Homeward Bound

A lot of people like Jan Leach, and it isn't hard to figure why. She's smart. She's quick with a laugh. She treats her employees well.

That sunny bearing wouldn't be noteworthy if Leach were the boss at a bakery, a junior high, or even a muffler shop. But she's the editor of a prominent newspaper, the Akron Beacon Journal -- a job that traditionally involves Erie-sized egos and broken phone receivers, a job in which a well-placed string of expletives was once considered an enlightened motivational technique.

"One of her strengths is that Jan treats newsroom people as real people," says Mike Needs, the Beacon's public editor.

Explains Leach: "I always thought people needed to have a life to report on everybody else's. I often felt that if we were so tied to our desks -- if we couldn't make time for soccer games or Girl Scouts -- then we weren't really in touch."

These days, Leach is something of an expert on trying to have a life. After five years of heading the Beacon, she plans to leave March 1. She was no longer able to "juggle demands of editor, mother, wife, community involvement and more," she wrote in a memo.

The explanation would draw howls if offered by a politician or CEO, but even newsroom cynics concede Leach's words ring legit. She has three daughters under the age of 12. Her husband landed a new job in Cleveland. And her mother isn't well.

"We're so conditioned to be like 'Yeah, right,'" when someone uses the spend-more-time-with-family line, says a former Beacon staffer. "But in her case, I think it's actually true."

The balance between work and home was one of the reasons Leach took the Beacon post five years ago. Raised in the Cleveland suburbs, she bounced around at smaller papers before doing stints at The Arizona Republic, The Phoenix Gazette, and The Cincinnati Enquirer.

Like many in the biz, Leach had long admired the Beacon, with its fat budgets, big news hole, and prodigious reputation. The paper had won three Pulitzers in three decades; it had been named best newspaper in Ohio nine times over one 14-year stretch. Staffers were well paid and content; ambitious work was expected.

"It is a dream job," says Leach. "How often do you get a chance to be the editor of a paper like the Beacon?"

Despite the weight of the paper's history, Leach didn't wait long to apply her stamp. She established an "Akron Touchstones" beat, covering all the things that made the city unique, like the Soap Box Derby. She anointed a public editor to vet complaints and probe mistakes. She pushed coverage of children's issues. She went hard-ass for open records.

"She believed that readers find newspapers difficult to navigate, difficult to know who to talk to, and somewhat intimidating," says Needs. "She wanted to lower those barriers."

Not everyone joined the parade. Her down-home demeanor -- diametrically opposed to her Sphinx-like predecessor, Dale Allen -- turned off some staffers. Others worried that she was putting less emphasis on the hard news that had brought the paper its glory, especially after some of her most aggressive lieutenants left for other shops. When Leach announced she was leaving, it didn't go unnoticed that she mostly talked about "soft" things like children's issues and community involvement.

"It wasn't stuff like how we ripped into the state budget crisis," says one reporter. "We were doing those things, but they were in spite of her, not because of her."

Yet even her detractors concede Leach was put in an impossible position: to maintain the Beacon's quality with dwindling resources. Throughout the 1990s, parent company Knight-Ridder had been squeezing its papers for higher and higher profit margins. By 2000, Leach's dream job became a nightmare. The paper killed popular sections and shut down suburban bureaus. It trimmed its Columbus office and slashed travel expenses -- even though it maintained profit margins of 20-plus percent.

By the spring of 2001, when layoffs began, the Beacon had become the poster child of profit-margin journalism -- a once great paper gutted to appease the demands of Wall Street.

"It was the kind of stuff that was happening at papers all over the county, but it was happening all at once at the Beacon," says columnist David Giffels. "It's like they decided to rip the Band-Aid in one stroke."

Leach did what she could to lessen the blow. She made calls, pulled strings, tried to open doors for the newly laid-off. She attempted to convince those still standing that the paper remained capable of quality work. "It was very hard for her too," says Stephanie Warsmith, who leads the reporter's union. "She did everything she could."