| Tomorrow’s Door: Patrick Butler Charts Unlikely Path to Washington Post, AU Like many remarkable journeys, Patrick Butler’s voyage from a Chattanooga newspaper to the U.S. Capitol, the White House, the Washington Post Company’s executive offices, and finally AU began with a door. Only this door was closed. As a reporter for the Chattanooga Times in the mid-1960s, Butler often suspected the most interesting news happened after his City Hall interviews ended. “I’d be leaving the mayor’s office to go write my story, and I would always see people walking in as I was leaving,” he recalls. “I’d watch them close the door, and I was always fascinated by what might be going on behind that door when I’m not there.” When Howard Baker, then a young Tennessee senator, offered the eager reporter a job in Washington, Butler jumped at the chance. But he wasn’t looking for a career change. “I thought I’d come back and be a more sophisticated journalist,” he says. There was only one problem. Butler became so fascinated with life behind the door, that he stayed in politics for nearly 20 years. The job with Baker led to a chair position on the Nixon impeachment task force, which led to a post as presidential speech writer for Gerald Ford and a return to Baker’s staff as legislative director during his run for president. By the time Butler came back to journalism in 1985, he says, “it was a little late to return to objective reporting.” Instead, for the last two decades he has used his status as a “creature of Washington” to work on the business side of journalism, first as a vice president at the Times Mirror Company and now as a vice president at the Washington Post Company. “My specialty has become working at the nexus between the media world and the public policy world and understanding how each affects the other,” he explains. For Washington Post Company president and CEO Donald Graham, that means clarifying complex FCC regulations vital to a company with a hand in print journalism, cable television, the Internet, and radio. “I will take him an issue that is just bothering the hell out of me about what it means for the future of the company,” says Graham, “and he’ll think it over, demystify it, and come up with a range of choices for us that are better than the range of choices I thought we had.” Butler’s decades as a beltway insider have also given him the connections to open for others the kind of doors that were once closed to him. “There’s nobody in this town he doesn’t know,” says washingtonpost.com executive editor Jim Brady ’89 explaining how, “If there’s a door in Washington you need help opening, Pat’s the best guy to talk to.” While Butler’s perspective and connections have helped the Post Company chart the future of news, they’ve also helped shape the future for the company itself. During his tenure, Post-owned Kaplan has developed into much more than a test prep service. Thanks in part to Butler’s advice, particularly in helping the company link its tutoring services with the No-Child Left Behind Act, Kaplan has grown into the Post’s most profitable segment. Butler expects Kaplan, which now provides education services from kindergarten through post-secondary school, to play an even bigger future role. “The Washington Post Company has become in these last 12 years not just a media company but a media and education company,” he says. “And it’s going to become more of an education and media company as time goes on.” In addition to politics and media then, lifelong education has become an area of interest and expertise for Butler. That’s fitting considering Butler himself earned his AU degree after he’d already become a VP at the Post. Butler left college for reporting before earning his degree, and his desire to finally finish what he’d started before “Washington beckoned” brought him to AU in the ’90s. Planning to only complete his bachelor’s degree, Butler took to his communication classes so well, that he earned a master’s degree in journalism and public affairs through a weekend program. He maintains close ties with AU as chair of the School of Communication’s Dean’s Advisory Council in part out of gratitude for how the school helped him tackle new media at a time when the Web itself was still news. “I learned how to write code,” Butler recalls. “I learned all kinds of things about the Internet that I needed to know at the time and had no other way of finding out.” Today, Butler acknowledges that “Sometimes I feel that the scope of what I do is so broad that things don’t cohere as much as you’d like them to . . . and sometimes I wish that it was more orderly. But most of the time I just enjoy the fact that a large part of my job has been and continues to be inventing the future.” top |
