Wordsmith

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.