Otterblog

I answer a lot of email every day. Raves. Complaints, Questions, etc. This is one worth sharing, because the question is interesting. It’s in regard to a story we ran last week about black travel clubs. My response is also included. The writer raises some important questions about coverage and why we do what we do. And I’d like to think that my job isn’t to put him or her in his or her place but to explain where the paper is coming from.

JOURNAL EDITORS-

Please, Please help me understand the reasoning of the recent article (9-15-06) on vacation camaraderie. How outraged would the public,specifically the afro-american community be if your paper advertised and promoted a travel club or ski club or WET(White Entertainment Television) ,etc. designed only for white folks! It is so discouraging to read articles about the afro-americans complaining about racism in the workplace and communities and amazingly there are very proud to organize these clubs and organizations designed strictly for their own ethnic group. If we are ever to move past this sensitive subject of racism let’s drop the promotions of these afore mentioned clubs and organizations!
Thanks for listening,

Dear XXX: Your email was forwarded to me. Thanks for writing. I’ve discussed your comments with several editors here, both black and white. These travel clubs that we wrote about exist for several reasons, even when it comes to vacations. Sometimes, black people feel more comfortable doing things—particularly things that white people don’t often identify with black people, such as skiing—in groups. And clubs etc. that we as the majority may feel are open to everybody don’t feel the same way to minorities. 

You’re right that there is no WET, but the reason BET exists is that network TV did a poor job of producing shows that catered to the tastes of black Americans. Minority groups in America—whether racial, ethnic or religious—have always found strength in their own. That’s something that is sometimes hard for people in the majority to understand, particularly in how it relates to the larger goal of building a society where people are judged by what’s inside rather than outside.

Again, thanks for writing and for reading the Journal.
Best,
Ken Otterbourg
Managing Editor

THOUSAND WORDS: There’s an interesting essay about photos and 9/11 worth reading. It’s from the other WSJ, and it explores the assumptions we bring to a photo before we know what the picture is truly about.

drowning.jpg

Last week’s big local story was the death of two young boys from Stokes County, who drowned in the Dan River. First, they were missing. Then, there was the search. Finally, on Friday, the bodies were found. It is a sad story of two lives lost before they really got started.

Our Saturday paper featured a five-column photo of the boy’s grandmother grieving over their death. I’ve attached it as well (click on drowning.jpg) There’s no tiny bodies here, no death. Just pain. It is not an easy photo to look at. The sadness just overwhelms you. We’ve gotten an email and call or two from people who thought we were cruel and invasive to run this photo.

So why do we run it? There are three reasons, to my mind. First, I believe that one of our missions is to support people in times of suffering. The photo --and the story—speak to our shared obligations to look out for each other in good times and bad. Second, the strong emotion of this photo is a reminder for people to pay close attention to young children. Accidents happen and we can’t watch everybody all the time, but maybe this photo will make a difference somewhere. Third, it is a beautifully composed photograph, with different layers, full of life and death and hope. I keep looking at it and finding new details each and every time.

We had the right to run the photo, but that’s secondary in this situation. The fact that we can do something is almost always irrelevant to our decision-making. I think we had the obligation, which is the important thing.

There is a great online debate raging about the harsh review our pop music critic, Ed Bumgardner, gave of Bob Dylan’s concert at Ernie Shore Field.

There are a couple of pages of back and forth on our Web site, and Ed’s gotten 60 or so emails that run the gamut from praise to ridicule. To summarize: Many folks said that Ed missed the point and the boat, that Dylan has never been better, and that his husky voice is the voice of reason in a world that has sold out to flash and the insubstantial. Others said Ed was spot on, that Dylan has become a hologram of himself, that his contempt for his audience is palpable, and that the diminution of his musical skills are being masked by his “reinterpretation” of his songs.

One of the old adages of newspapers is “If everybody’s mad, we must be doing something right.” Maybe. Maybe not.

Criticism and journalism aren’t the same things. We expect our critics to play from the same set of ethics and conduct as a news reporter, but we look for informed commentary, the ability to use their experience and judgment to interpret a set of facts. Will everybody agree with them? Of course not. That would be dull.

I was at the show. True to my nature, I come down somewhere in the middle. Dylan wasn’t awful. but he wasn’t great. And by the end, many of my expectations had been lowered sufficiently so that what would have in another context been viewed as so-so now seemed pretty exceptional. But that’s just me.

As a final thought, here’s what the critic in the Washington Post wrote two days later ...

ardmore.doc

I had the pleasure of speaking yesterday to a Sunday School class at Ardmore Methodist Church about Ethics in Journalism. A good group of people who asked some pretty astute questions about what we do and why we do it.

These sorts of discussions are interesting, as you get to see a wide range of people and hear what they have to say about journalism in general and the Journal in particular. One thing that’s clear is that people have an intensely personal relationship with the paper. That creates a sticky obligation on our part. We don’t want to disappoint, but it also makes change hard to push through.

I’ve attached a copy of a draft of my remarks.

There’s an interesting intersection between what’s a private matter and what’s a public matter. Journalists spend a lot of time discussing how to balance compassion and a respect for privacy with what is quite possibly a larger story with wider impact that requires public disclosure. Two stories from today illustrate that point. The first is about some hikers who got lost at Stone Mountain for three days. It’s not a huge park, but being lost is being lost and it can get confusing in a hurry. The second involves a boy who died at a camp on the WFU campus.

Hikers get lost in the woods all the time. 12-year-old boys die, not all the time, but more than we think. So how do these essentially private matters migrate into the public realm? There’s no hard-and-fast threshold, but there are a couple of factors in these cases. The first is public expenditure. It costs money to look for two lost hikers, and so even though these hikers are not from this area, many people who are were involved in the search effort. Also in this case, there’s a lesson about how easy it is to get turned around in the woods and the drama of survival.

The boy’s death is more complicated. But it goes something like this: When children die in public, and the police investigate, that’s newsworthy. Parents and guardians routinely turn their kids over to others to take care of them, whether it’s at school or at camps or in scouts or what have you. Custodians have responsibilities, and as the newspaper, we want to make sure that the custodians did their job. So, we’ll keep reporting on this until we get a final answer on why this boy died.

The journalism world is buzzing this morning about the president’s swearing. A microphone in St. Petersburg, Russia, picked up President Bush having a frank discussion with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The President said that Syria needs “to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s--- and it’s over.”

The other George, Carlin, made a lot of money and laughter with his seven words you can’t say on TV. Much of that still holds true today, and for print journalism as well. We have used some of these words in the paper before, but very sparingly and not to embarass. Many—but not all—of the national newspapers used the full S-word. Most of the papers in North Carolina that I have seen opted for the shorthand we used.

Either way, you get the idea of what the President said. You can decide whether it’s coarse or refreshing.

We ran a story Sunday about the pending closure of The Pavilion, one of those boardwalk-era type places that are fading fast from the American consciousness. They’re all a little frazzled and frayed, like they’ve spent too much time in the sun and the surf, which they have. What’s most interesting about our story and the topic for discussion today is our use of what I will call UPC, or user-provided content. There’s another term for it, but it escapes me at this time. UPC—much of it enabled by better communication and technology—is changing a lot of the world. It’s how Myspace and Flickr essentially work. And it’s traveled all the way to a newspaper near you, this time in the form of folks reminiscing about an entertainment complex on The Grand Strand.

It’s an interesting and seismic change for journalists—particularly those in newsrooms. We’re by nature reluctant to let outsiders contribute to our pages. That whole gatekeeper complex etc. But the walls are tumbling down. Several reasons: One, readers like it. They want to be part of the newspaper and its extended online empire. Two, editors have decided that the newspaper can be lots of things to lots of people. A true bazaar of content. Three, we still get to be the gatekeeper, and if we reject a lot of stuff for not being up to snuff, that still leaves a lot of UPC that is really very good for the format in which it was intended.

It’s all part of being interactive, which happens in fits and starts, and of being open to possibilities of letting others help, where appropriate. 

We published two stories this weekend about tragic deaths. The first was a followup to the death of a boy on an ATV. The second was about a man who survived the crash of a small plane where the pilot died.

Writing followup stories about deaths is tricky and painful territory. And they raise questions about what is fair in terms of assigning blame for accidents. In the plane crash, friends of the pilot asked us not to say what the National Transportation Safety Board had reported so far on the cause of the crash (They say it probably ran out of gas.) But we included that information in the story, not just because we could or out of spite, but because it’s a relevant fact and a natural question that any reader would have.

The ATV story raised more difficult questions. Nobody wants their son to die from an ATV accident, but this death was a perfect example of the limits of legislation. As some of you might know, the state passed restrictions on the use of ATVs by minors last year. But the laws are only good if people follow them. So our story wasn’t designed to punish the boy’s family again, but to illustrate the need for vigilance in ATV safety.

On the air: Myself and two other journalists were interviewed Saturday for NPR’s All Things Considered. Here’s the link to the segment. It was a good discussion about politics, the War in Iraq and other topics. Much of my comments reflected the input and feedback I’ve gotten from the Otterblog community. So thank you.

One of the criticisms newspapers hear quite frequently is: “You’re doing that just to sell newspapers.” My response is always the same: No, we’re doing that because it’s a story people care about and that for most of our readers, who have subscriptions rather than buy out of a rack, the decision to buy a paper has been made well before the paper is either planned or printed.

But there’s a provocative study making its way around journalism circles that challenges some of our conventional wisdom. Richard Morin writes about it in the Washington Post, and here’s the link to the actual study, entitled Blood and Ink and published in the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics (Study 285).

You’ll need your slide rule. The study is heavy-duty game theory and statistical analysis, but the authors essentially contend that the media and terrorists are in a mutually beneficial relationship, where terrorism leads to more coverage and more coverage leads to more terrorism. The inference is that this is a financially beneficial relationship for both parties. Terrorists use their press clippings to raise money, so to speak, and newspapers use banner headlines about terrorism to—you guessed it—sell more newspapers.

But the authors admit the limits of this implication. They note that their model probably only applies to tabloids and the like, which are based on impulse buying more than subscriptions.

It’s no secret that most newspapers are either losing circulation or holding steady. So, yeah, I want to sell more papers. But it’s hard to imagine our readers lining up to buy the newspaper if we overplayed every act of terror committed in the world today. We don’t think that’s where our future lies, and most studies about what readers want from a paper suggest that shock strategy isn’t a long-term success formula. Rather it’s information they can use, stories that demand to be read, and a presentation that ties it all together with sophistication and impact.

Back in Rudy Giuliani’s heyday as mayor of New York and before 9/11, his police officials adopted what became known as the “broken window” approach to fighting crime. Essentially, that meant the cops went after what seemed to be minor infractions, i.e. broken windows, as a way of drawing a line in the sand. They realized that the broken windows were the warning signs of bigger breakdowns. The theory—which has been adopted by police forces everywhere—went that if you get out ahead of major crime and not tolerate the little minor offenses, you create a more civil society with less crime down the road.

So what does that have to do with journalism? A lot, it turns out. We adopt that idea with our approach to the state’s public records and open meetings laws. Two stories from this past weekend illustrate that point. The first looked at a potentially improper vote by the local board of elections to name a new director. The second was about police policy on chases.

Both these articles involved the Journal pushing for access—to meetings or to records about policies. Public officials often don’t want to tell the public what they are doing. I don’t think it is that they feel they are hiding anything as much as they feel they know best and can parcel out information as they see fit. Our view is that democracy is messy and citizens ought to know what their governments are doing and how they are doing it. Police officials asked us not to publish chase guidelines, because they said it might give criminals a leg up in avoiding arrest if they know police won’t chase them in certain circumstances. It’s hard to imagine a dangerous criminal doing that calculus when an officer pulls him over.

Our quest for open meetings and public records often revolves around what are considered minor points—chase policies, a vote for the director of elections that won’t change even if it’s taken again. But they are the broken windows in our system of checks and balances. When government closes up on the little things, it isn’t long until they are closed up on the big things.