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.

Not the last word on obituaries

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.

The truth about journalism

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.