Frank Donze, perhaps the premier New Orleans political reporter of his generation, died unexpectedly Saturday at his home. He was 64.
For almost 30 years, until his retirement from The Times-Picayune in 2012, Donze and a succession of journalistic partners covered New Orleans politics and City Hall, including the administrations of mayors from Dutch Morial to Mitch Landrieu.
Frank Donze
In New Orleans, Donze’s reporting often laid bare the behind-the-scenes dynamics that drove some of the most important public policy stories in recent New Orleans history, from the wrenching debate over desegregating Mardi Gras krewes in 1992 to the chaos of the post-Hurricane Katrina Nagin administration.
Armed with an endless list of contacts and a particularly sharp BS detector, Donze seemed to know the entire cast of New Orleans newsmakers, as well as their friends and enemies, their open prejudices and their secret weaknesses.
Equipped with a rare amiability, Donze pressed his subjects again and again to give up the truth, usually unsatisfied with the first version of rehearsed answers.
“He’d ask you a question, and if he didn’t think you’d answered it right, he’d ask it again,” former City Councilman Lambert Boissiere Jr. said with a chuckle Saturday. “But the thing is, he always made you feel comfortable about it.”
Part of Donze’s easy cynicism was formed during a boyhood shooting hoops at NORD’s Stallings Playground in the Upper 9th Ward, where he got a no-nonsense, lifelong feel for the neighborhood rhythms and the racial dynamics of New Orleans politics.
Clancy Dubos, a Holy Cross High School classmate and accomplished political reporter in his own right, compared Donze’s knowing coverage of local politics with the sports coverage of two other native sons, Hap Glaudi and Buddy Diliberto.
Yet remarkably, in an era when public figures denounce unfavorable reporting, accurate or not, as “fake news,” Boissiere and Dubos both said Donze enjoyed a reputation for solid accuracy among all those he covered.
“He wrote it up as the facts dictated,” said Boissiere.
“Frank was a balanced and fair-minded reporter who struck the right balance in every important way,” said former Mayor Marc Morial, now head of the National Urban League. “He had this understated nature that meant he was easy to talk to, so lots of people were willing to share with him. But I never thought he had an agenda.”
“During all those years there was no one in city government who would not take his call,” said a newsroom colleague, Stephanie Grace, now a political columnist at The New Orleans Advocate.
Donze began reporting on New Orleans politics in 1984, having first spent three years in The Times-Picayune’s St. Bernard bureau, where he helped document the fall of the generations-long Perez political dynasty in Plaquemines Parish. He came to The Times-Picayune in 1977 as a fresh graduate of LSU.
For much of his career, Donze’s desk was a newsroom hub — a reporters’ open marketplace for swapping contacts and sharing political and neighborhood intelligence that might germinate into news.
That openness was another of Donze’s characteristics, colleagues said. “He may have mentored more New Orleans journalists than anybody over the years, including me,” said Grace.
Even after he left The Times-Picayune to become a spokesman for the Audubon Nature Institute, Grace said, Donze remained deeply plugged into the city’s political life, often calling in tips and political intelligence.
“He left the business, but people still called him, and he’d call us and tell us what he was hearing,” Grace said.
The newsroom was more than a career in another way, too: Donze married Elizabeth "Beth" Finney, the daughter of legendary States-Item and Times-Picayune sports columnist Peter Finney.
Besides his wife, survivors include two daughters, Caroline and Victoria Donze; his mother, Angelina Donze Cardarella, of Mandeville; two brothers, Dino Donze, of Mandeville, and David Donze, of Baton Rouge; and a sister, Lisa D. Jacob, of Mandeville.
Funeral arrangements are incomplete.
