Last weekend, Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, gave a speech for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies that raises some thought-provoking points about the role of news media in ensuring open government.
The text of her remarks is interesting reading, tracking the role and investment of traditional media in driving openness from government, courts and other institutions.
Hat tip to Romenesko for the link.
“The Old Man and the Sea” has 26,560 words. “Animal Farm” has 29,060; “The Call of the Wild” has 37,058; “The Great Gatsby” has 47,094; “Profiles in Courage” has 62,400; and the May 3, 2009, Wichita Eagle has 80,156, not counting advertising.*
Eighty. Thousand. Words.
Eighty thousand words about your city, nation and world in addition to sports, business, entertainment and commentary. All of it brought to you by people who live down your block, go to your church and shop at your stores.
On top of that, there are photos by prize-winning photographers, Parade magazine, comics and circulars that tell you what’s hot and, more importantly for many, what’s on sale.
Looking for a job or want to buy a car or a boat? Found a dog, lost a dog or want to adopt a dog? Going house hunting or mapping out your garage-sale route? There are hundreds of classified ads you can dig through.
Oh yeah, there’s also $318 worth of coupons.**
So . . . every Sunday you can read “The Old Man and the Sea” three times in a row and not save any money, or you can increase your knowledge, be entertained and potentially save hundreds of dollars.
All for only $2 — less if you have The Eagle delivered to your home.
Who says there aren’t bargains in the world?
* I chose May 3 because that’s when I started this project. It’s been six weeks, but man, that was a lot of counting. Also, numbers were counted as words. e.g. “The koala’s rampage sent 73 people to the hospital on April 14” would count as 12 words.
** This amount varies each week. But you’re smart, you knew that already.
On Friday afternoon, we launched our redesigned home page at Kansas.com. We think you’ll find it easier to find the stories you’re looking for, and the site more organized. Congratulations and many thanks to our site programmer, Katie Lohrenz, for a great deal of hard work to make our news site easier to use.
Here’s a note posted Friday by Nick Jungman, our deputy editor for interactive:
You might have noticed that we’ve changed a few things on the Kansas.com home page.
We’ve been working for weeks to develop a new home page for the site that is cleaner and more organized. The often chaotic jumble of information we used to have on the home page has given way to a categorized, calmer design. We think it’s a vast improvement.
But we know changes like this can be disorienting for our readers. We’ll certainly be making changes in the coming days based on your feedback, as well as extending some of these changes to other pages of the site. If you’re having trouble finding anything, or have any suggestions you’d like us to consider, please pass them along. You can e-mail us at webmaster@wichitaeagle.com or sound off in the comments below.
Many thanks to the readers who sent me some detailed examples of erroneous listings in our TV guide section the past month or so. With your help, we’ve been able to work with the company that provides our listings, Tribune Media Services, to make changes that should significantly improve the accuracy of listings each week.
TMS was able to track specific examples of incorrect listings, finding that in each case, the networks in question had changed their programming plans after we went to press with our TV section. Sometimes, the programming changed within hours of our printing.
Like most newspapers, we print the TV section well in advance of the day you receive it. TMS sends us a feed of the listings at a specified time each week to fit our printing schedule, and we discovered that significant changes were being made to programming after we printed the section. We can’t eliminate that completely — we need to print the section ahead of time to make room on the press for live news sections, and TV networks are always free to change their programming up to the last minute.
But the Eagle’s production director, Cindy Trenary, was able to shift printing schedules to nearly cut in half the advance time we need for printing the TV section. So beginning with the section you’ll receive on June 21, you’ll be getting more current listings that will capture many more of the programming changes that get made during the week.
We appreciate readers’ help in resolving these issues. Happy TV-watching.
One of the most common questions news staff members are asked about a major news story is, “How did you hear about it?”
On most crime stories, the answer is the police scanner, or a police report.
We learned through unusual means last Sunday that George Tiller had been shot, and I think it’s right to disclose to our readers how that happened.
For more than 10 years, Assistant Metro Editor Marcia Werts and her family have attended Reformation Lutheran Church. She was arriving at church Sunday shortly after the shooting occurred, and her husband and daughter were inside the church. She phoned Deputy Editor Tom Shine to alert him to the developing story. Marcia was understandably shaken by what happened at the church that day, and we did not ask her to take part in news coverage, though she did stay in touch with other Eagle editors through the day. Other media organizations also were arriving at the church about the time Marcia arrived, presumably after hearing of a shooting on the police scanner.
It’s rare that one of our staff members is so closely connected to a developing news story. Many people have asked how The Eagle confirmed the news of George Tiller’s death so quickly that morning, and I want to be open with our readers on the circumstances of how this happened.
A reader left a voice mail for me late last week, asking me to share some thoughts on a project by the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy that sought property tax records from 105 Kansas counties. The gist of the message was that the organization didn’t really have a right to the records — or was doing something wrong by “raising a stink” at being denied records — because it is not a news organization, but is a think tank that supports a specific point of view.
My reaction: Good for FHC. Doesn’t matter who you are or why you want public records. They’re public. Period. That’s why agencies aren’t legally allowed to ask who you are or why you want records (though state law doesn’t stop some from asking anyway). Public records belong to the people, regardless of the purpose for which they’re sought.
One of the most common — and ill-informed — arguments made for denying disclosure of records to a media organization is that “you don’t represent the public, you just represent yourself.” Most individuals don’t know where to go to obtain information, how to ask for it, how to argue for it when it’s denied, or what the law requires of public agencies. If records are illegally withheld, few people have the resources to legally compel an agency to comply with the law.
If individual citizens, bloggers, other media outlets or non-profit organizations such as the Flint Hills Center are willing to invest the time and resources to support open government in Kansas, I support their efforts.
One of the somewhat frustrating problems we wrestle with is accuracy of the listings in our Sunday TV section. We get complaints from time to time that the listings are incorrect, but we’ve had some problems pinpointing specific errors. Often the issues are about general inaccuracies, not specific channels, dates and times that we can point to with the company that provides the listings to us.
Recently, though, several helpful readers have logged specific issues that we’ve been able to pass along to the company that we purchase the listings from. They’re looking into the issues, and we expect the result to be improvement in the accuracy of the TV book.
In the meantime, if you notice a day when a TV listing is wrong, drop me a note at editorsdesk@wichitaeagle.com. It’s a big help to us to be able to point to specific dates, times and channels in our efforts to improve service.
I got a voice mail message from a reader who identified herself only as “McLeod” and asked for an editor to call her back. Problem is, the phone connection wasn’t very good, and I couldn’t correctly decipher the phone number to call back. If you are Ms. McLeod with a Cokie Roberts question — please drop me a note with your phone number at schisenhall@wichitaeagle.com. Sorry for the technology mishap.
In the next few weeks, we’ll be working on updating our print edition’s weather page. Designer Mike Sullivan has done a great job so far on a preliminary prototype to improve our graphics and make information as useful as possible. To help us with a facelift for the page, we want to hear from you.
I recognize that some readers prefer to get weather information elsewhere. This post is directed to the people who like to spend some time with the printed weather page and have favorite features on the current page, or ideas for weather content they’d like to see. Some questions that would be helpful to us: Do you spend much time looking at the list of temperatures/forecasts for other cities? Is a seven-day local forecast useful, or, given the mercurial nature of Kansas weather, would a five-day forecast be most helpful? Are air-quality indexes useful?
If you have any feedback to offer, post a comment here on the blog or drop us an email at editorsdesk@wichitaeagle.com. Thanks for your time.
Interesting draft report out today from the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy — the preliminary findings of the commission’s work since last June to gather opinion and fact about the information communities and citizens need to function, and how well those needs are being met.
Through May 8, the commission, in partnership with PBS, is seeking public comment on the draft report and taking questions for the commission’s co-chair.
The most common question I get these days is about what the future holds for all news media, including print newspapers. The commission’s report builds from a broad definition of “news” and should be an interesting read both for those who greatly fear the death of traditional news outlets and those who are eagerly anticipating such a moment.