Saving trees

If you’re hearing a slightly less hearty smack against the screen door in the early morning hours, it’s not your imagination. We’re taking down the size of the paper for July, which is typically the slowest month for news (although the first week has been a notable exception to the rule).

Find the document

We have a PDF of a document from Jim West’s lawyers outlining their stance on the effort to accelerate the recall petition, but there was nothing in today’s story alerting readers to its presence on the Web site. Our coverage differed somewhat from other outlets in that we looked beyond the initial statement that West wasn’t necessarily opposed to accelerating the recall and focused more on other comments explaining just how time-consuming the process will be, and it’s important for readers to be able to access the document to judge for themselves.

To the letter

A reporter questioned why there was no rebuttal to characterizations of our coverage of Morning Star Boys Ranch in a letter to the editor from Ranch board president Bob Durgan published today. The assertions that we neglected to report that Father Joe Weitensteiner’s leave is voluntary and that the ranch will bring in an independent investigator are demonstrably false , but when is it appropriate to interject into the letters page?

Opinion page editor Doug Floyd said the policy is to generally err on the side of the letter writer: “We’re going to let readers have their say unless they make a material statement … that is clearly on its face false. Durgan’s criticism of our coverage, Floyd said, is subject to interpretation - others are likely to agree with Durgan that the issues he raises could have been addressed more prominently.

Steve Smith said it’s important to resist the urge to get too defensive: “We’ve been wrestling with this sense that we’ve become too argumentative.” Ideally, we’d like to let the reporting stand on its own, but, as Smith said, “if facts could speak for themselves, there’d be no need for newspapers.”

Coming up

Joseph Duncan is expected to be arraigned today or tomorrow on murder charges, and we’re getting more documents from Tacoma and elsewhere. We’ll be posting these documents online as soon as we can go through and redact victims’ names - stay tuned.