Friday's Tracy Unified School District's spelling bee for seventh- through ninth-graders ended p with these four winners, who will go on to the San Joaquin Spelling Bee: Caitlin Dong (left), Hector Sanchez, Upinderpreet Gill and Arashpreet Gill. Photo by Diane DongEditor’s Notes
Some unsolicited insight
As I write this, a man holds a sign at the corner of 11th Street and Tracy Boulevard to protest the Tracy Press congressional endorsement editorial. I’m OK with that. He reads the paper, which I like, and he's entitled to his soapbox.
One of the callers who told me about the sign-man asked why it is that the newspaper took a stand on the Pombo-McNerney race — or any other race.
Good question. Like most newspapers, we maintain a strict separation between the editorial pages and news operations. Reporters are not supposed to have bias — or, at least, show it — in the stories they write, and the same goes for those of us who edit news copy. Our obligation is to be fair and accurate in our presentation of the news.
A newspaper’s endorsement of a candidate or an issue isn’t some kind of weird ego trip, despite what some might say. It’s an expression of the opinion of the publisher and editorial board, which, at the Tracy Press, is made up of a handful of the newspaper’s family members and managers. Those opinions show up on the editorial pages, where readers are encouraged to share their viewpoints, too.
Publishing endorsements is a traditional role for newspapers. Back in the early 1900s, the Tracy Press ran front-page pitches for presidential hopefuls. Many newspapers proclaimed their political leanings in their nameplates. Most have altered their names over the years, such as the Arizona Republic, which used to be the Arizona Republican. But some, like the Santa Rosa Democrat, have kept their names.
That early political zeal died down, of course, and it wasn’t until 1990 that the Tracy Press started publishing endorsements for local candidates on its opinion pages — now called Voice.
We’ve always had a front-row seat on politics and a leadership role in the community, and at the very least, we figure our independent views can serve the purpose of provoking thought and discussion. At the same time, we try to get out as much information about the candidates and the issues as we can so readers have something on which to base their decisions at the ballot box.
Last Saturday, we ran eight pages of Q&As from the City Council and mayor candidates so that Our Town readers could get to know them better. Also, on two separate evenings last month, we held public forums in a school gymnasium with the candidates for Congress, state Assembly and City Council and mayor. The forums were televised and have been aired nearly every day on the city’s community-access cable Channel 26.
Just this week, we thought of something else we could do, and when the two mayoral candidates showed up for their face-to-face interviews with the editorial board, we asked them if they’d be willing to participate in an experiment for the sake of open democracy. We audiotaped the 1½-hour sessions, edited them to roughly 40 minutes each and put them on our Web site, with photos.
We also made CDs of the interviews — the uncut, audio portion — and have them available for readers in our front office. The price is a $1 (minimum) donation to the California First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit public interest organization dedicated to advancing free speech and open-government rights.
One of our objectives in opening the window to this process is to show you what we asked the candidates and what they answered. We hope you’ll take a look and a listen and let us know what you think.
Who knows? By the time the next election comes around, we’ll probably be webcasting. And the protesting sign-man will probably still come around.
The Voice pages are packed during election season, and bringing up a topic not related to the races is asking for trouble right now.
But this is nothing compared to what happened when I thought the newspaper could exist without its daily horoscope.
The women who answer our phones at the Tracy Press have now tallied 50 calls of complaint — sometimes howling diatribes — about the disappearance of the daily prediction of events. Several weeks ago, in an effort to gain space for news stories, we dropped one comics page, which had been home to the signs of the zodiac. We moved some puzzles to the first pages of classifieds and added a weekly horoscope.
Who knew that a daily dose of astrology is more important to some readers than the police blotter or the obituaries or — imagine this — the latest developer agreement in town? Not me.
One woman, a Capricorn, explained that her daily habit is really a necessity. When she read her weekly horoscope in the Tracy Press this week, it left her defeated. It said, “News you will receive hits you very hard, Capricorn. But there is nothing you can do to change the situation, so you just have to work through it.”
Now she has to wait a week before she gets another message, when she’d really like some advice for how to get through the next few days of — something bad.
Then there was the woman who stopped in our office after West High’s homecoming parade Friday to ask if there was a chance the horoscope would be in today’s paper. The last one she’d read had said her relationship would fizzle — and it did — and now she wants to know what’s coming next.
For Cindy, whose last name will go unmentioned because she reads the paper when she’s supposed to be working for one of the largest employers in town, the horoscope is her morning ritual.
“We just have a nice little chitchat about our horoscopes in our department before we start our day,” she writes, using her work e-mail. “It wakes us up, and we move on.”
One of the women in her office says she knows how to deal with her husband after she reads her horoscope. Another says she just likes to be entertained.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but by the end of October in an election year, politics ceases to be entertaining to me. I’m tired of the TV ads, the mailbox junk, the survey calls and the computerized messages left on my answering machine.
I could really use a horoscope to read today.
So here you go. If you really want to know what’s happening, skip over the news and go directly to Page 35.
• 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).
“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”
— H.G. Wells
When I was an eighth-grader, my favorite subject in school was English, in spite of the old biddy who taught the class. Mrs. Sward, who taught many, many miles from here and has been dead for decades, would keep small bottles of whiskey in her drawer, and every time she’d read something in our essays that mortified her — say, a misplaced modifier or subject-verb disagreement — she’d take a gulp from the bottle and clear her throat.
I know the feeling.
I grew up to be a fanatic about the English language. In my years as editor, I’ve been known to wrestle with a pressman over a page that was about to go to press with a grammar gaffe in the lead story. I’ve pulled out perfectly good strands of hair (my own) over a faulty apostrophe that made it into the paper — you know, an “it’s” that was supposed to be an “its,” or vice versa.
A run-on sentence like the one on the front page of Saturday’s Tracy Press — “Daylight-saving time begins Sunday, move clocks forward one hour at 2 a.m.” — can put a damper on an entire day for me. If only I’d stayed up a little longer Friday night to proof pages, I could’ve turned that comma into a semi-colon.
Truly, my newspaper-reader-soulmates are the ones who stop me on the street or e-mail me when they’ve found an especially egregious language error in the paper (not to be confused with fact errors, which are another story.)
Just last week, Aaron Carter e-mailed with angst after he read the tease on the front page of Friday’s paper: In 1906, an earthquake and fire devastated the city by the bay. One hundred years later, officials are preparing for another terrible “tremblor.”
“I’m certain the person making the entry intended to use the word ‘temblor,’ which is defined as ‘a quaking,’” he wrote. “I am hopeful the writer did not intend to use the word “trembler,” which is a noun used to describe a person who trembles or who has trembled, or who, by nature, is a trembler.”
He’s right, and I'm trembling just thinking about that misspelled temblor.
Jane Devlin, another Tracy Press reader, called me recently to tell me that we should have corrected a source’s grammar rather than repeat the mistaken use of the word “like” in a direct quote. You know, we were, like, adults, speaking like kids, and we should, like, know better.
That just warmed her up to talk about other modern-day problems with the language.
“You know what really sends me over the edge?” she said. “When someone replaces the word ‘said’ with ‘go.’ That, to me, is a crime.”
Jane and Aaron remind me of another astute reader named Mike Blake, who started e-mailing me in 2002 with lists of annoying mistakes from our paper — words that sound the same but mean something different, like “patients” used in place of “patience,” and typos that change meanings, like “math lab” rather than “meth lab.”
I’d dutifully pass them on to my young staff (all college graduates who majored in English, journalism, rhetoric, history or political science, mind you) as Lessons From The Outside, which always carry more weight, you know, than those from ever-picky editors.
I eventually convinced Mike to work as a part-time copy editor for us. By day, he wrote software over the hill, and by night, he’d proof our pages — and save our bacon.
Alas, he moved on and bought a farm in Vermont. His wife, Margaret, recently asked about the New Year’s baby who weighed 15 pounds, 14 ounces, as she’d read on the Tracy Press Web site. She was pretty sure we’d meant to write 5 pounds, 14 ounces.
Uh, yeah. We ran a correction on that slip-of-the-finger on the keyboard.
Meanwhile, I’ll have three other editors read this column before it hits the press, so I’m pretty sure it will be typo-free.
Rest in peace, Mrs. Sward.
Posted by cmatthews at April 5, 2006 07:33 AM
This piece was quite revealing. It is quite a relief to know that even those who are native English speakers and consider English as the primary language also grapple with the tricky problems of grammar and usage, and even with such petty stuff as spelling. For those of us who have English as a secondary language, mostly because we originated from another country, jousting with the intricacies of the language is a continuing battle.
And English is such a dynamic and complicated language to be good at, much less to be a master at. What with all the countless rules and exceptions to the rule to be learned, remembered, and used properly. Partial thanks go to any spell-checker in any word-processing application for the valuable assistance that it provides.
I am by no means a linguist or a grammarian, but I do have a deep interest in the language and how it continues to evolve.
Thus, aside from those mentioned and narrated, I find another area where “errors” or call them, changes, may also be quite common. And it is in deviation from standard usage or meaning. Take the phrase, beg the question. Its standard usage is supposed to refer to a logical fallacy, but the common usage would now suggest that it means that a statement made prompts the question, or begs the question.
And to illustrate a classic change in meaning which I believe is universally accepted is the verb, to cleave. In olden times, the word meant to unite or join together, but now it’s quite the opposite, to break apart or separate, as in cleavage.
And lastly, regarding the inadvertent use of tremblor. I find this word easily confused because another common but correct word aside from temblor is the word, tremor, which also means an earthquake. Thus, if one puts the three words together and shakes them, it is understandable to see why at times it could come out as tremblor, instead of temblor or tremor.
Though, there is still the bigger issue in the use or over-use of clichés or bromides. But save that for another time.
And unfortunately, I have neither proofreader nor editor to go over this comment.
Posted by: Amadeo at April 5, 2006 11:42 AM
Dear Cheri,
Thanks so much for your April 5 article about the proper use of the English language - it struck a real resonance with me.
I also had a Mrs. Sward in my schooling days. Mine was named Mrs. Cook, also from many miles away and also long dead. Unlike Mrs. Sward, I don't remember Mrs. Cook having a bottle in her desk to help her cope with our butchery of English. Instead, she'd roll her eyes upward, looking perhaps for divine guidance to help us mend our ways.
For me, her methods worked as well as Mrs. Sward's apparently worked for you - I also grew up to be a fanatic about the English language. I was certainly in the minority of those in my chosen profession of engineering. I'm retired now, but as an engineering manager in the last years of my employment, I had ample opportunity to grit my teeth and make grammar and spelling corrections in the many draft reports I reviewed. My biggest pet peeves were the constant confusion of its/it's, your/you're, to/too, their/there, etc.
I think the situation actually worsened with the advent of word processing software with spell checkers, probably because many writers believed they no longer had to think about correct usage. Unfortunately, most of the errors are real words - they're just the wrong words.
Anyhow, I'm thankful for what the Mrs. Swards and Mrs. Cooks did for some of us. I just wish there were more of them and more of us.
Gus Carlson
News streams out of every room in my house — on TV, radio or computer. When my Dad visits from out of state for Thanksgiving, I tell him he can read almost any newspaper in the country from my laptop on the kitchen countertop, with its wireless Internet connection.
But he insists on walking the half-mile down our dirt road every morning at 7 to get the rolled-up Tracy Press in the newspaper tube. He’s used to a morning paper he can hold with his coffee.
Call it habit, he says.
With all the news about the demise of newspapers — declining circulation, competition for advertising and rising costs — it’s good to see newspapers consumed as well as they are. I often hear from people who tell me they read every word of the Tracy Press, and if the paper doesn’t get delivered on time, they call to complain — bitterly.
While I hate it when our delivery fails, I love to hear how much people care.
We’ve recently started a new weekly newspaper that serves Manteca and Lathrop. With newspapers across the country laying off some 2,000 workers this year, we keep hiring. Call us optimistic or call us crazy. We’re betting the farm that we’ll be around, in some form, for another 107 years.
Meanwhile, I get feedback from a lot of readers in response to this blog.
One former Tracy resident described how his mother sent him two weeks’ worth of the hometown paper when he left home, and he’d sit down for an hour or more and read everything from club notes to classifieds, describing it as his voyeuristic peek into the lives of the people he once knew and loved.
“Don’t forget the comfort factor,” he commented. “I read two or three papers on the Web each day, but the Web will never replace the comfort of a turned newsprint page.”
That made me wonder why other people read the newspaper when they could just fire up a computer to get some news. I googled “reasons to read newspapers” and found this list of 10, written by newsman Tom Rouillard and posted on Tim Porter's excellent media blog. Take a look, and maybe you have some of your own to add):
• The newspaper has never burned my lap (Macs run hot).
• The flight attendant has never told me to put my newspaper away.
• I can read my newspaper while standing, while eating, while riding a bus.
• I can give my newspaper to someone else when I am done.
• I can read the A section while my wife reads the metro section.
• My newspaper’s battery never dies.
• If my newspaper gets wet, I can buy another for about a buck.
• I can recycle my newspaper at the curb.
• If I drop my newspaper, it doesn’t break.
• I can read my newspaper during a lightning storm.
I’ll add this one, from the lyrics of Mick Jagger:
• Old habits die hard.
I learned that from my Dad.
“If you don’t want it printed, don’t let it happen.”
That’s the motto of a newspaper in Colorado and, as Michael Gartner writes in his new book, “Outrage, Passion & Uncommon Sense,” the motto that good editors of good newspapers have lived by for generations.
I’ve said it myself to people who call demanding that their names be left out of the police log that we publish every day.
Of course, just because something appears in the police log doesn’t mean it happened, just that someone reported to the police that something happened. And the arrests that we list are just that — arrests for suspected felonies, not convictions.
At any rate, some people simply don’t like seeing their dirty laundry in print.
Others, on the other hand, relish reading about the woes of others, if only for their entertainment. They skim over the items until they find something they can take to their friends every day at coffee.
Like the one about the man who walked into the police station waving a videotape that he claimed contained evidence that someone had stolen from him. Turns out the videotape showed people stealing, all right. They took the man’s marijuana plants from his backyard.
Another was from a man who called to say he’d found another man’s underwear under his bed. Huh?
Sometimes I’ll get a call from someone who says, “Why do you print that stuff, anyway? Why don’t you just print the serious crimes?”
My stock answer is this: “Because the stupid stuff appears to represent most of what the police deal with every day — and what our taxes are paying for.”
Besides that, I don’t think it hurts to know a little of what goes on in the lives of the people who share our town.
I posted an item recently asking readers what they thought about the police log.
The first person to comment was a commuter on the Altamont Commuter Express train, who said “it’s part of what makes Tracy still feel like the small town it used to be — it adds character.”
Kind of like our Poker City history.
Another comment was a confession from a man wh searches through the log in the hopes that no relatives will be mentioned.
That reminds me of the reader who told me she regularly scans the log for her ex-husband’s antics.
The block captain for a Neighborhood Watch group in town wrote that he’s keenly interested in what’s going on in the log. He has some questions, too.
“The reports always begin, ‘Tracy Police Department officers responded to 210 calls for service Monday.’ How does the report get edited down to the five or 10 items readers see?
“Does someone who works for the Tracy Press go through all 210 calls and decide what to print? Does the public have access to all of this information? Does the PD withhold certain information from these reports?”
Here’s how it works: Every day, the reporter who covers the police beat (Denise Rizzo, unless it’s her day off) goes to the lobby of the Tracy Police Department and flips page-by-page through the dispatcher’s daily log, taking notes on her reporter’s pad.
“I pick out items that typically identify crime trends, such as thefts from cars … or humorous and out-of-the-ordinary items,” she said.
She reads every item but chooses just a sampling, usually about 20 items. Then copy editors cut her column to fit the space on the news page.
If something is especially interesting or shows a crime spree, reporters can get more information from officers and turn it into a story.
If someone younger than 18 is arrested, the name will be blacked-out in the report. Other than that, everything is public information unless there’s an active investigation.
That means anyone can go down to the PD and read the log in its entirety — but only reporters get paid for it.
Posted by cmatthews at October 28, 2005 09:27 PM
What you say is true to a point. Yes, the information is available to the public but they would have to go down to PD to read it.
And if you cover a story that alleges that an incident occurred shouldn't good reporting follow up on the case to see what the outcome was?
My particular incident, covered by the Press in a lengthy Police Blotter article, had me arrested for brandishing a firearm.
What it didn't tell is why and what the outcome of that incident was.
In point of fact I was assaulted in my own home and defended myself with my handgun.
But the press never followed up on the story and to many people I had committed a criminal act.
No one from the press bothered to contact the court system or myself to learn that all the charges levied against me were totally dropped.
So, as you can see, simply printing the "facts" can cause harm.
Rarely today am I questioned by anyone on this as it was quite some time ago. But when it happened it caused me no end of trouble with people who had a mistaken impression they were dealing with someone who, in their eyes, was a criminal.
Dave Hardesty
Posted by: Dave Hardesty at October 31, 2005 09:36 AM
Thanks for answering my questions, Cheri. I would like to see all of those calls in the Police Log go online somewhere. Maybe then the log could be blogged.
Posted by: Jim Freeman at November 4, 2005 10:52 AM
Posted by cmatthews at October 7, 2005 01:53 PM
Nice web site, what are you going to do with it?
Posted by: Tom Benigno at October 12, 2005 06:42 AM
Hooray for you for including a blog in the updates to your website, it is looking much nicer. I agree with your son, blog something every day or two, at least!
:)
Posted by: Jim Freeman at October 12, 2005 08:45 PM
If it wasn't for our children we might never succeed.
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Editor's Notes
I promised to take a cursory look today at cussing in the newspaper.
It all started with a story we ran recently about three high school football players. We wanted to write a slice of their life, let them use their own words to describe what they do in their free time. We didn’t want to censor them. We didn’t want to be stodgy.
We let them swear in print.
Before and after we published the story, we discussed among our editing ranks whether to include conversation that contained a four-letter word used by George Carlin. You remember his “Seven Dirty Words” comic monologue and the words he said would infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war?
Those seven words were from 1973, of course, and this is now, when we would argue that the range of acceptable vocabulary has stretched just as the rules of polite society and forbidden speech have blurred.
Shouldn’t we thus embrace the youth with their verbal vulgarity?
Editors who have mentored me for years said no, in no uncertain terms. Not by quoting them verbatim.
And so did readers. One wrote me a letter to say the whole story was tasteless.
“These boys deserve nothing less than a public apology.”
Another said that the newspaper should have taken the high road when quoting them.
“Kids will say things that aren’t always appropriate, but as the adult present, the Press should realize what should and shouldn’t be put in the paper.”
Even if the story had been about an adult, several callers and e-mailers agreed, the crude expressions added nothing. They should have been paraphrased or, better yet, zapped.
Suffice it to say that I was wrong to allow a story to run that had so much potential to offend readers of all sensibilities, from the mother of one of the boys, to the boys’ coach and athletic director, to the superintendent of schools.
After several sit-down discussions, our editorial policy, from this day forward, will be to err on the side of caution when it comes to language. We’re putting a lid on those seven dirty words and other polluters.
That doesn’t mean that we are going to shy away from accurate reporting or edit in euphemisms. We’ll simply weigh the newsworthiness of expletives against concerns about community standards.
And in the future, when reporters raise red flags about the intemperate remarks of their sources, teen or grownup, we’ll remind them of the story of the three young football players — and of our cursory look at cussing that led to a policy about dirty words.
Posted by cmatthews at October 1, 2005 05:03 PM
Hi Cheri,
I am not so sure it was a mistake to run the article - while I understand the feelings of the parents, maybe there wasn't anything else to print from the interview - unfortunately, it didn't sound like the boys had anything intelligent to say. I think that the parents need to talk to their sons about the language they chose to use in an interview, and not blame the Tracy Press for printing it.
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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.
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.
Editor's Notes
When I started out in journalism, I used to joke that I wouldn’t mind writing obituaries at The Washington Post — if only I could work at The Washington Post. But I didn’t get to the Post, and even if I had, I would have found out quickly about the dying art of obituary writing. At first, the obit job was relegated to newsroom clerks. Then, at most newspapers, obituaries moved out of newsrooms and into the advertising departments.
How sad.
At their best, obituaries are gifts to families and to readers. They are stories about the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people in our midst. They offer a sense of history. They are news.
At their worst, they’re just death notices. Or revenue sources.
We still treat obituaries as news at the Tracy Press. Call us old-fashioned, but consider this: Have you ever gone out of town for a week and returned home, drawn to the stack of newspapers you haven’t read — not for the front-page headlines, but for the obituaries? Have you ever cut out the obituary of a relative and put it in a Bible to be read, over and over?
Age turns many of us into serious readers of obits, but so does connection with a community. Odds are you wouldn’t read the Vitals page if you didn’t think there was a chance you’d recognize a name.
I thought writing obituaries would be easy — entry-level journalism. But I was wrong. It’s painful to talk to people at times of great stress. It’s not easy to sum up a life with complete accuracy.
Every so often, obits open windows on how dysfunctional families can be. I recently found myself explaining to the mother of a woman who had died that I take obituaries very seriously. Yes, we get our information from funeral homes, which charge families for filling out the forms they fax to us. But we always try to talk to family members or close friends to verify the facts and make sure we don’t leave anything out.
The mother, obviously grieving, wondered why we had included memorial information in the obit that was given to us from her late daughter’s boyfriend. He had lived with the woman for more than a decade, but he wasn’t her husband. He shouldn’t even be listed.
That reminded me of the people who had listed only half of the survivors, leaving out an entire side of the family tree. It wasn’t because they were forgetful; they preferred an exclusive survivor list. I found out after the obituary published, so I wrote a new one — an accurate one — to run the next day.
So obit-writing can get complicated.
Alas, over the years, I’ve seen cultural shifts in the obituaries. “Significant others” and then “partners” shocked readers when they started showing up. So did the obituaries for babies who had died at birth. More than once, we’ve had requests to name favorite pets. Or to tell short anecdotes. Or to rerun the obit because they forgot something.
We try to comply.
Of course, some people think we’re ogres because we have a certain style in which we write our obituaries. They’ve wanted us to use euphemisms, such as how someone “leapt into the arms of Jesus” or “rode his Harley to the hereafter.” We prefer the simple word “died.”
Mostly, we consider obituaries to be an integral part of the newspaper, and we are deeply committed to running free obituaries for anyone who has ever lived in Tracy.
And now that I’m a seasoned editor, I can finally write obituaries whenever I want.
It’s not bad to have the final word.
Editor's Notes
I used to think that journalists were labeled as cynics because of our training. Professors and editors teach budding reporters to sneer at public relations wizards and propagandists. Pity the poor PR students who learn to spin the news for their future clients.
But that’s a little harsh. Most of the time, press releases, calls and tips lead to good stories. But not always.
A few weeks ago, a local woman called the newsroom to see if someone would write a story about her plight: Young mother suffers from brain tumor.
My cousin died after suffering from a brain tumor diagnosed when she was just her age. I know about brain tumors.
Brain tumors don’t usually become newspaper stories, though, unless the story is unusually heart-wrenching. In this case, the story is that a 25-year-old woman has a malignant vascular tumor on the right side of her brain. Doctors give her three months to live, but Medi-Cal, her only health insurance, will pay only for standard surgery, one that could destroy her ability to form new memories.
“I would rather die than not be able to remember my children,” the woman told reporter Malcolm Maclachlan. Her children are 1, 5 and 8 years old.
An alternative surgery, she said, would allow doctors to enter her brain through her ear rather than her skull. It could leave her deaf in one ear but wouldn’t harm her memory. Because it is considered experimental, she said, Medi-Cal won’t pay the full cost.
She needs $17,983 for her portion.
“They might as well have told me it was a million,” the woman told Maclachlan.
She’s a high school dropout and too sick to hold a job, she said, and her husband, a West High graduate, supports the family on his $11-an-hour job at Home Depot.
The story passes the heart-wrenching test. However, good journalists are trained to talk to other sources. It’s one way to sort out the truth. Or not.
Maclachlan called Les Brooks, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Health Services, which oversees Medi-Cal. She confirmed that the woman who talked to us has been treated for migraines and back pain but said her department lists no brain tumor in the woman’s records.
“What information we have is very different,” she said.
Dr. Khanh Do of Tracy Family Practice said he has treated the woman at his office for the conditions Brooks identified. But when Maclachlan showed him the medical forms that the woman provided — with his name scrawled at the bottom — he said the signature was not his. And he said he didn’t know about a tumor.
At this point, the reporter went back to the woman and told her that the medical professionals have contradicted her story. But she stuck by her claims.
Who is telling the truth?
Sylvia Drew Ivie, project director with the California Endowment, a private group that gives grants to community-based healthcare centers, said it’s not entirely out of the question that doctors would try to limit care to a destitute Medi-Cal patient.
As a managed care institution that takes Medi-Cal patients, Tracy Family Practice could be under tremendous pressures to limit costs.
Ivie’s own husband died in March of a brain tumor, she said, and navigating his care was incredibly difficult, even though they were fully insured, middle-aged and well-versed in medical matters. So for someone like the woman who called us — young, uneducated and, perhaps, heavily medicated and suffering memory loss from a tumor — navigating the Medi-Cal system could be nearly impossible.
But too many details don’t match up. The woman said she had a CAT scan. Patients with brain tumors are usually scanned using magnetic resonance imaging, or MRIs. A neuroscientist who commented on the woman’s description of the surgery option said it doesn’t make sense. She also said she only has four pages of medical records. I had more pages than that for an impacted wisdom tooth.
If the woman falsified medical forms, possibly with the goal of getting out of welfare obligations, she could face charges. A check of San Joaquin County Superior Court records shows she already has convictions on charges of driving under the influence of alcohol and narcotics.
So amid the waving red flags, I ask myself: Am I ethically obligated to report this woman to legal authorities? No. Should the reporter testify against her, if it comes to that? Never. Will others be duped by this woman? Maybe.
Call me a skeptic, but for now, her plight is a warning to others and a reminder to ourselves that the truth is worthy of pursuit.
And that’s the story.
Editor's Notes
Our city editor recently handed a list of about 100 banned words to the reporters at their weekly meeting.
First they groaned. Some muttered under their breath. A few argued.
How in the world were they supposed to write about a feasibility study without using the word feasibility? How could they cover a City Council meeting without facilities, mitigations, allocations, implementations and infrastructure? How could they ever quote another public official?
New rule: No sentence will stagger under the weight of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo. Reporters will throw out all those tired, poor, wretched words, yearning to be rewritten.
Take vehicle, for instance. Why write about a vehicle found in the canal when you can be so much more specific by calling it a car or a pickup? Same goes for juveniles. That’s cop talk: Call them teens instead. And in case you find yourself writing the word utilize, don’t. Trade it for three letters — use.
Every reporter who takes a beat at a newspaper knows that it has its own language to be translated. Sources from school officials to cops, lawyers, politicians, coaches and bureaucrats use languages steeped in jargon, and if reporters aren’t careful, they’ll pick up the same shopworn vocabularies.
Thankfully, some public agencies are starting to recognize the problem. Contra Costa County supervisors, for instance, took a brilliant anti-acronym stand last month and banished alphabet soup like EIR (Environment Impact Report), ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments) and RFP (Request for Proposals) from all speech and written materials. Only commonly used acronyms such as FBI or BART are acceptable.
Supervisor John Gioia of Richmond said he was inspired by the board of commissioners in Kitsap County, Wash., which fines anyone $1 who uses bureaucratic acronyms. The money goes to charity.
“I think it’s important for government officials to speak in English,” the Kitsap board’s chairwoman said.
In the same way, we think it’s important that people understand what government is up to, so our job at the newspaper is to make what we write more understandable. We need to avoid clichés (like the plague), and jargon (like best practices), which are ho-hum to readers.
So the list of banned words is an attempt to strive for language that’s fresh, never arcane. Strong, active verbs. Meaningful nouns. Rarely used adjectives and adverbs.
If you see any of the following words in our copy, feel free to point them out to us. (Note that this is just a partial list, because I don’t want your eyes to glaze over completely.)
Banned: Action plan, assess, at-risk, benchmarking, capacity, continuum, empowerment, extrapolate, incentivize, initiative, joint resources, leverage, paid personnel, residence, stakeholders, sustained injuries, juveniles.
If you have any nominations of your own, send them my way to add to the banned word list. And if you have any pristine, unsullied replacement words, ship them over, too.
Editor's Notes
Some people are having a tough time with the Judith Miller case. They lament that this confrontation between the press and government isn’t anything like the last big fight, the one in 1971 to publish the Pentagon Papers.
Regrettably, they’re right; this case involves what could turn out to be a political hack manipulating the media and putting a CIA agent in danger — which is a federal crime.
But who is in jail? The journalist who didn’t even write a story. And something’s terribly wrong with that picture.
To give you some background: A former CIA consultant criticized the Bush administration, and, presumably, one or more high-ranking government officials tried to discredit him by telling journalists that his wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. A syndicated columnist and a Time magazine reporter wrote the story about the outing of the CIA agent, and a federal grand jury investigating the case demanded the identity of the sources.
Columnist Robert Novak must have coughed up the information, because he wasn’t held in contempt of court, as were Time’s Matthew Cooper and New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, the two other reporters who had received the leak. After a federal judge ordered them to testify, an appeals court affirmed the order, and the Supreme Court let it stand.
Time Inc. then handed over its reporter’s documents to a special prosecutor, and Cooper agreed to testify. Then on Wednesday, Miller, who had promised not to reveal her source, and kept her promise, went to jail.
Journalists are supposed to be watchdogs of government, trained to bare our teeth at anyone who would take away our legal rights and abilities to keep the public fully informed. Unfortunately, on the federal level, we don’t have complete protection, as Miller’s incarceration sadly shows.
Sure, we’ve had more than a few journalists who have abused their privileges and humiliated the rest of us. But we have to ask, as Miller did, “Do you want to hear from authorized government spokesmen, authorized corporate spokesmen alone, or do you want to hear what’s really going on inside an organization?”
In Tracy, we rarely write stories using confidential sources, and we’ve only twice had to fight to keep our reporters from turning into investigators for the government by being forced to give up their notebooks or provide witness statements. But it happens often in Washington, especially with administrations determined to operate in secrecy and federal prosecutors who find themselves threatened more by those who wield pens and notebooks than by what could happen to our democracy without them.
Judith Miller made a personal choice of conscience in defense of the First Amendment and its principles. She stood her ground, and for that, I stand in awe.
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.
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.
Editor's Notes
Today’s changes are not so shocking to make you spill your coffee, but by now you’ve probably noticed something different from the last paper you picked up on your doorstep. We’ve gone back to the past with a new Tracy Press flag on the front page — actually the old one that nearly matches the 1970s sign on our building on A Street and the 1940s lettering on the brick wall in our alley.
Today’s Old English flag is red, and it’s larger than the black Tracy Press flag from more than a year ago. It’s also has some three-dimensional design work, circa 2005.
We’re inspired by Rolling Stone magazine and also by the comments of readers, who told us they just never got used to the square TP flag after a year. We still like it, but we’ll relegate the red TP to our business cards.
Probably bigger than the flag change, though, is our radical change with the sports pages. Unlike what your first thought may have been, if you’ve gotten that far — that we had a problem in the press room and accidentally turned some pages upside down — we actually planned to run the entire sports section this way, beginning on the back page. And we aim to keep doing it.
The idea came from a brainstorming session several months ago here at 10th and A streets. Readers asked us if we could be more consistent about the location of the sports pages. We talked about starting the sports section on the back, like the Chicago Sun-Times, but when we studied a week’s worth of that paper, we thought it just didn’t seem natural to read the pages from right to left.
Then someone suggested we turn the paper upside down so we could read from left to right. Some of the editors in the room, myself included, guffawed at the out-of-the-box thinking. The publisher would never go for it. We couldn’t possibly pull it off. Our old offset press would probably sputter to a stop if we tried it.
But he did (go for it), we did (pull it off) and it didn’t (roll to a stop). We ran some test runs with some sports pages flipped — flip for sports — and with some sports pages not flipped, and we showed them to all the readers we could find who would look at our work and give us their opinions.
Most people liked the upside-down model, even if the page numbers did run backward, which made more sense than to renumber them. Typically, when they took their first look at the paper, they registered confusion for about five seconds. Then their frowns were followed by an “Aha!” And in most cases, they went on to cast an affirmative vote for the flipped-out model.
The only folks who weren’t so impressed were those who never read the sports pages, anyway. Those readers spent more time looking at our Page 2 redesign. Most of them said they like the smaller index and space for breaking news.
So today we debut our clever changes, including the switch from “Play” as a section head to “Sports” to more accurately describe the coverage.
We hope you like the new look this last day of May. We can’t promise this is the last of the changes, but we can say we’re ready for another three-day weekend.
