The space shuttle Columbia was breaking up over East Texas, while, in a San Antonio newsroom, Brett Thacker ’83 was agitating for an extra edition.
“It was early in the morning, and I had been straddling the fence. But I saw we had the people to get it done, so I said, ‘Let’s do an extra.’
“It was one of those adrenaline days,” says Thacker, then an assistant managing editor at the San Antonio Express-News.
Thacker remembers it as one of those magical moments in the news business that makes editors their most proud – the news-gathering is tough, if not nearly impossible, but the result makes it all worthwhile.
“The shuttle was our first extra since 9-11. We covered the unfolding of the event in East Texas,” Thacker says. “We yanked it together, and the excitement, the palpable energy in the room – it’s kind of like Friday night football in sports. You have all these people, and everyone’s doing their own thing, but, somehow, it magically comes together.
“That day was amazing. You’re coordinating with circulation to get the extra out and production to book the press time, and you’re trying to add pages for the next day, and you’re trying to get the stories in and edit them and make sure the headlines and the photos strike the right chord. Sept. 11 was like that, and capturing Saddam was like that, but this topped them all.”
Thacker likes to think that extra edition of Feb. 1, 2003, helped him cinch his position as managing editor of the one of the nation’s major newspapers. With a circulation of 240,000 weekdays and 355,000 Sundays and an editorial
staff of 280, it is the third-largest in Texas. In April, the Express-News earned its first ever Newspaper of the Year honors from the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors. The Express-News was honored the best daily paper
in its big-city circulation category, topping competitors in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and Austin.
Thacker and his staff had another opportunity to practice over-the-top journalism when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the New Orleans and Southeast Texas-Southwest Louisiana areas in August and September.
“Throughout the ’80s and early ’90s, for a major metropolitan daily, this newspaper was not held in very high esteem,” Thacker says.
“When Hearst purchased us in 1993 – it owned the rival San Antonio Light, and it bought us and closed the Light – the company infused us with resources to have more people, a better building and raise the quality of our journalism.”
Thacker’s career rise has been newsworthy in its own right – beginning with his years in the Beaumont Enterprise sports department, where, as a 17-year-old rookie still in high school, his primary daily duties were to answer telephones and call the bait camps to see if the fish were running. “The main question was, ‘How is the fishing?’ and the final question was, ‘You got any bait?’” Thacker recalls.
There were all-nighters at the University Press. “We had so much fun,” he says. “We would stay up there all night, literally. We were pouring our heart and our soul into that publication. We were really clicking.”
For more than two decades, he and the Express-News have been clicking in a major way.
In a field not known for long-term associations, Thacker has been with the Express-News 22 years. He joined the paper in 1983 as a copy editor – two weeks after graduation from Lamar. And, he says, “Here I remain.”
Thacker became assistant sports editor in 1988, sports editor in 1997, assistant managing editor for weekends in 1999 and deputy managing editor in early 2003. In August 2003, the newspaper named him its managing editor after a nationwide search.
He supervises the news operation, running the news meetings, determining the lineup for the front page and supervising the different sections of the paper with their planning, personnel and procedures – “just your chief administrator, basically.”
Thacker figures his interest in journalism began when, at age 8 or 9, he produced his first newspaper on a notepad. “It was two or three pages, and it was called The Unknown News. I could not tell you what the content was or what it was all about. It was essentially, here’s a masthead, and here are a couple of bogus stories, and here’s a little drawing I did.”
Born and raised in Beaumont, Thacker graduated from French High School, where he was editor of the school newspaper. His mother, Ann ’72, who died four years ago, was director of elementary curriculum with the Beaumont school district. His father, Ike, was an engineer who worked for 36 years at the Magnolia – later Mobil – refinery. He has three brothers, Charles ’71, Ike and Ben.
For a guy still in his teens, the Enterprise experience was a thrill. “That was back in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and here I was, just a kid, with lots of enthusiasm for the job,”
Thacker says. “It was the Wild West. I liked working nights and I liked the satisfaction of having something in front of you the next day to see what you had done.”
Halfway through his first year at Lamar – he had just turned 19 – Thacker was hired full time. He was a copy editor in sports, with occasional stints on state and city desks. His editor, veteran sports journalist Joe Heiling, now retired, was an early inspiration.
“It was just too cool because Joe gave me a lot of freedom,” Thacker says. “Then, and even when I came to San Antonio, it was more than a matter of instruction. It was, ‘I trust you. Do what you think is best. Make us better.’ It was an early lesson that stuck with me.
“I try to trust people. I try not to be a micromanager. I understand what it’s all about now because some days, a tsunami can get you, and you leave here just boiling. Some days, you’re fine. I’m doing great today. But I’ve still got several phone calls to return, and I know they’re going to be pretty contentious. The word ‘editor’ in my title is really a misnomer. My job is really more about putting out fires.”
Much of his knack for running a large-scale news operation, complete with pressures and unpredictability, might stem from early experience juggling classes, a full-time job at the Enterprise and working at the University Press.
At Lamar, he was aided and abetted by fellow-UP diehards Frank Conde ’82, now public information officer for the Dallas mayor and city council; David Harrington ’82, senior announcer at KUAT-FM public radio at the University of Arizona; and David Martindale, a freelance writer regarded as a national authority on television reruns.
Thacker was still at Lamar (“I was on the five-year plan.”) when he received his first job offer from the Express-News. But he opted to complete his degree. After graduation, he applied “to every single major paper in the state.” San Antonio called, and the rest is history.
As sports editor of the Express-News, he implemented many of the moves he wanted to make, and the section earned two national Associated Press Sports Editors Top 10 awards.
Then came the transition to assistant managing editor, coordinating Sunday sections. “By that time, I’d been working in sports most of my career,” he says. “I was about to turn 40, and I wanted to try something that I thought would be more substantial.”
He considers the Associated Press “best-in-show” honor a crowning achievement.
“APME randomly selects two dates during the year (for which to submit issues), so you could be lucky – and good,” he said. “The two they picked happened to be pretty eventful for us. The one we picked was out of the ballpark.
“A train crash had released a cloud of chlorine gas. Fortunately, it was in a rural area, but it killed four people. We reconstructed the accident and exposed how our emergency response people didn’t have their act together. Even more people could have been killed as a result of carelessness and lack of training. We concluded: ‘If this had happened two miles, or even 10 miles, up the road, you’d be talking about hundreds upon thousands of casualties.’”
When he’s not keeping the wheels of the newsroom turning, Thacker is an avid cyclist, riding his bicycle an average of 80 to 100 miles per week.
Another favorite endeavor harkens back to his time trodding the boards at Lamar Theatre.
On and off during the past dozen years, he’s been involved – as producer, writer and actor – in San Antonio’s annual Gridiron Show, in which local media parody newsmakers and news events through sketches and songs. Thacker has been honored as best actor four times, including in 2003 and 2004. “I have a killer portrayal of Carole Keeton Strayhorn,” he says.
His wife, Tina, who hails from the Hill Country town of Kendalia, is an activist in architectural preservation of their historic Monte Vista neighborhood and a leader in literacy efforts, including the Express-News’ book and author luncheon and children’s reading program.
Thacker maintains a leadership role in his profession, serving on the board of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas and as second vice president of the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors. The San Antonio Express-News has come a long way in terms other than prestige. As recently as the 1960s, Thacker says, “They had carrier pigeons to carry the film back from football games in outlying areas. Our chief photographer had a pigeon roost on the roof of our building.
“Now, thanks to the wonders of technology, I’m able to dive into the system from home at night to look at pages being built, read the headlines and edit stories every once in a while. I don’t get to edit as much as I’d like, but the thrills of this job are of a different kind.”
Hurricane Rita Postscript
First there was 9-11. Then the capture of Saddam. Then the space shuttle Columbia disaster, which, for San Antonio newsman Brett Thacker ’83, was a coups in news coverage.
Then came Katrina and Rita. Though the hurricanes hit hundreds of miles away, they cast the San Antonio Express-News managing editor into another whirlwind of “adrenalin-day” journalism.
Not only did his news teams cover the hurricanes per se, but they also told the stories of those sheltered in the Alamo City – as many as 13,000, of whom at least 1,500 remained in mid-October. After Rita, the Express-News also printed The Beaumont Enterprise, a sister Hearst publication, for three days, beginning Oct. 2 with a special that included a 10-day run of truncated editions posted online but not previously distributed to readers.
“Logistically, the Express-News was just starting to ratchet down on our Katrina coverage when Rita started to percolate,” Thacker said. “We had as many as 15 people in Louisiana in the immediate aftermath of Katrina but had been caught somewhat unprepared with just one reporter-photographer team in New Orleans when the storm hit. So four days before Rita came ashore, we were posted across the entire Texas Gulf coast, with nine teams
and more ready to fill in as the storm made up its mind.
“As with Katrina, we alternated people in and out of the storm zone for five- to seven-day stretches. Still, a lot of people are pretty cooked after covering two big natural disasters in a one-month span,” Thacker wrote in an Oct. 12 email.
He added a footnote: “Right after Katrina, we were faced with a dilemma on how to house our people where the available housing was either destroyed or closed. So the Express-News rented a recreational vehicle and parked it in Houma. As things stabilized in New Orleans, we moved the RV to a house in the Garden District. As Rita made her approach, we were faced with having to bring the RV back to San Antonio. That goal proved unattainable, given the biblical traffic jam the Thursday before landfall. So our final team in New Orleans managed to bring the RV as far as . . . Beaumont, where it remained during the storm and served a purpose for our displaced colleagues from the Enterprise.”
