Update: Services for Malinowski: Calling hours 4 to 7 Monday at Watson Funeral Home, East Providence. Funeral Mass Tuesday 10 a.m. at St. Luke’s Church in Barrington.
Providence Journal investigative reporter Bill Malinowski died last week at just 57 years old. RIPR political analyst Scott MacKay, a former colleague, talks about Malinowski’s life and legacy.
Newsrooms are filed with prima donnas and strong personalities. People who crave recognition, if not money, flock to reporting. The hours are long, the work – especially investigative reporting – often tedious. Sometimes rewards for success are big journalism prizes, where public acclaim accompanies peer respect.
As author Timothy Crouse so aptly said in his 1970s book about the nation’s political reporters, journalists tend to be “insecure egomaniacs.’’
Not Bill Malinowski, the retired Providence Journal investigative reporter, who died of ALS last week. He was a secure guy who had scant ego. He won numerous awards, but was never motivated by glory. Many investigative scribes protect their sources and zealously hide their methods, like a fisherman his secret stream.
“There are very few people in this business like Bill,’’ says Amanda Milkovits, the Journal crime reporter who collaborated with him on many urban crime pieces. “He was trusted by cops and gangbangers. He could talk to anyone. And he was the greatest of mentors to young reporters.’’
Malinowski had an almost puritanical belief in right and wrong. He believed watchdog journalism mattered, that people in Rhode Island’s wealthy suburbs needed to know what life was like for young people in violence-plagued South Providence. He dug into the swamp of Central Falls city government, exposing the way the political hierarchy ripped off the struggling immigrants of the state’s poorest community.
After working in the now-closed Pawtucket bureau, Malinowski became part of the Journal’s investigative team. It was a hothouse that led him to the underbelly of the state’s political and law-enforcement systems. He flourished in a system where such top editors as Jim Wyman, Joel Rawson and Tom Heslin made smart, tough journalism a priority, recalls Malinowski’s close friend, New York Times columnist Dan Barry.
Looking at the dry words on his resume, you could easily have mistaken him for t a guy from a cosseted background. Prepped at Marianapolis School in Connecticut, studied English at Connecticut College, earned a masters at Northwestern.
Malinowski’s upbringing belied, and informed, his success. He was the son of a Polish immigrant who was active in the World War II resistance. His father was interned in a Nazi concentration and labor camps, where he had his teeth knocked out and was ordered to dig his own grave.
His dad was always reliving the war. As Dan Barry says, there were no war movies allowed on television at home. `The inadvertent slam of a door echoed like gunfire in his father’s ears, enraging him, leaving his wife and three children to tiptoe around their modest house,’ Barry wrote in a column about his friend.
His dad worked as a janitor, his mother a nurse. The family eked out a working-class life in Norwich, Conn., a seen-better days city with a skyline of boarded up red brick textile mills.
Bill Malinowski became a fine athlete, his muscled frame reaching six-feet three inches. He played basketball, ran marathons and was an expert swimmer. Until just a few weeks ago, he didn’t let his death sentence diagnosis stop his exercise forays to the Barrington YMCA.
After coming to the Journal in the 1980s, he met Mary Murphy, an accomplished photo journalist. They married and had one daughter, Molly. The couple moved from Cranston to Barrington for the schools. Molly adopted her dad’s love of competitive running, becoming one of the state’s best at Barrington High School. She graduated from Williams College.
By profession and persona, Malinowski was skeptical about most things. Except for the annual pennant chances of his beloved Boston Red Sox. “I never knew whether he was motivated more by love of the Red Sox or hatred of the Yankees,’’ says Barry.
Malinowski’s friend Mike Stanton, a former ProJo colleague, says he was successful because he paid attention to the mundane details of reporting and writing and evolved as fine story-teller. “He really cared about his craft.’’
Tall and imposing, with a receding hairline and expressive Brown eyes, Malinowski was soft-voiced. He had a raffish dry humor. He always believed that respect was earned, not imposed. As is the case with the best of his lot, he was out to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted.
The old adage is that the cemeteries are filled with people who couldn’t be replaced. That isn’t true this time. Yet, death can never steal the memories, and the example, that Bill Malinowski left for his friends , family and colleagues.
Scott MacKay’s commentary can be heard every Monday on Morning Edition at 6:45 and 8:45 and on All Things Considered at 5:44. You can also follow his political reporting and analysis at our `On Politics’ blog at RIPR.org
