Editor has been thinker, challenger, teacher

Dennis Hartig doesn't talk with his hands nearly as much as you might imagine. It's the force of his ideas and their expression that gives you the impression that he's always moving, even when he's sitting at a table, eating lunch, trying to explain The Virginian-Pilot to a skeptical job prospect.

It was 2000, back when the economy was hot and jobs were plentiful. My gig at a nearby newspaper had ended suddenly and badly, and for the fourth time in 20 months I faced the prospect of picking up my family and relocating. I had a couple of offers, but a job at The Pilot meant I wouldn't have to move.

The editors were being cautious. My career had been in small newspapers, and this is Virginia's largest. I had talked with so many people I was repeating myself in my thank-you notes. But I still hadn't met Hartig, the Ocean View native who then occupied the newsroom's corner office.

On a hot summer day, he and I walked down Boush Street to Freemason Abbey. Two hours later, and without a single glass of wine, I decided that this was where I wanted to work, and this was the guy I wanted to work with.

Hartig did that to journalists so often that I'm sure he doesn't remember that afternoon, filled with disquisitions on the purpose and goals of journalism, on the craft and the risks, on the importance of family and community. But that lunch led as directly to this column, and to this career, as anything in my life.

Now he's going.

Hartig, 60, retires next month as the editorial page editor, as this paper's resident theoretician and troublemaker, as the guy who can help you untangle right and wrong when they're less distinguishable than you'd like. The guy who made me a better writer, editor and thinker than my native abilities should have allowed.

The Pilot itself is a notoriously wacky news organization, a place of competing constituencies and threads of influence. When I arrived, even simple news decisions seemed to emerge at times from the middle of a rugby scrum, by a process that was completely impenetrable. Near the center was Hartig, then the managing editor, trying to tap into the wisdom of the very, very smart crowd that he and Editor Kay Tucker Addis had assembled.

At that long-ago lunch, he told me he had the best job in journalism. He may have been the paper's managing editor, but unlike every other managing editor on the planet, nobody actually worked for him. Instead, he was paid to manage the hurly-burly. To manage the news.

In 2002, he came upstairs as editorial page editor. True to form, he made changes. The idea of an editorial page as a town square, with ideas flowing from everywhere, captured his imagination.

The page's opinions became more muscular, less predictable. When I applied to work for him in 2004, he demanded that I banish the phrase "on the other hand" from my vocabulary. Nuance in opinion is important, but uncertainty is the result of incomplete reporting. And incomplete reporting isn't allowed.

He fostered political conflict on the editorial board as a way of vetting ideas. Now there's always a chair at the table for the devil's advocate, a place for contrary opinions, even for crazy ones. The idea is to give the best ideas a chance to stick and expand. To move institutions and leaders and people and hearts.

To make this - Hampton Roads - a better place.

It's a messy process, but Hartig revels in that mess, understands how it works and what it accomplishes. I've spent years following the guy around this building, watching his joy in the job infect everyone else. Watching him talk with his hands, shaping ideas and shaping stories.

I'm not ready to stop. But he is. He has more important things to do.

When many folks retire to spend time with their family, it is to conceal something. Not in Hartig's case. As much as he loves this paper and its purpose, it is nothing to him compared with his family, to Diane and to generations of Hartig boys.

He's ready to exchange the full-time chaos of a newspaper office for the deeper chaos of a family. If you want to know what gets Hartig up in the morning, why he works so hard to unmask the truth and to identify solutions, that's all you need to know. A good man is his family. Hartig is his.

Donald Luzzatto is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. E-mail him at donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.