Newsroom values drive coverage decisions
This has been an uneasy season in Spokane, Coeur d’Alene and environs.
There has been a run of bad news, culminating last week in the grisly revelations surrounding the Shasta and Dylan Groene kidnapping.
If you are a reader of this section’s letters column, you know that many in the community blame the newspaper for much of the bad news, including ongoing investigations of Mayor Jim West and the Morning Star Boys’ Ranch and its director, Father Joe Weitensteiner.
The West and Morning Star stories are, in the parlance of the news business, enterprise projects. They exist because journalists chose to pursue them not because they bubbled into the public consciousness through other means. If we don’t work those stories, they don’t exist.
So why pursue them, we have been asked, if we know they will damage the community’s reputation or harm the reputations of citizens who otherwise stand as community leaders and role models?
I’ve written in this space before about the values that drive our journalism at The Spokesman-Review, forming the basis for the many news decisions we must make daily.
Our values are deeply rooted in our profession and some go back to the founders who foresaw the importance of an unfettered press in a free society. Mostly, we share the values of other newspaper journalists, though we may articulate them in different ways.
Spokesman-Review values are posted in the newsroom and frequently form the basis of conversations at news meetings. They provide an answer to the question “what do you stand for?” And in our values, I think you can see the “why” behind the West and Morning Star investigations.
The values, in no particular order:
“We reflect the life of our community every day in all of its wholeness and complexity. By this we mean that all our citizens should be able to see themselves – their hopes, dreams, aspirations, successes and tragedies – reflected respectfully and authentically in our pages. There are segments of our community that some citizens wish we would ignore. Doing so would violate this value.
“We tell people what we know when we know it, without fear or favor. This is the hard news value that means we’ll not sit on news or information to serve one interest group over another. This value says there are no sacred cows, that we’ll go where the news takes us.
“We watchdog government and other public life institutions. This is a fundamental professional value that can be traced to the founders and is the basis for the tension that must inevitably exist between government and a free press.
“We are committed to the free marketplace of ideas. This is another value that goes back to the founders. It is the basis for an open letters and column policy that permits publication of ideas, opinions and theories that some people might find offensive. In our view, free debate allows good ideas to rise and bad ideas to fall. But there is no such thing as an idea too offensive to discuss and debate.
“We believe the public’s business ought to be conducted in public – always. Unfortunately, there is a natural tendency in government to conduct business behind closed doors, sometimes because it makes the business of governing more efficient. However, there are times when secrecy masks darker motives. As an institution, the newspaper is charged with representing the public’s interest in open government. In the last few years, this newspaper has spent tens of thousands of dollars and numberless work hours seeking information we believe ought to be public. This is why.
“We give voice to the voiceless and defend the defenseless. In our society, what other institutions are able to step in to represent the interests of the disenfranchised? When we write about child abuse, we are representing the interests of society’s most defenseless, our children.
“We recognize the positive lives led by our community’s young people every day. This value is personally important to the journalists in our newsroom, many of them parents, many of them involved in youth programs and organizations. For too long, young people have found their way into the news by being victims of crime or perpetrators. This value compels us to look for a more authentic reflection of young people’s lives every day.
“We empower citizens so that they can exercise their citizenship. This is the value that supports the enormous amount of time and energy we devote to election coverage, to routine government coverage, coverage of education and public health and so on. The information we provide ought to arm citizens with the information they need to effectively lead their public lives.
“We will do good … not just good work. Our profession has numerous ways of rewarding good work, at least as it’s defined by journalists. But in the last few years, we’ve dismantled our newsroom’s contest culture, emphasizing service to citizens, not contest judges. Our journalism, even the most depressing, ought to achieve some larger good.
Of course, newspapering is a human endeavor and so, imperfect. I won’t argue that we are able to live up to our values every day. But we do try. Understanding those values is one way to understand why we do what we do even if you think what we did is wrong-headed or inappropriate.
We’ve created a variety of ways for people to react to our journalism, even participate in its creation. There are the old tried and true ways – letters to the editor. But we also have open news meetings and frequently host guests from the community (call 509-459-5420 to make an appointment). We post online summaries of our daily news meetings and briefings. We recently introduced an online feature called “News as a Conversation” in which five wildly different community commentators offer daily critiques to which news staff and citizens can respond.
We have an “Ask the Editors” Web log in which several of us answer questions from readers about what we do and why with excerpts periodically appearing in print. My recent online chats have attracted so many questioners, including some of our harshest critics, that we’ve decided to schedule them regularly.
And some time this fall we’ll begin Web-casting, on an experimental basis, our daily news meetings and critiques, inviting real-time community participation.
Thoughtful, reasoned and reasonable debate over our values and their application is always welcome, even when it’s critical. If we dish it out, we must be able to take it. In the long run, citizen participation in newsroom decision making, debate over news values and quality conversations about news and its delivery are good for the newspaper and good for the community.