Ahot debate has emerged around and about the Spokane Spokesman-Review in the last few days not so much about the paper’s recent layoffs – cutbacks which, especially in the Idaho part of the operation, we consider tragic – as a news report about them. The debate has to do not with the accuracy or general approach in the piece, but rather with who wrote it.
“Leaning Tower,” about the cutbacks, appeared in the Spokane alternative Inlander, and was written by Kevin Taylor. The tag line at the end notes that the writer is “a former Spokesman-Review employee,” and he was. He worked in the paper’s Idaho bureau, and was fired from his reporting job there, before linking up with the Inlander.
You can read the article from the link; our quick take on it is that it seems generally neutral and fair.
Which made for an unusual post from Steve Smith, the Spokesman‘s editor. Smith’s blogging (he does a good deal of it, and commenting too) ordinarily runs toward the thoughtful and well reasoned. But he sounded scattered in his post about the Inlander article:
“I have no specific complaints about the report except for its superficiality. What is happening to this newspaper and the industry overall is complicated and important and worthy of in-depth outside review. Of course, that isn’t The Inlander’s goal when they report on the SR. My biggest complaint involves Taylor’s assignment to this or any story about the SR. The note at the bottom of his story describes him as a former SR reporter. Well, that is like calling Jayson Blair a former New York Times reporter. It’s true, but highly inaccurate.”
Running through . . . Most news reports, notably most in most newspapers (daily and weekly both), necessarily, are superficial: They are produced fast, and only limited space is alloted for them. Would a book length have met Smith’s standards? (Not that the subject of what’s happening to newspapers wouldn’t be worth that treatment.) He gets into mind-reading when he prescribes a “goal” for the Inlander, which seems unfair since the only available evidence, the article itself, read like a straight news report. And in fact, “calling Jayson Blair a former New York Times reporter” would be accurate – a description insufficient for fair understanding of the situation, but accurate nonetheless.
Our interest here, though, is in his suggestion (generally in the post) that certain reporters shouldn’t write about certain things – that Taylor shouldn’t have been allowed (or assigned – we evidently don’t know which) to write about the Spokesman because of the blowup involving him and it.
This gets, perhaps, into a matter of philosophy, but we take the view that anyone can write about anything, as long as you’re honest about what stake (professional, financial, emotional, whatever) you have in the subject. The Inlander should have added, in its tag line, either that Taylor was fired from the Spokesman or at least that he left in controversy; readers should have known that. But implicit in the idea of journalism – that you can send a reporter out to research and write about, well, damn near anything – is the idea that this kind of activity is generally valid, provided reasonable professional care is taken. (We would argue that any actor is at liberty to assay any role they want to try – for much the same reason.)
At the same time, as some commenters to Smith’s post have pointed out that personal background, even negative background, can be useful in helping to understand a subject, so long as the context is out in the open. And so it can. One of our favorite journalism books is The Chain Gang by Richard McCord, about the battles of a New Mexico weekly and a Wisconsin daily with the big Gannett newspaper group. It was written from the perspective of the editor of the first and consultant to the second, and to say the least it cut Gannett no slack: It was a polemic, not a dispassionate accounting. That made it no less valuable. Of course, McCord hid nothing about his views on the matter, or where they came from, or what his own stake was.
In this new electronic news age (which Smith has been energetically exploring and even embracing), these questions will recur, often. They’ll need ongoing review as we all track this new territory.
Share on Facebook
