Otterblog

Our lead headline today said “Bombings in Iraq kill journalists.” It’s an interesting headline from a lot of different perspectives. First, there’s the whole question of whether the death of a journalist is more important than the death of a soldier or the nearly three dozen Iraqis.

I’d like to think all life is sacred, but I think the work of journalists—particularly those in war zones—is among the most important work done anywhere. These are people, essentially given over to the idea of objective coverage, going into a killing field armed with a flak jacket and a notebook or a camera. The truths they tell are almost guaranteed to upset somebody. Journalists continue to make enormous sacrifices to cover this war the best they can. It is a call to duty and a noble mission.

The second thing I find important about this headline is the use of the word journalist to describe the camera and sound men. It wasn’t too long ago that photographers and camera men and the like were seen as second-class citizens, more support personnel than journalists. But they are. I know at our own shop that some of the best journalism we do is done by photographers and graphic artists etc. And there’s been a growing recognition that journalism is more than just words. It’s the whole package, pictures, sound and presentation.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE: Saw Over The Hedge, the movie, yesterday. This is based on one of our new comic strips. I found it funny, but not particularly coherent. It’s also strangely dark, filled with the unspoken sense that the stars of the movie, i.e. the animals, will ultimately be paved over by the gluttonous, SUV-driving, Spuddies-eating intruders, aka us.

Corrections are an important part of a newspaper’s attempt to be a transparent and credible institution. Almost all are a result of trying to cram a day’s worth of news into a paper on a short deadline. I spend a lot of time dealing with corrections, and there is almost always shared blame. A reporter may make the error, but editors looked at the copy and didn’t see the failed logic etc.

We ran an interesting correction last week from a story in the New York Times. Maybe you remember the story. It was about a purported plan by Airbus, the big airplane maker, to produce a plane where passengers would stand instead of sit, so even more passengers could be crammed into place. Without laps, so to speak, there’s more room for fares. It got a lot of play, in the Journal, and elsewhere.

Turned out, however, that Airbus, had abandoned the idea about two years ago. The story wasn’t really a story, more of a glimmer of an idea. This is not to slam the Times. It’s a great paper. And everybody makes mistakes.

The Times has a public editor, a guy named Byron Calame. He wrote an

interesting column about the Airbus affair. Calame breaks down the errors of omission and comission that led to the mistake. It’s not pretty, but it’s a good tour of how big newsrooms work and how things can fall between the cracks if people aren’t careful.

There are a lot of things that make newspapers unique. First on the list is this: we routinely anger our two main sources of revenue, i.e. readers and advertisers. Sometimes we do both at the same time. That’s a twofer. Do we go out of our way to do this? Nope. But it comes with the territory.

That’s the situation we’re in right now with our restaurant critic, The Dinner Belle, who wrote a less-than-glowing

review

of Dudley’s on the Park. The owners didn’t like it, so they’re conducting a little flier campaign to try to unmask her. Which I guess is their right, even if it’s a bit juvenile.

Restaurant critics have a tough job. A bad review can hurt a restaurant, maybe even close a restaurant. So there’s all that rah-rah “help the local economy stuff”. Which leaves a newspaper with three alternatives. One is to take the Lake Woebegon approach: all restaurants are above average. The second is to not review any of them. The third is to only write up reviews where the restaurants would get good marks. None of these work for me. It’s an abdication of our responsibility to inform.

The two scarcest resources people have these days are time and money. What good critics do is tell people what they think are wise investments of those resources. Do we expect people to agree with critics every time? Of course not. That would be boring.

What I ask of the paper’s critics is simply this: Be honest, be open-minded, be professional, be prepared, be entertaining. I know the Dinner Belle. The Dinner Belle knows food. And if you go back and read her reviews, you will see that she is extremely diverse in what she likes. She’s not anti-downtown, or anti-suburbs, or anti-sandwich shops, or anti-steakhouse etc. To me, that’s a signal that she is focused on what she finds when she walks in the door.

 

 

There’s a lot of police lingo that floats in and out of newsrooms. One of these is the word “mugshot,” which as I’m sure you all know is slang for the photo of a person taken at the time of their arrest. They are rarely flattering photos. Over time, for newspaper purposes, the word mugshot has also come to mean any small, tightly cropped photo of a person that we run, regardless of whether the story has to do with crime. It’s just a picture of what they look like.

We run a lot of mugshots, crime-related and not. We ran four this morning on our front page. Two had to do with the increasingly nasty battle in the GOP primary for the 31st Senate seat once held by Ham Horton. The others were the booking photos of the two deputies arrested in Davidson County and charged with second-degree murder in the death of an inmate.

Why do we run mugshots of people charged with crimes? The flip answer is because we can. But that’s wrong. The reasons have to do with the role of a media that is independent of the government and our responsibility to bear witness. It’s not about shaming people. But mugshots—particularly of those charged with crimes—are snapshots, and they give us some inkling into who people are. It’s the newspaper as window and as mirror.

More from the definition wars.

As the debate over immigration rages from Washington to Winston-Salem, there’s a lot of discussion about what to call the people in the United States who are not legally entitled to be here.

The National Association of Hispanic Journalists

is asking news organizations to refrain from using the phrase “illegal alien” and the shorthand “illegals” in favor of “undocumented worker” or “undocumented immigrant.”

NAHJ suggests that illegal implies a criminal wrong, when immigration status is a civil violation, and that alien used to mean foreign and now conjures up weird images of MiB and ET. 

Obviously, there is a political subtext to all of this. One person’s clarification is another’s euphemism.

AP style on this is to prefer this middle ground: illegal immigrant. It probably dissatisfies many people, but to me it’s a fair compromise. Illegal is illegal, regardless of whether it’s criminal or civil laws that are at issue, and immigrant is a humanizing term that reminds everyone that we are talking about people, not bizarre life forms from outer space.

We got a request a few days ago from a law-enforcement agency to use some photos from our archive. They wanted to post them as part of an investigation. We declined.

This wasn’t out of spite or a desire not to help. We just don’t think that is the best way we can help. A newspaper functions best as an independent organization, a watchdog, rather than as an agent of the state. Once, we start turning over our files to public agencies, we’ve given up that independence and the freedom that comes with just having a note pad and a penchant for asking questions.

This ties back to some extent to the

Judith Miller case of last year and a more recent one involving the SEC and a reporter’s notes

. The Miller case was to a large extent about confidential sources, but it’s also about government agencies trying to get the media to help them do their jobs.

The way we help is simple. We write stories. Then public officials can read them and decide what to do.

One more thing: Wake Forest may not be

winning a lot of games

, but you gotta love their understanding of world events. Only Skip Prosser would use the phrase causi belli in a quote. Not to be outdone, Eric Williams gives a nice summation of European history with this quip: “Coach always talks about me being selfish, but at the same time I’m not going to be stupid. I’m not going to try to fight my way through the Russian Army.”

 

There are a lot of ways that technology is changing how reporters do their job. Some good. Some bad. We used to have to call people to get information. Now we just go online. It’s quicker, but of course something gets lost in the anonymous transactions. Good reporters still call their sources.

Online diaries are also being mined. Many students post bios and write extensively about themselves on myspace.com and facebook.com. They’re fun snippets of young people and their friends and their thoughts. They’re also potentially valuable sources of information—for parents, for prosecutors, for reporters.

Imagine this scenario. A college student is charged with a serious crime. Would he give us his high school yearbook so that we could better understand who he is and what he believes? Probably not. But we can go online and find out much of that information from facebook or myspace. They’re essentially open sites.

We studied the facebook entry of

Marcos Bryant the other day

. He’s the student at Winston-Salem State University charged with two counts of murder. We used some information from that site, but other information we chose not to include in our story because we thought it was inflammatory and it was hard for us to get a sense of the spirit in which it was written. Context is important. And as most of us know, what we write and tell our friends isn’t always the truth.

Online diaries were a key part of the

reporting on the tragic death of James Dungy, the son of Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts. His myspace entries painted a very different picture than what he often appeared like to family and friends. Reporters chose to use those—and I think rightly so—because the comments were extensive enough to offer some insight into his troubled mind.

We’ve been having a vigorous debate in our newsroom about whether to publish the cartoons that have sparked riots and violence across the Middle East and in Europe. To date, we haven’t.

By publication, I’m referring to both print and online.

The Philadelphia Inquirer to date is the only major U.S. newspaper to have run the cartoons. There’s a healthy discussion across the media industry

on whether to run the cartoons or even to link to them.

It’s easy to say that linking isn’t publishing. We’re just providing a way for readers to get more information if they choose. But I think that’s a bit of a dodge. If we provide the link, we are in a sense taking ownership of what’s behind that door.

Journalism is about a lot of things, but often it’s about being a gatekeeper. Every day, we decide what fits best into the newspaper, with an eye toward answering the questions of what do readers need to know about their world. We take these decisions seriously.

We have written extensively about the cartoons and described them in ways that make clear their content. In that sense, it’s no different than when we write that someone made a “crude gesture with his hand.” Most people know what that means.

Generally speaking, we try not to offend, and we never run stories or photos just for the sake of running them. But have we offended? Of course. The world is a dangerous and complex place. Many folks complained when we ran a photo of the Blackwater Security personnel who were killed and burned in Iraq. Others complained about our decision to run photos of the two sons of Saddam Hussein after they were killed.

We thought those photos told something that couldn’t be described in words.

We carried a small police brief

today about a woman who apparently killed herself by jumping off a bridge in Yadkin County. Careful readers of the Journal know that we don’t publish a lot of suicides these days. That’s a change from the past.

Our old policy was that we reported all suicides in our circulation area. Or at least we tried to. But our policy changed over the years to reflect two different concerns. The first was whether there was compelling public interest in a very private and painful decision by somebody to end their own life. Our collective decision was that most times there wasn’t. The second—although less important—was more pragmatic. Finding out about suicides was extremely difficult. In some counties, they weren’t reported in a timely fashion and were on occasion covered up. The result was haphazard coverage, which didn’t make a lot of sense.

Here’s the basic rule now. We report suicides for three general categories. First are suicides that take place in a public setting. Second would be a suicide by a public official or similar newsworthy person. Third are trend stories that examine the issue of suicide, such as past coverage of high suicide rates among the elderly in some rural counties.