I covered a difficult story recently, one that involved a situation I had thought about on more than one occasion and wasn’t looking forward to reporting.
It was a happy story, particularly for The New Era. The newspaper was honored as the Business of the Year for 2006 by the Chamber of Commerce. We greatly appreciate the vote of confidence that represents to us.
I had no idea it was about to happen, and even when our reporter, Sean Morgan, showed up unexpectedly before the awards presentations to “switch cameras with me,” (in reality to snap a photo of red-faced me and my wife getting the award) I didn’t smell a rat. So there I was, the guy who shared one of the awards and who had to write about it. (Sean, of course, bolted the place as soon as he took that picture because he knew I’d call on him to write the story.)
As a journalist, writing that story put me in an awkward position because it runs against the grain for many reporters to be a part of a news story themselves. When I say that, I’m not talking about TV “news” stories that seem to focus more on the person in the monogrammed jacket, holding the mic, and the fact that it’s “live,” than they do on the story itself. I’m also not talking about first-person feature accounts of how it was to hike up a mountain or sky dive or something like that.
But most serious journalists I know are not comfortable with making news. If you attend journalism school or go to editorial conferences, you will hear frequent discussions on where the lines are between being an observer and being a participant. You’ll hear real-life or hypothetical incidents in which a reporter or photographer is at the scene of an accident or other breaking news situation and has to decide whether to stop being a journalist (observer) and help someone in distress.
(Personally, while I’m very committed to trying to avoid being part of a story I’m writing, I’ve never doubted what I’d do if I have to make that choice. If necessary, I guess I’d just have to write a first-person account later. But the need to be objective, to me, should never stand in the way of someone else’s life or limb.)
One thing that a lot of big-city journalists and many of the experts you find at journalism ethics conferences haven’t experienced is of journalism we do here in Sweet Home. We’re in a small community where it’s impossible not to participate – and we have no intention of not participating in community life. But then, again, I have to be the objective-as-possible reporter at the same time, so it can get a little sticky.
What we’ve aimed to do in the last couple of years with The New Era is to cover as broad a spectrum of the community as possible. My goal as editor is to try, whenever possible, to write about or photograph people who are not necessarily the normal movers and shakers in the community. There are, of course, people who are very active, who are talented, who are in public office, and therefore will appear in the news more than Joe Average might. Even looking through today’s paper, you will see familiar names and faces – people you’ve seen before and will see again for the reasons stated above. But I hope you also see people whom you’ve never seen before, at least in these pages. That’s our goal.
This newspaper is about the Sweet Home community, not about us. But at the same time we’re part of the community too. So you might see people who work at The New Era, uncomfortable though it might make me, pop up in these pages now and again. I avoid running photos of my family members in the paper unless they’re in a class or group and they’re just a participant in an event we’re covering. At the same time, if one of my daughters turns out to be skilled at something and wins an award that we’d give coverage to someone else for, then you’ll probably see her in the paper – along with all the other kids who won similar awards. That’s just presenting a fair and balanced report of what’s going on around you.
The tension between being an objective reporter and participating in community activities may make me a little uncomfortable, but it’s part of being something other than a disinterested bystander in the community. And disinterested is definitely something we don’t want to be.
So we just have to work at aiming for that “happy medium,” as my parents used to call it, and do our best to cover the news fairly and objectively while casting as wide a net as possible to bring you stories about the many interesting folks in our community.
P.S. Don’t hesitate to let me know if there’s someone out there you think fits that last description.