THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 10, 1995 TAG: 9509100037
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
SOURCE: Cole C. Campbell, Editor
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
What if The Virginian-Pilot displayed on the front page or the Metro News front the story of every murder in Portsmouth?
Would the citizens of Portsmouth hail us for focusing the community's attention on this serious crime, or lambaste us for drawing excessive attention to only one dimension of the city?
What if the newspaper ran on a news front only one story of a Portsmouth murder for two years, putting stories about the rest inside the news sections?
Would Portsmouth citizens condemn us for downplaying this serious crime, or thank us for not being obsessed with only one element of city life?
These questions are more than rhetorical musings.
On Thursday, staff writer Charlise Lyles devoted her Metro News column to an internal newsroom discussion about how we covered five homicides in early August.
A story about three homicides of blacks in Portsmouth within a few hours of one another ran inside the Metro News section, as did the story of a fourth homicide in Portsmouth later in the week. In contrast, coverage of the killing of a white teenage girl in Virginia Beach ran on the Metro News front.
``I don't know about you,'' Lyles concluded, ``but here's the message I'm getting: When certain people in a certain city of a certain race lose their lives at the hands of a killer, it's just not news.''
I could quibble with the column for making it sound as if we ignored the Portsmouth homicides. We didn't. And I could harrumph because the column suggests that race, gender and geography are the sole determinants of news judgment. They aren't.
But the column speaks to a larger question. Are we as a society blase about the continuing occurrence of certain crimes in certain circumstances? Are those of us who are journalists letting our conventions and decision-making standards interfere with our portraying a fair and accurate picture of life - and death - in our communities?
Newspapering would be a lot easier if news were just a collection of facts forced upon us by the flow of events. But it isn't.
The facts we set out to find, or are in a position to discover, or choose to pay attention to, reflect a judgment.
The facts we include or delete from any single story or any single edition reflect a judgment.
The facts we choose to highlight - by their placement on a particular page and at a particular place on the page, by displaying them with or without art and typographical displays - reflect a judgment.
Everything about newspaper journalism - from reporting and photographing to writing and editing to designing and producing each day's edition - reflects a chain of a hundred little judgments.
Some are so reflexive that the journalists who make them don't think of them as judgments at all. They think of them more as instinct or intuition.
And people outside newspapering sometimes believe that everything we do is shaped not by judgment, instinct or intuition, but by the personal biases of the people who work here.
Lyles reports that we are engaged in dialogue about the issues raised by this homicide coverage. And we are. But we also will do more than talk.
We're learning to measure our work in new ways and ask ourselves - as Lyles does - what these measurements tell us about the conventions we rely on to shape our work and the processes we use to shape news coverage and display.
We already have begun measuring how our news report shakes out according to the kinds of stories we publish - breaking news, investigative news and the like. We will expand such content audits to include whether we treat race, gender and other matters in a meaningful or stereotypical way.
We are learning new ways to deliberate together in analyzing data - not simply jumping to obvious but perhaps misleading conclusions, but pinpointing problems and their causes before testing solutions.
And we are increasing our training, including planned diversity training, to help us use new skills and develop new perspectives to enrich our work.
All this is part of our gradual mastery of the tenets of Continuous Improvement, or Total Quality Management, the managerial discipline described in detail on A1 today in the start of a series by staff writer Lon Wagner.
Charlise Lyles' challenge to our newsroom ``to deliver a . . . fair(er) reflection of the world to your doorstep each day'' makes this endeavor more than mere flirtation with a new way of organizing our work.
It makes it an imperative that we test our moral sense of ourselves against a measurable sense of ourselves.
And we will take that measure of our work. by CNB