Otterblog

As we all sit in front of our computer screens and watch the Dow drop and drop ... some odds and ends and catching u p

First, the Dixie Classic fight hoax. We ran a story on Friday about the police chief having a news conference to say there was no truth to the rumor that there was going to be a gang fight at the DCF. I was talking to a friend of mine in the TV news biz that evening, and he had asked me why we ran that story.
The short answer is that we thought it was news. The long answer is that the world of bomb scares and hoaxes has become more complicated in these times. Back in the day, when I was in high school, I probably spent 20 mornings shivering outside my high school, while they searched for a “bomb.” None of this made the paper; the idea from news folks is that reporting on these scares gives the pranksters what they want. But we live in different times, and this past week, the fight scare wasn’t just a phone call. It spurred emails and telephone calls and the like, so we thought that the correct thing to do was to try to put these rumors to rest in as public a way as we could….

All aTwitter: Some of you may know about the messaging tool known as Twitter, which allows users the ability to send brief (140 character) text messages to others, either on their computers or cell phones. In my constant attempt to try to keep only slightly behind the leading edge of technology, OTTERBLOG is on Twitter. There is a certain goofiness to it, but it’s all about information ... If you’re using Twitter, check me out…

There’s enough news/commentary etc. from our little patch of printed paradise that I rarely feel the need to write about somebody else’s newsroom. Today, I will make an exception.

The News & Observer is running a story on the retirement of Pat Stith, its longtime investigative reporter. Pat is the real deal, and it’s not overstating things to say his reporting has led to a better North Carolina. Journalists like the phrase “end of an era” and so we throw it around like a Frisbee, but this is one of those occasions where it truly applies. Pat came to the N&O before Watergate, and he leaves at the moment in time when the public-service journalism that he has embodied is under pressure like never before.

I am glad that I was never the subject of one of his investigations, but I can tell you that one of Pat’s most remarkable traits is his generous spirit. I feel fairly safe to say that if I called him up in the middle of the night and needed a favor, he would try to help me out. And he would probably do the same for the folks whose misdeeds he has so able uncovered for nearly 40 years. That’s just who he is. We’ll miss his work.

A quote you don’t see every day. In Wednesday’s paper, we used a rock ‘em/sock ‘em presentation to highlight the fight between Novant and WFUBMC over hospital plans in western Forsyth/Eastern Davie. That story hinged on differing interpretations of what Novant said at a hearing this summer. Today’s story was far more brutal. In 20 plus years, I can’t recall a CEO ever speaking of a competitor in the same community with the vitriol that Paul Wiles used to refer to his counterparts at WFUBMC. Here’s the quote: “I have never seen an institution lose its moral and ethical compass the way N.C. Baptist Hospital has under the direction of board Chairman Steve Robertson and acting President Donny Lambeth.” That is harsh.

We are covering an immense tragedy today, the death of four young people in a car wreck off of Yadkinville Road. If you go to the bottom of the story, you will find a running dialogue of comments that is startling. Boiled down, it is this: Some writers think the ethnicity of the victims explains the deaths. Others think that is beyond cruel. It is the megaphone and the microphone unleashed among the population.

Our policy on these sorts of comments is to tread lightly. Offensive is a difficult word to describe in a way that garners broad agreement. From time to time, we do remove comments. But generally, we don’t.

I find some of the comments offensive, but there is a conversation that nonetheless is worth having. I’m sure there are folks who think this isn’t really a conversation, but rather various anonymous folks talking and typing past each other. And that’s true to some extent. But the alternative is not to have them at all. And that’s a worse alternative. I’m interested in your thoughts on these online dialogues. They are a staple of online news stories now—everywhere. It’s the media, w/o the filter.

I’ve been getting barraged with emails the past few days about the Associated Press. The emails center around the conduct of Ron Fournier, who is the AP’s Washington bureau chief.

While many folks think that the NY Times is the most powerful news organization in America. It isn’t. AP is. The reason is simple. Most newspapers rely on AP for the meat and potatoes of their out-of-market coverage, nationally and internationally.

Here’s the start of one such letter:

I expected AP to be free from bias as it has always been fairly “middle of the road” in coverage of various issues over the years but I have to admit the new D.C. Bureau Chief Ron Fournier has shown a shocking lack of balance so far this election year!

What has the emailers all in a swivet is an analysis by Fournier on Sen. Barack Obama’s pick of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate. Led by Moveon.org, these folks allege that Fournier crossed over from analysis to opinion and that he unfairly slammed Obama. As proof of his bias, they note that Sen. John McCain at one point offered Fournier a communications job (which Fournier declined.).

I asked AP about the whole flap, and it’s their decision not to comment on Moveon.org’s allegations. But a spokesman noted that Fournier has solid credentials as a journalist known for fairness and shoeleather. The organization also notes:

” The dual role of AP Washington Bureau Chief and political writer has long roots in AP history, as well as that of other Washington bureaus. Walter Mears, who won a Pulitzer for his 1976 presidential coverage, served in both capacities from 1977 to 1984. As bureau chief he continued to write news copy, usually analytical pieces. Likewise, other leading news organizations have often had their bureau chiefs serve in both capacities.”

For a not particularly flattering profile of Fournier, click here. I read the analysis, which was clearly marked as such. It seemed to me more of a column than an analysis to me. And in the important advice that it is often not what you say that matters but how you say it, the piece is very blunt, more blunt than most of the content on the wires. You can find the column at the bottom of this E&P story.

But that said, I don’t believe the AP is out to get Barack Obama. Generally speaking, I think the coverage is even-handed. And I’ve heard some folks in the news biz grouse that the AP’s daily coverage on the campaign trail is too Obama-centric.

What seems pretty clear in all of this is that the media is finding itself under intense scrutiny for every sentence in this election year.

Update: Follow this link to a memo from AP about the Fournier flap. I’m not sure it addresses the central question of whether that analysis was analysis or opinion, but it’s a good primer on the interconnectedness of Washington media circles.

Some of you may remember a young woman named Chelsey Powers. She was shot to death a little more than a year ago. Our most recent story was in late May. She was a freshman at Reynolds High School.

This past weekend, we covered another high-school tragedy, that of a young man named Matt Gfeller, who died while playing football. He was a sophomore at Reynolds. We remade our front page for Sunday, and followed up with another story today, and my guess is that there is further coverage to come.

Two kids. Two tragic deaths. Two very different levels of coverage. Why? It is a difficult question. There are a couple of reasons, to my mind. First, Matt’s death happened in front of several thousand people at a game. Chelsey was killed in front of her home at 2 a.m. Second—and unfortunately—children dying playing football is rarer than children being shot to death. Third, the community responded in different and more public ways that made this past weekend’s events a larger story.

Certainly, there are socioeconomic factors as well. The Gfellers are wealthier and better-connected than the Powerses, but I think that’s secondary to what made us react the way we did. To me, the main thing was the public nature of the event and the grieving.

With all the attention focused on the race for president, it’s easy to forget that we’re also choosing a governor this year. Last night was the first live televised debate between Lt. Gov. Beverly Eaves Perdue and Mayor Patrick Lloyd McCrory of Charlotte.

Those are their full names. There’s a bit of a controversy over their political names. McCrory goes by Pat. Perdue goes by Bev, or at least she wants to, but most of the media won’t let her. The AP refers to her as Beverly Perdue. So do most of the state’s major newspapers. After some discussions last week, the Journal is calling her Bev, a change from how we used to do it.

Why the change? Journal style used to be that we always called people by their full name. The exceptions were for celebrities. The idea was that the full name minimized confusion. But over the years, it’s been relaxed. There are a lot of reasons behind it. For politicians, this has always been tricky territory. We were sticklers about calling Jim Hunt James B. Hunt Jr. and Jim Martin James G. Martin, but we have no problem calling Michael F. Easley Mike Easley.

The rule—if there is one—is that within reason, people ought to be named in the manner in which they refer to themselves doesn’t lead to confusion. Bev is a reasonable and accepted nickname for Beverly, no different than Mike or Jim or Fred. I suspect the reluctance for most of the media to use Bev Perdue is a matter of consistency. Mike Easley has always been Mike Easley. It’s not clear when Beverly became Bev on political documents, but you can see the change on ballots. Click here for the 2004 election, and here for the 2008 candidates list.

I’m not sure of the reason behind the switch, if Beverly has always called herself Bev or if there’s a political angle, i.e. to appear more approachable, but again, within the realm of generally calling people what they want to be called, it’s a fair and reasonable use.

We are still getting emails about the John Edwards story. The refrains are: We should have run something sooner. Who cares about this? Why was there no followup story in Sunday or Monday about it.

Between chores and projects, I spent a good deal of time thinking about this during the weekend. What we should have done differently. Could have done differently. Quick answer. I don’t know. One journalist friend of mine spent a week in California trying to confirm the meeting that the Enquirer wrote about. He was unable to. It seems to me that the press gets criticized on the one hand for having no standards and on the other for having too high standards. From what I can gather, the Enquirer got half the story right, that Edwards had an affair. But the child isn’t his. Of course, there’s a chance he’s lying about that. My guess is that the paternity will eventually come out one way or another. At some point, the child is going to drop his pacifier and somebody will pick it up and do a DNA test on it…

On the same day that Edwards fessed up, a not-so-tidy war erupted in Georgia, between the former Soviet Republic and Russia over a dissident province. Tanks rolling from Russia are not the sort of footage you liked to see. The last time I saw them was in Afghanistan, and that was a disaster on too many levels to repeat. Edwards was our big story. The Russia-Georgia war ran across the bottom of Pg1. In another part of the country, perhaps the Russian tanks got a higher spot in the paper. Not here. A former N.C. senator’s confession of an affair during his run for the president is big news, regardless of how the story finally made it into print. That said, the Russia-Georgia story has legs. And it isn’t going away.

It is a measure of John Edwards’ considerable fall from grace and place that the story faded so quickly. The spigot of coverage was open wide on Friday. Saturday, it was reduced to a stream of sidebars. Sunday, it became a trickle. The last gasps are reports from Newsweek and the LA Times about their reporters’ bizarre encounters with Rielle Hunter years ago. As I said a week or so back, the mainstream media—despite what conservative commentators may think—has never been in love with John Edwards. With his candidacy dead and the fact that he was never under serious consideration for a VP slot, they were more than happy to give up their first inclination to bury him and to just do something even crueler: ignore him and move on.

Update: Here is a nice discussion that includes Rick Thames, the editor of The Charlotte Observer, discussing his paper’s coverage of the Edwards story.

It’s amazing that after all these years we are still running into new ethical gray areas in journalism. Here was yesterday’s issue: We posted a short story early in the afternoon about the double homicide off of Coliseum. Our online stories allow comments. One of the first comments was from a woman who said she knew one of the victims. If you read our comments, you know that the identity of the commenter is a little squishy. People often use screen names. In this case, it was—I think—Angelina1. Anyway, if you’ve ever posted a comment on journalnow, you know that it requires registration, including an email address. So we had this woman’s address. And the question was, whether it was proper to contact her and see whether she wanted to talk with a reporter about her friend. Our Web site has an extensive privacy policy, which spells out a lot of things, but doesn’t exactly say whether your email address can be given to a reporter. I talked with our attorney who helped draft the policy, and it was his opinion that legally we were allowed to contact this person. From an ethics point of view, we didn’t. Our reasoning was as follows: the comment was made with the expectation of privacy. Now, that’s not a rule going forward. It’s how we looked at this particular case. If it was a life or death situation, i.e. a killer on the loose etc., we might see things differently.

But this shows the mingling of the online and print worlds in ways we couldn’t imagine. I’m going to do some research on this—time permitting—and see what other news operations do in this area.

I’m also interested in your thoughts about the proper course of action.

A few weeks ago, the editor of our sister paper in Bristol, Va./Tenn. made headlines when he wrote a column criticizing Andrea Mitchell, the NBC News correspondent, for the manner in which she characterized the folks of Southwest Virginia.

Similarly, there’s an outrage in Findlay, Ohio, over a story in the Washington Post about how voters in Findlay, known as Flag City, USA, are paralyzed by rumors about Barack Obama. The local paper, the Findlay Courier, wants an apology.

For as long as there have been big cities, there have been big-city journalists who have been coming to small towns and either (depending on your view) speaking the essential truths that the locals dare not speak or painting gross caricatures that oversimply complex relationships. As a mid-sized newspaper (and city), Winston-Salem and the Journal get to be on the giving and receiving end of this examination. I’ve cringed when out-of-town reporters come here and botch the nuances of life here. And I’ve also been upset when I’ve felt that somebody who wasn’t from here managed to find meaning that was right under our noses.
On the giving end, we have reporters who cover many small towns in Northwest North Carolina. And one of the charges I’ve given them is to write the stories that the local papers in those communities can’t or won’t do. One of our recent successes was our examination of the drop out rate in Lexington. Last year, we did a big takeout on the changing culture in Yadkin County. It was a controversial story. For every reader who thanked us for examining why the county’s embrace of the past was getting in the way of the future there were others who said we got it wrong, talked to the wrong people and were simplistic in our analysis.

I think it is human nature to dismiss outside criticism as invalid and uninformed, and to sieze on tiny errors as proof of maliciousness or total incompetence. It’s also easy to dismiss these stories as hit-and-run journalism. The reporters come in, gather selected facts, write a scathing piece and then leave, never to be seen again. That too, is simplistic. Reporters want to be accurate and the ones I know sweat to get it right. Particularly in this day and age. A generation ago, a reporter who wrote a similar piece on Findlay was insulated from the locals. Now, with the Web, they’re a click away from making his or her life misery.

I noted the other day the running commentary on our Web site about the racial descriptions used (or not used) in stories about crime. A couple of folks have asked me to write about how and when the Journal decides to use race as a descriptor. I won’t call this a rule, because rules tend to imply a yes-no approach to something. I’ll call these guidelines.

Essentially, it is this. We use race when it is relevant to the story or helpful in the capturing of a suspect.

Imagine this description of a robber at a convenience store: Police are looking for a black man in his 20s. Or this one: The robber was described as a heavy-set white woman. As the detectives in Law & Order might say, that ain’t a lot to go on. As you add more details, height, weight, clothing, etc., a fuller description emerges: Witnesses said the driver was a white man in his 20s with a beard and was wearing overalls and an Atlanta Braves ballcap.
But even if those barebones description aren’t helpful to the police, are they relevant to people’s understanding of the event? Some people suggest that when we leave race out of descriptions, we are doing it to cover up the extent that crimes are committed by members of one race or another. I don’t think we are. It’s just that the race doesn’t in our opinion appear to be relevant to the crime. When instances occur where members of one race appear to be targeting victims based on their race, then those caveats might be reexamined.
You’ll notice before that I said “guidelines.” One reason for that disclaimer is this: Different editors sometimes have different benchmarks on when a threshold has been reached to use a racial descriptor. We’ve erred in the past on using race when she shouldn’t have, and also in not using it when we could have. We learn from each episode.

Followup: Some time back, I told you about a great read by Gene Weingarten, on an experiment at a Metro train station in D.C. Here’s a followup. It is proof positive of the old journalistic adage, There are no new stories, just new reporters.