Columns

Inside Out: Trying to make a marketing guy get what we do

As ubiquitous as newspapers have been in the life of the country for centuries and remain a major resource despite the ongoing revolution in media delivery, many people don’t seem to understand how reporters and editors operate — even as they rely on those reporters and editors to deliver reliable information about what’s happening, what’s going on.

No wonder. Reporters and editors do not all operate under the same rules or with the same goals. The executive editor of the New York Times does not think like the editor of a supermarket tabloid. People who work for Rupert Murdoch, as we have seen, do not necessarily hold themselves to some high ideal of community service, much less legality. TV news is nothing like serious print news. People Magazine is not the New Yorker.

My wife and I were out for dinner a couple of months ago with very dear friends. I told them about a painful episode I’d just endured involving my reporting on the public excoriation of the son of a friend and co-worker.

The episode I’m referring to is no secret around here. Without bringing up every detail once more, let me explain only that an elected town official stood up at a Town Board meeting, with the video camera rolling and my pen flying, and blamed a well-known local professional (who was not there to defend himself) for delays in a certain public works project. He asserted that his plans contained serious flaws that made it impossible to proceed without major revisions.

The public official, a week later, would retract his assertion, assure the Town Board there were no flaws in the plans, and publicly apologize. Of course, I did not know he’d do that. I instantly recognized the charge as a bombshell — a whole new and surprising, if not bizarre, twist in a long story about a public facility that needed to be overhauled to bring it up to code.

It did not entirely make sense to me — these plans had been developed in consultation with the elected official and had been approved by the controlling agency — but the elected official had made his decision to go public with his charge in a big way, locally speaking. The thought never occurred to me to ignore what he’d done or bury it as a sentence or two at the end of a long Town Board story.

I would not have felt good about myself as a small-town (or any kind of) newsman if I’d done either one of those things: censoring or hiding a story because of personal knowledge or bias. I knew the targeted professional and considered him to be highly competent.

If I’d nixed the story, anyone watching the meeting online or on TV would have been right to wonder why it didn’t show up in the Reporter. If they cover up that kind of thing, the TV viewer might have wondered, what else do they cover up in the interest of “good taste” or “better judgment” or professional and personal alliances?

To my mind, the worst trait of any small town paper is the tendency of editors and reporters to quash news the publication of which might make it dicey to walk to the post office the next day.

Sensitivity to the community is very important for any newspaper that wants to last but censorship to “clean up” a story, to get rid of anything problematic, makes the paper’s coverage unclear, opaque, fuzzy and intended only for an insider readership that already knows the story and can read between the lines.

A newspaper that isn’t clear and direct about what’s going on is not really a newspaper. It’s not a trustworthy source of information about what’s happening on the public stage. And what’s the point of the public political process if the public is denied the right to read about it?

As I told this story at dinner, it became clear to me that one of our friends just could not get his head around the idea that I had a duty to report what had happened at the Town Board meeting. The overriding issue in my friend’s view: by writing and publishing a story about it, I was as — or even more  — guilty of damaging the professional’s reputation as the public official who had criticized his work so publicly in the first place.

My friend’s disapproval goes to the very heart of my craft. If he wants the press to ignore a major news development contained in a speech in, say, the House of Representatives or the Senate because some reporters and editors “know” it’s just a lot of baloney, fine — but then he wants a Big Brother press to sanitize the news for him. Good luck with that at a time when major corporations, whose primary businesses are not journalism, run so many newsrooms as a result of mergers and acquisitions.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, you’re not editing the New York Times,” someone said to me many years ago during an angry phone call about something very tragic that had been reported in my paper. I wish I’d had the presence of mind to reply, “I know I’m not — but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t aspire to the high standards of journalism.”

I can hear the groans and see the eyes rolling at my holier-than-thou defense, especially after our recent election season. I have never before sensed the level of personal affront and outrage a few people seem to feel about the paper’s coverage (and editorial endorsement) this fall. I think they are like my good friend, who remains my good friend. Biased. He’s a PR and direct-marketing man. His job is to control the press to achieve sales. That makes him less than open-minded about the news business. And that’s my bias talking, isn’t it?