Al Diamon
Copy Editor? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Copy Editor
A case of Original Irregular-itis: The sentence below came not from the oddly written weekly paper in Kingfield, but from the indifferently edited daily paper in Waterville. In an Aug. 11 Morning Sentinel story by Larry Grard, readers were informed that: “The Rangeley incident was not an isolated one, nor do law-enforcement officials believe one such event can be linked to another.”
Which leaves us with what other options?
A case of misplaced malice: I can understand why Lewiston Sun Journal executive editor Rex Rhoades is frustrated. Advertising revenues are down. Costs are up. The news hole keeps shrinking. And all around him, there are proclamations of the death of the print media.
But, in an Aug. 8 column, Rhoades chose a strange target for venting his anger.
He lashed out at the state’s public radio system.
“Maine Public Broadcasting repeats news from around Maine, but, 99 percent of the time, it doesn’t cover it,” he wrote. “Maine Public Broadcasting says it covers stories in depth in its numerous appeals for money … I gag every time I hear that.”
Rhoades makes the argument that virtually all the real reporting that goes on in the state is done by daily and weekly newspapers. All the lazy radio and TV stations do is wait for the Associated Press to send those stories over its wire service and regurgitate them.
He’s more or less correct. Most radio news is a rehash of what was in this morning’s papers. A lot of what makes it on TV news is a video version of what’s already been in print. Rarely does anyone in broadcasting add anything new and important to what’s already been covered by the newspapers.
Rhoades has a right to gripe.
But public radio is still a poor target. Its morning and evening news shows feature significant amounts of original reporting, sometimes on stories Maine papers haven’t covered, and other times on aspects of the news that were missed by the print media. Unlike the Sun Journal (and the Portland Press Herald, the Bangor Daily News and every other paper in the state), Maine Public Radio has a full-time reporter at the State House. Unlike the Sun Journal (and etc., etc.), that reporter is experienced in state politics and the legislative process, not somebody sent in for the day to try to sort out what’s going on.
While it’s true that public radio uses the AP wire for some of its news, Rhoades conveniently ignores the fact that the Sun Journal does, too. Its pages are filled with rewrites of stories that ran in the previous day’s Portland and Bangor papers. Like public broadcasting, the Sun Journal pays for this service because it’s impossible to be everywhere.
Rhoades has one more valid point: “If newspapers ever stop covering local news in Maine, it won’t get covered. Period. Not by [public radio] or anyone else.”
It’s true that a statewide radio network isn’t going to report on routine selectmen’s meetings in tiny towns across Maine. That’s not its job. It’s supposed to deal with issues and events that affect people all over the state. Local newspapers are supposed to handle the local news.
On those rare occasions when such coverage results in a story of importance, the Sun Journal shouldn’t begrudge its fellow subscribers to the AP wire if they want to spread that information to a wider audience. And it shouldn’t rip the only radio outlet with a substantial news staff because it’s not wasting its time hanging around places where nothing of statewide consequence is happening.
(Full disclosure: I worked for public radio for three years, departing in 1991 as a result of budget cuts.)
A case of oops: Speaking of news recycling, the Sun Journal did some of its own on its Web site on Aug, 10. No fewer than three stories that appeared on its home page were listed twice. What, nothing new to report? Maybe you should listen to the radio. (Props to “mediadog” on the As Maine Goes Web site for being the first to notice the repetition.)
A case of sorry: On Aug. 9, the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal ran an extensive correction of a story they originally published in March.
The article, which carried no byline, did a decent job of detailing what the paper did wrong – it reported a Winslow youth had pleaded guilty to a sex crime, when in reality the charges against him had been dropped – and how the mistake happened – the reporter (who’s not named) relied on a telephone call from the alleged victim’s mother that the youth had agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge. The reporter contacted the district attorney, but got no comment, because the defendant was 17, and juvenile proceedings are confidential by law. The paper made no attempt to reach the accused or his lawyer.
Executive editor Eric Conrad is quoted promising to better train journalists to prevent such errors in the future.
While Conrad is at it, he should add a couple of items to the agenda for that educational session. Here they are:
When running a correction, the readers deserve the whole story. This article doesn’t explain why the correction ran five months after the error was made. We might assume it had something to do with delicate negotiations over a possible libel suit, but we don’t know. Even if the paper agreed to keep those discussions secret, it should at least tell the public it had done so.
When correcting a grievous error, the paper should explain what consequences it suffered. Did it pay the wronged party a monetary settlement? Did it agree to let the wronged party’s lawyer review the correction story before it was published? Did that lawyer have the right to demand changes? Did it offer any other compensation, such as a guarantee to run an op-ed piece or feature story?
If this correction was the whole deal, it would be helpful to the readers to know that.
A case of a kinda, sorta explanation: In her Aug. 10 column in the Maine Sunday Telegram, editor Jeannine Guttman did something unusual. She actually tried to answer a question a lot of her readers, including me, had raised.
How could her struggling newspaper afford to send a sports reporter to cover the Olympics in Beijing when it was simultaneously laying off staff and cutting pages at home?
Here’s Guttman’s reply, which you’ll have to read here, because she doesn’t put her columns online, for reasons that escape me.
“This assignment was set in motion two years ago when we applied for credentials to these Summer Games,” she wrote. “As a part of that process, we paid substantial sums of money, up front, for hotel accommodations and other expenses. Given all the resources that we had sunk into this assignment and the powerful reader impact we knew this news coverage would have in Maine, we decided to go forward, sending sportswriter Mike Lowe to China.”
If “powerful reader impact” is created through original and insightful reporting, I have my doubts it’s going to happen. To date, Lowe has produced nothing that hasn’t been readily available elsewhere, with the exception of his personal musings on the weather, the proximity of his room to the events he’s scheduled to cover and his need for more sleep.
Sending this guy half-way around the world while claiming the Telegram/Press Herald can’t afford to staff a bureau in Augusta on a regular basis strains credibility past the breaking point.
Al Diamon can be e-mailed at aldiamon@herniahill.net.
Posted on Monday, August 11, 2008 in Permalink
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Reader Comments:
If they only had one seat, why didn't they send someone who can write. Enough of this Ugly American stuff about cute Chinese words found in phrase books, and condescend comments of how many Chinese people are spotted riding bicycles. Racist, too. Go to Holland and you find see human beings riding bicycles, too
Guttman's column is posted online; you must click the "Insight" link. You'll find a few comments pondering the same question.
Eric Conrad, editor of the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal, takes issue with a couple of items above.
Conrad sent me an e-mail in which he says the papers did not wait five months to correct the error in the story about the Winslow youth. "We corrected that twice, within days," Conrad wrote. "I'd be happy to mail you the newspapers
that contain the printed corrections."
I e-mailed back and asked if the corrections were posted online and if so, to send me the URLs. To date, I've received no response. A Google search I conducted before writing the above posting turned up no corrections. This leaves me with more questions than before.
If the story was corrected -- twice -- right after the error occurred, why was another correction run five months later?
Why aren't the original corrections online, or, if they are online, why don't they show up in a standard search?
What's really going on here?
Conrad also takes issue with my comment in another item above that his newspapers don't have a full-time State House reporter. Here's what he wrote:
"Susan Cover of our newspapers still covers the Statehouse full-time from the Statehouse. She's filled in as city editor for six weeks this summer, a cross-training opportunity that she requested. But that was never permanent. She is a full-time Statehouse reporter who will be back there Monday. It is patently false to say we do not have a full-time
Statehouse reporter, per se. Please correct this."
Which raises this question: What part of "full-time" doesn't Conrad understand?
Al Diamon
"Unlike the Sun Journal (and the Portland Press Herald, the Bangor Daily News and every other paper in the state), Maine Public Radio has a full-time reporter at the State House. Unlike the Sun Journal (and etc., etc.), that reporter is experienced in state politics and the legislative process, not somebody sent in for the day to try to sort out what’s going on."
Wrong, Al. There might be fewer reporters covering the Legislature than years past, but saying that daily newspapers in Maine now lack any full-time reporters monitoring the State House is plainly incorrect.
The Sun Journal - where I work - has a full-time political reporter, Rebekah Metzler. She is not "somebody sent in for the day," as you say above.
The insinuation is that the daily newspapers have abandoned the State House, and when it is covered, it is covered by staffers with no knowledge of state politics or the legislative process. This just isn't true.
Your criticism is about semantics. Yes, the Sun Journal doesn't have a full-time reporter lodged inside the State House, like MBPN, who has one of the best. But we do have a reporter whose full-time job is covering the Legislature.
It is wrong to suggest otherwise.
The disagreement of what constitutes state house coverage, as it lobs back and forth in the above, is a matter of semantics. The point, however, goes well beyond semantics.
Newspaper editors may endeavor to be like MBPN - or the lone wolf freelancing wonder Victoria Wallack and her State House News Service — and staff the state house halls daily, but declining revenue has made such staffing (and outfitting with a state house office) a luxury. Sending someone from base camp to Augusta during the legislative sessions is about all the budgetary wiggle room left for many newsrooms, or so it would seem.
To Al's point, however, the state house requires the type of on-the-ground coverage Wallack and MPBN give. (It's coverage that will return to the KJ next week as Susan Cover returns from a temp assignment at KJ headquarters, according to her exec. ed., Eric Conrad.)
As someone who once edited Wallack, I can attest that she was on the pulse of the stories coming from Augusta, more often than not scooping her peers at the dailies.
How could the weeklies scoop the daily giants using a freelancer? When your freelancer has an office on state grounds, and shows up — in session or out — the reporting is sure to follow. Wallack gave (and gives) the smaller weeklies a credible set of eyes in Augusta and something for the dailies to chase. (Look back to see which reporter began to unravel the computer errors that plagued DHHS and other top Augusta stories and you will see a Wallack byline early in the mix. Brava.) Her secret? She shows up, follows her instinct and gets it right — every day, time and again.
She was (and, I suspect, remains) invaluable and trusted by both sides of the aisle, in no small measure because she was seen, known, trusted. She could get comments where others fell flat. Credible. Ahead of the crowd. Accurate. Balanced. If the weeklies can have that type of coverage with Wallack, what should news consumers expect of dailies?
If I gain anything from the Mutt's criticisms it is that the state house needs more Victoria Wallacks in the ranks. From the consumer perspective, it's hard to disagree with the need for more coverage that stems from being observant, observant of far more than the fax machine as it spits press releases and dates for press conferences sent by various govt. agencies.
— L. Costigan
It's hard to believe that at Downeast. a publication once seen as honorable and thoughtful, such uninformed claptrap as Al Diamon posts is being featured, let alone promoted. Does the guy ever pick up a phone and do the kind of reporting that would be appropriate to someone writing about the media, or anything else? Or is his column just the dyspetic ranting of a reporter manque, who now sits in his little house and writes about what annoys him? This is media criticism? Any media critic who had made the serial mistakes Al has made in the last few weeks should be hang up his laptop, or have it disabled by his employers. And that the once-august Downeast would allow such ethically dubious practices as having your editor -- L. Costigan -- write posts supporting her employee, Al, without identifying herself as a Downeast employee, is heartbreaking. Are the inmates running the asylum? What has happened to Downeast? Must they whore after readers with such crap?
In any event, let's get real. Even MPBN, until the very excellent reporter AJ Higgins took the Statehouse job, didn't have a fulltime Statehouse presence year-round. Statehouse reporter Fred Bever, who lived in Portland, would hardly venture north of Falmouth during the non-session period if he could help it. That was the custom for all the years that he was there, and it didn't necessarily hurt MPBN's coverage. That's because, contrary to what some Statehouse-fixated folks think, not all coverage of what is really the government beat has to take place in the seat of government. In fact, some of the best of it takes place away from all the self-serving government hacks feeding your their limited and view of the world.
Good, thoughtful, informed, responsible criticism of Maine's media would be most welcome. Those of us who are journalists would love a thoughtful eye trained on what we do. But Al ain't it and Downeast certainly isn't doing a public service by promoting an irresponsible, lazy guy who makes mistakes and refuses, in the most petulant way, to correct them, as the state's media critic. What would happen if the media behaved like Al does?
I want to correct two possible mis-impressions from Down East magazine's most recent media blog entry:
1. That the Morning Sentinel took five months to correct an error about a Young Marine and sexual assault case. We made errors here but corrected them in a matter of days. Al Diamon is correct in saying a more detailed article came out just last week but we looked into it right away and corrections ran almost immediately.
2. That no daily newspaper has a full-time Statehouse reporter. Down East is simply wrong here. Susan Cover was and is our full-time, Statehouse reporter based at the Statehouse. She filled in as a Kennebec Journal editor for six weeks this summer but she is a full-time, Statehouse newspaper reporter.
I am taking the time to correct these items because a few of our readers and employees have read Down East's Web site and asked me about these matters.
Eric Conrad
Executive Editor
Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel