The e-mails

Today’s meeting started with a playing of Jed Conklin’s audio slide show about Craig Bickerton’s death. That’s something you’ll only see on the Web; no reporter was involved in the project.
The conversation then jumped to the Lewd e-mails story and Baughman coverage out of Kootenai County. The conversation circled around whether or not The Spokesman-Review would be posting the e-mails that are at the heart of the story. The decision not to publish them online because of their inappropriate content was made after several conversations last night. The options were to publish them as is (with all attachments and images/photos intact), blur out the naughty bits (or doctor them in some other obvious way) and publish them or not publish them.
In the meeting Steve Smith asked the room if there were any other ideas. Joe Palmquist suggested getting a group of readers together to look at them and then get their responses. Other ideas included publishing a few of the e-mails with some of the “more standard pornographic images” and making printouts of all the images and the e-mails and making them available at the Idaho office for anyone of legal age to see.
Ken Paulman mentioned that by getting stuck on whether to publish the e-mails we might be losing sight of the story a bit.

The issue was still under consideration as the meeting ended.

Looking ahead:

We are keeping an eye on the Kevin Stevens murder sentencing that should happen this afternoon and a utility tax story out of the business section. Be well.

Joe