And yet!
Here's another what-would-you-do-quiz. Follow this sequence of events, then answer the question at the end:
I first saw Anne Denogean's column about 1 a.m. PT Saturday, when I checked my e-mail one last time before going to bed. At that hour, I decided to wait until later in the day to do anything with the text. In the back of my mind, however, was the possibility that the column also had been e-mailed to Tucson Weekly, Phoenix New Times, or Jim Romenesko's blog; that posed a potential competitive threat.Near 11:30 a.m. PT, and ready to post, I briefly considered calling or e-mailing Denogean. I had only one way to contact her, however: the Citizen phone number and e-mail address listed with her column. I could not reach her at home -- where I assumed she would be at that hour on a Saturday. That was a dumb mistake, and I knew better; I should have tried.
Instead, I published the text at 11:33 a.m. PT.
Problem solved -- not!
Now, suppose I had instead called Denogean's work number and left a message, and also wrote to her Citizen address at 11:30 a.m. PT. I could then have written: "Denogean could not be reached for comment at post time" -- and immediately published the piece.
Somehow, though, I don't think that's what @2:03 and others have had in mind.
Question: If I'd left those voice and e-mail messages for Denogean, how long would I need to wait before posting?
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Maybe it's because I'm not a newsroom employee, but I was not appalled by Jim publishing the column. Perhaps his lead up to it was clumsy, but not deliberately disrecptful.
ReplyDeleteI thought his whole intent was to show us that there was nothing in there that corporate should be up in arms about.
Although it was still a draft, it was written for publication, it was not a private document.
Can you imagine the holy hell Jim and others here would have raised if an editor or a corporate staffer, without a writer's knowledge or ok, had pulled an unfinished work out of a queue and run it?
ReplyDeleteI thought it was a good column. Hope she turns it in, and it runs.
ReplyDeleteJim...fess up. you screwed up. Your wishy-washy responses make you sound like a corporate PR flack.
ReplyDeleteYour competitive concern is weak. You sound like the danger of being scooped trumps ethics. If that's your position, have the courage to say it. And, really, it's not like the column was revealing Who Killed Hoffa. It was interesting but hardly worth sacrificing minimual journalistic standards.
You were lucky. It was her (first draft) work. But you didn't confirm that before you published it.
You didn't bother to try to reach her? She might not be at work? She might be at home on a Saturday morning? Geez...Just what type of reporter were you?
I don't think you have to beat yourself to death over this matter, but since you ask, as a reporter I would either make an effort to get hold of the source of a document, or take it to the source's employer. That normally gets a response. I know this is a new world, but I have a greater-than-normal suspicion of any paper that comes over the transom.
ReplyDeleteGeneral rule: 24 hours, more if it's on the weekend.
ReplyDeleteI need to know one possible mitigating factor to decide this issue: did the story come into you with a Tucson Citizen e-mail address, or was it sent to you by someone you know? Or did it come in via an service that blitzed out the sender information? If it came from someone you know and trust as being normally reliable, that is one thing. But if you trusted the report only because it came in with a Tucson Citizen e-mail address that is another matter.
ReplyDelete5:45pm: 24 hours is too long: That's 10 days down there in Earth time. (Seriously; that's even too long for print!)
ReplyDeleteStunningly defensive when a simple "my bad" would be most appropriate.
ReplyDeleteI agree with an earlier post, a brilliant career awaits you in public relations - which means never having to say you're sorry.
I think he should have tried, left the messages and fired it off first thing in the morning. I didn't see it anywhere else. If he had been scooped, he could say he tried and waited to hear.
ReplyDeleteWe would have understood. We've had to wait before, lost our edge and rewritten with new information from the contact when it finally came.
Sorry it unraveled like this.
But, that's the news business. To push the button or to wait until the phone rings is an ongoing dilemma.
I'm clearly far below Jim's level of manners.
ReplyDeleteI would've called her at 1 a.m.
Why? Basic reporting instinct.
Think about it.
Say you work for Gannett, you've just written a deeply-felt column about your historic paper's possible demise -- and you've done it without ONCE using the phrase "seltzer-squirting yahoos" in reference to your owners.
Even so, the desk sterilized it so badly you wind up spiking it yourself.
Are you awake at 1 a.m.?
You're more than awake. You're mainlining vodka through an IV line, cranking The Toadies' "Backslider" out open windows, standing on furniture and breaking shit.
You're answering the mother f'ing phone at 1 a.m.
Or maybe that's just me.
But, OK, what if she had been asleep, and screamed at me to get the f*** off her phone? So what? She'd earned the right.
Besides, c'mon, calling people at insane times is what we DO -- and who hasn't had wayyyyy worse said to them, at even later hours? (Contest alert!) (No, parental epithets don't count.)
And if I hadn't reached her at 1 a.m.? Or reached her and been righteously cursed off?
Probably I'd have started again at 9 a.m., maybe 8:30.
And I and wouldn't have posted until I'd heard her out.
That said:
Easy for us to judge. Not so easy for Jim to do what he does -- and that includes judgment calls like these.
Remember, this game is changing roughly every 12 hours, and Hopkins is a one-man show (yet a deliciously terrifying one for the folks in MacLean -- talk about bang for your buck.)
So, yeah, from time to time, he's gonna piss off a colleague.
But I'm hard-pressed to find it intentional.
Even so, if Denogean's pissed, so be it -- and let her be.
She'll work again. Hell, the woman recently copped to clearing out her desk and finding an old bra she said she shed one day si,mply because it didn't feel right.
I'd read her supposedly unpolished crap over anyone tortured-to-perfection prose any day.
Which, of course is completely lost on the seltzer-squirting yahoos currently running Gannett straight into the ground.
God speed you both.
Your limited audience pretty much negates your worry about competitors scooping you. You'll still get the pageviews from Gannett employees looking for comment from other Gannett employees.
ReplyDeleteI'm not from the news side but I found it appalling that Jim would publish that column without the reporter's permission. Especially considering the fact that he knew it did not come directly from the reporter.
ReplyDeleteHe declines to give the names of the corporate folks who were in Tucson without confirming first with Tara... but he's all okay with printing a reporter's unfinished work without permission / confirmation???
I wonder how he would feel if the same had happened to him?
Maybe 5:45 PM works for a weekly!
ReplyDeleteYa shoulda called; ya shoulda emailed. Lesson learned. No magic number on response time. Just give her a chance.
ReplyDeleteShe sounds justifiably MORE pissed at the colleague who filched a draft of her column from the queue than you. I would be, too. Isn't life bad enough at a place like that and now they've got to deal with in house spies. Geez.
6:39 pm: You say you would have called her at 1 a.m., and although don't specify, I gather you mean you'd call her at home.
ReplyDeleteQuestion: How do you call someone at home when they have an unlisted phone number?
6 pm asks several questions about how I received the text of the column (was it from a Tucson Citizen e-mail address, for example?).
ReplyDeleteI cannot answer that question without potentially compromising a source.
Folks, this is 21st Century journalism get with the program. Immediacy is the key. What if Jim's blog only had a following of 5 people and he posted the column? Do you really think anyone would have been trying to point out his "journalistic errors." Whether we like it or not, journalism is changing; we don't have to like it, but we have to try to understand those changes.
ReplyDeleteBush League, Jim,
ReplyDeleteYou should admit your mistake and explain what you would do differently in the future.
In this day and age of electronic journalism, practically anybody can send us supposed "documents." If we are not wise enough to employ journalistic skepticism before publishing them, then we lack good judgment and basic principles. I know you are good at what you do, but simply posting information on your site without doing a little basic groundwork doesn't seem like your style. It's not consistent with what you have been able to uncover with your other research. If you are more worried about competition than you are with fairness or accuracy, then I would suggest that points to a credibility problem. Nor can I see that the content of this column warranted concern about delay in publication. Again, I do think you are providing a valuable service, but this seems like a lapse in judgment best admitted and learned from rather than defended.
11:52 pm: Did you miss the following sentence, which I put in italics so everyone would see it?
ReplyDelete"That was a dumb mistake, and I knew better; I should have tried."
I highly recommend the comment by 10:30 pm.
ReplyDeleteUntil I saw that, I was beginning to fear no one would point out this fundamental new reality of our work lives. Folks: It's 2009 -- time to start getting serious.
10:30 Ok, I am an old fuddy-duddy, and don't understand immediacy and the new journalism. But there are some reasons for the old ways of doing some basic checking to see if someone is pulling your legs. One of the reasons for this caution is libel, which is a real bummer that can screw up your career. There's nothing some in the legal profession love more than reporters who say they didn't bother to try and check the veracity of the information they published. Makes it real simple for jurors, too. I realize that with tweets and anonymous postings that the old days are gone, but some of the old traditions sometimes kept you out of trouble.
ReplyDeleteJim, thanks for running that column, whether it was finished or not. It give us good perspective on the Tucson Citizen situation. As to the rest of you self-important Gannett "reporters" be seeing you soon at the soup line because of the bad vocational decision you made.
ReplyDeleteJim (@9:10 p.m.),
ReplyDeleteYou start calling around the newsroom until someone picks up -- a photog, a janitor, anyone.
Then you start talking. You don't stop until you either have her number, or you have her on the line because someone had her call you.
No newsroom answer?
Call the security desk. The TC still has one 24 hours a day; and those guys know everything.
Still no luck?
Start over and start calling Tucson TV & radio stations until someone answers.
Why? Reporters know reporters. And the woman's far from unknown. Someone would ring her -- or at least get you two hooked up, and long before 11:30 the next morning.
Now, that's if one is hell-bent on tracking down an unlisted person at 1 a.m.
Fun? No. But not the Bataan death march either. Worst it did to Carl Bernstein was make him hear something unspeakable about that nice Mrs. Graham may she rest in peace.
Sometimes it works, sometimes not.
Almost always worth a shot, though.
Especially if it meant you could call up Dubow and ask if he has Prince Albert (or the last of his conscience) in a can.
Jim. What would you have done if this happened during your editing days at Gannett, and you found out that some reporter passed you a story based on information that had not been checked out?
ReplyDelete12:26 am nails it cold! That's the way it's done when you really want to track someone down; I know it because I've done it.
ReplyDelete12:30 am: A comparable example from my newspaper editing days might be the following, which is a true story; I've altered one fact to preserve someone's privacy.
ReplyDeleteA very experienced reporter for a newspaper filed a feature profile about a business owner. The reporter does not disclose that he and the owner are friends; I know this because I happened to discover that fact some weeks before, when it was immaterial.
I give the story a rigorous editing, and discover that the story's premise hinges on a dollar figure from the subject of the story -- a dollar figure that the reporter never checked out. This is the sort of stuff a cub reporter would know better than doing.
What did I do? I explained patiently, but firmly, that the story had to be redone. And it was.
But that's and example from my PRINT days.
"But that's and example from my PRINT days."
ReplyDeleteSee, that's the problem. It's all print, whether it's printed online or in an actual newspaper. There should be no difference in what you do and how you do it. The only difference is where you do it. This type of "information center" has no credibility because it has no checks and balances. This is more on par with The Weekly World News than anything else.
Jim,
ReplyDelete12:26 a.m. and 6:39 p.m.?
Same person.
Me.
Enough, though.
I say let's cut you off the cross, make sure some mighty amends are made to that columnist, and let's crack on with the serious business at hand:
Keeping GCI's exemplary greed in the spotlight, making sure its breathtaking ineptitude becomes an ongoing national story; and, when there's time, setting fire to big bags of dog poo on Dubow's doorstep, ringing the bell and running like hell.
We are, after all, professionals.
Jim
ReplyDeleteYou don't take criticism well, do you? You have been very defensive about this whole affair. You made a couple of decisions in this matter that offend some of us. You say you made a "dumb mistake" hoping it will absolve you. But like the "sort of" at the top of this, you refuse to say "I was wrong." The only true defense you offer is that times, and standards, have changed. Much of the criticism of Gannett on this blog centers not on what it has done, but how it has done it. You rage at Gannett for its attitude, its lack of standards, the refusal, in your eyes, of the company and its top execs to have a moral compass. If that is true, it seems you and the company should be getting along very well in this new era where standards are lax and the only thing that matters is the bottom line, no? You disappoint me.
Jim disappoints all of us.
ReplyDeleteYes, Jim. Nice rationalizations. Now when will you get around to admitting breaking federal copyright law by taking this story from this writer and paper, and using it as content to help drive revenue for yourself? This is the crux of why copyrights are in place. Of course, you won't admit to that, would you? Don't be surprised when your phone rings.
ReplyDeleteMaybe someone sent the column to Jim out of spite because Anne has taken a PR job in Tucson?
ReplyDelete