By TIM WHEELER
College Topics Staff Writer

For just “pure ‘D’ fun,” George Rodrigue says his new job probably can’t compare with his experiences as foreign correspondent, especially the time he got drunk on fermented mare’s milk in Kazakhstan.
Rodrigue got his joy juice from horses in the early 1990s, when he covered the former Soviet Union’s difficult emergence from communism for the Dallas Morning News. For his reporting there, the 1978 editor-in-chief of The Cavalier Daily shared in a Pulitzer Prize, his second.
Now, after taking over in July as managing editor of the Morning News, Rodrigue, 47, will have to settle for mostly vicarious rewards from the work of the 604-person news staff he oversees. But it’s still a thrill, he says—albeit of a different sort—to return to the city where he worked as a young reporter 22 years ago.
“This is a great place,” he said, shortly after arriving in Dallas from Washington, where he had been vice president overseeing national news coverage for the publishing and broadcasting operations of Belo Corp., the media chain that owns the Morning News. “It’s a state with an awful lot of issues. Being a reporter in heaven would be an awful job; being a reporter in Texas is an ideal job.”
Rodrigue was tapped in April to become the Texas daily’s 18th managing editor as part of a newsroom shake-up that the paper’s editor, Bob Mong, told Editor & Publisher was intended to “unleash a lot of energy in here.”
The paper, which had won six Pulitzer Prizes between 1982 and 1994, had gone a decade without one of journalism’s most coveted prizes until this spring. Mong said he wanted some “new blood” to guide the news staff. At the reins, he said, he wanted Rodrigue, the paper’s only double Pulitzer winner.
“I’m just trying to do a good job here,” Rodrigue says. “I think the secret to that is listening to people and giving them a chance to do their best work. If that unleashes a lot of energy, that’s good.” Beyond that, he says, he and the paper’s editor and publisher are encouraging more investigative reporting, telling the news staff “there’s no such thing as a sacred cow.”
In Texas, there’s no shortage of cows to punch. Rodrigue notes that the Lone Star state is roiled with out-sized controversies over privatizing social services, building toll roads and school funding, among other things, as well as a litany of abuses of people in the care of the state’s health and human services system. “It’s a state that needs a good newspaper, and it’s our aim to be that,” he says.
Journalism has been in Rodrigue’s blood since high school days in the Atlanta area, when an injury derailed his ambitions to play football. “I got my start as a suburban sports writer,” he recalls. “It took me about four hours to write my first three-paragraph story.” As he left a summer internship with the Atlanta Constitution to enter the University of Virginia, he says, “the city editor told me he’d hire me if I promised not to major in journalism.” At a university without a journalism program, that wasn’t a problem. He majored in history, and landed the job in Atlanta upon graduation.
Rodrigue took a reporting job in Dallas in 1982, where he covered City Hall then graduated to writing projects. He earned his first Pulitzer Prize in 1986 with reporter Craig Flournoy for an investigative series documenting racial discrimination in public housing in East Texas. He was promoted to day city editor, but took a year off in 1989 to spend a year as a Nieman Fellow attending Harvard University, in his hometown, Cambridge, Mass.
After the fellowship, Rodrigue went to Berlin as Europe bureau chief for the Morning News from 1990 to 1994. There, he covered German reunification, the Yugoslav civil war and Operation Desert Storm.
As that list suggests, it wasn’t all fun. Sarajevo, Rodrigue says, was “absolutely the most poignant, saddest place I’ve ever worked.” While abroad, he was part of a 30-person team that produced a series on violence against women that earned a Pulitzer for international reporting.
In 1994, Rodrigue returned to Washington as a national correspondent, then jumped to the West Coast in 1998, when he became editor of the Riverside, Calif., Enterprise, a daily in the far suburbs of Los Angeles with a circulation of about 275,000. After three years there he returned to Washington to manage the capital-based national coverage of the Belo chain, which includes three daily newspapers and 19 TV stations.
Each milepost in his career has had its rewards, Rodrigue says. His stint at The Cavalier Daily is no exception—he met and later married Wendy Meyer (‘79), the paper’s production manager. They have two children: Pete, 12, and Susannah, 9. Now, with his family moved to Dallas, he’s raring to immerse himself back in the culture and controversies of the state where he shone as a reporter.
“Texas is a place that has a good sense of itself,” he says, with its “rugged individual attitude on life. In some sense it has worked. There’s an interesting sort of energy to the state that I like. ... It’s a little crazy here, but a good kind of crazy.”
Even with his renewed enthusiasm for all things Texan, though, Rodrigue indicates he will maintain his journalistic detachment—at least when it comes to fashion. “I do not own a pair of cowboy boots,” he says. “I have never owned a pair of cowboy boots.”