When hate comes to town

Editor's Notes

Two weeks have passed since the traveling Westboros burst into town, waving their signs of hatred at our high school graduates and yelling at our church-going citizens.

Thankfully, the picket signs and T-shirts are gone, along with the out-of-town media and counterdemonstrators. Unlike Topeka, Kan., home of the anti-gay Rev. Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church for the past 14 years, Tracy can sigh with relief that its residents don’t share Phelps’ extreme wrath.

Two weeks have passed, but we’re still talking about the pickets — and our response to them.

A reader asked why we put a photo of the protesters above the graduates on the front page of the June 13 paper. A school board trustee remarked at the last meeting that the demonstration was a “non-issue” and that we should have covered it as such.

Most people are surprised to know that we debated for weeks how we would cover this spotlight-seeking group. We knew we wouldn’t ignore them, because as journalists, we are responsible for reporting what’s happening. But we didn’t want to overplay — or be played by the players.

At first, we tried to bolster the understanding of what was coming to town with research and learned that the Westboro folks are publicity hounds who know how to get free airtime and newspaper space. In our reporting, we tried to reflect that research — that Phelps’ followers are mostly family members; that they not only target gays, but all Americans; that they rarely spur violence; that 30 extra Tracy police officers and a handful of sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrol officers would be assigned for crowd control during the two days of protests; that counterprotesters would far outnumber the protesters.

We know that it was our original reporting of West High’s Gay-Straight Alliance that drew the attention of Phelps in the first place. And later, when we talked to local ministers, we reported that even the most conservative refused to take Phelps’ side, and that’s what led to the public protests at the churches.

But we didn’t create the Phelps family and its anti-gay, anti-American sentiment. And unlike what one letter-writer has asked of us, we can’t print just the positive news in town; that’s the job of the chamber of commerce.

Still, what’s a local newspaper to do when hate comes to town?

We did what other newspapers do when faced with demonstrations by the white supremacist Aryan Nations or rallies by the Ku Klux Klan. We covered the attention-getting protests and the community’s response to them, betting on the public benefit, and we tried to keep our own biases at bay.

And now we take notes of the lessons learned — that events such as this can provoke individual thought and reveal shared attitudes. That some churches will pass the collection plate to help pay for the extra police protection that the city provided. That the effect of blatant hate can backfire on its instigators.

The Westboro crew got us talking about what was once considered taboo and maybe, just maybe, it brought us closer as a community. And that’s news.

Truth: on the record or off?

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Grappling with all those grads

Editor's Notes

On June 9, 1939, stories in the Tracy Press told how the fire department extinguished a threatening grass fire, preparations were completed for the 16th annual Holy Ghost celebration and the town’s high school seniors received their diplomas. Individual photos of the 95 graduates, with names like Silva, Parker and Bettencourt, appeared on Page 6.

Grass fires still threaten Tracy in the windy city, the Portuguese community still has its annual celebration and high school graduation is still front-page news in the local paper.

But for the first time in 65 years, we aren’t running the photos of all the high school graduates, which amount to nearly 1,200 students, including those from Tracy, West, continuation, charter and private high schools.

I guess you could say Tracy has finally reached that milestone of being just too big.

While some people have said, “I wondered when you’d cut back,” a few parents have expressed their disappointment in our diminished graduation section, which published Thursday. “I can only assume this is a cost issue on the paper’s part,” a parent wrote in an e-mail with her canceled subscription.

It’s never been a moneymaker to print the special graduation section, with its hard-to-come-by content and labor-intensive production. Tracy’s Johnson Studio has always been accommodating and generous, but local photographers aren’t always contracted to take the senior portraits. Yearbook companies are often less than eager to share the photos, while some have gone out of their way to ship us what they had, even from other states.

Then there are the seniors who somehow missed having their photos taken, which can come as a surprise to parents who look for them in the grad tab. And, of course, there’s human error on our part, which has led to mistaken identities and missing seniors.

Most daunting these days is what used to be the easiest: getting the names of the actual graduates, which schools have become more reluctant to release. Last year, a parent actually sued the school district over the list of graduates provided to us — and threatened us for printing it.

That’s when I knew this wasn’t the Tracy of 1939.

We’ve always considered the grad tab to be a community service that required lots of staff and volunteer help. It was a labor of love, not so different from working on our own school yearbooks. Tom and Sam Matthews recall the hours spent engraving all the photos of the graduates back in the hot-metal days of letterpress printing. A generation or two later, my staff will remember shifts spent scanning senior photos, inputting names and trying to match everything together by deadline.

As for readers, I know they will miss the grad tab. I’ll certainly miss my annual search for familiar faces in the black-and-white photos of smiling graduates, just as I miss recognizing people I know in the grocery store.

But I take comfort in the fact that today’s graduations at Peter B. Kyne Field are still newsworthy events. Whole families will fill the grandstands. Graduates will sit on folding chairs under the bright, June sun. Valedictorians will give speeches about looking to the future. Reporters will jot notes into their tiny notepads. And photographers will try to capture the image of a graduate as he throws caution to the wind — and mortarboard into the air.

Thankfully, the pomp and circumstance hasn’t changed at all.