversation long enough. Long enough.
I think it's going to take a little while for me to decompress. I've been watching all my colleagues at the Enquirer getting ready to cover the Superbowl, and I get to enjoy it. You know, I get to be a bandwagon fan and enjoy the experience that people are having with this.
What was the proudest moment of your journalism career?
I would say it was in January 2002. I was in the Charleston County Courthouse in Johnston County, North Carolina. I had been covering the journey of a wrongful conviction case. A 17-year-old Black teenage boy was convicted of attempted murder, burglary, and robbery that he did not commit. It took four years, but eventually, the case came back to the courts. I'll always remember that day in the courthouse. I watched this young man walk out of prison, down the staircase, and into his mother's arms.
About an hour later, there was a giant welcoming party for this young man at a Black church nearby. It was packed with all these people who had come from Goldsboro to watch this kid get out of prison. The pastor first asked the young man's lawyer to stand up, and they thanked him, and everybody applauded him.
Then the pastor thanked the police officers who pushed the case to ensure justice was served, and everybody clapped for them. Then he asked me to stand, and he said because the reporter stayed on this story, this young man is free today. Everybody stood up and applauded.
I knew at that moment that it would not get any better than this. I didn't win any prizes for that coverage. A lot of times, I got a lot of grief, "Why are you following that? What are you doing?" But at that moment, I just knew I did not walk away from injustice, and I hope that every young journalist in the world knows that moment.
Who is a woman that inspires you in your life?
The older I get in journalism, the more I think about the great thinkers of our time. I really admire Heather Richardson, a history professor who's been writing Letters from an American for the last year. Every woman writing today – I don't care if you're doing a mommy blog or covering the White House – anytime a woman speaks up and uses her voice, you're my hero, girl because men have dominated the conversation long enough. Long enough. Not that anything they say is bad or wrong or out of sorts, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is we've had enough. Like, "Thank you very much. Everything you folks have done and said has put us in this dreadful situation. We're going to take over now and fix it. Thanks a lot. Thank you for your service. Here's a parting gift."
When women speak together and work together, stuff gets done. I mean, look at the nations of the world that had lower COVID crises than we did; they were all led by women. All the nations that were run by women are coming through this less harmed. All the nations run by men are still at war.
Boy, howdy, I also say someone like representative Liz Cheney, who I would never in a million years agree with politically, what she's been doing, takes immense personal courage. Immense personal courage. If I agree with her or don't agree with her, it doesn't matter. It is courage. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who can stand up and speak and do so under those conditions. I could not. I'm glad they can. It takes a lot of courage. Courage is a funny thing because you don't know you have it until you have to use it. You have to find it in yourself.
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