A couple of days ago I wrote that were it not for some breaking news, we would have had racing pigs at the fair on the front page. Today we have racing pigs at the fair on the front page. We had some good news stories (Harry & David, shooting trial), but racing pigs was our best art. And in fact, those little leaping pigs were kind of cute. Check out the racing pigs video to see what I’m talking about.
A candidate for Medford City Council says I should abstain from participating in editorial endorsements for the council because two of the incumbent candidates are “friends” on my Facebook list.
At first glance, it does seem like a conflict, but maybe not so much on further review. Certainly, if I had identified the two incumbents (Bob Strosser and Al Densmore) as my friends (as opposed to my “friends”), I should declare a conflict and stay out of the debate. But following someone on Facebook, while it’s called “friending,” is more about access to information than a definition of your relationship.
With all due respect to Mssrs. Densmore and Strosser, accepting a “friend” request does not make us friends. It merely means that I — and they — can follow what the other has to say or post on their page. That seems like a logical thing for a journalist to do — after all, information is what it’s all about, whether it’s information provided in a press release or information gleaned from someone’s Facebook page.
There’s another Facebook category that poses a potentially troubling impression — the “fan” label. Many organizations, projects or fund-raising efforts create pages and ask Facebook participants if they want to be a “fan” of the page. Again, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a fan, but rather that you have access to the page.
The truth is, I probably don’t have enough “friends” in high places and I’m not a “fan” of enough events and projects. (The other truth is that anyone who is a “friend” of mine is probably sorely disappointed in the lack of interesting things on my page.)
It seems to me that reporters and editors who are following political or community issues should try to get as much access to candidates, politicians, bureaucrats, public organizations and other people in the news as possible.That’s called doing your job, not being biased.
So, for the candidate who thinks I shouldn’t be “friends” with Strosser and Densmore, I have a suggestion: Send me a “friend” request and I’ll accept it. Just remember, that doesn’t mean we’ll be friends.
The plan for each day’s newspaper generally takes shape over the course of the preceding day. Some stories are in the works for days in advance, but often it’s a turn-and-burn process. The stories we’re writing today will for the most part run in tomorrow’s newspaper – then again there are those days when things don’t end up exactly as planned.
The planning for today’s paper (7/20) had been in the works since last week and we had a package scheduled on the desperate straits of the folks who are running out of unemployment benefits. During the day we had a report on county unemployment numbers for the month of June, so we added that to the front page mix.
Then it all changed. The unemployment benefits package survived a scare — OK, really it was the editors who survived the scare — when it was announced Congress would approve a benefits extension. Turns out our story focused on people who apparently will not be eligible even for the extension because they’ve been unemployed for so long. So that story stayed on Page 1.
Everything else changed: By late afternoon, we had added an AP story about the cost of the Kyron Horman case (more than $400,000 so far, with another $438,000 requested). Then we got word that state legislators had reached an agreement to at least temporarily fund Oregon Project Independence, which allows seniors who need some care to stay in their homes rather than in much more expensive nursing homes. That had been the topic of a major piece on 1A in the Sunday paper, so it went back on 1A for Tuesday.
Then we got word that a judge had issued a temporary restraining order to stop work on the removal of Gold Ray Dam. Made room on 1A for it, too. Unemployment number story moved to the Business page.
So the plan we had at 4 p.m. looked nothing like the paper we were building at 6 p.m. No complaints here; we’re happy to have news, especially in the middle of summer when the day’s next best story might be about pig races at the fair. Don’t give up hope, you pig-racing fans. it could make Page 1A tomorrow. We’ll see what develops.
Fridays are the happiest of the five typical work days for most folks. Less so in a newspaper newsroom, where Fridays come attached to Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays.
Many stories written for the weekend are features or stories advancing something that will occur in the following week. There are, of course, the weekend events, accidents, etc. that are covered as they occur, but since most of the reporting staff works weekdays (when their sources are more likely to be available), a lot of content has to be prepared prior to the weekend.
That means on Fridays reporters are often working on multiple stories and editors are reading stories for three days’ worth of newspapers. And then there’s the holiday weekends like last week — when the advance preparation stretches out to four days.
Fridays fortunately tend to be busy news days, probably due to human nature, which causes us all to wrap up our business at week’s end. Hmmm, come to think of it, maybe newsrooms aren’t the only places that get hectic on Fridays.
Maybe we all should change the acronym to TGIFE — Thank God It’s Friday Evening.
Some days the funnies are not so funny and today is definitely one of those days: We ran a full page of yesterday’s comics and crossword. (For those of you astrologically inclined, you’ll be relieved to know that the horoscope was actually the right one, so you can proceed with your day accordingly.)
The bad news is, we screwed up. The good news is that tomorrow’s readers will get two days’ worth of comics and crosswords. We probably won’t run the horoscope again, because that could throw off the earth’s rotation.
The simple explanation for the screwup is that the person who normally handles the chore is on vacation and something went horribly wrong in her absence. But there’s no excuse for our failure to catch the error and we are taking steps to correct that lack of oversight.
We apologize for the error and will try to do better.
Traffic is in the news in the Rogue Valley, but having just survived a trip to and from the periphery of the Bay Area, I have to say that when it comes to traffic, we just don’t how good we have it.
At about 3 p.m. on Saturday, we found ourselves in one of your good old-fashioned urban area traffic jams. Five to six lanes of traffic, creeping along somewhere between Richmond and Oakland. Must have been an accident, right? But around every corner and over every rise, all I saw were lanes and lanes of cars creeping forward. After 30 minutes or so of that, traffic picked up near Berkeley, reaching speeds that at least allowed a little air movement with the window down (it didn’t stay down long; exhaust fumes are even less enjoyable than the auto air conditioner). We never did see any evidence of an accident.
Made me wonder what in the heck all those people were doing on the road at 3 p.m. on a Saturday? Couldn’t they see they were getting in the way of people like me, who really needed to be there? 
In today’s paper was a story about a study of traffic “chokepoints” in Oregon. The Medford area registered two on the top 50: No. 33 is Highway 62 from I-5 to White City and No. 46 is the winding truck route from Highway 140 near White City to I-5.
While most of us have encountered the auto frenzy on Highway 62, we are far, far removed from the craziness of real traffic jams. We can only hope some of the projects now on the board will help us stay that way for the foreseeable future, but the skeptic in me thinks only $10 a gallon gas will do that.
Next time you’re in one of those Southern Oregon traffic jams, with six cars between you and the light, just remember, it could be worse, a lot worse.
“He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.” Ben Franklin
Sometimes when we’re here too late in the evening, trying to edit that last story — the one that inevitably needs a lot of work — the temptation is to say “close enough,” spellcheck it and move it on down the line. Who will notice, you ask yourself, if I recast this sentence from passive to active voice? Will anyone care if I change “they will be deciding” to ”they will decide”? Is that dangling preposition really a problem?
Then I get a letter from a retired schoolteacher containing newspaper clips that appear to have been attacked by a red-pen-wielding psycho. “Here’s a typo … there’s a sentence fragment … doesn’t anyone know the difference between ‘its’ and ‘it’s’? Who’s minding the store there?”
The first reaction is to be defensive. We’re all working on deadline; we publish tens of thousands of words every day; we don’t have the size of staff we once had. Cut us some slack!
But, fearful of living down to Franklin’s words, we right our listing spirits and promise to do better. As we should. We are professional writers and editors and it should be no more acceptable for us to mismatch subject and verb than it is for an accountant to misplace a decimal point.
I was reminded of that earlier this week after speaking to a local group. An audience member came up to me after the session and offered some constructive criticism of the misuse of “that” and “who,” an all-too-common occurrence in the Mail Tribune and publications across the land. “That” is a thing, “who” is a person or persons. We all should know “the people that spoke before the council” should be “the people who spoke before the council.”
The grammar critic, who was very kind in her delivery, said it seemed to her to be just one more dehumanizing miscue in a world intent on turning us all into “that” instead of “who.”
No argument. It does matter.
A new chapter is approaching in the ongoing effort to figure out how best to manage reader forums. Beginning Monday, April 5, forum posts will be reviewed before they go live. The idea behind this, obviously, is to cut down on the objectionable, attack-posts that too often sidetrack conversations on the forums.
We have no intention of censoring posts because of political viewpoint or because the post disagrees with the Mail Tribune’s editorial position. That canard no doubt will be raised (again), but even a cursory review of what’s posted online and printed in letters to the editor shows that we routinely run opinion that doesn’t match ours.
However, if the opinion — whether it matches ours or not — wanders off into the area of name-calling, libel or false accusations, we will expect the moderators to alert editors here and the postings will be reviewed. If they are deemed inappropriate, they won’t be posted.
This is a change in one significant way. Currently, posts go live immediately and editors here review them only if we get a complaint from another user. That works to a degree, but also means that objectionable and potentially libelous posts are available for anyone to read prior to an editor seeing them. In the new process, the intervention will occur before the post goes live.
There is another change: The moderation will be done by an outside company that has contracted to provide the service to all newspapers in our company, the Dow Jones Local Media Group. Moderators will review posts 10 times a day (seven on weekends). If they see no apparent problems, the posts will go live. Anything that raises a red flag will be forwarded to us for review and we’ll apply the same standards that we’re currently using to determine if a post should be killed.
Believe me, our preference is to intervene on as few posts as possible. We’ve always wanted the forums to be a place where people could exchange ideas on important and interesting topics, but too often that exchange has been highjacked by people who prefer to hurl abuse. We hope this new moderation approach will help keep the conversation civil.
We’ve had a couple of questions raised about why we didn’t cover a few recent events. The short answer is that we want to cover the news, not necessarily the event.
The two events were a candidate’s press conference, announcing that he would run for a county commissioner’s seat, and the city of Medford’s 125th anniversary celebration. In both cases, we made conscious decisions not to cover them, for somewhat different reasons. In both cases, the news was covered, just not the event.
With the candidate, there was a complicating factor: He had not officially filed for the seat, so we held off running a story on his announcement. It’s a simple safeguard to avoid an egg-on-face moment for us; we don’t run candidate filings until they’ve filed, although that’s a rule that could be waived if the candidate is a notable public figure.
Beyond that, there’s not a lot of value for us or our readers in covering a press conference in which a candidate (or anybody for that matter) delivers an announcement that we can get in a face-to-face interview. We can ask questions, dig for a few more details and generally get more information by sitting down with the candidate (which we did in this case) instead of listening to a prepared statement.
In the case of the city’s celebration, we ran a front page story on the Sunday prior to the event, providing a lot of historical information as well as information about the upcoming event. For most events, and particularly ceremonial events, we think it’s a better service to tell people about the event beforehand, so they can attend if they’re interested, rather than tell them after. It’s clear in talking with event managers that they absolutely prefer that — nobody wants to read after the fact about a great concert or civic event that they would have liked to attend, if only they had known it was happening.
We also want to cover what the event is about, rather than what various officials have to say about it. Medford’s 125th was interesting because of the history that accompanied it, not because of the speeches talking about that history or because of the cake cutting at the event. If you have unlimited reporter resources and space in the paper, you can do both the advance story and cover the event itself, but that’s not a luxury we have.
Ultimately, we want to cover the news, not the press conference. There are exceptions in which the press conference or event is newsworthy, but if it’s to announce the obvious or to provide a platform for self-promotion, generally we’ll pass.
Now I understand
Just got back from 5-6 days of flying and spending time on the East Coast, including Washington, D.C. Now I understand why they can’t get anything done back there — nobody could get anything done in that weather. 103 degrees in D.C. is an entirely different deal from 103 in Medford. You simply cannot function and the humidity feels like it seeps into your bones. Everyone has air conditioning, but you just can’t escape it — even the underground Metro stations were stifling. Glad to come home to a pleasantly dry 96 degrees.