Wordsmith

Sorry for not posting the last two days. I’ve been promoted (and hence have to move. Again.), and I had a road trip to see if I can find some housing.

In my travels, I got to talk to a young reporter who is just starting to learn her craft. She’s working at a small paper — er, a “community paper” — and it’s interesting to see her perspective. As the journalism world moves kicking and screaming toward the digital age, newspapers are asking their reporters to do more and more. Reporters at small papers don’t just write anymore. They take photos, shoot video, blog and update Web sites.

All that for $10.50 an hour in some places. Are you kidding me? One thing that journalism must work on. I realize that many newspapers are losing circulation. But we’re also not paying our people nearly enough. That means that many times we’re getting underqualified, poorly-trained people as reporters. And the state of journalism is such that those people often move up into management positions. That’s a fatal cycle if we’re not careful.

The young reporter I was talking to is unique in that she still seems to have some enthusiasm for the job, even though she’s been overworked for several months. We talked about the Web, and its usefulness in breaking stories. We also talked about how some Web sites don’t have to do the “due diligence” necessary to report a news story.

We also talked a little bit about “owning” issues in the paper — making your newspaper THE source for information on certain issues. That’s a topic for another day, though. I’m going to go enjoy a rare weekend away from the office.

Note: Names and locations have been changed to grant anonymity to the source.

Today’s lesson comes to us from a small-town daily newspaper (circ. approximately 3,500):

Business owners in Carthage*, Ala., have been solicited by a Texas-based promotion company to sponsor T-shirts for Carthage University*. The shirts were supposedly part of giveaways at the university’s sporting events.

The outfit received a cease-and-desist order from a company that already has the rights to produce such materials. In addition, the Texas company appears to have used the name of the university’s athletics director and cheerleading coach without permission during its appeals to business owners.

The local newspaper reported all of this, but the reporter who handled the story says her work was given an unusual amount of scrutiny from her publisher — and some pertinent information was left out of the draft that finally made it into the papers.

At least two Carthage* business owners were hung up on when they questioned the Texas’ company representative who solicited them via telephone. In one instance, a business owner even had to correct the representative on the name of the university (Carthage University has undergone a name change in the last 10 years). But if a company were legitimately working in partnership with a university, it seems that they’d at least get the name right.

Further investigation by the newsroom raised more questions about the solicitors. When the reporter tried to contact the Texas company, she was hung up on. The company appears to operate on a 1-866 (toll free) number and a pair of cell phones. The company is not a member of the Texas Better Business Bureau.

While the reporter can’t call the T-shirt boondoggle a scam, she felt that the inclusion of quotes from business owners who had contact with this company would have benefitted the readers of the newspaper and made readers more wary. The reporter didn’t just have the unverified story of the business owners; she contacted the Texas company herself and received much the same treatment from a company representative.

This certainly should have been included in the story. Instead, it was cut.

Privately, the reporter wonders if there was some conflict of interest on the part of the newspaper’s management. She says she’s never had a story vetted like this one before — and that it adds another layer of frustration to her growing disillusionment with her job.

She wonders at the publisher’s peculiar interest in this story. It’s out of character in a laissez-faire newsroom where the editor rarely pays attention to what anyone writes, instead concentrating on pagination.

She asks me for words of encouragement. I don’t have any. I wish I did. It’s just another sign of the crumbling world of journalism.

We’ll come back to this subject often. Bias is a tough word in our business. To many of our readers — especially in the “red states,” the national media often seems to show a politically liberal bias. Web sites such as newsbusters.org have made a pretty good living off of pointing out the national media’s flaws when it comes to showing that bias.

Even former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg admits to a great amount of de facto bias in the national media. In his excellent book, Bias, Goldberg gives a great deal of anecdotal evidence that the national media is very much pro-liberal and anti-conservative.

Interestingly, smaller papers have less of an issue with “liberal bias.” In fact, they may be biased toward the conservative side, depending upon the political makeup of their communities. A newspaper in the rural South, for instance, is going to have a much more conservative view than, say, the Washington Post. We’ll leave the relative journalistic merits of those two papers out of the equation for now. Heh.

But I’d stipulate this: It’s not a bad thing for a journalist to be liberal in his or her thinking. The cliche’ is that we’re supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Journalists are supposed to ask the questions that no one may want to answer. Conservatives aren’t known for questioning authority. Who is more likely to question an elected official? Who’s more likely to disbelieve the “official” line?

The liberal media, of course. But where the press must be most careful is that we must not let that bias affect our reportage. All too often we give short shrift to the conservative viewpoint. And in some cases it seems … personal. The press should NOT tell our readers what to think. We should present information — as objectively as possible — and allow readers to draw their own conclusions.