The Editor’s Desk

In Saturday’s paper, Mayor Carl Brewer wrote a letter to the editor about our report Thursday concerning how he and city manager George Kolb were bumped up to business class on a flight to Jacksonville, Fla., with a group of Wichita business and government leaders. Brewer said our story on the incident, the lead item in Carrie Rengers’ "Have You Heard?” column, represented "a lapse in basic journalistic standards.”

Some background on how we reported the story: Business reporter Jerry Siebenmark also was on the trip to Jacksonville, a city-to-city visit sponsored by Visioneering Wichita and the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce. While calling in an update for our Midday Business Report, he told us of Brewer and Kolb’s seating arrangements. He said a lot of people on the trip were talking about it. I assigned Carrie to make some calls on the situation to see what was up. Our initial question was whether taxpayers paid for the upgrades. It became apparent early that neither Brewer nor Kolb asked for the upgrades, which Carrie reported in the fourth paragraph of her column. They were given upgrades as a courtesy by an AirTran employee. That raised the question whether it was appropriate for Brewer and Kolb to accept the upgrades because the city provides a subsidy to AirTran.

It also was apparent early that a lot of people on the trip were surprised and bothered by the fact that Brewer and Kolb sat apart in business class while the rest of the traveling party — which included a who’s who of Wichita business, civic and government leaders — sat in coach. Not surprisingly, none of the people who were bothered wanted to talk on the record. But all of the people Carrie and Jerry talked with, and there were nearly a dozen, agreed that they were bothered by the incident, and they said so were others in the traveling party. That’s what we reported. Both Brewer and Kolb were given an opportunity to comment, which they did.

So, were there lapses? Not any that I can see. Did we harm the "community mission of Visioneering Wichita,” as Brewer said in his letter? We were the only media outlet in Wichita who thought the trip was important enough to cover. Jerry and I planned our coverage of the trip before he left and never strayed from the plan. That included daily coverage of the trip in The Eagle and at Kansas.com, and a 1A story wrapping up the trip that appeared in Saturday’s paper. Can Brewer argue that it was a non-story? Sure. There often is a fine line about what is and what isn’t news. I don’t think this was one of those cases, but senior editors still held several discussions about how to report and play the story. I think we got it right.

Tom Shine