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Risking the newsroom’s image

Monday, October 8th, 2007
For what causes, if any, should a newspaper cross the line between editorial advocacy and community activism? The Owensboro (KY) Messenger-Inquirer crossed the line in 1983. We learned that even in a worthy cause, you don’t work on a complex issue for three years without getting your hands dirty - risking your credibility and perhaps raising expectations of future activism.
Our goal was low-cost higher education for Owensboro, Kentucky’s only urban area without a public college or university. The Messenger-Inquirer had agitated for state funds for years, without measurable effect. Access to low-cost education was critical for reviving the stagnant local economy, we believed, and those with greatest need, the poor and working-class people, were being left behind.
So when John Hager, the paper’s publisher and editor, was asked to help form a committee to work toward state funding, he accepted. Although I was editorial page editor, I also agreed to serve on that group.
We talked many times about the dangers of our participation. We knew we were risking the credibility of our news coverage and the independence of our editorial opinions. But we tried to minimize those risks. When the Committee on Higher Education began, we wrote a long editorial explaining that our personal involvement was unusual, an exception to what journalists often do. We argued that education was a fundamental need in Owensboro, compelling us to take the unusual step.
We continued to do editorials on education and in particular on issues brought up by the citizens committee and its proposals for a community college. At those times we included an editor’s note explaining the newspaper’s position and the role Hager and I played on the committee.
Although the newspaper was open about our involvement, the committee’s record for openness was ambiguous. The committee included broad representation - business, labor, education, women, minorities - and called regular public forums, but not every meeting was announced in advance to the media. While this ad hoc committee did not fall under the state’s open meetings law, the conflict between journalism’s commitment to openness and loyalty to the committee was unavoidable.
Because of our involvement, neither Hager nor I exercised direct control over the news coverage of this story. But readers are unlikely to believe that what the editorial page editor and the publisher do on a citizens committee has no impact on the newsroom’s coverage of that issue.
Outside the newsroom, our involvement could also create an expectation that the newspaper would be a team player and booster - rather than a disinterested observer and critic - in key community issues. How would we shed that expectation? How would we choose among issues?
For all that, our venture into community activism was successful: The state legislature approved a new community college in 1986, and a $13.5 million campus was dedicated in the spring of 1989.
Still, questions linger.
A newsroom’s independence may survive a limited amount of community involvement by the paper’s executives; but would it survive regular, or frequent, doses of activism? Even on this issue, the fairness of news coverage was challenged by a developer whose land was not chosen as the community college site.
If the issue had blown up in our faces, how would we have defended our credibility? Our involvement would have been far more controversial if the new community college had caused the closing of the two private colleges in Owensboro.
Finally, what damage to editorial independence follows in the wake of close cooperation with politicians? Will readers think that deals have been cut the next time the paper endorses some government project the politicians support?
Certainly, life would have been simpler had we not been involved with that committee. But one can also argue that a smaller community in distress has a right to expect community involvement from the head of one of its major institutions. In reality, Hager’s leadership was critical.
My position was more ambiguous. For me it was a long period of preserving an uneasy balance between editorial independence and corporate responsibility.
Despite that tension, my venture into community activism was the most satisfying experience of nine years as an editorial writer. Given a chance, I’d do it again.
Yet I still see activism as a limited exception, not a model. To risk one’s independence and credibility, the cause needs to be critical, the risks clearly understood, and the tough questions answered first.

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Project censored, sins of omission and the hardest “W” of all — “why”

Monday, October 8th, 2007
Why did we hear so little about the savings and loan and banking scandals when they began? Because they didn’t pass the National Enquirer Litmus Test: no sex, no star, no violence — no story.
While journalists and scholars debate about the ethics of what is published in the mainstream media, little is written about the ethical implications of what isn’t and why it isn’t.
For 16 years, I have been exploring these sins of omission in American journalism through a national research effort called Project Censored.
I have discovered that there are a plethora of important issues that are overlooked, under-covered, or just plain censored by the media every year. I also discovered that the mainstream media reject out of hand the notion that they self-censor, and refuse to explore or even acknowledge their sins of omission.
The usual explanations of why vital stories are not covered — or, just as important, contextualized — include reliability of the source, complexity of the subject, the fact that controversial issues often are potentially libelous, and a perceived risk to their chimerical objectivity.
But there are other, less acceptable, explanations for the media’s failure to cover important stories. For example:
  • It probably took the "October Surprise" so long to be discovered by the mainstream media for the same reason it took Seymour Hersh more than a year to get the My Lai story published: Both stretch the bounds of credibility and therefore present a discomfiting challenge.
  • Our Vice President’s guileless appearance has the press less interested in what he’s doing than what he’s saying. While reporting on Quayle’s every faux pas, the press overlooked [until mere days ago] his misnamed Council on Competitiveness, which has seriously undermined federal health and safety programs on behalf of big business since 1986.
  • It was difficult to understand why the Congressional press corps took so long to report all the perks our elected representatives enjoy until we realized that reporters feed at the same trough.
But perhaps the most blatant example of media self-censorship is an incident which occurred last summer. The Bohemian Grove encampment, which draws the cream of America’s male power elite — including press moguls — to northern California each year, is one of the media’s best known, best kept secrets.
Dirk Mathison, San Francisco bureau chief for People magazine, managed to surreptitiously infiltrate the encampment in search of a good story. And he got it.
He recorded a variety of newsworthy items, including a previously unpublicized Gulf War Iraqi casualty count of 200,000 reported to the Bohemian Club by former Navy Secretary John Lehman. Unfortunately, Mathison was spotted by a Time Inc. executive and quietly ordered to leave.
The article, which Mathison said was scheduled to run for four pages, was suddenly killed.
When I asked People managing editor Lanny Jones whether the fact that Time Inc. owns People had anything to do with killing the story, he said no. Since his magazine had obtained the story by illegal trespass, he said, running it would have been unethical.
Think about it. Peeping People magazine — they of the hovering helicopters at rock stars’ weddings plead ethics to explain why they spiked a story the American people should hear!
When I took exception to Jones’s response, he asked me what I would have done without violating the publication’s guidelines. I said, at the very least, I’d have Mathison write a straight news article describing exactly what happened. Jones said it was a good idea and he’d think about it. That was August 6, 1991.
Television journalists are as culpable of the sins of omission as their print colleagues. But it was not always so. Where we once had the NBC White Paper, CBS Reports, and ABC’s Close-up, today we have A Current Affair, Unsolved Mysteries and Inside Edition. Where we once had See It Now with Edward R. Murrow, today we have Now It Can Be Told with Geraldo Rivera.
While the media moguls squander their resources hounding Donald Trump, Pee Wee Herman and William Kennedy Smith, they ignore the economic, environmental, political and social ills that profoundly threaten the nation.
The media’s love affair with sensationalism, combined with its sins of omission, leaves the American people uninformed and ill-prepared for the 21st century.
While the press generally does a good job in answering the first four W’s of journalism — who, what, where, and when — it often fails to even address the hardest W of all: why.
On this, the 200th anniversary of the First Amendment, it would be fitting for the nation’s press to start asking why and to acknowledge its ethical responsibility for keeping the American people adequately informed.

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Written rules can be hazardous

Monday, October 8th, 2007
The law has had a tenuous and at times perverse relationship to ethics. The effect of negligence law is to penalize the written expression of high ethical aspirations and reward minimum standards of professional conduct. This is most certainly so in the case of ethics codes for journalists.
While providing licensure and regulation of virtually any other profession is a logical purpose of government, the First Amendment and our colonial history teach us that similar control of the press is unwise and unconstitutional. Thus to regulate the conduct of the press, government has had to take the much more subtle measure of tort law, and arguably that subtlety leads to perversity in its practical result.
The tort system is the law’s great regulator of human conduct. The law focuses on the base level of conduct, drawing a line between the minimally acceptable and unacceptable through imposition of criminal and civil punishments, reparations and injunctions.
Ethical systems ideally function at a loftier level, asserting principled goals for which principled men and women strive, measuring their success by how close they come.
Lawyers have not been spared the impact of negligence law on the ethics of their own profession. In fact, avoiding heightened liability for legal malpractice is one of the articulated reasons for a recent national move to alter legal ethics.
In very broad terms, the ethical rules of lawyers of past decades were divided into two components, Disciplinary Rules and Ethical Considerations. Like other systems, the Ethical Considerations articulated lofty ideals.
To the dismay of lawyers, courts began to cite Ethical Condiderations as establishing standards of conduct in malpractice suits, using the breach of these loftier ideals as evidence of negligence.
However, replacement of this ethical system is now well underway by the substitution of the American Bar Association’s Model Rules. These take a more middle-of-the-road approach, which in broad measure defines unacceptable conduct by a combination of arbitrary, prohibatory rules and common-sense guidelines.
In the decade following the Supreme Court’s 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, the law of libel underwent several major changes that ultimately emphasized established tort law principles of negligence. Sullivan rejected the old common rule that liability for defamatory speech was automatic, called "negligence per se." Instead, for articles discussing public officials, press liability would not pertain unless the press acted with actual malice — that is, knowingly lying or recklessly disregarding reasons to doubt the accuracy of the story.
That doctrine was easily extended from public officials to public figures and, at the apogee of First Amendment interpretation of libel law, to articles about matters of public interest.
In the 1974 decision Gertz v. Welch, the Supreme Court retracted from a malice test for public interest articles and instead articulated that for private figures, the First Amendment demanded only a "fault" or negligent standard, allowing states to erect higher barriers if they wished.
Courts define negligence as the breach of a duty or a departure from a reasonable standard of conduct. The analysis was further refined to the question of whether a journalist’s actions would be measured against a "reasonable man" or "reasonable journalist" standard, the latter prevailing in most jurisdictions.
Of course, a "reasonable journalist" libel standard focuses the law upon standard journalistic practices. Commonly in a private-figure libel trial, the plaintiff will find a disgruntled journalist or J-school professor to come to court and expound, with the benefit of hindsight, upon the defendant’s failure to live up to exquisite, lofty standards of conduct by journalists. Consequently, the articulation of industry-wide codes of good journalism is deadly to the defense of libel suits.
A similar risk inheres in a press organization’s own code of standards. Nothing is more delicious to a good plaintiff’s lawyer than the irony and hypocrisy of a defendant that fails to live up to its own rules. In the Westmoreland libel suit, CBS was severely challenged for failing to live up to its own news standards. It is for this reason that a vast majority of media lawyers, including this writer, counsel clients against adopting any form of ethical code, whether expressed as a statement of principles, a statement of corporate policy, standards contained in personnel manuals or even style-book or training materials.
The effect is unfortunate. These defensive tactics clearly bear an adverse effect on the ability of news organizations to establish principled corporate culture, to train new members of the profession and to reinforce these standards in writing. As a result, newspapers are left to express and reinforce standards in one-to-one contacts and orally in formal training sessions.
The larger irony here is that the application of negligence law to codes of ethics is self-defeating. Use of codes of ethics to create liability engenders enormous disincentives to articulate, adopt and apply sound professional principles.
If there are to be written standards, media lawyers will argue for the bare minimum. The law imposes an extra penalty on loftier expression of ideals; indeed, it has eliminated its own.
This underscores a deeper philosophical concern for a negligence system that encourages the bare minimum of normative conduct and punishes the expression of higher aspirations. In so doing, the law impedes one mechanism — written codes of ethics — by which we can all seek to improve upon established standards of conduct.
For another view, see "The problem is in the writing."

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The problem is the writing

Monday, October 8th, 2007
The problem with ethics codes is not that lawyers misuse them, nor that jurors misunderstand them. The problem with codes is that journalists can’t seem to write them.
When journalists find themselves in court, something will instruct the jury and the court about how reasonable journalists act in simlar situations. Far better for that something to be a well-conceived and well-written code of ethics than the "disgruntled journalist or J-school professor" that George Rahdert warns us about.
We do have, in fact, a national news ethic. Television news simulations that aren’t labeled as such, reporters who lead their readers to believe that they are reporting from the scene of a story when they are not, and composite story subjects presented as bona-fide individuals are a few of the practices that have been widely condemned. National awards would be meaningless without agreement on what constitutes outstanding journalism.
But even if journalists can identify and agree upon some behaviors that they condone and others that they condemn, what emerges from most attempts to write codes is a confusing mix of the two against an overlay of conventional practices.
If the code writers can’t get it straight, how can jurors and lawyers be expected to separate the lofty ideals from the conventions of the business, or from the behaviors for which a journalist should be drawn and quartered? Why shouldn’t a juror be confused when the professional society’s code says one thing and the editor says, "But we have a different practice in our newsroom"?
National professional societies should confine their codes to description of the ideals and, in a separate section, the usual practices of the profession. News organizations should describe, in their codes and statements of company policy, the minimal expectations for staff and discuss how in-house conventional practices differ from the national norms.
The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists provides a case in point for the current state of confusion. The Code includes, as it should, ideal standards for which all virtuous journalists strive, with statements like "Truth is our ultimate goal."
And, "Objectivity in reporting the news is another goal that serves as the mark of an experienced professional. It is a standard of performance toward which we strive. We honor those who achieve it."
However, the next sentence in the SPJ Code seems different. It says, "There is no excuse for inaccuracies or lack of thoroughness."
Now, how is one to make sense of that? It reads like a minimal standard, comparable to the ABA’s Disciplinary Rules.
But would we want journalists held accountable for every inaccuracy or lack of thoroughness?
Which news story is "thorough"? How can it be when news itself is a snapshot of evolving truth?
No excuse for inaccuracy? How about the mistake in the police report? How about the lying source who has been trustworthy and truthful for months? What about the misunderstanding with the copy desk that results in a pivotal paragraph being dropped?
Maybe this is neither an ideal nor a minimal standard, but a description of the way journalists usually act. If so, it should read something like this: Within the recognized constraint of deadline, journalists do everyhing within their ability to provide stories that are both accurate and complete.
A minimal standard should be expressed this way: There is no excuse for lazy reporting.
When truth, objectivity and no excuse for inaccuracy appear in the same section of the code, it makes sense that they might be treated alike. With no differentiation between kinds of standards, it is just as likely as not that a juror will think they are all enforceable.
A useful code is one that clearly outlines the minimal expectation, specifies that other goals are ones that most mortal journalists can only hope to approximate, and states that still others are conventional practices that are followed, all things being equal (but set aside with adequate justification).
If clearly-labeled ideals and conventions are misused in the courtroom, then the problem is with the quality of the news organization’s legal representation and not with the code. Being "outlawyered" can happen at least as easily with expert witnesses as with well-written codes.
If the written minimal standards come back to haunt the news organization that fails to live up to them, so they should. The public nature of journalistic misadventures means that ethical breakdown in one organization raises questions of credibility for all.
For another view, see "Written rules can be hazardous."

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Overdraft on credibility?

Monday, October 8th, 2007
On Jan. 1, Rhode Island’s $3 billion credit union industry melted down to zero. Very quickly and with little warning, the credit union crisis touched more than a third of the state’s million residents in an intensely personal place, their bank accounts. And it forced many Journal-Bulletin editors and reporters, including myself, to re-examine the extent of our community involvement and where we should draw the line between private affairs and journalistic responsibility.
The turmoil began with an alleged embezzlement from a single bank. The $13 million hole led to a financial crisis that closed 45 financial institutions. Among those shutout of their banks were the 1,600 shareholders of the Journal Employees Credit Union, every one of them a newspaper employee, with some $3.5 million on deposit.
But by mid-January, the newspaper credit union rescued itself by winning federal deposit insurance. The move got scores of reporters off the ethical hook since they no longer had deposits that would be affected by governmental plans to rescue the closed credit unions.
However, some reporters, including myself, also had accounts at other credit unions that remained closed. The newspaper’s management never polled any of its reporters or editors, including those covering the crisis, about whether we had accounts in the still-closed credit unions. Instead, they relied on individuals to raise the issue independently.
Before I wrote my first credit union story, I did just that.
I told my editors about how I had opened an account at East Providence Credit Union last year after hearing rumors of insider loans and other questionable management practices there. My supervisor, Karen Maguire, and I had agreed that the best way to get access to inside information was to become a member.
Three months before any hint of the impending banking collapse, I moved some of my personal savings from the Journal Employees Credit Union to the East Providence Credit Union. On New Year’s Eve, I had not yet written a single story about East Providence Credit Union. But that was soon to change.
When the crash came on New Year’s Day, I reminded Maguire of my account. I also discussed the potential conflict of interest with our ranking editor, Andrew Burkhardt. We all agreed that my account was indistinguishable from the 30,000 other accounts at East Providence Credit Union, and that it would not affect my coverage of the credit union. As a precaution, I decided not to vote on any shareholder ballots at the credit union. I also told the credit union president that I had an account with his institution.
Neither I nor my editors considered adding a note to my stories telling readers of my savings account in the credit union. The newspaper does not have a tradition of such self-disclosure and it did not occur to us that such a note might be warranted.
Two months into the credit union crisis, and many stories later, I thought my ethical concerns were over. That was, until a debate about journalistic ethics sprung up in CritQ, the newspaper’s electronic in-house forum for newsroom employees. Several colleagues accused me of a conflict of interest, saying I had a direct financial stake in the resolution of the credit union’s fate and therefore should not be writing about it.
I responded that I did not believe my account at the credit union had influenced my writing and that my editors agreed and had been fully informed. Nevertheless, the criticisms from my colleagues shook my confidence.
In the week following the CritQ debate, I again raised the issue of my potential conflict of interest with my supervisor, asking whether I should stop writing about East Providence Credit Union in light of the allegations. She said absolutely not, reiterating her belief that there was no conflict. She also said my knowledge of the history of East Providence Credit Union and its ties to the state political leadership was too valuable to the newspaper and its readers for me to disqualify myself. In this case, she said, the public interest in the news outweighed a marginal consideration of conflict.
Since that discussion, I have written many more credit union stories and there have been no further submissions in CritQ about me. Even so, I remain acutely aware that some of my colleagues may be looking over my shoulder, trying to detect the slightest hint of bias.
In retrospect, I still believe journalists should not be forced to stuff money in their mattresses and that it was important for a reporter to open an account at East Providence Credit Union. There was legitimate news interest in creating the relationship. Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, I would have opened only a nominal account, say $25, rather than $1,000.
But the fact remains, if my editors had removed me from covering East Providence Credit Union, they also would have been forced to remove half the staff from covering the initial days of the crisis. There were just too many of these financial relationships with all the closed credit unions, including the newspaper ’s own employees’ credit union.
And then, surely, the public’s interest in getting the news would have been sacrificed on the altar of ethical purity.

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Not friendly fire

Monday, October 8th, 2007
Who is Al Berman, and why is he saying all those nasty things ahout me? Al Berman is a CBS senior producer for the "popular" late-night news show "America Tonight" which airs on some CBS affiliates. It was Berman who called WJBK the day before Halloween which many refer to in Detroit as "Devil’s Night." This is a night where for the past 15-20 years hard-core young thugs set fire to abandoned buildings and cars throughout the city.
When I was a kid growing up in Motown, this was a night reserved for dumping over garbage cans on people’s lawns and perhaps ringing doorbells and running away before the resident could answer. Alas, times have changed. Now let’s get back to Berman and the ensuing controversy.
When Berman called, he requested I provide a reporter to do a live shot for "America Tonight." Berman asked for a story about the fires. I told him we would be glad to help, but I was quick to point out that while the problem still existed, it was not nearly as bad as it had been in the mid-’80s. Undeterred, Berman said, "Yeah, I know, but I need a story on the fires."
I explained we would help out, but the piece I was willing to provide would have balance. You know, all the good stuff about neighborhood patrols chipping in to help curtail the problem. Berman said there was no time for such a lengthy piece.
No time for balance? Was this really CBS News talking? OK, I thought, how about two stories, one on the fires and the other on how most folks were doing their part to assure that things did not get out of control: neighborhood patrols, extra police, block parties for would-be wayward kids? In other words, the other side of the story. Berman said there would be no time for such a thing. After all, this is a network news program, and 2:00 for one piece was about all they could handle.
By now it’s getting late in the afternoon, and I’m talking to this producer for what seems like the fifth time. (It was only the third.) I tell him, "Look, pal, either you take the piece with balance, or I don’t give you the story."
Berman has led some to believe that I threatened to deny videotape of the fires to the network because I was concerned about the image of the city. I am concerned about the image of the city. But at no time did I withhold or threaten to withhold raw tape of the fires. We are a CBS affiliate, and we provided any and all tape they requested. My point was — and remains — I will not put a reporter of mine on national TV with a story I would be ashamed to put on my station.
The story is far from over. Eventually, Mr. Berman calls me back and says, "OK, I’ll take the story with the balance, but it has to be kept short." I commend him on his ethics, but as I am preparing to leave for the evening, I tell my managing editor that I don’t completely trust Berman, and I warn against an end run.
Now all of you are going to be shocked, but literally 30 minutes after I left the station, Berman called Managing Editor Nelson Burg and requested you know what. Burg had orders from me to tell Berman and "America Tonight" there would be no piece if there was any attempted chicanery. Berman was livid and was apparently left with a big hole in his show. Too bad!
It is now almost three months after the incident with "America Tonight," and Berman continues to refer to me as a hack, lacking ethics, and a shill for the city of Detroit. Berman says we would not provide the story because Mayor Coleman Young asked the media to go easy on the city. I invite anyone who reads this article to call the mayor’s press secretary, Bob Berg. Ask him how much WJBK or any station in this town shills for the city.
With regard to the issue which has been raised as to whether it is a journalist’s role to be concerned with how his or her city is perceived — you’re damn right it is. How should this role be played out? Through reporting every story with balance. Report two, three, or four sides of a story when necessary.
Right now I am looking at one of our competitors in the market as they cover an anti-war rally on a college campus. They are providing two minutes to 60 people protesting the war. Nowhere in the piece is there anything about the fact that this small group represents an infinitesimal percent of the student body and that in fact there was a pro-war rally the same day on the same campus. Without the balance, the wrong image is conveyed.
In conclusion, the mayor’s office did ask the local media to call the day before Halloween anything but Devil’s Night. So what? Call it pre-Halloween fires, call it arson, call it string beans if you want to. The bottom line is that the facts were and always will be reported on this station. There is nothing wrong with looking out for the image of the city you live in if the only compromise you make is reporting the facts fairly.
Editor’s note: Al Berman, the CBS senior producer referred to in this article, had this response: "Mort Meisner’s account of events has little resemblance to the truth."
Berman said the report sent for their use was "not of network quality." He said he called WJBK’s managing editor to ask for a "better" report which he had seen by satellite, but was refused. He said this request had nothing to do with not wanting a balanced report.
Berman said there’s a larger issue of whether media in a town with an image problem should be "toning" down coverage at the request of the mayor’s office. "WJBK won’t even use the term ‘Devil’s Night,’" he said.

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When your newspaper is the news

Monday, October 8th, 2007
The strike has changed our coverage in several ways. Stories about the strike are now mostly written by management editors rather than Guild reporters because there aren’t any Guild reporters around. I don’t think it is possible to cover the strike totally without bias and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. I think our news stories about the events of the strike — the rallies, the utterances, the violence — have all been objective, as objective as the pre-strike news stories. What we have not done is the sidebars that the other newspapers have done — the big picture stories on the history of the newspaper, profiles of the union leadership and management people . . . There’s a practical reason for that. We find ourselves with most of our cityside staff outside of the building . . . It ought to be pointed out that there’s not a paper in the city that doesn’t have a conflict of interest, a vested interest, in covering the strike. NewsDay, in particular, is in competition with us for readers.
—by Jim Willse, editor, The New York Daily News
 
The St. Petersburg Times became the story when a publicity-shy investor, Robert Bass, tried an unwelcome takeover.
I initially heard about it at the time when Gene Patterson was retiring and we were opening a new building — so we delayed publication of the fact that these 200 shares of stock had changed hands. Frankly, we didn’t perceive it having so great importance. The result was, I read about it in the Tampa Tribune, which was difficult to my pride and extremely hard for the staff.
. . . We assigned an extremely able reporter, Susan Taylor Martin, to write a story on the occasion of a visit that Bob Bass paid. Susan wrote a first-class story which kind of got us back in the league. Then she wrote a long article on the history of the Times and the current situation which I delayed publication of for roughly six months based on my concern that publication would cause us to have more difficulty coming to an amicable settlement.
. . . On final settlement, one of the provisions was that I would say nothing about it other than what was in a rather lengthy press release worked out between lawyers. The net effect is that I have been unable, and am at this moment unable, to accurately characterize the nature of this deal. It would be easier if I worked in a role in which I could just say "Well, I’m only the publisher and everybody knows publishers don’t believe in reporting, anyway." Since I am editor, I have been forced to acknowledge that when you are fighting for the very existence of a publication which you care about, there are times when you have to say, "It is so much in the disinterest of the newspaper to publish an article at this time that we’re just going to delay publication." And if anybody asks, that’s what I’ll say I’ve done. And, that is a conflict and it isn’t clean and it is a problem — and I would do it again.
—by Andy Barnes, editor and CEO, The St. Petersburg Times
 
The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times reported on their own sale under difficult circumstances.
There is an acid test for the owners of newspapers and broadcast stations.
That test is the accessibility of information when they and their companies are the story. From my personal and very disappointing experience, the sale of The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times, WHAS and the other Bingham-owned properties revealed that the owners put detailed news coverage low on their list of priorities.
After the sale had been announced and investment bankers had moved in to manage the process, discussion turned to a "gag order" which would prevent family members and top management from talking to any reporter about the sale. The gag order contained many ironies. The platoon of lawyers, representing various members of the family, was exempt! But no provision was made for an exemption to the order when a buyer for one of the properties was announced. In fact, the very announcement of a new owner would have been a violation of the order. I was finally able to change that and also obtain a grudging exemption for a Courier-Journal reporter who was writing a Sunday Magazine article. In the end one of the lawyers even tried to suppress that article.
The whole fiasco was a humiliating finale for a family which had made its fortune by collecting and distributing the news. But when it came to the sale of our own companies, the right of employees and the public to know what was going on was no longer a priority. When we were put to the test of permitting full news coverage of ourselves, we deserved a failing grade.
—by Barry Bingham, Jr., publisher of FineLine, former editor and publisher of The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times
 
For another view, see "Like any other story."

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“Like any other story”

Monday, October 8th, 2007
From the start, my editors told me to treat the assignment "like any other story." But this was not like any other story.
It was the labor negotiations at my paper, The New York Daily News. At stake: the future of the newspaper where I’d worked for fifteen years.
Even before I wrote my first story on the negotiations, I knew the situation was likely to become ugly. By hiring the law firm of King and Ballow, a Nashville-based company with a national reputation for union-busting, News management had signaled its intention to take on the ten entrenched unions at the paper. The unions, no patsies, also had let it be known they would not bow down without a fight.
The lines were clearly drawn and I felt like the referee.
There is no denying the inherent conflict I faced even agreeing to the assignment. I am a member of the Newspaper Guild of New York, the union representing editorial employees. As such, I had a vested interest in the Guild achieving a good contract.
The metropolitan editor, Arthur Browne, didn’t want me to take the job, knowing the intense pressure I’d be under from both management and labor. He suggested the newspaper carry the wire service reports on negotiations. Editor Jim Willse overruled Browne and, when I agreed, the assignment was mine.
My instructions from editors were to follow the story wherever it went, whether it reflected badly on management or the unions. I took their advice.
At one point, I got a tip from a fellow reporter that the Tribune Company, which owns The Daily News, was asking reporters at its other papers in Chicago, Florida and Virginia, to fill in at The News should a strike take place. I called assistant editor Rich Rosen and, to his credit, he said, "Go for it."
The next day, The News ran a surreal story under my byline about my paper recruiting reporters to take our place in case of a strike. Reporters at The New York Post and The New York Times told me they were amazed that management had allowed me to write such a story. They were even more surprised that the story was given prominent space.
But not all my dealings with editors went so smoothly. Another time, the only way I could learn of The News‘ contract offer to the pressmen’s union was through a source who refused to be quoted by name. I wrote a story about the proposal using unnamed sources. Managing editor Matt Storin refused to allow the story into the paper.
I strenuously argued the point. The News often used unnamed source stories. I complained that The News had promised to treat the story like any other and now it was changing the ground rules. Storin relented and this story and ones similar to it eventually ran.
As the months passed, union leaders would leak me damaging information on management; News officials would leak me damaging information on the union. I never ran with the information unless it had thoroughly been corroborated by the other side.
I was convinced I was doing a fair job because both sides complained. The News spokesman was annoyed his quotes were being chopped while the union leaders claimed I had shortchanged them.
The greatest pressure for me came when I wrote stories involving my own union. It came to a climax in mid-March when The News offered the Guild an unheard-of 30 percent raise over three years, a contract that would have made us the highest-paid reporters in the country.
I knew what I thought immediately. Where do I sign? I was excited at the prospect of getting that kind of raise. Who wouldn’t be?
I called Guild president Barry Lipton to get his reaction. I’ll never forget his first words when I asked what he thought of the proposal: "Utterly retrogressive."
Lipton thought the contract was a horror because it affected job security, a change Lipton could not abide.
I took the temperature of the newsroom. The die-hard unionists hated it; others loved it. As the reporter who had to put it into the paper, I kept my opinion to myself.
On the morning of October 25, the end game between management and labor began. By the next night, nine unions at The News, including my own, went on strike. I earlier had asked Lipton for an exemption to continue working on the theory that the unions would get more balanced coverage from me than they would from the management people who would take over the coverage if I went on strike.
Lipton refused the exemption. This was no ordinary labor strike. When management began permanently replacing long-time union workers, it became a labor war.
I went on strike and the coverage, written mostly by management, immediately changed. The paper became a propaganda tool for management. (For another view, see "When your newspaper is the news.") The same day 13,000 union members protested outside The News building, the editors led the paper with a one-sided account of a blind newsstand dealer who’d been threatened by union drivers not to carry the paper. The dealer’s seeing-eye dog Lars was prominently featured.
On strike, I’ve had plenty of time to consider the way I handled the coverage. For anyone facing a similar assignment, I have this advice: Give both sides an equal chance to state their case, avoid analyses where opinion often creeps in, and make sure you have the backing of your editors. It also helps to have an iron stomach to ride out the tough periods when it seems everyone is against you.
For other views on this topic, see "When your newspaper is the news."

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The ties that bind

Monday, October 8th, 2007
In May 1989, editors at the Rochester (NY) Times-Union asked me to look into tips of financial waste at the local United Way. I knew I was headed into sensitive territory. After all, no cow is more sacred in Rochester than the United Way — one of the strongest chapters nationwide.
Virtually every mover and shaker in town sits on the organization’s hoard, from top banking executives to senior Eastman Kodak Co. officials to Vince Spezzano, then-publisher of the Times-Union and its sister Gannett newspaper, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.
So we knew a critical look at Rochester’s United Way would invite pressure from powerful forces to quash the story. We had heard that a local TV station had killed a similar story after its general manager — himself a United Way board member — was lobbied by a United Way volunteer who happened to be one of the station’s major advertisers.
Would we fare any better, particularly in light of Gannett Rochester Newspapers’ own close ties with United Way? And how would Spezzano handle the obvious conflict between his job as publisher and his position as a United Way board member?
I didn’t know the answers to these questions as I began my reporting. But I was encouraged by my editors’ enthusiasm; they had not flinched from pursuing the tips.
One of my first steps was to review our old United Way clips. I didn’t find much. Gannett Rochester Newspapers is one of United Way’s biggest corporate donors, and our United Way coverage consisted almost entirely of boosterish stories about the annual fundraising campaign. Editorials exhorted the public to give generously.
After weeks of interviewing United Way officials and pouring over budget documents and tax records, it was clear that the Times-Union had failed to report on fundamental changes inside the community’s premier social-service fund-raiser.
In short, United Way’s leaders had decided to pump millions more dollars into fund-raising expenses after enduring several disappointing carnpaigns. This meant spending more of every contribution on advertising, on courting wealthy donors, and on broadening the base of corporate support. United Way’s annual allocation to its own operating costs increased 61 percent in five years. It was a big change for an organization which prided itself on minimal overhead costs.
United Way officials were candid in discussing this shift in strategy. They were less eager to discuss the president’s $124,000 salary, free car and paid country club membership. Nor were they eager to discuss the lavish renovation of United Way’s headquarters which included a $3,700 sun patio, a $3,000 reception desk, $5,800 for 68 plants and another $135 a month for a firm to water the plants.
When I had finished most of my reporting, I met with editor Barbara Henry and other senior editors to present my findings. They were excited. We discussed story structure and length, possible sidebars and art. It was full steam ahead. I began to write.
We had heard from Henry that United Way board members and officials were lobbying Spezzano. Their chief concern was public reaction to the president’s salary and perquisites. They also were worried about reaction to the renovation expenses, particularly since United Way had been preaching sacrifice to donors and social service agencies. (We later learned that United Way had hired a pollster to gauge donors’ responses to our story.)
On the evening before publication, I went home to refresh myself with a nap. When I returned to finish writing, assistant city editor Kevin Ryan called me into a conference room. I could tell from the look on his face he had bad news. Henry had taken drafts of the stories to Spezzano, he told me. Now Spezzano was demanding deep cuts.
What had been planned as the paper’s lead story jumping to two full inside pages was relegated to a bottom corner of the front page and a single inside page. Those topics which United Way had been most concerned about — such as salaries, perks and renovation costs — were hardest hit by Spezzano’s cuts.
I pulled my byline from the story in protest. Word of what had happened spread quickly through the Times-Union and Democrat and Chronicle newsrooms. The Newspaper Guild filed a grievance accusing Spezzano of violating Gannett’s conflict-of-interest policy. About 60 reporters signed a petition demanding a meeting with Spezzano.
At the meeting, Spezzano denied that he acted in response to pressure from United Way. The published version of the story, he correctly pointed out, included a brief mention of the president’s salary and some of the renovation costs. In his judgment, the original drafts were unfair to United Way — a view which was not shared by several editors, including Barbara Henry.
As for Gannett’s conflict-of-interest policy, it simply did not and could not apply to the publisher, he said. The publisher has a civic and business obligation to participate in organizations like the United Way. At the same time, he said, the publisher must retain control over editorial content.
As it turned out, Spezzano’s intercession probably did more harm than good for United Way. The controversy over the cuts was picked up by other local news organizations, which kept the story alive longer and left United Way officials scurrying to do damage control.
But the big loser was the Times-Union. Readers questioned the paper’s independence, even though the paper partially redeemed itself with a couple of strong editorials critical of United Way’s spending practices. Still, there was no getting around the appearance that the newspaper’s ties to United Way had affected its coverage of the organization.
Editor’s note: Rochester Times-Union editor Barbara Henry said that while there was internal disagreement about the editing of Barstow’s United Way story, what appeared in the newspaper was anything but a "puff piece." Henry said that as a result of the Times-Union’s aggressive reporting and editorials, the United Way changed some of its practices.
For a related view, see "How now, sacred cow?"

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How now, sacred cow?

Monday, October 8th, 2007
United Way raised $2.98 billion in 1989. United Way of America estimates $45 million worth of advertising was donated during the televised NFL football games alone during that year. Spokesperson Cathy Jenkins said that media support would total "much, much more" if all donated public service mentions and news coverage were taken into account.
While I applaud United Way’s marketing successes, what are newsrooms doing donating staff and editorial space to the cause?
Of all the charities and non-profits that exist within a community, only United Way gets the benefits of widespread payroll deductions. Few fund drives involve reporters receiving pledge cards with their paychecks. Even fewer receive newsroom "volunteers" who follow up with colleagues, checking to ensure that everyone has "had the opportunity to give."
The special treatment United Way gets should raise questions in journalists’ minds about fairness. United Way is not the only fund-raising game in town, but it’s the only one that can depend on news staffs to boost its efforts.
The sheer magnitude of United Way’s efforts should also signal the need for special scrutiny. But that’s not likely to happen when news organizations are part of the corporate community that provides United Way its support. Often the newspaper’s publisher and television station manager are members of the local board. How do you ignore your boss’s favorite charity?
New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist and reporter James Gill agreed that investigative stories need to be done about United Way, but admits he is one of many who hasn’t done them. "We have a vague idea that we ought to do it someday," he said. "But, it’s not the kind of thing you get assigned by management."
The Times-Picayune runs a daily tally of United Way progress during its fall fund-raising drive, a weekly column in a zoned section on Sundays called "United Way at Work," and occasional stories in the metro section on the campaign. City editor Keith Woods said that United Way gets attention unlike any other charity because the newspaper hasn’t been asked for similar treatment by any other charity of that size.
Many other news organizations also do their part.
For example, The Charlotte Observer’s coverage of last fall’s United Way campaign was low-key until the local chapter said it might not make its fund-raising goal. Then the paper rallied to the cause.
During the last weeks of the campaign, The Observer ran stories with headlines that read, "United Way Troops Get Marching Orders" (10/19), "United Way Struggles To Meet Its Goal By Thursday Deadline" (10/23), "United Way Expected To Miss Its Goal By Thursday Deadline" (11/1), "99.1% Not Close Enough for United Way Crew, Challenge Continues" (11/2), "United Way Issues Plea For Support, Current Donors Asked to Increase Pledges" (11/6). [1]
Lisa Hammersly, city editor at The Observer, said the faltering campaign was news. "United Way has a record of making its goal," she said.
Scott Wharton, media relations associate for United Way of Central Carolina said they appreciated The Observer’s help. "We are obviously dependent on the press to tell the United Way story," he said. As a result of The Observer’s coverage, Wharton said new donors called in and others doubled their pledges.
It’s only on the editorial page that such community boosterism belongs, said David Johnston, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who pioneered critical coverage of non-profit organizations in the early ’80s.
"I read editorials and say this is United Way propaganda. If you want to write about them in the newsroom, then cover them like any other institution. Why should United Way be treated differently?"
It has been Johnston’s experience that there are many stories about United Way that don’t get written. "Typically," he said, "Boy Scouts gets twice as much money from United Way as Girl Scouts. Are Boy Scouts twice as good?"
Johnston suggested that news organizations check out which banks in the community house United Way funds and see what role officers from those banks have within the local United Way structure.
"United Way ought to be treated like every other institution in the community," Johnston said. But, the problem, he said, is larger than the United Way.
The non-profit sector is generally not covered with the kind of scrutiny used on other institutions in the community. "Reporters hear ‘charity’ and think that means ‘good,’" he said.
Now that the fall United Way campaign and the holiday season with its share of media-endorsed charities are out of the way, it’s time that newsrooms take a careful look at their own favored causes.
If a news organization endorses a fund-raiser, whether it is for an individual in need or the monolithic United Way, that news organization takes on a special obligation to tell people how that money their reporters helped raise is being spent.
Every story about social service agencies or non-profit organizations ought to tell readers how much of its funding comes from private philanthropy. Readers need to know how many of their United Way dollars are supporting that work. News stories at the time of campaign kick-offs should include mention of the problems of United Way and its agencies along with their successes and goals.
It’s not wrong for journalists to want to contribute to the community welfare, but they should do so in the privacy of their own checkbooks. Journalists can’t escape the appearance of a conflict of interests if they are raising funds for an organization they should be watching.
[1] Based on Vu-Text search
For a related view, see "The ties that bind."

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Family Ties

Monday, October 8th, 2007
It is a routine story - three teenagers and two adults are arrested on burglary and stolen goods charges.
The goods: $23,000 in computer equipment. The victim: Their high school.
What would your newspaper do? Probably run it, with all its twists. The youths used a stolen key to enter the school and one later tells the newspaper that the burglary started out as fun, but the sight of the computers made grand larceny "just too easy."
Among the suspects are the son of your newspaper’s general manager, the son of an elementary school principal in the same district as the burglarized school and the son of a state government division manager.
Now, what would your newspaper do? When are parents of criminal suspects newsworthy?
The State, a 150,000-circulation daily in Columbia, SC, ran the story. But the 16-paragraph description that I wrote became a six-paragraph brief devoid of family ties.
The identities of the parents were confirmed early in the day. The story was deemed "sensitive" and discussions began. The deputy metro editor, Leesa Marsh, wanted the link between the newspaper’s general manager, Sid Crim, and his son included despite the fact the son was 20 years old and did not live with his father.
"We make judgment calls almost every day about whether somebody is a public figure, and we’ve occasionally identified business executives as such," Marsh said. "When it comes to one of our own executives, we should be beyond reproach in our decision-making."
I believed, as did Marsh, that the link between the principal and her son should be included in the story, too. It is somewhat unusual when a principal’s 17-year-old son is accused of grand larceny against his school district. (In South Carolina, an adult is anyone 17 years old or older.)
Incident reports from the four break-ins and warrants were reviewed. The suspects were telephoned, and to our surprise, they described how they simply walked into the building and hauled away boxes of computers.
By 7 p.m., the story was complete. Metro desk editors edited the story and forwarded it to the copy desk.
The original lead read: "Deputies said they solved the case of a $23,000 theft from Spring Valley High School with the arrests of five people, including the sons of a school principal, a newspaper executive and a state government department head."
What appeared the next morning was a brief story stating that the thefts occurred and that five people had been arrested. The suspects were named, but their relationships were not. Nor were their comments about the crimes included.
Managing Editor Robert M. Hitt III made the decision to delete any references to parents and the suspects’ ties to the community.
"The simple guiding principal in my mind is not to brand the son with the sins of the father or vice-versa, unless there is an overriding news interest, " Hitt said. "There was no overriding news interest other than to hold up a principal, a state official and our general manager to ridicule for something that is not their fault. I find no fairness in that." He said he had no discussion with the newspaper’s general manager before make his decision.
Naming the parents would be acceptable, Hitt said, if the parents were highly placed in the community and the children were living at home, which the general manager’s son was not.
Hitt also noted that the youth who had the stolen key to the school was not the principal’s son - an angle, which had it been present, would have made more of a case for including parental ties.
I do not believe that the story was altered because of any pressure or connection with a newspaper executive. Yet I disagree with the decision because of the possible appearance of undue influence or special treatment. As the deputy metro editor put it, the newspaper must be "beyond reproach."
The State does not have any specific guidelines on using the names of parents of criminal suspects. But had the suspects been the products of impoverished, broken or violent homes, I believe that information would be included. If their mothers and fathers had been senators, police or judges, I believe that would be part of the story.
What many readers in Columbia did not learn was that youths from comfortable middle-class backgrounds were accused of theft. They did not learn that these youths had ironic ties to the community.
Had our readers known what we did, many would have been suspicious about the handling of the story. And, in a city the size of Columbia, many readers undoubtedly did know what we knew.

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Close to home

Monday, October 8th, 2007
It had all the elements crime reporters have come to love - sex, murder and a big name personality. But before this story was filed, we would come to learn more than we cared to about the human and professional costs of violence when it strikes close to home.
When the news staff at KIRO-TV got word of a double murder August 1, we had no idea one victim was a friend, colleague and relative. And we had no idea that we were about to become the focus of lead story news throughout the Northwest.
It’s something every reporter wonders about and even fears - being on the other side of the mic or notebook. What’s it like to be a principal source in a news story at the same time you are covering it?
It started with an early morning stakeout at the scene of a possible triple homicide. By 10 a.m. the medical examiner’s office had confirmed that veteran KIRO reporter Larry Sturholm was found stabbed to death in the home of a woman who was also murdered. A third person was hospitalized with self-inflicted knife wounds.
Larry’s brother Phil Sturholm is our executive editor, and he sat a few feet away from me as I got the news from the M.E. I found myself putting my own emotions on hold as I told Phil of the death of his brother and got on with the business of covering this major story. It would not be the last time that day that personal feelings took a back seat to getting the story.
As other members of the staff learned of the apparent double murder/suicide attempt, they began to speculate about the relationship between the three people. Some staffers who were close to Larry knew of his supposed romantic involvement with a woman who lived where the crimes were committed. And they knew of a jealous rival.
The love-triangle angle was especially hard for us. Many of us know Larry’s wife of 22 years. All of us work with his brother. For us to report on an affair between Larry and the female victim would cause the family even more pain. We were torn between doing the best job possible and protecting our friends.
No doubt those who worked closest with Larry and knew him personally were the first to suspect an "affair." Another station was the first to report it. Their reporter cited a vague source in the police department. That station’s decision to bring up the affair, forced us into action. Getting skunked made us more aggressive.
Phil urged us to vigorously pursue the story of his brother’s death, not to hold back. Phil’s urging helped all of us do what we knew, as journalists, had to be done.
Our field reporters, Brian Wood and Essex Porter, were quickly told that the victim was Larry. We wanted them to be able to begin coping with the loss of their friend before having to go on the air "live" with the news.
As word spread to the rest of the media, Wood and Porter were photographed by The Seattle Times as they covered their co-worker’s death. Their photo appeared on the front page of the evening paper in living color under a bold headline. Now the shoe was on the other foot. We were the "hook." We were the ones answering questions. We were the ones hounded by cameras and by phone calls.
One reporter complained that the caption on the picture presumed to know what he was thinking. We kidded him that this is what we do every day in our work. Clearly both reporters, and the newsroom in general, felt uncomfortable being the focus of media attention.
The decision was made to provide dubs of Larry’s work to the other TV stations requesting them. And we designated one of our anchors as a spokesperson for interviews. But we refused requests by other stations to come into our newsroom and videotape the grieving news staff at work.
None of us wanted to be taped. We were in shock yet still trying to do our jobs as journalists. Of course, we often ask the bereaved if we can come into their homes, shoot video, ask questions. Now that we’ve seen things from the other side, I think we’ll still ask, but we’ll be more understanding when the answer is "no."
However, we refused (and are still refusing) requests from the "tabloid" TV show "A Current Affair." They want our help in doing what they call a "tribute" to Larry. Knowing their work, we feel the focus will be on the love triangle, not on Larry’s legacy of feature reporting, his record-breaking number of Emmys, and the family and friends who loved him. While we recognize the need to cover the story as hard news, we hope to avoid sensationalizing the personal relationships among the two victims and the suspect.
The story took an enormous emotional toll on our staff. There were tears, quiet days and many trips to the local watering hole. We coped as journalists do: with black humor, cynicism and hard work.
At least one reporter on the police beat wants to get off crime coverage. Others say they’ll be more careful in their choice of words when describing crime scenes. Words like "brutal," "bloody" and "horrible" hurt a lot more when you know the victims.
Still, we know that we will have to continue to cover awful crimes. And to some extent that will involve using and exploiting the victim and the family of the victim. We wouldn’t do much differently in this case, and we probably won’t do much differently in the next. We may feel the pain of the family and friends a little bit more than we did in the past - now that we know how it feels to be on the other side of the microphone.

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The ethics of information selling

Monday, October 8th, 2007
Revenue and satisfied customers. Newspapers are looking for ways to increase both. One way news libraries are trying to contribute is by offering fee-based services to the public. They are also marketing their databases and repackaging information for sale.
After years of being closed to the public, except through the mail, the Miami Herald library started a telephone research service. It has received an enthusiastic response from the public and has realized a modest profit. It has also run into some ethical dilemmas we hadn’t anticipated.
For example, a man called the information line asking for any articles on Yahweh Ben Yahweh, the controversial leader of the Temple of Love, a Black Hebrew Israelite organization. The man paid $212 for the stories.
A few days later, a reporter who had done some major pieces on Yahweh was in the library talking about how the mayor had designated a Yahweh Ben Yahweh day. I mentioned to her that someone had just asked for all the Yahweh stories. She asked who. I told her and she said, "I think he’s with the FBI — maybe they are doing an investigation on him."
I immediately felt uncomfortable with having given the name of the person who had requested the information. Librarians are taught that information requests should be confidential. (Remember the brouhaha over the FBI’s request that librarians tell them who checked out certain books?)
On the other hand, as a news librarian with a finely-tuned news antenna, I felt bad I hadn’t passed on the lead to the reporter sooner so she could check it out. (Yahweh Ben Yahweh was arrested on several counts of murder a month later.)
Clearly, there was a conflict between the confidentiality of the client and feeding tips to the newsroom. We asked the newspaper’s lawyer for guidance. He counseled that we cannot guarantee information requests would remain confidential. If the newspaper coincidentally reported on a story someone had requested confidentially, it could put the paper in a difficult legal position. Bottom line, go ahead and pass along those tips.
Our managing editor decided that tips gleaned from public information requests should be passed along to the newsroom. If clients ask, I tell them I can’t promise confidentiality.
Librarians, as adjunct journalists, try to operate under the same ethical guidelines as our colleagues in the newsroom, including not crossing the line between observer and participator. I think we fell over that line in another case where an official from Miami Beach requested an extensive background search for articles on drugs in the workplace. We put together a package of information from a number of databases which included studies on drug testing, rehabilitation, and the impact of drugs on businesses.
A few days later a story appeared in the Herald. The lead: "By weaving in facts and figures about the dangers illegal drugs pose to the public, Miami Beach officials hope a proposed law to notify employers when their workers are arrested on drug charges will fall on the right side of the Constitution. ‘Beware the zealot that does his homework,’ said attorney . . . The new draft is stocked with references to studies and statistics that underscore the damage illegal drugs do to a community . . . ."
Those "studies and statistics" were gotten, in part, from the Herald. By providing this information, couldn’t we be perceived as taking part in policy-making?
Another situation came up that had potential for awkwardness but which does have a more clear-cut solution.
We got a call from the campaign manager of a local candidate. At first he asked for every story that had been done on his candidate’s opponent. When he heard how many stories there were (the opponent was the incumbent) and how much it would cost him to have all the articles printed, he asked that we go through and just pick out ones that reflected badly on the incumbent.
For more about this topic, see "Other views from librarians."
Clearly, making subjective decisions about the articles would be inappropriate. Had the incumbent heard his opponent dug up dirt on him with the help of the newspaper, the paper’s reputation for balanced reporting could have been hurt even though the incumbent could have asked for the same thing about his opponent.
The policy on this situation was easy. We will not do selections of articles on individuals but we will provide a list of citations and let the requester select the articles he wants.
Newspaper libraries considering getting into the public information business can expect situations to arise requiring a delicate balancing act between the needs of the clients and the needs of the newsroom. A lot of problems can be avoided from the outset by establishing guidelines which are known by the researchers, clients and newsroom.

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Other views from librarians

Monday, October 8th, 2007
My feeling is that when we sell service to the outside, we have ipso facto made a contract with that person that we will not divulge the subject of their information . . . If I had done a search for someone on the Times side, I would not have told someone on the Courier side I had done it. Looking at it from that standpoint, we owe the same protection to someone from the outside. I have called people at the (Lexington) Herald-Leader and asked them for something in the library. If they had told the newsroom, we would have lost our lead. And they didn’t. There’s an unspoken agreement that librarians do not divulge reference questions from patrons, no matter who the patron is.
I don’t go to the newsroom with tips about anything. I don’t feel I have the right to do that, especially if we are selling the information. That’s even worse, in my opinion. I don’t feel that there is a loyalty to the reporter unless he already knows something, he already has an inkling of something. At that point I would do everything but divulge the name to lead him in the right direction.
—Doris Batliner, chief librarian, The Courier-Journal, Louisville, KY
 
We intend to keep the information service away from the news operation. There will be a separate staff with nothing to do with the newsroom but it will be under the news library’s management. I think this will help us avoid some of these conflicts.
—Nancy Burris, library director, New Orleans Times-Picayune
(The Times-Picayune is in the process of establishing an information service desk.)
 
We have not set a firm policy yet and it is difficult. We really are betwixt and between here. We may be librarians but we’re also journalists. We are doing this as a business and we have to be fair to the client but, although I’m sure it wouldn’t be quite right, my instinct is to tell the reporter about possible tips.
As far as selecting articles, our policy is to send every article written. We will not make a selection — that is not ethical — though it does seem like a different situation if they just ask for good things like awards, positive news.
—Bob Isaacs, library director, Ft. Lauderdale News/Sun-Sentinel
 
We (news librarians) maintain confidentiality for requests from the newsroom. We should operate under the same tenets for people requesting information from the outside.
(On selection of articles) if someone were to call wanting research to support a particular point of view, you would have to negotiate with them. The fact is, we are not doing primary research, and if we are not making value judgements on the results that should eliminate any appearance of steering results.
–Anne Mintz, information services director, Forbes Inc., editor of Information Ethics, Concerns for Librarianship and the Information Industry
 
(Our reference service) Bee Search is separate from the editorial library although I am in charge of it so I guess it’s not all that separate. We do (keep information requests confidential). However, we’re not obligated to under our contract with the public. We just do out of a sense of propriety. Many of the people using our service are local politicians. They ask for information on their opponents.
We have found ourselves in a situation before in which the Bee Search librarian was talking to me about some requested information on a local utility by a councilman, and a reporter was in the library and immediately queried her as to what kind of information he was asking for. That’s when I interrupted and said we can’t give out that information . . . we have to protect them to a certain degree.
We will certainly give (clients) a copy of anything that has run in the newspaper, but if they’re asking us to do research for them, we don’t do that. We answer their questions (and) if their question is, "I’m looking for something specific that the Bee ran on so-and-so, I think it deals with his wife and a divorce," we’ll search for that.
(As far as sharing possible "tips" with the newsroom) if there’s any question, the Bee Search comes to me and then I make the decision. To date, nothing has been passed on, nothing’s been followed up as a story.
—George Schlukbier, library director, The Sacramento Bee
 
For the original article these views reference, see "The ethics of information selling."

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Building barriers

Thursday, October 4th, 2007
Some news organizations own pieces of downtown hotels, some help restore historical sites. Others revitalize areas near the newspaper offices or finance convention centers. It’s all part of being good corporate citizens, some publishers say.
This notion of corporate responsibility may please civic boosters, but when news organizations start handing over money to create the kind of community they want to see, they also create conflicts of interest and barriers which interfere with their reporters’ ability to do their jobs.
No matter how carefully guidelines are engineered to protect the reporting staff from influence, they can’t change the inherent conflict. Any guidelines to protect the reporter who’s covering the company just underscore the fact that this story is treated differently.
Publishers who argue for financial involvement say it’s not a problem.
Atlanta Journal and Constitution publisher Jay Smith said that he has little patience with newspaper folks who take on a "monastic role" in their communities. His paper became a stock holder in the underground Atlanta revitalization.
You take on the projects, Smith says, but be open about it with your readers.
Publisher Raymond Jansen said that the Hartford Courant’s involvement in the restoration of Busnell Park, the city’s centerpiece, should "not be any cause for concern on the part of someone covering the event." Courant reporters should cover it like any other company in town.
But they can’t.
Reporters can’t report on their bosses’ financial dealings without a vested interest any more than they could report dispassionately on their spouse’s fmancial dealings. There’s a conflict there that’s enhanced in companies where reporters hold shares of the stock. Now they, themselves, are the owners on whom they are reporting. Being open with the public about the company’s financial involvements doesn’t change the fact that they ought not be there in the first place. And now that your audience knows that your business coverage isn’t objective, what should it do? Read the alternative weeklies? Turn to competitors’ coverage? These are luxuries that many communities don’t have.
Stories about in-house financial concerns often get special handling which only compounds the problem.
Take accuracy, for example. Everyone thinks that every story should be accurate, but publishers get especially nervous about company stories.
"If you can’t get it right about yourself, how can you get it correct about someone else," asks Minneapolis Star-Tribune publisher Roger Parkinson.
So, at the Star-Tribune, stories about the company are read by top management, a process endorsed by business editor Larry Werner.
"The public does notice when we say we got stories wrong about the Star-Trib," he said. "Our product is credibility."
But those additional layers of editing bring "accompanying layers of frustration," said Star-Tribune writer Dan Wascoe. And they put the reporter on notice that this story will be handled differently from the rest. What one person calls a slight change to enhance readers’ understanding, another may call bias.
The gloves go on with company stories long before they are edited. With other stories, reporters are expected to go with what they can find, however and whenever they can find it. But with stories dealing with company financial involvement, reporters are put in the strange situation of having too much access: Information heard in-house is often off-limits.
Star- Trib’s Larry Werner explains, "We might find out about some special financial problems or opportunities because we work in this building. We get information that other people outside might not. If we get information because we’re employees, we try not to treat that information as the basis for pursuing a story."
Reporters have got to refrain from going with their special information if management is going to be open with the staff, said Parkinson. "Otherwise, you force me back into a shell," he said.
At the Providence-Journal, a shop which lacks such strict policies, writer John Castellucci says he still worries about how this reporting stacks up against his other newspaper work.
"I’m not sure if I’m being tougher than I would normally be or more lenient," he said. "When it’s in the family, you’re not sure what’s going on subconsciously."
You can’t get around the problems of reporting on yourself. Period. Publishers who believe they can are deluding themselves. The inherent conflict of interest is unfair to the reporters who must cover stories in which their companies are involved — and to the community which gets the sanitized, company-approved version of events.
For news organizations, being a good corporate citizen means you report on change. You don’t create it.

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Brewing controversy

Thursday, October 4th, 2007
Should journalists do commercials?
"No!" said a chorus of critics after Linda Ellerbee’s recent debut in Maxwell House coffee commercials. Ellerbee, a former network news reporter, host of TV magazine programs, and now a commentator for CNN, said she "knew there would be criticism" but had been surprised by "the nasty tone and the ignorance."
Ellerbee is frank about her motive for doing the commercials: She needed money for her Lucky Duck Productions. But she got only $300,000, she said, not the $550,000 widely reported.
Whatever the amount, her critics would have her wake up and smell the ethical coffee.
"This is advertising news disguised as NBC news," declared Bob Garfield in Advertising Age. "It is misleading. It is cheap. It is wrong." He was one of the critics of the Maxwell House set, which he said was "such as you’d find on a network news magazine show, three of which were hosted over the years by one Linda Ellerbee."
Garfield was troubled by "the problem that comes when news personalities begin redeeming their celebrity for cash and other valuable prizes. The lecture circuit and book lists are clogged with names of network correspondents past and present."
For Garfield, "The issue is even more ambiguous when it comes to ex-news personalities." If Walter Cronkite "donned an eye patch for a Hathaway shirt ad, I don’t think anybody would begrudge him his fee," Garfield wrote. "But if he sat at an anchor desk with ‘important news about bladder control,’ you would hear howls. . . . Why? Because shilling for a product is one thing and trading on journalistic credentials is another."
Ed Siegel of The Boston Globe, recalling Ellerbee as "the iconette of integrity in broadcast journalism," was among the unhappy. "Now she sits there shilling for Maxwell House coffee. She can make fun of network news all she wants, but when’s the last time you saw Connie Chung hawking somebody else’s product . . . "
Barbara Lippert, who critiques advertising for Adweek, described herself as "such a fan of Linda Ellerbee" and recalled that Ellerbee’s "television essays regularly took on media hypocrisy." Lippert asked: "If Ellerbee really needed the money, then why couldn’t she have insisted on a script that didn’t completely compromise her integrity and credibility as a newswoman by putting her in this fake news setting?"
It wasn’t a news set clone, Ellerbee tells questioners: The Maxwell House set, at her insistence, had been made to resemble a talk show set, not a news set. "I did not sit at an anchor desk," she has emphasized.
Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times is one critic who did not view Ellerbee’s venture as black or white.
"Ellerbee is in that gray area occupied by quasi-journalists still thought of as full-time journalists and consulted about journalistic issues," Rosenberg wrote. "No longer regularly employed by a news organization (as she once was by NBC and ABC), however, she’s ethically free to do what she wants.
"The problem is one of form . . . Ellerbee doing a commercial here sounds a great deal like Ellerbee doing a commentary (a la Paul Harvey juxtaposing the two on radio). And when commercial and commentary run in reasonably close proximity on CNN - as they sometimes do - there’s a real potential for confusion."
Ellerbee has said she doesn’t think viewers were confused, only the critics.
But what about the money, and would she do commercials again?
"Given the same choices again, I would still do it," she declared.
Other choices, she said, were to give up her production company, which had lost money, lose control of it by taking on venture capital, or accept a syndication company’s offer to do a daily talk show on TV.
Talk shows, Ellerbee said "are far more sleazy" than what she did.
Doing the commercial was "a far more honest" choice, she said.
But should journalists do commercials?
"I think journalists should not do commercials," Ellerbee said. "People who cover the news should not do commercials."
But isn’t she a journalist (she has described herself as a "writer")? "I am not saying I am a journalist or that I’m not," she replied. Let others decide that question, she said.
"We’re talking about perception," she said, and perception is up to the viewer. "Do you think I could go out and cover a story about coffee? I’m still the same reporter I was."

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The Bee that roared

Thursday, October 4th, 2007
In the inaugural issue this January of the Bullhead City (AZ) Bee, we stated in an editorial what readers could expect: There would be no sacred cows, no special favors for our subscribers, advertisers or friends.
It was pretty heady stuff for a new weekly operating out of a 1,000 square feet office on a shoestring budget. And within weeks, our editorial principles would be pitted against harsh financial reality.
The lead story in our April 12 edition told how incorrect information led to a firm owned by Don Laughlin getting a municipal bus contract. Don Laughlin is a multi-millionaire and namesake of Laughlin, Nevada, the gaming community directly across the Colorado River from Bullhead City. The business magnate’s many interests include the Riverside Resort and Casino, the Bee’s largest advertiser.
The day our paper hit the streets, we received a call from the Riverside Resort’s marketing department — our advertising contract was cancelled. No reason was offered. Another call minutes later informed us that this cancellation also affected advertising from two Arizona businesses owned by Don Laughlin, a resort/restaurant and the Bullhead/Laughlin airport.
Before the week ended, we were told our news racks had been pulled at these two sites, that our newspapers sold inside the Riverside Resort were no longer welcome, and that the work of a featured columnist, who also worked for Laughlin, would no longer appear in our newspaper.
Past experience at other Bullhead City publications had taught us that some major advertisers, including the Riverside Resort, felt they could control editorial content by virtue of the size of their accounts. In my previous editor’s job, the Riverside Resort cancelled advertising on at least five occasions in as many years and its manager sought to have reporters fired for stories he didn’t like. The Bee’s publisher Thom McGraham had faced similar squeeze plays. The desire to be free from advertisers’ whims, to be able to do any story we wanted, had been among the reasons we’d started the newspaper.
In meetings that sometimes included our small staff, we considered our options: We could apologize to the Riverside, thus possibly cutting a minimum $5,000 per month advertising loss. A second option was to simply ignore the Riverside’s actions, in hopes that after a "cooling off" period, they would come back to us. But, the majority decision was to write an editorial, letting the community know what had happened.
Reaching this solution was not as simple as saying, "We have these options, let’s take a vote and pick the best one." First, the publisher and editor are not merely employees, we are co-owners of the Bee and have to look out for its financial future. Painful as it was to admit, the Riverside account actually could keep our business solvent.
But if we did back off from the casino, if we abandoned our journalistic standards, our highly-principled staff would likely take a walk. Reporters George Ziemann and Susan Alfred were angry to the point where they were willing to place their jobs on the line.
Knowing that it could spell financial disaster, we published an editorial: "The truth, we remind, is not for sale." It restated the Bee’s editorial independence and called the Riverside to task for trying to control the news.
Staff members, some of whom had seen Riverside’s tactics before, lobbied to get their thoughts included. We had to be cautious to act with our heads, not our hearts.
The completed editorial read, in part:
"The ads of a regular advertiser, Don Laughlin’s Riverside Resort Hotel and Casino, which have been with us since our first issue, do not appear in the Bee this week.
"We knew it would happen, we just didn’t know when. Media manipulation — certain advertisers squelching unfavorable stories by pulling their ads or by threatening to do so — has been a Bullhead City staple for years. To our knowledge as long-time media personnel in this town, not once has any member of the media used its voice to speak out against the tactics used to color the truth with a U.S. mint shade of green.
"Until now."
The Riverside Casino manager’s response — a begrudging acknowledgment that the cancellation of the ads related to the story — was included in the editorial.
Reader reaction to the editorial was resoundingly supportive. One reader wondered why "the ivory towers from across the river hadn’t been dismantled long ago."
This initial reaction from the community prompted a sigh of relief from the Bee, but it didn’t last for long. We now must deal with the long-range effects of our actions.
We are fully aware that our editorial will forever alter the way the public perceives the newspaper. When we need to report on the casino again, will our readers believe that we can still be objective?
We also fear a "ripple effect" from other advertisers, some of whom have already cancelled or cut back on their advertising. The lost revenue already has the newspaper scrambling to avoid its demise.
Even with these concerns, we would not handle the situation differently. If we had catered to our advertiser’s demands, we would not be able to live with ourselves.

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Author! Author!

Thursday, October 4th, 2007
While writing a book, New York Times reporter Richard Severo found new information on the government’s cover-up of Agent Orange. Although the discovery was made on his own time, he offered the fresh news to the Times.
"It was awkward for me to write something that might make a big splash without it being in the Times," Severo said.
But, because he wanted to protect the book material, he held on to it until the book was finished.
Reporters who write books or freelance pieces struggle with what they owe their employers. News organizations struggle with what rights they have to control staffers’ off-hours work.
Even when staff and management agree on what the policy should be, problems almost always arise. And the problems multiply as the budding authors become more prolific.
Bob Woodward’s practice of writing books while collecting a full-time salary from The Washington Post has resulted in off-the-record accusations at the Post and elsewhere that he gets special treatment. Arguments over rights to material in reporter Severo’s first book, Lisa H, lasted for seven years and resulted in what Severo called an unfair transfer from science reporting to metro.
In theory, management wants to like reporters’ extracurricular success. But, in practice, many news organizations prefer monogamy. Or so it seems to their staff.
For example, Business Week Assistant Managing Editor Jack Dierdorff said that non-competitive after-hours projects are fine as long as the staffers "continue to make significant contributions to the magazine." But Business Week Senior Writer Chris Welles says that while freelancing is not forbidden at the magazine, it is "discouraged." His impression is that management accepts staffers’ book writing as a "necessary evil." Management fears that outside writing diverts people’s time from what they should be doing, he said.
The sticky issues will be a little different in each situation, but some things can be worked out before someone’s ego or book contract is at stake.

* Does the news organization have a right to know when a reporter has an after-hours project in the works?

Of course. If the book is a spin-off of reporting done for the paper, the reporter has a moral, and often a legal obligation to clear the use of the materials, outtakes as well as the pieces that appeared in print.
Even if the project is entirely separate from the reporter’s beat, management has an interest. Unless the work is produced under a pseudonym or without identifying the author’s regular occupation, reporter-authors should consider how the extracurricular activity will reflect on the news organization. And their own careers.

* Does the news organization have a right to say no?

Sometimes. Other times, management may need to reassign the reporter.
Coauthoring celebrity books and similar PR work is out of line for journalists, although exceptions may be made for private individuals who are not likely to receive continuing journalistic attention.
But what do you do when a reporter wants to express in a book the considered opinion she developed while working as a reporter? The issue of position advocacy is more difficult.
The key is what happens to the reporter’s and news organization’s credibility. There’s a difference between a reporter-author reaching a conclusion that annoys people and writing a diatribe, said Carolyn Lee, assistant managing editor of The New York Times. "If the reporter reported and quoted critical material that leads readers to their own conclusions and the subject of the book said, ‘this is unwarranted,’ this would not cause us to remove him from the beat."
When it comes to the credibility of their beat reporter, management has a right to decide if the reporter-turned-author has soiled his nest. Life is a lot easier if the news is no longer fresh.
Minneapolis Star & Tribune reporters David Hage and Paula Lauda coauthored No Retreat, No Surrender — Labor’s War at Hormel after covering the Hormel strike. The book included "a great deal that had already appeared in the paper," Hage said. "Largely what we were doing was filling in the gaps."
Hage said that they were delighted with management’s support and Managing Editor Tim McGuire said that management was delighted with their book. "This one was very clean in that the strike was over, yet there was still some interest."
On-going news is different. The reporter who covers abortion cannot maintain her credibility if she writes a pro-choice book any more than she could if she marched in a pro-choice rally.

* How supportive can you expect a news organization to be?

It’s reasonable to expect news organizations to grant permission for reporter-authors to use material that they developed. Beyond that, management should make decisions on what is in the best interest of the news organization.
A short-staffed newsroom may not be able to grant leaves for book writing. Paid leaves aren’t appropriate unless the reporter is writing the book on behalf of the news organization, but accumulated comp time and schedule changes may allow for research that can’t be done after-hours.
A final problem that needs to be resolved is how to handle the book review. It’s unfair to ignore a book deserving notice just because it’s written by a staffer. But even if the book is panned, there will still be the appearance of conflict because the book was chosen over others for review. The damage can be minimized if the review includes a disclosure of the author’s connection and the newsroom’s support.
In return, management deserves no surprises when the book comes out. As long as the author is on the newsroom payroll, breaking news belongs in the news columns first.

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Family feud

Thursday, October 4th, 2007
It happens. Reporters and sources who share an interest in a story find that they share an interest in each other.
It used to be "unprofessional" for a journalist to fall in love with someone he might cover. He could have his career or his love, but not both.
But times have changed, the rules have changed. If the newsroom was cleared of everyone dating, married to, or living with a potential source, it would be close to empty.
So what should you do? Since the editor can’t tell the reporters’ spouses what they can do, is it justified in some cases to, in effect, "penalize" the employee?
Absolutely.
Journalists depend on the public’s trust to do their work. Their personal choices, and those of their partners, have an impact on their professional lives and the credibility of their news organization.
Even if only those reporters with the highest integrity were hired, those who could never be swayed, the audience would suspect that the reporters are as human as they are. The company has the dilemma of treating their highly-principled employees with respect and keeping the trust of an audience that suspects the worst.
The traditional way of resolving the conflict — assigning the reporter to another beat — isn’t the cure-all it used to be. Today, stories on even the most isolated beats, such as religion or sports, are entwined with business and politics. And, if it’s not the life’s partner writing the story, it’s likely to be the tennis partner.
The news organization has to trust the professionalism of its staff when it comes to coverage of people with whom they have social contact. But when a staffer’s love interest becomes a newsmaker or newsbroker, the company is obliged to ask some questions: Why doesn’t this constitute a conflict of interests? How are you and your partner working to avoid professional conflicts? How can the newsroom maintain credibility despite the appearance of a conflict?
Journalists expect other career-minded couples to make compromises and expect other professions to regulate their own. They should require no less of themselves.
Imagine the indignant write-up if a lawyer were to try a case before a judge who was also his wife. Who would blame GM for not hiring that bright young engineer who is married to the R & D genius that Ford brought to town?
Two-profession couples have never had an easy time of reconciling love and careers. More than one spouse has turned down out-of-town advancement because doing so would disrupt his partner’s work. When in-town careers conflict, individual aspirations may need to give way to a partner’s professional life.
When it’s a question of whether the company or the staffer has to bend, general rules can apply. (More on that later.) These rules should be for everyone from those in the executive offices to those on the night copy desk.
Do any of these situations sound familiar? The publisher is getting calluses from sitting on every civic board in town, but the metro editor is forbidden to work for a library tax. Your station’s general manager regularly editorializes in support of his wife’s pet project, but the assignment editor can’t fundraise for his daughter’s school. No one suggests that the popular TV anchor should be taken off the air when her husband runs for office, but the education reporter gets pulled from his beat because his fiancee is a deputy school superintendent.
How dare a news organization hold that the publisher, GM, or talent can handle a tempting conflict but the reporter or someone lower in the pecking order cannot? There’s no known correlation between salary level or popularity and purity of heart. If one representative of the company is held to a particular standard, it must apply to all.
If the "real" problem with conflict of interests is how things appear to the audience, management must know that the public doesn’t separate the publisher from the reporter, the general manager from an assignment editor.
So which relationships should be of concern? Only those that would prevent news staffers from carrying out their watchdog role over a significant decision maker.
The mayor’s husband does not belong in the newsroom, nor does the love interest of the town’s major employer. But, these outright conflicts probably exist with only a handful of people. Most spouses or friends can be active and vocal in community affairs without posing a threat to the reputation of the journalist or the newsroom he works in.
The audience may need to be convinced, however. Full disclosure and plans for resolving the conflict should be shared with the public. Better to let the audience in on the complexity of the issue before it erupts into a public relations nightmare.
It’s a safe bet that a higher percentage of news staffers than news organizations would be willing to withstand this sort of scrutiny. How many news organizations are connected, if not by love then by money, to the institutions they profess to watch?
For another view, see "All in the family: When a journalist’s spouse creates a conflict of interests."

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All in the family

Thursday, October 4th, 2007
When my wife, Susan, confided that she wanted to run for the Austin City Council this spring, I didn’ t know whether to cheer her on or chew her out.
It took me about a minute to decide to cheer, even though I had a feeling that my employer, the Austin American-Statesman, was not going to take it well.
Susan had been active in community issues long before I met her in 1987 and married her a year later. As a City Hall reporter in 1987 and 1988, I had to stay away from a few issues in which she was involved. It had been easy to avoid conflicts because fellow reporters readily took on those stories. So I figured we could do the same thing if she were elected, especially since I had been a business writer at the paper for the past year and was not covering City Hall news.
I felt I had no right to restrict Susan because of my job. After all, journalists with mates in other professions were facing similar situations without apparent repercussions.
One local reporter, for example, has had to stay away from covering the University of Texas because his wife is on the school’s executive staff. Another reporter’s spouse is a public relations official for a major high-tech firm. The husband of American-Statesman Editor Maggie Balough has worked in local political campaigns and formerly was employed by the city of Austin. Even our publisher Roger Kintzel has seen nothing wrong with his dual role as publisher and as 1990 chairman of the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce.
When Susan formally announced, my supervisor, Michele Kay, the business editor, said she was worried about my status at the paper if Susan got elected. I said I thought we could avoid any conflicts, but if I saw a problem coming, I would inform her immediately.
The election campaign lasted five weeks with nightly forums, debates and precinct walks. I tried to stay out of the way, except to offer occasional advice, usually on little things like how to get her point across better at public meetings, and to chauffeur Susan around after she broke her toe.
On May 5, with only 15 percent of Austin’s voters going to the polls, Susan got the second highest number of votes in her race. This put Susan in a runoff.
At this point, Michele Kay informed me that Managing Editor David Lowery had voiced concern about my continuing as a business writer. I asked for a meeting with Kay, Lowery and Balough.
Lowery said he was worried about the "perception of a conflict" because the council is often involved in business issues. Keeping me out of a potential conflict would put undue pressure on Kay to juggle staff reporters, he said.
I understood his concerns and I believe he was genuinely trying to do what was best for the paper. But, we had avoided problems in the past and I felt we would continue to do so. There were plenty of stories to keep me busy and away from the council, I said.
Surely Balough would understand, I thought. I covered her husband when he was an assistant city attorney and later when, as a private attorney, he was hired by the city to represent Austin. At the time she was assistant managing editor.
Balough asked a question about my writing stories about local businesses. I took it to mean that she was questioning whether there were possible conflicts if I wrote about a business that may give Susan a political contribution. I acknowledged there could be a problem, but I felt any conflicts could be avoided. For one thing, most of her contributions were coming from friends and relatives. Also, records must be kept of campaign contributors and I figured I could check the list.
I did not mention Balough’s husband, but I did bring up Kintzel. Balough made it clear it was not a subject she wanted to discuss. Kintzel’s chamber connection had long been a sore point at the newspaper and some local weekly publications hammered regularly at Kintzel about it. Kintzel had strongly defended his position at the chamber, saying he had nothing to do directly with the paper’s editorial content.
Lowery made it clear that I had to leave the business desk. But what to do with me? I offered to take paid or unpaid leave until the campaign was over. Balough offered to move me to the lifestyle desk to write "how-to" features. I asked about an existing opening at the Capitol bureau covering state news. But Balough said the opening was not a priority. She left me to choose between features or vacation.
The more I thought about the features job, the madder I got. Features were OK, but I had been a hard news reporter for over 20 years. I decided to take vacation and volunteer for Susan’s campaign.
While away from work, I made up my mind to quit the newspaper whatever the election outcome. I was upset by what I believed was a double standard, one for me and another for company executives.
When the votes were counted, Susan was defeated. Her one regret, Susan said, was that she was responsible for me leaving my job. I held no such regrets.
In eight years with the newspaper, I had developed a good reputation in the community and among my peers. Neither my ethics nor my integrity had ever been questioned. I believe my record should have been taken into account.
Journalists often face situations where they must be trusted to do the right thing. With the increase in households with two professionals, editors and publishers are going to have to place a lot of trust in their employees. And, more importantly, editors and publishers must be in a position to set the highest standards themselves.
For another view, see "Family feud: Handling conflicts between journalists and partners."
Editor’s note: Austin American-Statesman Managing Editor David Lowery commented on this case, "We can’t simply ask our readers, ‘to trust us’ based on past experience and reputation. We must keep an arm’s length from the people we cover."

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Agreeing to disagree

Thursday, October 4th, 2007
It was the day after the Supreme Court had announced its decision on Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services, and our city beat reporter said she was attending a pro-choice vigil that night. The rally was at the office of a state assemblyman we usually didn’t cover.
"I wouldn’t do that," I said.
Like a lot of newsroom decisions, this was a seat-of-the-pants kind of thing. I didn’t think I had any legal grounds to keep her away, but my stomach knotted at the thought of someone seeing her there.
The assemblyman was a leader in the capital - someone we might cover in the future. I said her attendance might make it hard to assign her certain stories down the line.
That was the beginning of a standoff: She wanted to go, and I was dead-set against it. She didn’t think I could stop her, and I thought she was probably right.
The fact that she’d been invited by