This is cool!

I started out in journalism with a new electric typewriter, the only one on my dorm floor. Here I am, exactly 30 years later — a newspaper editor with a laptop and a blog.

I'm no expert at this blog stuff. Ask my son, who first defined the term for me. But here I am, dipping my toe in the scary waters of weblogging. I'm the first to try this in our newsroom, and if all goes well, I'll have some company here.

Like Editor's Notes, my column in the Tracy Press, this is where I'll offer spontaneous commentary about the newspaper, why we do what we do and what we think about it. With this blog, I hope you'll join the conversation.

Let me know what you think!

- Cheri

Words: When do we cross the line?

Editor's Notes

Words can be such delicate matters.

Just in the last few weeks, a handful of words that we've used in the paper have come under fire. They've offended some newspaper readers. They've also sparked passionate discussions about what words should or shouldn't be off limits in the Tracy Press.

The first word came up shortly after Hurricane Katrina released its wrath and drove people from their homes along the Gulf Coast. The wire services described them as evacuees, survivors, victims - and refugees. The Rev. Jesse Jackson and President Bush both took issue with the term refugee, calling it racist when used to describe so many black Americans.

Like other editors, I scrambled to my dictionaries to find out if the word refugee truly excludes Americans in their own country or could reflect racism. I didn't find the definitions to be so narrow.

Still, there are many ways to describe those displaced, and we will avoid the word refugee, keeping in mind the sensitivities of some readers. But like The Associated Press, which provides most of our national news, we'll reserve the right to use it to capture the scope of this disaster on a vast number of our citizens.

Meanwhile, no policy can cover every situation, and in our newsroom, we openly discuss potentially controversial content and words as they come up. Sometimes they are direct quotes. Sometimes they're the reporter's words or an official's description.

Last week, we ran a police log item that described a rape report in which a man was accused of pulling out his penis and telling a 13-year-old girl to orally copulate him. A reader e-mailed us to say she was offended that we had chosen to report something so titillating and sensationalistic in nature.

So we asked, did we cross the line? Did we sensationalize the news?

To me, a report of a rape is far more serious than the theft of two golf putters or a few broken car windows. So I don't think we overplayed the item. However, in retrospect, I think we should have used less graphic words. We could have told the story by writing that the man was accused of exposing himself. He had also demanded oral sex, and I can't think of a way around those words.

It's always been a delicate balancing act to report what's relevant while keeping a certain level of civil discourse, especially in coverage of crime and the courts. As society's mores have become more tolerant, certain words and terms have gained acceptability. Yet we still don't all agree. What one person considers tasteless or vulgar is accurately descriptive or even commonplace to another.

Should community newspapers take the path of least resistance? Should we generalize rather than risk losing readers? Should we shy away from words that describe the human anatomy? I don't think so. But as journalists, we should talk about the words we use and always ask ourselves - before we publish - whether they're necessary to tell a story.

And we should always consider our readers' sensibilities.

Next column: Teenagers and profanity.

Bush bashing is no laughing matter

Editor's Notes

A reader called this week to tell me she’s canceling the paper. She’s tired of our Bush-bashing at a time when we should be pulling for the president.

I had to think. As a community newspaper, we don’t write often about President Bush, except when he flew into the Stockton Metropolitan Airport for a Republican fundraiser in 2002. However, he appears often in wire stories on our “national” pages, and his name comes up all the time in editorials.

Turns out she was talking about our Voice pages — the opinion section of the paper. Specifically, she was miffed at our editorial cartoons. How could we draw such things?

Like most editors, I can barely draw a stick figure, so I buy cartoons from a company called Cagle Cartoons, which serves newspapers all over the world. I like the service, because it offers a wide selection of images that can be downloaded from a Web site. They’re timely, and they represent a broad range of styles and diversity of perspectives, which is what we aim for on the Voice pages.

This week, for instance, we have dozens of Hurricane Katrina cartoons from which to choose. The disaster isn’t funny, but it’s in the news, and it gives cartoonists a graphic metaphor for which to make political or social commentary. One cartoon shows looters running with overflowing grocery bags, and the line, “Natural Disaster: The Second Wave.” Another shows the Grim Reapers holding a scythe with the word “War,” and another one with a chainsaw that says “Katrina.” A cartoon titled “Hurricane Katrina’s Effects” shows a distressed man in a storm with an oil can (“Oil Prices”) flying overhead.

Sometimes I don’t understand all the cartoons, especially when I’ve crawled into my cave and haven’t followed what’s happening outside of Tracy. I always recognize Bush in the cartoons, though. His caricature, usually a big-eared monkey in a cowboy hat, isn’t hard to spot.

I asked Brian Davis of Cagle Cartoons if people ever complained about cartoonists’ characterizations of President Bill Clinton, when he was in office. He was a Democrat, after all.

“People complained about that, too,” Davis said. “If you’re in power and you’re making the news, you’re going to get picked on. When Clinton was president, people asked us to send more liberal cartoons.”

Readers often say that the editorial cartoons aren’t even-handed, and my response is that they’re not supposed to be. They are potent opinion pieces. Like news stories, they are done on deadline, but unlike news, they aren’t supposed to be objective or even polite. They’re supposed to ram home a point to make readers think. And often, they exaggerate or use satire to
do that.

Cartoons can also have inspirational moments, like Daryl Cagle’s drawing of a crying boy sitting in a child-sized space shuttle — a cartoon he submitted the day of the Columbia shuttle tragedy. That day, Gary Varvel planted a half-mast flag on the moon for his cartoon. Jeff Parker drew a moving image of Columbia landing at the pearly gates with six stars and one Star of David in the night sky to represent the fallen astronauts.

More often, editorial cartoons are provocative, edgy and highly political. Some fall to the left, and some fall to the right.

I e-mailed some of our cartoonists to ask them how they’d rate themselves in terms of political leanings. And how do they portray Bush in their cartoons?

Cartoonist Sandy Huffaker wrote that he’s not about to pin a label on himself. Liberals, he asked? What do they stand for, anyway?

And conservatives? Weren’t they the guys who didn’t like to spend money?

As for Bush, he draws him looking like a mouse holding a smiley-face balloon labeled Iraq. He wrote that he’s probably the worst president ever — “for sure, if Iraq fails” — and he added, “I kind of like him personally, though.”

I don’t think anyone aims to be disrespectful to our commander in chief. But we recognize the value in offering a diversity of opinions and exercising our American freedom of the press.

The Poynter Institute, a school for journalists and media leaders, has a cartoon by Rob Rogers (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) on its Web site that shows a big-eared Bush at a press conference saying, “The newspaper was a mouthpiece for radicals inciting anti-American sentiment in Iraq … We HAD to shut it down!”

The next frame is a drawing of a big-city newspaper office and a “closed” sign over “The New York Times.”

I tried to paint that picture to the reader who called to cancel her subscription. At the end of the conversation, she had one more comment, and I quote: “Cancel my cancellation.”

It was a very good day.

For a great Web site devoted to editorial cartoons, see Cagle Cartoons.