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Do you want a piece of PolitiFact Texas?
Among the developments that has kept us hopping in recent months was the Jan. 13 launch of PolitiFact Texas, our new website dedicated to holding public officials accountable for the information they give the public. The site spins off of the national PolitiFact site, a Pulitzer prize winning innovation by the St. Petersburg Times. We hold the exclusive right to use the PolitiFact name and methodology in Texas to make sure local and statewide politicians are being honest as they spin their deeds.
While the new feature has provoked the occasional squawk from a political campaign, the feedback from readers has been overwhelmingly positive. So we’re trying to expand the reach of PolitiFact Texas by making available to bloggers and other media outlets an online widget to link back to the site. Just click here to learn how to request the widget. We’ll review it and, after ensuring the widget won’t be used for partisan purposes, send the code needed to embed the widget on a website. So far, the Waco Tribune-Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram are among those bringing PolitiFact Texas to readers.
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How we conduct ourselves
In the Statesman newsroom we recently went through the exercise of revising our newsroom ethics policy. In the process, we decided to go ahead and post that policy on the website here so that readers can see the code we expect all of the journalists in the newsroom to follow.
Having a code of ethics and abiding by it is one of the things that sets a newspaper (and most others in the oft-scorned ‘mainstream media’) apart from many of the blogs and information gathering sites you’ll find on the internet. If we abide by this code, readers can know that we are not using the very public platform of the newspaper and its websites for personal financial gain, personal politics or any other motive that undermines the credibility of the information we present. So keeping this code is about defending the integrity of the newspaper. We take it pretty seriously.
The reason we were tweaking our policy recently was to better address the technological changes that we’ve seen in recent years. Even though we have always believed our journalists’ use of social media such as Twitter or Facebook was covered within the broader ethics policy, in these revisions we included some language to specifically address social media use, where phrasing used in different programs (for example, becoming a ‘fan’ of something in Facebook) can affect public perceptions of us. Our intent wasn’t to stop journalists from using social media — we encourage it as one more way to get readers information — but to make sure we were behaving in cyberspace the same way we are expected to behave in real life.
So if you’ve got time, feel free to peruse the policy. Let us know what you think.
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Hate crimes
Good crime stories contain an abundance of verified detail and nuanced understanding of context. That’s what makes crime reporting a challenge. We’re lucky at the Statesman to have a trio of experienced reporters working the beat and working it well.
We consider detail to be verified when more than one independent source asserts it is accurate. As for context, probably the first threshold a crime story must clear is frequency: How unusual is the incident?
It’s against that backdrop that Claudia Grisales reported in The Blotter today that “Two Austin City Council members and the deputy director of Equality Texas spoke against hate crime at City Hall this afternoon following a reported attack on two gay men this past weekend.”
If an attack happened early Saturday, why is the Statesman reporting it for the first time on Thursday? The short answer is that only now did the incident begin to meet our criteria for publication. It’s unusual for two City Council members to make public statements against ugly misbehavior based on an alleged assault. Their actions made news.
We have yet to verify, either through witnesses or police, that the alleged crime was motivated by hate. Had Randi Shade and Laura Morrison not stepped forward, we still might not have mentioned the incident, online or in the paper. It’s an unfortunate truth that assaults without apparent provocation are not unusual downtown.
The Statesman abhors hate crimes. If we have cause to believe one occurred, we pursue the story aggressively. We do not throw out our principles, however, when a person alleges he’s the victim of a hate crime. We compile facts until, in our judgment, we have a story that meets our criteria for publication.
Here’s the background on our reporting, put together by John Bridges, senior editor for local and state news:
We began looking into the attack on Sunday. Tony Plohetski talked with the victims and with police and was pursuing it as a story for Monday’s paper. But the police department could not confirm then that anything had even been reported to them; the public information officer simply didn’t have access to the information. By Monday, the police spokesman could confirm only that police did have a report on the incident but said it had not been assigned to a detective and could give us no details. As of today, we still have no details from police. Police have not said they are pursuing this as a possible hate crime. (Note that this stands in contrast to two previous hate-crime incidents in Austin involving gay victims that we reported on. One was a home invasion in 2005; the other an assault in 2003. In those cases, police said from the outset that they were investigating the incidents as possible hate crimes because of the sexual orientation of the victims.) Because police were not classifying it as a hate crime and because no one was killed or critically injured, Plohetski and his editor saw nothing to distinguish this from (sadly) countless other assaults and robberies that occur in the entertainment district that do not get reported on individually in our pages. Police reports show seven downtown assaults last month alone. By Wednesday, we began hearing that Council Member Laura Morrison might be getting involved in this case. Plohetski interviewed her, and she said that this was a case that concerned the gay community. This morning, we got word that Morrison and Randi Shade would be holding a noon news conference about this case. Morning police reporter Claudia Grisales was on duty when that word came, so she wrote a blog item and called the victims. She is covering the noon news conference for us (Plohetski is committed to a speaking engagement). And so, we reported the story aggressively, but that reporting had not turned up anything to meet our standards for reporting on crime. Today, that changed when City Council members took their feelings about the case public, and we are reporting on that.
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The climate emails
Columbia Journalism Review beat me to the punch with a blog item on the journalistic dimension of the climate email hack .
I asked Asher Price, our environmental reporter, to provide an explanation of how he went about assessing whether the email hack was an appropriate story for him to pursue; here’s his response:
As weak as this might sound, I was out of town and holed up all Thanksgiving week, when the news broke of the hacked climate emails. Middle of this week I wondered whether any UT or A&M scientists were implicated. About the same time, (senior editor) John Bridges stopped by my desk and asked the same question. Typically, unless there is a clear Austin angle, I tend not to write about international or Washington carbon dioxide deliberations or issues. Even if there is a conference in Austin on global warming I tend to ignore it: My experience is that rarely does any news come out of these, and there’s not much point reporting — again — that Texas scientists again said they’re worried about levels of the Gulf or hurricane incidence or more drought. I downloaded the hundreds of emails on Thursday (yesterday) and started reviewing them. As far as I can tell, no Texas scientists were copied on the emails. But with a Texas A&M scientist scheduled to talk on global warming issues and Texas at UT on Friday, Dec. 4, I talked with Bridges and Labinski about putting together a story for the next-day’s paper that would wrap all this up. I asked an Austin man — a global warming skeptic — who frequently emails me his thoughts whether I could quote him for my story. (He had written me a note on Wednesday expressing disbelief that taxpayer money was paying for Austin’s climate protection plan. He said the plan was based on obviously fraudulent science.) He gave me permission. Then, because of snow and ice possibilities, the lecture — and the story — was postponed Thursday late afternoon. Today, Friday, I talked with Camille Parmesan, a UT scientist who’s flying on Sunday to Copenhagen. She gave me her thoughts. So that’s where things stand. Bottom line: At first I thought it wasn’t much of a story since I didn’t have an Austin angle; then I looked into it; then I realized I could tie it together with a story about a visiting scientist talking about global warming and Texas; then that lecture was postponed. Story should appear early next week. (Could be in this weekend.)Asher’s reasoning is consistent with the way we approach most coverage questions here. With few exceptions, we rely on wire services for stories about topics that have no local angle. We believe it’s the best use of our reporters’ time and expertise. The story he mentioned above will appear in the paper in the next couple of days now that the lecture has been rescheduled. Of course, climate is a local as well as global phenomenon, and we will feel the change here over time. At the state level, effects of climate change have a potentially huge impact (rising sea levels along the coast, to cite just one example), as do proposed responses to the change (limits on carbon emissions). The ubiquity of climate change, though, does not make for a good local angle on the email hack, as Asher concluded. Sorting through the science and politics of the hacked emails will require setting all else aside for a lengthy period, as Brainard acknowledges, and it’s a pursuit that’s inconsistent with our approach to news coverage. Instead, we have relied on wire services. Our first story, from The New York Times, was published on page A3 on Nov. 21, within days of the hack. The second, also from the Times, appeared on page A4 on Nov. 29. I’m linking to the full versions on nytimes.com because, by contract, we may keep Times stories on our site for only a day after publication in the newspaper. Alert readers will see that we published considerably shortened versions of the stories. That’s a kind of editing we often do to give readers a more diverse menu of stories than would be available otherwise. We also published an op-ed column from Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post on Nov. 29. Our most recent item, a brief, updated the job status of two scientists involved in the episode. Sunday, we published a Washington Post story updating the situation again. Here’s the gist:
Leaked just before international climate talks begin in Copenhagen — the culmination of years of work by scientists to raise alarms about greenhouse-gas emissions — the e-mails have cast those scientists in a political light and given new energy to others who think the issue of climate change is all overblown. The e-mails don’t say that: They don’t provide proof that human-caused climate change is a lie or a swindle. But they do raise hard questions. In an effort to control what the public hears, did prominent scientists who link climate change to human behavior try to squelch a back-and-forth that is central to the scientific method? Is the science of global warming messier than they have admitted?
Is that enough? My answer is no, though I’m something of a glutton on the topic (for example, I routinely visit this site even though the underlying science generally makes my head swim). Then again, we rarely provide enough coverage for those truly enamored of a topic, although we do come close with UT football.
Let me know what you think….but keep it civil if you’d like your comment posted.
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Changes to online corrections
You may have noticed a change starting this week in how we handle errors in stories online. In the print edition, we have always corrected errors on A2 or, if they are significant, on the front page or a section front. On statesman.com, we have always run a file of those corrections and just made the corrections within the stories because they still exist long after their initial publication. With significant online corrections, we would sometimes run a correction at the top of the web story.
Under our new online corrections policy, we are going to try to do a better job of owning up to those mistakes online. Now whenever we are making any correction that goes beyond a typo, we will not only fix the error in the copy but also append an update explaining that the original article was in error and it has been corrected. That way people are aware that something has been changed.
As always, please be sure to contact a reporter at the email address attached to the article if you find an error. And if you don’t get a satisfactory answer, email me at dhiott@statesman.com.
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Keeping it civil in comments
Like newspapers across the country, the Statesman is struggling with online commenting on our website when it so often veers into the gutter. Back in April and again in May Fred and I talked about the online commenting on our websites, statesman.com and Austin360. Our tactic has been to set up a newsroom team that would monitor abuse reports. Readers can report abuse when they see someone violate the terms of our warning to be civil and avoid ‘profanity, ethnic or racial slurs, or take shots at anyone’s sexual orientation or religion.’ Staff members zap those abuse reports when they feel they have violated our guidelines. We have had more eyes on the problem, but that hasn’t always helped to create civil discourse.
So now we are going a step further and broadening our interpretation of the guidelines. For example, a comment may not contain an ethnic slur, but may make broad racial stereotypes and generalizations about a whole group of people. We’re not going to tolerate that. We’re also not going to tolerate excessive name calling, calls to violence (which occur with alarming frequency), unsubstantiated allegations and personal attacks against people in stories and other people commenting on our pages. Oh, and if someone who is commenting has to use clever keyboard characters to spell out a word and get around our profanity filter, we’ll zap the whole comment once we see it.
If the problems get out of hand on a particular story and require too much staff time to monitor, someone from our staff will drop in and warn people that if the violation of our guidelines continue we will shut down commenting. And if they do, we will.
We will continue to allow and encourage vigorous debate and disagreement about the issues, stories and the way we cover things. There are methods for doing that without resorting to gutter sniping.
Some people will decry our monitoring of the comment boards as censorship. We consider it editing, no different from the editing that goes on every day for our print edition.
Finally, a big thanks to the many people who comment on our site and follow the guidelines. Please, stay engaged and help us keep it civil.
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Opinions
As editor, I oversee both our news and opinion operations, though you might not know it by reading the blog. That’s an oversight. When I work my way through reader complaints about the paper, particularly of the broad-brush variety, it’s often our editorial policy that has triggered the feedback.
Statesman editorial policy is centrist and pragmatic. We approach issues individually and look for principled, common-sense positions. We don’t start from a partisan stance, and our owner, Cox Enterprises, takes a hands-off approach.
We concentrate on local and state issues, just as we do in our news coverage, and the unsigned editorials represent the consensus of the editorial board.
On the op-ed page, the page facing the editorial page, we have a different goal. There, we try to publish contributions that provoke a strong reaction. We value the forceful articulation of interesting ideas.
The most common complaint we receive about our editorials? We’re too liberal. A close second? We’re too conservative. Likewise, many critics see nothing but liberal opinion on the op-ed page, although some find nothing but conservative views.
The fact is we attach considerable importance to maintaining a balance of competing opinions on the op-ed page. I asked Ana Cantu, who puts it together, to explain how she goes about achieving that balance. You’ll find her explanation below.
This blog exists because Debbie and I see value in trying to explain how we go about making our decisions at the paper. We’re trying to demystify our work and, when necessary, clear away misconceptions about it.
In that same spirit, editorial page editor Arnold Garcia and his staff —- editorialists Alberta Phillips and Ken Herman and copy editors Tom Widlowski and Cantu — are launching a new approach to letters to the editor.
Until now, we have given letter writers the last word. If a letter made some case that was demonstrably false, we did not publish it, and that won’t change. If the letter was ambiguous, or if it took some liberties, we might publish it anyway, without any comment.
We appended editor’s notes to letters only if the writer asserted something about our work that we knew to be false.
We’ve decided that doesn’t serve us or readers very well.
A couple of examples help make the point:
— After President Obama made his televised speech to schoolchildren about the importance of education, we received several dozen letters applauding the speech and none taking issue with it. We published, without comment, a selection of the letters. That, in turn, provoked letters blistering us for the ostensibly biased editing of the letters package. Our silence created a misimpression and a response that might have damaged our credibility.
— When Ken Herman issued his ironic endorsement of Gov. Rick Perry’s re-election on the grounds it would move him near the top of the list of America’s longest-serving governors, some readers mistook it for a serious nod. We published a couple of letters without comment, provoking a couple more pointing out the column was a joke.
So we have decided to take a more expansive, conversational approach to editing the letters. We’re going to explain and talk back. The tone will be light, informative, respectful. Let us know if you think it works.
Here’s that explanation Ana Cantu wrote about how she assembles the op-ed page:
Dozens of decisions determine the balance of the page, and that balance is a moving target. Columns on the OpEd page are chosen first and foremost for readability. Pieces must be well-written and offer clear, intelligent arguments or analyses. The page strives to be ideologically balanced over time; there’s no quota for specific viewpoints from day to day. The page attempts to reflect the views of its readers by including pieces from across the political spectrum so it contains a mix of conservative, liberal and moderate columns on newsworthy topics. Pieces that don’t take a political position - such as columns by Leonard Pitts or Rhonda Swan championing crime victims or John Young on green burials - would fall into the moderate category. Another classification is neutral or other, which covers columns that are just provocative pieces of writing, like Arleen Spencely’s recent piece about why she plans to remain a virgin until marriage.
Another layer of the decision-making process is meeting the newspaper’s production needs. Every day, at least one column must offer the possibility of using a photo or illustration; no one likes looking at a page that’s all type. And if a strong column runs longer than the average length of 700 words, then at least one of the others must be cut.
Balance also involves getting diverse voices on the page. We strive to include columnists of color as well as women to reflect the interests and makeup of our readership. That said, we don’t chose to run a column by a minority or female columnist simply because of who they are. Their pieces are evaluated just like any others; they must meet the same readability standard. But their columns give readers a chance to see perspectives that wouldn’t come from white males, who dominate the nation’s opinion pages. Columns by Gail Collins and Ellen Goodman tackle issues facing women in the workplace or women’s health. Ruben Navarrette, who is Mexican American, often discusses immigration. A recent piece by Joseph Rocha, who is gay, offered a firsthand perspective of the failures of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the U.S. military.
Sometimes, columnists planted firmly in one ideological category - conservative George Will, for example - write pieces at odds with their established viewpoint. In September, Will wrote back-to-back pieces urging the withdrawal of U.S. troops from both Iraq and Afghanistan. How do you categorize columns like that? Do they fall into the conservative category because of the author? Or are they liberal because of the argument they make? The page allows room for nuance when there is no concrete answer.
Columnists’ opinions and viewpoints also evolve over time. During the 2008 presidential campaign, one of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s toughest critics was conservative Kathleen Parker, who initially wrote columns praising her after she accepted the GOP nomination. Did writing columns critical of Palin mean Parker was less of a conservative? Of course not, but it did change how the Statesman classified the columns to maintain the OpEd page’s ideological balance. For instance, if another conservative column on the page praised the GOP ticket or other Republican candidates, a critical column by Parker could be used as a counterpoint, even though she’s also conservative. It didn’t matter that the criticism wasn’t coming from a liberal; it actually gave more context to the argument because readers could see how and why columnists with similar worldviews strongly disagreed.
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Like him or not, Leslie represents one aspect of Austin
There are plenty of polarizing figures in Austin, and if it wasn’t obvious before, it is clear after last week’s events that Albert Leslie Cochran is one of them.
We reported last week that Cochran, the cross-dressing, downtown homeless fixture who once ran for mayor, had been hospitalized with a severe head injury the week before. We were a week late because even though we had rumors of his injury early on, there were no official sources we could rely on to provide the information. There was no police report on the incident and federal laws allow hospitals to keep patient information private unless the patient or a family member okays release of that information.
Eventually we did get a credible source, but only on condition of anonymity. We wrote a story explaining that Cochran had initially been hospitalized with a critical injury. (His condition has since been upgraded and he was released to a rehabilitation center.)
The reaction to the story from our readers online was swift and, in some cases, judgmental. While many expressed concern for Cochran, others couldn’t understand why his injury was news. In particular, some objected to a web headline that called Cochran ‘Austin’s thong-wearing homeless icon.’
TexasTransplant wrote:
“icon? please……this is not who or how i want austin represented”
Said leeboy:
“He is a symbol of Austin? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? You’re joking right?”
No joke. We never said Cochran is a hero, but do believe he is an Austin icon — a symbol or emblem of some aspects of our city. Whether it is a good thing or a bad thing may be subject for some people to debate, but Cochran has over the years become iconic of an ‘only in Austin’ weirdness. Other cities may have similar characters, but Austin’s version has been featured in advertising, run for mayor (and received almost eight percent of the vote) and had fridge magnets of his likeness sold in local stores. That speaks to the city’s acceptance for — and in some case an embrace of — eccentricity. But Cochran is iconic of only one facet of a very diverse city. For those who believe he doesn’t represent their particular Austin, that might be true. He’s not the symbol of Austin, only a symbol of Austin. Just as it would be impossible to accurately describe all that Austin is in one word, it would be hard to depict Austin through one person.
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Grieving family allowed us to tell their story
There is a stereotype of members of the media as ghoulish news hounds, eager to push a camera in a grieving family’s face or go to any length to snatch a sound bite or quote for a story. As with many broad stereotypes, there is very little truth to it. That kind of thing rarely happens. But that doesn’t stop some people from jumping to conclusions and making assumptions about our ghoulish nature. For example, there were these comments posted to our story on the death of five-year-old Catherine Elizabeth Gibson, criticizing the stunning photo that ran with the story.
Mechanic wrote:
I cannot believe the AAS would place a picture of the grieving family in the paper. Is there no sense of privacy or decency left? Did they give permission for that?
Lost Pup wrote:
What is wrong with you, Jordon Smothermon, taking a photo of Mr and Mrs Gibson grieving for their child? I was so embarrassed to see the photo. This is not the sensational media, just little Austin and a very tragic story about a family losing their beautiful little girl to flu, which is senseless in itself.
The simple answer? The family did give us permission to be in their home as they grieved, we understand privacy and have a sense of decency about grief, and Jordan Smothermon, a very talented photo intern from the University of Texas, was doing his job when he took that picture.
The more complex answer to questions like those from Mechanic and Lost Pup is to explain how we came to be in the Gibson’s home for the picture.
A friend of the family approached us to tell Catherine’s story, and helped our health reporter, Mary Ann Roser, get in touch with Catherine’s mother, Kristin Gibson. Roser said the conversation with Kristin Gibson was not easy, but it was obviously important to the grieving mother.
“She wanted to do something positive,” Roser said. “She wanted the public to be aware of the endowment she was setting up and that there were no underlying (health) conditions” that would have contributed to the flu death of a vibrant 5-year-old.
At one point in the conversation Roser asked if she could send a photographer to the house and was told she could.
Alberto Martinez was the photo editor on duty that night, and he had no qualms about sending Smothermon, a 28-year-old student who had already demonstrated maturity on the job. Martinez said he knows it is hard for a photographer to take photos of grieving family members without feeling intrusive.
“Nobody on this staff approaches that with a cavalier attitude. He knew enough to be as sensitive as possible,” Martinez said.
Smothermon said Catherine’s parents were very gracious, despite their grief, asking him several times what he needed to help tell their daughter’s story. Smothermon said he was unsure at first how to answer, then said “I guess more than anything, I want the photo to communicate how much you love your daughter.”
The photo Smothermon took of Ken Gibson clutching Catherine’s favorite stuffed animal while Kristin Gibson holds him certainly does that. It was not posed. It was a genuine moment of grief and love that resulted in a beautiful picture. I feel confident it helped draw many readers into the story that the Gibsons wanted to tell. The Gibson family friend who helped arrange the interview sent Roser an email saying they liked the story.
We are grateful to the Gibsons for sharing their story with us and the community. Not all grieving families want to do that, and that’s understandable, too. The least we can do in such an instance is to handle it with sensitivity. It is unlikely that there is anything we could do at the newspaper in a time like this to help the Gibsons with their grief, but I don’t think we contributed to it.
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ACORN and news
Until yesterday, when they became a torrent, the emails and calls had trickled in steadily, and they posed the same question, with varying doses of outrage: Why no coverage of the ACORN story in the Austin American-Statesman?
Today, after we published a story, the pace picked up, but the question has changed. Now, it’s why didn’t we get the story straight?
The answers to both questions are substantially the same. The ACORN story involves an apparent pattern of petty misbehavior elsewhere, which makes it of scant interest to a local newspaper in Austin. To the extent it’s a story at all, it’s political in nature, with little import in the wider world beyond the spin applied to it; and we, along with every news organization I can see except Fox News, see no connection between videos purporting to catch ACORN employees in foolish behavior and President Barack Obama.
For those of you who have not watched Fox News in the past week, the ACORN story involves hidden-camera journalism by an “activist filmmaker” who appears to catch ACORN employees in Baltimore, Brooklyn, Washington, D.C., and San Bernardino, Calif., providing advice on how to engage in various illegal activities.
Fox and various blogs kept the story alive for several days, alternately dribbling out the tapes and complaining about the failure of the mainstream media to cover the story. On Monday, the Senate voted to bar ACORN from access to federal housing grants.
Today, the attacks on ACORN have picked up pace, and the organization has announced an internal investigation.
ACORN is a national group dedicated to community organizing. According to its website,
ACORN is the nation’s largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people with over 400,000 member families organized into more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in 110 cities across the country. Since 1970, ACORN has been building community organizations that are committed to social and economic justice, and won victories on thousands of issues of concern to our members, through direct action, negotiation, legislative advocacy and voter participation. ACORN helps those who have historically been locked out become powerful players in our democratic system.
Wikipedia has a succinct description of the group:
ACORN is a non-profit, nonpartisan organization that typically champions liberal and progressive causes. It is made up of numerous legally distinct parts including local non-profits, a national lobbying organization, and the ACORN Housing Corporation. ACORN has been the subject of public controversy and has been accused of actions including embezzlement, management fights, and voter registration fraud committed by its workers.
So, why haven’t we jumped on the ACORN story with the same vigor as Fox?
First, it’s a local story set elsewhere. There’s been no suggestion yet that Fox has caught ACORN in a national campaign of abetting criminal behavior. Given the reports from those cities and the Senate vote, we needed to check on local ACORN activities, and we did. We leave the larger story to wire services and national newspapers.
Second, we’re not Fox, and we resist letting Fox set our agenda. The story is only now beginning to catch fire among the news sources that we trust. As they offer stories that dissect ACORN, its activities, the origin of the controversy and the credibility of its principal antagonists, we will publish them.
Most importantly, though, we see no evidence of any current ACORN-Obama link.
It’s no secret Obama has done work for ACORN. That doesn’t make him an agent for the organization, or the organization a tool of his administration. Until evidence of a link surfaces, the ACORN story is a sideshow.
Fox News believes otherwise. As this YouTube video shows, Glenn Beck, among others at Fox, is eager to drag newspapers into the skirmish. His viewers are eager to join the fray; just after he urged them to call their local newspaper at the 5:20 mark in this video, our phones erupted.
That doesn’t make it news.
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Kelso’s column? It’s a joke, folks
Every time John Kelso writes a column like this one about Oklahoma, we get some email complaints. Predictably, they are from people who don’t normally read the paper and, more significantly, aren’t familiar with Kelso’s work. Here’s an excerpt of what one Sooner from Houston had to say:
“I am stunned that such a small-minded point of view would get past the editorial staff of a major newspaper. I guess your point is that since you were born in Oklahoma you are entitled to lob ignorant and tired old stereotype criticisms and call it journalism? What was the point of this “essay”? How is anyone better for having read it?”
The answer is this: no one around here is likely to pretend that what Kelso does is high-minded, capital ‘j’ Journalism, least of all Kelso himself. His job description is humor columnist. His mission is to make people laugh, often by being outrageous and silly. Does anyone really think Kelso believes that male children in Oklahoma are fitted with a mouthpiece at baptism or taught how to block before being potty trained? These really are jokes, not journalism. The point is to make people chuckle, not to make them somehow better, although I would argue that having a sense of humor generally makes a person better. Kelso does seem to particularly enjoy skewering people from Oklahoma, College Station or California, but he has also been known to make fun of himself, the Longhorns or his beloved Austin with regularity. It really is nothing personal.
Not that Kelso can’t do serious and introspective at times. He has proven that most recently with the graceful columns he did on his cancer diagnosis and treatment. And a column he did in 2002 about the death of a homeless man called Mountain Man remains one of my all-time favorites.
And Kelso can be a sharp satirist, exposing political absurdity on both sides of the aisle, whether he is taking aim at Gov. Rick Perry over secession comments or Pres. Obama over the tax problems of some of his appointees.
But most days what Kelso is doing for the Metro & State front is providing some levity in the midst of the heavy news about crime and taxes and occasionally giving us a little insight into our community in the process. It’s not the most noble work, but I know many of our readers would miss it if it were gone. I know I would.
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All the news
Debbie has done a good job in the past couple of weeks explaining how we go about picking stories for publication on statesman.com and in the Statesman. Coincidentally, I’ve received a couple of letters upbraiding us for failures to publish stories.
Both letter writers assert, reasonably enough, that there’s a growing universe of writing on the internet that’s available for all to see but that does not appear in the newspaper. The difference is one of capacity; on the internet, it’s infinite; on newsprint, circumscribed and, sad to say, shrinking.
From that difference, though, the letter writers infer a plot to deprive them of news for ideological reasons. What the difference — available on the internet, absent from the newspaper — actually reflects is the distinction between opinion and news and our resolve to focus on news outside a couple of opinion pages and various columns sprinkled around the paper daily.
The first letter came by mail and complained about our coverage of the reaction to an essay by John Mackey, co-founder and chief executive officer of Whole Foods, about health care reform. Mackey espoused ideas, in keeping with his libertarian world view, promoting individual choice and market-based solutions.
The writer said we should have covered Mackey’s ideas as well as the reaction to them and suggested we might by suppressing the story because we resent his success. Our neglect of Mackey’s ideas is an example of a larger pattern, the writer said: We leave out “significant elements of a story,” making readers “uneasy and distrustful.”
My answer:
As I reconstruct it, the column appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Aug. 11. By Aug. 14, the backlash had begun to get some notice on various blogs. We published our first item on the dispute on Aug. 18 on statesman.com. Substantially the same material appeared the next day in the Statesman business section. We updated the skirmishing on Monday, two weeks after the essay appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Had Mr. Mackey offered us the essay at the outset, we would have published it on the opinion page. He did not. In retrospect, I wish we had moved quickly, within a day or two, to pick up the essay on the opinion page. We did not do that, and I regret it. The essay is not news, however. The ideas themselves are not particularly novel, as I understand it, and the fact that Mr. Mackey proposed them is no more news than if I were to propose a solution to, say, climate change. I’m neither a player in such policy-making nor an expert in the field. What is unquestionably news is that thousands of people found Mr. Mackey’s ideas so offensive that they took action against Whole Foods. We have covered Whole Foods, its leadership, its values and its corporate culture better and longer than any other publication. We, too, have watched it grow. We’re not inclined to confer hero status on Mr. Mackey, but we certainly agree that he has been a driving force behind a remarkable business.
The second came by email and concerned an internet phenomenon. Under the subject line “Why wasn’t this in the newspaper???”, it read:
TEA Party in Lubbock , TX At the TEA PARTY, a black man, Dr. Donald May, delivered this message from the courthouse steps in Lubbock . He electrified the audience like I haven’t seen in a long time. His delivery was masterful. I am sorry you could not see him in action. Anyway, I thought you might enjoy his words. The news media was there, but not one word of this man’s appearance ever appeared on TV or in print, even though he completely dominated the scene.
The email concluded:
This should be on the front page of every newspaper in the USA instead of being swept under the rug and kept off the news broadcasts. Our news media sucks, plain and simple. They are not “reporting the news,”— they are telling us what THEY want us to hear and that is not reporting the news. One more step toward Socialism. Let’s keep this going so everyone will know the truth.My answer:
An editor at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal informs me that the newspaper’s account of the April 15 tea party did not mention Dr. Donald May. We rely on the Lubbock paper, via the Associated Press, for our coverage of events there. If the Lubbock paper did not report on Dr. May’s speech, neither did we. The newspaper website, lubbockonline.com, has a blogger named Dr. Donald May. I’m not sure why your email correspondent thought Dr. May’s race is significant, but the editor with whom I spoke confirmed what a glance at lubbockonline had suggested, that Dr. May is a white man. He works under the nom de plume “Mr. Conservative.” In that capacity, Dr. May has been untiring in his criticism of Barack Obama and his administration, writing hundreds of entries in such categories as “Barack Obama citizenship,” “Barack Obama socialism” and “President Barack Obama power grab.” The text you cite appears in Dr. May’s blog and is dated July 5. As you’ll see, Dr. May reports he gave the speech four times, from July 2 to July 4, including on the courthouse steps in San Angelo. Here’s the deeper reason why this wasn’t in the newspaper: It’s not news. That a conservative blogger would deliver a speech attacking Barack Obama, on our nation’s birthday or any other day, is not news. It happens daily. Dr. May might have phrased his attack with more power and passion than some, but at best his speech is a long op-ed essay of the kind we publish with regularity.
Thoughts welcome, but let’s try to avoid partisan bickering.
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Sen. Kennedy’s death
Several angry callers here complained that Sen. Edward Kennedy’s death received less substantial treatment on our front page today than did the death of Michael Jackson when he died.
I prefer to salute Raeanne Martinez and the rest of the folks on the copy desk, in our prepress and plateroom operations and in the pressroom itself for the great work they did getting the story into the paper at all. The Kennedy family did not announce the death until after midnight, and subsequent news reports did not arrive until 15 minutes after the deadline for our final edition.
Here is Raeanne’s account of what she and deputy news editor Rindy Weatherly managed to pull off early today:
Had a bit of excitement late, when we learned via CNN about 12:30 and, via AP just after 12:30 a.m., that Ted Kennedy had died. We put him at the top of A1 — no time for art — and moved two other stories around the page to accommodate it. NYT moved a long enough story to use at 12:54. I did the design and Rindy did the editing/cuts, and we were able to release our three made-over pages at 1:10. Press 1 was holding for us; I stopped the presses on Press 2 to wait so we could get this to the maximum number of folks. 44,077 out of 80,000 Final papers — more than half — got the obit. Many thanks to the speedy and helpful prepress, plateroom and pressroom folks for helping us get it through quickly.
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What’s news on the web?
Sometimes people who read the newspaper express frustration that a story they found on the front page isn’t on the home page of our web site when they surf over to statesman.com later that day. That’s because the factors that determine a home page story on the web are very different from the factors that determine a front page story in the newspaper.
The biggest difference is that while newspaper readers generally look at the front page of the paper once a day (because, well, it looks the same at noon as it did when you picked it up off your driveway at 7 a.m.), we want our website readers to come back to the home page again and again throughout the day. So we have to keep it fresh. Sometimes that means immediacy outweighs news value.
I asked Internet Managing Editor Zach Ryall to share his thoughts on how we play things on the web. I think he summed up the issues well:
Just as with print, we try to keep content local. It’s our strength and our franchise. Though we have a nation and world section of statesman.com, you won’t find many of those stories on our home page because you can find them plenty of other places. Breaking news and immediacy are what the Internet and any good news site should be about. Online we have the luxury of being able to pitch news of the weird without placing undue importance on it. Our tools for measuring exactly what you view online and for how long are much more precise than the survey approach to what you read in print. As such, we can cater much more to what people want rather than guess. Web sites also have the ability and I would argue, mission, to deliver credible hard news while soliciting your Chihuahua photos without being schizophrenic. We can carefully serve up some shallow, but very entertaining material while simultaneously holding state government accountable. Too much of either makes for a site that will not engage and grow audience. We look for multimedia opportunities in every story we discuss, and often highlight crimes that might be briefed in print because their overall significance is low compared to their “quirky” factor.
One thing I would add: We haven’t abandoned deeper reporting on our website. That’s one of the reasons we started the Focus page a few months ago. That’s where we collect and highlight the watchdog reporting our folks are doing.
And if you’re curious about what people are looking at on statesman.com, here’s a one-day snapshot of just the ten most clicked-on stories yesterday (excluding photo galleries and multimedia): five crime stories, four government stories and a sports story. Only one of the top 10 stories was on the front page of our newspaper that day.
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We’re thinking about local news priorities
Last week I mentioned our local news focus on the blog. Just recently we put a new person in charge of most of that coverage. John Bridges, who has been sports editor for seven years, is our new senior editor over local news. He oversees the work of more than three dozen metro, state and projects reporters and editors.
John has been at the paper more than 20 years. He is a University of Texas grad who, back in the day, worked at the Daily Texan. Since coming to the Statesman he has been a copy editor, national editor, news editor (in charge of newsroom production) and metro editor before going to sports. He knows Central Texas, has a well-rounded background at the paper and he’s also one of the most creative and thoughtful journalists I know.
Those attributes are key as we struggle with the contradictory nature of our mission right now. On the one hand, we want to serve readers on the web with fast-breaking, frequently updated information. On the other hand, we want to serve readers in the paper with the type of in-depth analysis and investigation they won’t find elsewhere. And we want to do all of that as the number of people on the newsroom staff has decreased in recent years. It’s not an easy task, but John and his folks will do it in part by better prioritizing what we do and don’t cover. In the coming months, we will continue to review how we have our resources allocated throughout the newsroom to make sure we’re focusing on the right things. Your thoughts, as always, are welcome.
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Yes, our focus is local, and here’s why
Every once in a while I hear from a reader who complains that we aren’t putting a lot of national and international news on the front page. The most recent was this letter to the editor from Theresa Carlton:
“Can you please tell me why the national news is no longer on the front page but buried inside? It used to be that the Metro & State had the local news but now it is all over, even the front page. I guess you do not want us to know what Obama and his Washington cronies are up to.”
First of all, national news makes it to the front page with regularity. And in the almost two decades I’ve worked at the newspaper, local news has always had a home on the front page. Most importantly, our philosophy about putting that national news on the front page hasn’t changed from one president to another.
What has changed in recent years is that space has gotten tighter and people have more options to find their news with the advent of the internet. So it makes sense for a local newspaper to focus on local news. And by local news, I mean what is happening in Central Texas in news, business, entertainment and sports that you aren’t likely to find in another publication. By local news I also mean state government, because as the capital of Texas, everything that happens in the Capitol and surrounding state agencies is local to our readers.
That doesn’t mean we are going to ignore what happens outside of Texas. Most days we have one or two national or international stories rounding out the front page. But if we have five strong stories about happenings that are closer to home, we might go with an all-local front. And it’s a rare day when you’ll find a national or international story dominating coverage on statesman.com. It’s not that we believe the things happening in the rest of the world are less important, it’s just that we know our readers can get that information from hundreds of other sources as well: national newspapers and magazines, cable news, websites, niche blogs.
Given finite space and resources, what do you think we should focus on — news close to home that’s harder to find or the national and international news that’s available to you from multiple sources?
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Secrecy and AISD
The Austin school district decided Monday night to slow its rush to fight an order that it release more records related to its recent search for a new superintendent. That’s a good first step. Next, it should drop the fight completely.
Newspaper, parents, teachers and other interests have bristled for years over the secrecy that surrounds superintendent searches in Texas. State law allows districts to hide the names of all candidates except a single finalist whom they must name several weeks before making their decision official. Practically speaking, that means boards make their picks, in total secrecy if they wish, then indulge in a rubber-stamp charade.
Here at the Statesman, we think it’s a bad law. You’ll see an editorial on the topic in the Wednesday paper.
My preference would be to make the names of all candidates public, and I suspect that sentiment is widespread among newspaper people. Other reasonable folks think naming up to a handful of finalists makes more sense. Either option is an improvement on what we’ve got now.
The Austin Independent School District, like other districts in Texas, says it must conduct a secret search to attract the best candidates. After her selection, Dr. Meria Carstarphen said she would not have applied for the Austin job had the law required school districts to release the names of all candidates for superintendent openings.
Statesman reporter Laura Heinauer and editorial writer Alberta Phillips both filed record requests with AISD seeking information about the search as it progressed. The district released some information and argued that some of what we sought was confidential. Attorney General Greg Abbott, who must referee this kind of dispute, issued a split decision. Then the district’s attorneys filed a lawsuit to appeal his ruling to a district court here in Travis County. They did so in June without board approval, and sought to get the board’s okay Monday.
At the board meeting Monday night, Mel Waxler, the district’s general counsel, asked that the board postpone its decision on authorizing the suit for a couple of weeks. It assented.
That’s good. It gives the board some time to build up its resolve, sweep the appeal effort onto the dust heap where it belongs and follow Abbott’s order.
During the 11 years I worked at a newspaper in Florida, searches for local government executives, including school superintendents, happened out in the open, for all to see. It made for some interesting newspaper stories and public discussion.
Thanks to Keith Elkins for showing up at the board meeting as an AISD taxpayer and as executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas (where, in the interest of full disclosure, I am secretary) and urging the board to release the information now.
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Sic semper
I got my first inkling on Sunday morning of the melee that concluded U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett’s visit to the Randall’s in South Austin when this email arrived:
More humor for Kelso and Sergeant If you don’t do your job and cover this major news story I will organize a boycott of the AAS. Sic semper arrogancia http://www.youtube.comwatch/?v=a8UjY3YDlwA.
The message bore many of the rhetorical flourishes that cheapen so much of what passes for speech these days: sarcasm, contempt, inappropriate conclusions and a double heaping of threats, including one, delivered in Latin, that echoed the words shouted by John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.
Was it accurate? Did we miss or willfully ignore a major news story? Was it a major news story?
No Statesman reporter attended the event. Absent the bullying that’s apparent on the videotape and in the followup, the Randall’s appearance was the kind of event a member of Congress schedules routinely for weekends and recesses. It never appeared on our radar. Doggett’s office lets us know when it believes he is going to commit news during a district appearance, and it said nothing. We did not hear in advance from the people waiting to hector him, either.
We did not ignore the confrontation, however. Once reports of the unpleasantness started trickling in Sunday morning, the metro desk began trying to reconstruct what had happened. We didn’t get very far for Monday’s paper.
Gardner Selby looked at the event this morning and gave all sides a chance to deliver a post mortem on the rumble at Randall’s. Predictably, he found a partisan split, including an assertion by one activist that congressmen around the country are getting similar receptions.
My take on all this?
Fixing the health care system is both hugely important and hugely complex. Ideologues will take advantage to raise the metabolism of their constituents.
We missed a political mugging, not a major news story.
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How we cover the biggest crimes
The slaying of two recent UT graduates in a West Campus condo last week has resulted in lots of coverage, much of it on the front page. A high-profile case almost always leads to questions about how we decide coverage of homicides at the newspaper, including whether we take into account the victim’s race and where he or she lived.
Not all homicides are alike in their news value, and their coverage by the newspaper is rarely a value judgment on someone’s worthiness as a human. Here are just a few factors at play:
Youth. When young people die in violent circumstances it tends to have a larger impact on the community — and the news, especially when they are school-age kids. In addition to last week’s West Campus slayings of two recent UT graduates, who were Anglo, some other homicides with young victims have received multiple stories, including front page coverage. One involved a 17-year-old Hispanic mother found dead in her Northeast Austin apartment. Another involved a 21-year-old Hispanic woman who disappeared from Sixth Street.
Location. As Chuck Lindell’s story Sunday pointed out, West Campus is not a high crime area. In fact, it’s one of the lowest, according to police. When bad things happen in unexpected places, it does increase the news value. That also goes for places such as Sixth Street, where large crowds gather for entertainment.
Circumstances. All three of those homicides we have played prominently this year have involved mysteries: the young mother home alone in her apartment; a woman who disappeared off Sixth Street; two recent graduates shot to death in their condo. Circumstances have a lot to do with how we play a story. And if there is a larger story to tell related to the circumstances — for example, police allegations that one of the UT victims was involved in drug trade, leading to questions about drug use and trafficking around the university — we’re likely to spend more time and space telling it.
Information. It’s not the best excuse, but sometimes we don’t have extensive coverage of a homicide because we can’t get information from police, neighbors, family of the victim or other sources. And the resources we put into getting that information can be affected by everything from the homicide circumstances themselves to what other news we are chasing on a particular day.
Homicide is still a rare enough occurrence in Central Texas that we should be paying close attention to the victims, suspects and circumstances surrounding each case. But how we then cover a murder relies on too many factors to simplify into an easy formula. What it really boils down to is relying on the news judgment of the reporters and editors who put out the paper every day. Sometimes we make the right call. Sometimes we don’t.
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Competition and collaboration
Newspapers all over the country face the same challenges we do in Austin. The recession means less advertising revenue even as we face increased competition from online competitors for advertising dollars. To remain profitable, we have to reduce costs, and at a newspaper, the big costs are people and newsprint.
That squeeze has prompted editors to rethink what it means to compete, and we’re exploring ways we can collaborate without compromising our independence. The internet, with its culture of crediting others’ work by linking to it, has added momentum to that effort.
After a staff meeting last week, I sent an email to our staff elaborating on some points I had made about competition and collaboration. Readers might find the message enlightening, so here it is:
From: fzipp@statesman.com Subject: competition and collaboration Date: July 24, 2009 2:19:17 PM CDT To: newsroom@statesman.com
Folks,
Allow me to elaborate on some points we covered in yesterday’s staff meeting to make sure there’s no confusion about where I stand:
— We compete with other news/content providers in various ways: for paid subscriptions/home delivery, for advertising, for attention, for credibility, and so on.
— We have long agreed on a set of areas where the Statesman must be the pre-eminent source for information if we are to thrive as a news organization: city and state government; public education; the University of Texas and higher education; University of Texas athletics; prep sports; the music, arts and entertainment scenes; growth and development; environmental issues of local interest; technology as a business, a lifestyle and a tool; public safety and the justice system; the vibe and quality of life in Austin.
— We need to provide both timely, breaking news and deep enterprise in all those areas. We cannot let any other news/content provider consistently beat us in any of them.
— Because we no longer compete with the Dallas, Houston, San Antonio or Fort Worth newspapers for paid subscriptions/home delivery, we are experimenting with collaboration on stories that make the paper better and free up our reporters to focus on the highest-payoff stories on their to-do lists. For now, the collaboration consists of trading daily A1 budgets (and stories, if we choose) and Big 12 South content. It might expand beyond that in the future. The primary question we will ponder as time passes is whether any proposed next step makes for a better newspaper for our readers.
— Because we do compete with Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Fort Worth on the web, we will not trade stories there. Rather, we will trade links. Again, our primary question in deciding whether to link to a story on another site is whether the link makes statesman.com and austin360.com a better, richer, more credible experience for viewers.
— We’re surrounded by competitors for local news and information. Some are free, some paid; some online, some print; some broadcast, some cable. They are TV and radio, the Austin Chronicle, Austin Business Journal, In Fact Daily, Austin Monthly, Tribeza, Austinist, Quorum Report, Burnt Orange Report, Texas Monthly, Texas Tribune and dozens more. Any blogger is potential competition. Any blogger who beats us to a story is actual competition.
— If a competitor gets to a story before we do, if the story is worthwhile, and if it makes strategic sense for us to concede so we can concentrate on a higher-payoff story, figure out a way to link to the story in your blog. That curation function is helpful to our readers and improves our site.
— If a competitor consistently beats us in the areas we have defined as strategically important, figure out what’s wrong and fix it.
Make sense? If not, feel free to stop by and talk.
fz
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How we fix our mistakes
Jared and others have raised some good questions about how we handle our mistakes, so I thought I would run through an explanation. We don’t want to make errors, and we have reporting guidelines and layers of editing in place to try to avoid mistakes, but we haven’t figured out how to eliminate them. They happen more frequently than I would like.
When staff members receive an allegation of an error, we expect them to investigate it and, if warranted, make corrections promptly. Online, we correct most errors within the copy of the story. We try to do this as quickly as possible after an error is pointed out so that anyone who looks at the story from then on sees the corrected information. We also have a link on the website where all of our corrections should reside. In addition, if there is a significant error, we will post the correction at the top of the story online.
In the newspaper, most corrections are printed on A2, as Jared notes. However, if there has been a significant error, we will publish the correction on the front of the section where the story ran, usually with similar prominence. We have run corrections about front page stories or headlines on the front page. Likewise, some corrections have appeared on the metro & state or business front.
Bottom line: if you think we’ve made a mistake, we want to hear about it. Start by calling or emailing the reporter who wrote the story (contact info is at the bottom of each story) but if you don’t feel like you are getting satisfaction, email me at dhiott@statesman.com or give me a call at 912-2937.
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