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July 2008
The line between news and opinion
I’ve received a couple of e-mails in the past 24 hours from the same person. She asked that her name not be used, so it won’t. Not that it matters.
In the first instance she was praising us, and reporter Amy Hamilton in particular, for the work we did earlier this week when Amy broke the story about Roice-Hurst Humane Society being in violation of state laws that govern charities.
A quick recap if you missed it: Roice-Hurst, the county’s only no-kill animal shelter, has been in dire need of funds. It sent out a distress call to the community and the community responded with more than $210,000 in donations. The problem, as Amy reported, was that the non-profit group failed to do the required paperwork with the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office and as a result could not legally accept donations.
That was a good story, we thought, and one that should be reported. The e-mailer agreed, heaping praise on Amy for her good work.
“Amy Hamilton has introduced the community to a very real problem. One we don’t wish to look at directly. And, she did it factually and with finesse. It does no one any good if you ‘miff’ someone off in the pet industry/community—it serves only to set things ablaze. While any negative comment against or about Roice-Hurst is liable to cause a stir, Amy Hamilton was able to do what she did in a straight forward manner and it allows those of us who wish to look at this problem head on without flinching and try to see if we as a community can discuss (in an adult manner) and address the issues,” wrote the e-mailer.
I couldn’t agree more. Without going into detail because it’s not relevant, I’ll just say that there were some delicate issues to deal with in that story, and Amy dealt with them in the manner we expect from all of out reporters — professionally and with compassion.
Amy’s story ran on Page 1, the prime real estate in The Daily Sentinel for news stories. News stories, by definition, are to be nothing more than facts. They are to take no position and they are to be as objective, complete and fair as we can humanly make them. We don’t decide what is a news story based on what we think of the issue. We make that decision based on nothing more than whether we think it is of importance to readers.
But we do have a place in the newspaper where we do allow opinions — ours and others. It’s Page 4A, the editorial page. And on that page today there is an opinion piece that says we think the problems besetting Roice-Hurst, while very real, are nonetheless not of such importance that they should cause the facility to be shut down. In fact, we think it deserves continued public support. Those observations are opinions. Some people may agree with them and some may not.
The e-mailer in question falls into the latter camp.
She wrote: “You guys have most assuredly pulled a quick turn on a dime that I was not expecting. You are advocating support for an organization who has (by way of Secretary of State records) elicited funding illegally—I don’t care if they knew they were wrong or not. The article somehow puts forth that you hope because the Secretary of State is so overwhelmed and understaffed, that Roice-Hurst will squeak by without being noticed? What the hell kind of reporting/editorial is this? Is it really the Daily Sentinel’s official stance to turn the other cheek even when illegal activity has occurred?
“I’m simply stunned by what I’ve read. Amy Hamilton did some excellent investigating to set you all up for a slam dunk when the timing was right. What the hell happened?
“Now, this latest … editorial actually at the end of the article says ‘help save the unwanted pets and donate to Roice-Hurst.’ That is just too quaint for me. You begin an investigation that could prove to be bruising enough to them to make them contemplate a change in practice, then you end up using editorial space to elicit funding for a program that has illegally elicited funds in the past?
“Wow, knock my socks off. I never saw that coming.”
She fails to understand the difference between the story Amy did and the editorial that appeared in today’s paper. Apparently, she thinks if we do the story that points out Roice-Hurst’s problems, then our editorial position will be that Roice-Hurst should be prosecuted, a possibility, albeit a slim one, under a strict reading of the state’s charity laws.
Reporting about something gone awry, though, does not automatically lead to an editorial position that someone needs to pay for the indiscretion. And in this case, we thought it did not.
What’s more, the editorial in today’s newspaper by no means indicates that we won’t continue to report on Roice-Hurst. If we find out more about the organization that casts it in a negative light we will continue to report it.
The point is this: What is written in the news columns has no bearing on what is written on the opinion page. Facts are facts and opinions are opinions. They appear in different places in the newspaper and serve different functions.
This Sunday, for example, The Daily Sentinel will endorse either Janet Rowland or David Kearsley for county commissioner. I’m not going to say which one now. But it will be one of them. That does not mean that we will quit reporting on the other one, or that if our favorite does something stupid during the campaign, that we won’t report that. We will.
If Roice-Hurst next week does something untoward, we’ll report that, too.
That line between news stories and editorials is one that is very clear to us in the newsroom. I know it’s less clear to readers. I hope this piece helps explain it. But I’ve heard from enough readers over the years (that’s a fact) to know that it won’t erase all the doubts out there (that’s an opinion).
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Covering weather
We’re a daily newspaper, but that doesn’t mean that everything you see in The Daily Sentinel or on GJSentinel.com was produced in the past 24 hours.
To the contrary, some things are produced far in advance of their publication. The New York Times and a lot of other national publications, for example, have scores of obituaries written for people who are very much alive. They’re ready to be pulled out and used when various luminaries depart this world.
We don’t do that around here, but we do try to anticipate events to the extent we can.
City Editor Tim Harty several weeks ago took note of the fact that we always write the same story every year on the first day we hit 100 degrees. He decided to do something different, so he assigned a reporter to find out everything he could about 100-degree days in Grand Junction, and compile it for use on the first 100-degree day of the year.
That little task was accomplished and it’s been sitting there ever since. It seems the first 100-degree day of the year is late in 2008. But it’s forecast to hit 100 this weekend. So we’re going to pull out the story that’s been sitting around and run it on Saturday, assuming that will be the hottest day of the year to date.
Among the things once can do to beat the heat, of course, is sit in an air-conditioned theater. And this also happens to be the opening weekend for the new Batman flick, the Dark Knight. So, the temperature story could segue nicely to our coverage of what is expected to be the biggest film of the summer. “Comics relief” is the headline News Editor Brian Harvey suggested. Not bad.
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About SB200
This is rich.
The editor of the little feature paper in town had this to say in his column today about SB200, the so-called “bathroom bill:”
“One can only wonder: If the other newspaper had done the right thing and pointed out the twisted smear campaign for what it is, would it have reaped the revenue benefits of the Focus on the Family smear ad?
“If you read my column last week, you’ll remember I stressed the benefits of two newspaper voices in a community.”
Let’s deconstruct those two paragraphs. They have much to say about “newspaper voices.” First, Mr. Nichols is talking about editorial positions. Editorials are a journalistic endeavor about which the little paper knows not much. In its five years or so of existence, it has published at most a dozen editorials. (We publish that many every week, and have been doing it for more than 100 years.) The other paper has taken such gutsy positions as warning people to not drink and drive at Country Jam, and such happy talk as urging some guy to raise money for some charity.
Not that there’s anything wrong with discouraging drinking and driving, and the fundraising effort for the Muscular Dystrophy Association was no doubt worthwhile. We occasionally pat people on the back on our editorial page, too. But an editorial page is much more than that. It’s where serious discussions take place about serious issues. It’s where readers go to be challenged. It’s one of the places where public policy is shaped. To the best of my knowledge the other paper has never endorsed a candidate, nor has it dealt substantively with any significant issue.
When it comes to editorials, there is only one newspaper voice in town. It’s The Daily Sentinel. There’s really only one voice when it comes to everything else, too, but Josh’s column was specifically about editorials.
And oh, about that claim that we didn’t say anything about SB200 because anti-SB200 forces were advertising in our paper. That is simply a cheap shot of the highest order. I’m not sure what to say about it other than it has no basis in fact. Around here we work hard at making sure our opinions are based on a set of facts. Readers may look at the same set of facts and arrive at a different conclusion. But the facts will be there. That’s something else that sets us apart.
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First we check
I just posted a comment below from “Cecil.” It’s a comment I received a day or two ago but didn’t post at the time because in it, Cecil made some claims about Mesa County Commissioner candidate David Kearsley. Specifically, Cecil wondered why we hadn’t reported that Kearsley had received a campaign contribution of $20,000 from one individual.
I don’t think it would have been fair to post that comment without first checking out whether in fact Cecil’s claim was correct.
We did. It was.
I suspect, despite the tone of Cecil’s post, that we eventually would have seen that contribution and written about it. We check campaign filings on every candidate periodically. But thank you, Cecil, for pointing it out before we got around to finding it. It is a good story. That’s a very large contribution from one individual. It’s perfectly legal, though. There are no limits on contributions to county commissioner races.
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GJ’s hardest-working blogger
There are a lot of bloggers in this town, but the hardest-working one of the bunch is Mike Saccone, our political writer.
He takes his blog, “Political Notebook,” as seriously as he takes his job covering the political scene in Colorado. It’s become must reading for anyone in Colorado who’s interested in what politicians are up to.
And that, apparently, judging from the number of visitors he gets every week, is a sizable number. Lately he’s been the leading Daily Sentinel blogger. He consistently gets double the number of visitors that I get. It’s not difficult to see why. Rarely does a day go by when he doesn’t post at least a couple of times. Rarely does a week go by when I post more than a couple of times.
I say all of this to draw attention to “Political Notebook” today. It’s a fascinating and insightful look into what Mike worked on most of yesterday. In today’s print edition of The Daily Sentinel he has a story about Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer’s involvement securing contracts with the Iraqi Kurdistan for an energy company and the fact that the U.S. State Department considers such contracts not in Iraq’s best interest.
You can read the story in the paper, but you can see all of his source material and hear an interview with Schaffer only by clicking on “Political Notebook.”
Take a look. You can see how one hard-working reporter and blogger practices his craft.
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Country Jam and babies
Local blogger John Linko didn’t much like our story today about the alarming number of pregnancies in the county after Country Jam.
Guess he would have preferred we spend more time singing the praises of the Nurse-Family Partnership, a program in the Mesa County Health Department that helps young families who might be struggling with pregnancy and parenthood. I’m sure that’s a very good program, and one that, after its Country Jam report to the Mesa County Commission Monday, stands to see its staff of nurses greatly increased. (Note to self: Do story when money for Nurse-Family Partnership, which is funded by money the state got from the tobacco settlement, runs out. When that happens will the program go away or will it continue to be funded by taxpayers?)
Other people saw the Country Jam story differently. While waiting, as a train sat motionless, more than 30 minutes on the north side of the railroad tracks coming back to my office on the south side after lunch, I checked my messages. One was from Wednesday columnist Dick Maynard, who said he had sent a replacement column for Wednesday.
“The Country Jam story this morning was just too rich,” he said, and he wanted to write about it right away. I recommend his column. Let’s just say his perspective is a little different from John Linko’s.
And when I finally did get back there was an e-mail from the Rocky Mountain News. Did we have any “Woodstock-type photos” of Country Jam. I wrote back and said we’d look and send one if we can find it. “Baby story?” I asked. Sure enough.
And the story was getting hit hard on GJSentinel.com today. It’s what we in this business call “a reader.”
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Decisions, decisions, decisions
Not all of our time at The Daily Sentinel/GJSentinel.com is spent contemplating and producing the next day’s news.
In fact, the executive committee has spent a great deal of time the past few months working on the design of our new building. We hope to break ground next month at our site on H Road and move in sometime in late 2009.
This morning anyone driving down S. Seventh Street may have wondered what we were doing on the lawn, looking at bricks and small pieces of metal. With the help of our architects, we were choosing the masonry and metal colors for the new structure, just one of seemingly thousands of decisions that we have to make in the near future.
