Warren Bovée:
His writing goal: "To enlarge the readers' understanding"

His education was interrupted by World War II, where he served in the Army Air Corps as a flight instructor and later as a Hump pilot, flying cargo planes over the Himalayas between Burma and China. When he got back to college, the dean suggested he use the instructional skills he learned in the war and teach. Bovée enrolled in the grad program and served as a student teacher. Those early years developed his interest in journalism and honed his teaching. Bovée earned a bachelor's degree cum laude from Marquette in 1947 and a master's in 1949. He did post graduate work at Columbia University from 1949 to 1953.

Bovée worked as an instructor of English and journalism at the College of New Rochelle in New York from 1948 to 1953 before returning to Marquette in 1953. At Marquette he served as graduate director, assistant dean, acting dean and journalism chair. He retired in 1991.

Bovée took several leaves from teaching over the years for hands-on journalism experience. "Marquette always emphasized that anyone who teaches an art or skill has to have practiced it," he said. During one of these leaves, Bovee worked at The Reporter, a premiere cultural, political and intellectual magazine at the time in New York. His work at The Reporter, was, he said, "his most intense and enjoyable journalistic experience."

Bovée said what he likes most about teaching is the students. "Every student is different," he said. "Every class is different. There is a discovery, an adventure involved in teaching. If you happen to do it well, years later a student will come back and comment about a course. It is an enormously satisfying kind of work. It's probably why teachers do it for relatively little pay."

Writing, he said, is just another approach to teaching. "I enjoy thinking about things that will be of some intrinsic value to people and that they find interesting and helpful," he said. Being able to combine those two things through writing, he said, is "thrilling and wonderfully satisfying."

Bovée's Discovering Journalism, published by Greenwood Press in 1999, won a Texty Award from the Text and Academic Authors Association. Bovée said he found the TAA judges' comments "most generous and gratifying." He wrote the book, he said, as an effort to try to explain what journalism is. "When I read books about journalism, some of which I consider excellent, I often found that they did not have as a primary objective a deeply considered definition of the work of journalism," Bovée said. "My hope was that my work would be able to enlarge the readers' understanding of the nature of journalism, and also that it might be thought-provoking to journalists about the underlying purposes of the work they are doing."

He had been thinking about a philosophy of journalism for many years, he said. It was a topic he thought would not only be fascinating to write about but also one that was needed. "Journalism is an important area of everyday life," he said. "Society would benefit greatly if both the reading public and all working journalists would have a well-developed understanding of the uses and possibilities of journalism."

The book is being marketed by the publisher to introductory journalism classes and journalism graduate programs, but when he wrote it, Bovée had hoped the book would reach a more general audience. "In the minds of some people the book is useful for beginning journalists, but I had hoped it would be read by established journalists in order to deepen their understanding of what they had studied for a long time," he said. "I didn't think of it as a textbook, but it seems to be finding a niche as supplementary reading that offers a philosophical context to the basic, practical classroom texts."

AWARDS NIGHT A long-time friend of the Boveés, Kathy Lorenz, joins Gladys and Bo at Le Pavilon after he received the Texty for Discovering Journalism

Bovée expresses great admiration for what he considers the outstanding journalism textbook currently available, John Vivian's The Media of Mass Communication, and also for Vivian's and Alfred L. Lorenz's News: Reporting and Writing. Both Vivian and Lorenz are former Marquette colleagues. "These works set the standard for true breadth and excellence in journalism textbook writing," Bovée said.

Bovée was not familiar with TAA when he began dealing with his publishers, and he now feels he would have benefited greatly from the organization's support and experience when he began negotiating his contract. For example, he said, "The publishers put a rather hefty price on the book -- $60 retail," he said. Considering its size, 223 pages, he protested the cost: "I thought it would sell better if the price was lower. They said that if it sells well, they will lower the price."

Discovering Journalism is now in its second printing, "so people must be reading it," he said. Although he wishes he had a surer sense of the nature of the book's readership, he has received positive reviews and communications from as far away as South Africa.

Despite the success of Discovering Journalism, Bovée said he's more experienced as a magazine, academic journal, and article writer than as a book writer. He's written more than 100 articles and, he noted, only a few books. In addition to Discovering Journalism, he has written Research Materials, published in 1956, and The Magazine Editor-Writer Relationship, published in 1965. He also edited The Byline Awards, published in 1995. Although retired since 1991, Bovéee goes to his campus office almost every day and writes on his Smith Corona word processor. "I devote part of the day to writing on the word processor, then I look it over," he said. "I let it cool off for a while, and then decide whether to do it all over again."

Although the people he talked to about getting Discovering Journalism published were helpful, he said, they weren't greatly experienced. "I wish I had found more people with whom I could have discussed the marketing and other planning of the book," he said. Text and Academic Authors has done so many good things he wasn't aware of when he was writing and negotiating his book, he said: "I wish I had been a member at that time. I got TAA's tips handbook after the book had been published." He adds that his TAA membership was a gift from a very dear friend "for which I will always be enormously grateful."

Bovée said he doesn't know what motivates many people to write a book: "It may be that they are so fascinated with the subject that they want others to know about it. You have to love what you are doing. Things flow from that." Bovée served as a Texty judge in 2001 for the first time, which took him into contemporary textbooks in related fields. He was astounded at how textbooks have grown: "Many were multi-volume works with quizzes, answer banks and slides. The quality and quantity of the material produced overwhelms me."

Bovée has been the leading proponent of the practice of signed editorials for many years. "People are finding it difficult to determine what types of journalism they can trust," he said. "One way to increase trust is to know who is writing editorials." Professional journalists have been concerned about this, he said, especially with the rise of electronic materials, in which, in many cases, you don't know who the author of the material is. "The readers often get the impression that editorials are the product of management or are written by the whole editorial staff," he said. "This is not true. I've sat in on more than a hundred conferences, in which editors gather in groups of five or six to discuss editorials, and only found two instances in which an editorial was written by a group. One was a presidential endorsement and the other a governor endorsement."

He has written several articles on signed editorials and communicated with newspaper editors on the subject, but even many of the most prestigious publications are reluctant to throw tradition aside and take that step, he said. In the past several years, however, a slowly increasing number of publications have begun to sign their editorials, he said: "I don't know how much has been influenced by my efforts."

Bovée lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with his wife Gladys. They have five children: Priscilla, Christopher, David, John and Paul.

— reported by Kim Pawlak, 2001