Getting it right the first time is a daily newspaper challenge
Well they passed a law in '64 to give those who ain't got a little more, but it only goes so far
APRIL 26, 2010: As I always say, the Watertown Daily Times is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard in the past 24 hours — distorted despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias, by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from your doorstep and read about it in an hour.
Of course, while I like to say it, I didn’t say it first. Washington Post columnist David Broder said it years ago about newspapers in general.
Broder said it for two reasons. One was to remind readers that what newspapers produce every day on the fly is subject to the whims of time, resources, and cooperation from sources.
And the other reason is to remind journalists that, ahem, what we produce is far from being the word of God.
Journalists generally don’t need to be reminded as readers are all to willing to point out our shortcomings, pitfalls, pratfalls, mistakes and just bad luck.
Or, as I also like to say, I decided to spend my career at small newspapers as I prefer making my mistakes in front of as few people as possible.
“Despite our best efforts,” we goof. And usually, time is part of the equation. Trying to print a paper at 1 a.m. that will be relevant at 6 a.m. is a challenge, especially when car crashes, elections, baseball scores and mining disasters might be still unfolding as we go to press.
We recently printed a headline with the words “presumed dead” following a car accident on Arsenal Street in which an EMT told our reporter the crash scene was being handled as if it were a fatal accident. Our calls to police and others before press time for more information were unsuccessful.
Our presumption was, fortunately for the driver, wrong. The driver was very much alive when our paper hit the streets that morning. If we could do it over again, our headline and story would have left the presumption on the cutting room floor.
But we’ve had worse. Months ago, a law enforcement officer calling a Syracuse hospital to check on the condition of a traffic accident victim was told the man had died. He passed that info on to us. And for a couple of hours on our Web site, we had a story that said the driver had died in a Syracuse hospital.
But he hadn’t, as a family member called to tell us. We removed the story from our Web site soon after.
Occasionally, the news is the other way around, going from good to much worse. During a horrific West Virginia coal mine accident months ago, many newspapers, including this one, went to press with a headline rejoicing that family members had been told that several trapped miners had been found. The reality was that every miner was dead, which is what the morning TV shows were reporting as the ink was still drying our newspapers.
Conversely, the Watertown Times was one of the few Eastern Standard Time newspapers to tell readers on a Sunday morning that Princess Diana was killed in a car wreck. Most papers had already gone to press by the time of the announcement.
More recently, we were preparing a “Too close to call” headline on the night of last year’s special election between Bill Owens and Doug Hoffman as too many votes had still not been counted. But suddenly, Hoffman stood up in front of supporters and journalists and gave a concession speech. Our readers the next day got a headline that reflected the situation, but had Hoffman waited another hour to give that speech, our readers would have gotten our initial headline.
Breaking news is often just that: News that is broken and still needs to be put together. That’s why I always note that we journalists have an inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never really be completed about a world we can never really understand.
Well, I sort of say something like that. The late Philip Graham, owner of the Washington Post, said it first.
