New challenges, old ethics

A woman who identified herself as a parent called the newsroom Monday to tell us we should read a certain comment left on our Web site.

Someone using the name of the West High School student arrested three days earlier on suspicion of making a bomb threat, making terrorist threats and creating a disturbance on a school campus had posted something that looked to be another threat.

“I was the one who set the bomb up,” the comment read. “The bomb is still located inside the school. To tell you the truth, there is more than one bomb. I set one inside the clock tower and another inside the school district.”

Online comments are uncharted terrain, as we’ve found in the less-than-two months since we’ve added this challenging function to our newspaper Web site.

Information, however, is nothing new for us. The job of newspapers is to gather news and information, and sometimes that information arrives unsolicited, as it does in the online comments.

Rarely, though, does information put us in the kind of situation it did Monday, where we find ourselves becoming part of the story that we also have to cover.

When we read the comment at 1:30 p.m. Monday — about 10 minutes after it was posted, as it turns out — we called Tracy Unified School District Superintendent Jim Franco and faxed a copy of the comment to his district office, which contacted the police.

Then we drove to West High with cameras and notebooks in hand. School had let out at 1:30 p.m., so there were few students milling about. We waited about 15 minutes before we noticed Franco and a campus security guard looking inside the clock tower.

Two hours later, long after the threat to public safety had presumably passed, the police called to ask us for a copy of the e-mail address that had accompanied the comment.

Until this point, everything we’d provided to the school district had been information made public on our Web site, except for the Internet Protocol address, which showed that the comment had been made using the school’s computers.

I called a newspaper attorney in Sacramento to talk about whether we should give up the e-mail address, something I’ve told readers in the past would not be shared.

Telling the police that we wouldn’t give up the unpublished information without a subpoena isn’t all that different from demanding a search warrant before letting an investigator onto private property. Of course, even with a court-issued subpoena, newspapers legally don’t have to give up unpublished information.

Why?

All unpublished content — photos, reporters’ notes, tapes, data, eyewitness observations, unnamed sources, e-mails and addresses — is protected in the state Constitution under the California Shield Law.

We take this legal right seriously, because it sets us apart from the government and entities we write about. It puts us on the side of the people, who provide information to us — and all media — without expecting that it will be used for something other than newsgathering.

If we’re so quick to hand over information to the police, without regard for the ethics of doing so, how can we expect the public to trust us with the information they give us in the future? We don’t want to lose that trust.

I found it interesting that William Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group followed this news story in its San Joaquin Herald with the headline, “Police upset over response to threat.” It contained more false statements made by the reporter than truth, quoted only one side of the story and editorialized about the part the Tracy Press played in the “lost investigation time.”

MediaNews owns or controls almost every daily newspaper in the greater Bay Area, except the Tracy Press and the San Francisco Chronicle, the latter of which is owned by media giant Hearst Corp. Hearst and MediaNews’ attempt to consolidate in the last year was slapped down by an antitrust lawsuit, followed by a settlement agreement just this week.

I think it’s important for people to realize that the future of newspapers in the Bay Area under Singleton’s control isn’t just a monopoly situation. Under MediaNews, newspapers are becoming more the mouthpiece of government than the communities they serve. They have little regard for the rights of the people and the press and the laws that protect them.

Sadly, the California Shield Law has little future unless it is exercised.

Cheri Matthews, editor of the Tracy Press, can be reached by phone (830-4201) e-mail (cherim@tracypress.com) or blog (www.editor-matthews.blogspot.com).

Sunshine Week Part 2

Here’s to open government — and a little poetry

The Tracy Press has raised some eyebrows over its efforts to shed the light on Councilwoman Suzanne Tucker’s e-mails to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory about a proposed bio-lab and open-air explosions — something she and the city have refused to provide.

First we asked nicely, with an e-mail of our own. Then we asked officially, with a public records request. Then we asked again for disclosure, through a local attorney and a San Francisco attorney who specializes in First Amendment law.

You can read the nine-page letter sent this week to Deputy City Attorney Bill Sartor, below, on the next blog posting.

As we come to the end of Sunshine Week — an annual celebration of the nation’s freedom of information laws — it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of why open government, accountability and the public’s right to know matter so much. Having access to government information empowers the public and makes communities stronger.

Newspapers all over the country have called for more sunshine on the public’s business with laws that improve access to public records and allow the public to keep watch on government at all levels. We support those efforts in California and in the nation.

Locally, with your help, we’ll keep an eye on agencies and officials who spend public money — from council members and county supervisors to school board trustees — so that they will keep their decision-making open. And we’ll remind you, the people, of your rights, which are guaranteed by the First Amendment and California’s Brown Act, Public Records Act and Proposition 59, the state’s “right-to-know” provision in the Constitution.

And now for some poetry

While I’m passionate about First Amendment issues, I can also get fired up over good poetry — good being a keyword.

Poetry rarely finds a place in newspapers these days, but back in the day, it was a staple on the printed page. As U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser said, “Readers enjoyed it. They would clip verses, stick them in their diaries, enclose them in letters. They even took time to memorize some of the poems they discovered.”

Poetry, Kooser said, is a perennial expression of our emotional, spiritual and intellectual lives.

And yet, we have so little time for it.

Starting today, we’ll offer a poem a week on our Voice pages, compliments of Kooser and a project called American Life in Poetry — Reintroducing Poetry to American’s Newspapers. The project is supported by The Poetry Foundation, an independent literary organization; and by the University of Nebraska and Library of Congress.

Kooser, also a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, chooses the poems and writes a brief introduction with each. The poems are short and packed with simple truths that readers can understand and appreciate.

I hope you find them as insightful as I do.

Cheri Matthews, editor of the Tracy Press, is a member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and California Newspaper Publishers Association. She can be reached by phone (830-4201) e-mail (cherim@tracypress.com) or blog (www.editor-matthews.blogspot.com).

Anonymous darts cause commotion online

Here's tomorrow's column today:

This week started early Sunday with two comments posted on the bottom of our police log on our Web site.

Had we heard about the crash? Were we going out to the scene?

It was those early comments online that pushed us out the door and over to West High School to see what had happened late the night before. Now, at week’s end, I’d venture to say that everyone in Tracy knows a student died and three others were seriously injured in the tragic accident Jan. 27.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes at the Tracy Press, we’ve had technical turmoil that turned to angst. The “comment” function was added to stories online less than a week before the accident at West High. The idea — to allow readers to leave notes, almost like instant letters to the editor or an online bulletin board. I’ve noticed on other newspaper sites that commenters seem to like to chime in with a final word on stories, with a, “Good job, Jake,” or “Boy, are you biased, Betty.”

Little did we know that this new function would produce an explosion in feedback, turning into a public forum where a full range of emotions would be expressed — and managing to wreak havoc on our computer server.

Before Sunday, the Tracy Press site averaged 1,100 hits a day. When we posted the first photo and story about the accident Sunday afternoon, the comments started rolling in, and so did those hits. By Monday, the hits increased tenfold, to more than 10,000. Page views (the number of times users request a page) went from 5,000 to more than 43,000 that day.

Rapid-fire comments were being posted on stories at a rate of one a minute, producing instant-messaging. That’s about the time that Steve Reichgut, owner of SolutionsIC, which hosts our site, had to disable the commenting for a few hours to relieve the overloaded server. The increase in traffic, he said, was massive and the number of comments phenomenal.

On Tuesday, the commenting barely took a breather. One story gathered more than 200 comments online, with tears flowing and tempers flaring.

And that’s where the technical became personal.

Many of comments were wonderful tributes to the teen who died. Some of the memorializing was pure poetry. Other comments, however, were toxic diatribes that assaulted the senses. Members of the community worried — and rightly so — that the families of the young victims would be hurt by the comments. Some said it was irresponsible for us to allow this and pleaded for us to take down all the comments.

On the street, we also heard from parents — some angry at the uncensored comments and others happy to discover a place that served as an outlet for their children’s expression.
Some were merely aghast at the poor writing skills of the commenters.

We started to monitor the site for more than profanity, all the while discussing and debating with everyone, from the publisher to the webmaster, about which posts crossed the line. Cuss words were obvious, but what about criticism? Those who posted comments were quick to point out the insensitive posts, and we removed some of them.

As City Editor Eric Firpo told a reader, “I know that fails to satisfy a lot of people who are offended by some of the postings, which seem tasteless at best. But we’re reluctant to start censoring based on taste, or hurtfulness. Where do we draw the line there? That line is different for everybody and would satisfy no one.”

So it’ll be a never-ending judgment call for individual posts, and we’ll keep monitoring, even when the commotion dies down.

I don’t know where all this is heading. This is new territory. Someday we may look back and cringe at our rudimentary methods of connecting the town through personal comments pasted on online stories.

But community conversation at a time like this, I think, can be good, perhaps, even healthy.

• Cheri Matthews, editor of the Tracy Press, can be reached by phone (830-4201) e-mail (cherim@tracypress.com) or blog (www.editor-matthews.blogspot.com).