Category Archives: News content

Magazines struggling at the newsstand

An hour and 30 minutes ago

I’ve written here many times about the challenging environment these days in the media industry - an era when changing reader habits are creating upheaval in media use, and every media company is working to adapt.

Because we’re a newspaper, we tend to be myopically focused on newspapers when we talk about this in the newsroom. But it’s interesting to look at the impact of changing media habits elsewhere, too. Women’s Wear Daily has an interesting piece today looking at first-half newsstand sales for major magazines. It’s an interesting chart and analysis.

By Sherry Chisenhall | Filed under Current Affairs, News content, People, Reader issues | Comments (0)

What’s new on the complaint desk today

An hour and 40 minutes ago

Three readers called or emailed today to take issue with the Wednesday “Meaning of Lila” comic strip in which the Boyd character is referred to as gay by another man. One reader termed this “sickening,” and another cited it as an example of The Eagle “sanctioning this social conditioning.”

I’m not a regular reader of the Lila comic, but I do read it occasionally. What’s clear in the trio of complaints today is these are not regular Lila readers either - past Lila comic strips have made clear that Lila’s friend Boyd was gay, so these are obviously readers who stumbled into this comic strip Wednesday, or who had someone point it out to them.

One challenge of newspaper comics pages is offering comics that appeal to a wide range of readers. Newspapers have worked over the years to find new comics that will interest younger readers who don’t see some older comics as representative of their lives.

In publishing the Lila strip, the newspaper isn’t making a social commentary on what anyone “should” do, contrary to one reader’s assertion. It’s simply acknowledging that for a great many readers, this reflects the reality of the friendships in their lives.

You can read the writer of the Lila comic discussing his viewpoint at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s letters page from June.

Also in the Inbox today is a new one in my 23 years of newspaper work. I have a letter and clipping sent to me from a reader complaining that there’s less in the paper these days. The example she mailed that upset her is a day when we had only a handful of obituaries in the paper, and she apparently wanted more.

All I can say is that there’s only so far I can go to make readers happy. I’ll have to stop short of making new obituaries.

By Sherry Chisenhall | Filed under News content, People, Reader issues | Comments (1)

Michael’s 2 cents on the election headlines

Wednesday8:11 p.m.

Here’s a how-the-cocktail-wiener-is-made peek at the creation of the Karl Peterjohn/Tom Winters headline Sherry wrote about in her last post.

Copy editors write the headlines and then a person called the slot either signs off on them or re-writes them. Last night the copy editor working on that story wrote “Peterjohn topples Winters in county race” for the headline. “Topples” is a good verb and one we don’t use often. The problem was that it was very short, leaving an empty space that screamed “Wow, I may be interesting but I look anorexic. Can’t you fill me out?”

So the slot — that was me last night — looked for a different word.

The way I saw it, Peterjohn, who has been unsuccessful in previous runs for office, unseated an incumbent by a 14-percentage-point margin. Was the margin wider in other races? Sure. But looking at the big picture made me quite comfortable saying he overwhelmed him.

By Michael Roehrman | Filed under Current Affairs, Headlines, News content, Politics, Reader issues | Comments (1)

Reader is underwhelmed by election headlines

Wednesday6:48 p.m.

John is one of my frequent emailers who takes issue with our coverage or with actions of one of the community’s governing bodies on occasion. He’s a careful news peruser and is usually correct in the points he makes. Here’s what he wrote today:

“Peterjohn garners 55% of the votes to Winters’ 41%, and the Eagle headlines this at the top of Page 1A as overwhelming. Marcey Gregory gets 60% of the vote in the #3 district commission race. That seems to be slightly more overwhelming by at least 2 percentage points. Kelly Arnold gets 58% of the vote in the race for county Clerk, and the Eagle says he won easily, and placed that opinion on Page 6A. Jim Ryun - behind by the still unsettled bid for the 2nd district congressional race was simply in trouble. In fact, by the time that edition of the paper was written, Ryun was behind. Why not just state the vote numbers and percentages and let your readers decide is a man who lost by 107 votes is merely in trouble, or factually out of the game?

Jim Slattery got 69% of the vote in the senate race. Ty Masterson got 60% in his race. Oletha Faust-Goudeau received 71% of the votes in District 29, and Carolyn McGinn got a whopping 83 in District 31, and Steve Abrams got 60% of Distric 32’s votes. Why aren’t these over-whelming numbers?”

John, I get to disagree this time! We didn’t characterize the vote margin as overwhelming. Our headline said that Peterjohn overwhelmed his opponent, using the word as a verb, not an adjective describing the vote totals.

OK, that’s splitting hairs. But a 14-percentage point win is not winning overwhelmingly? Doesn’t seem like an opinion to me, but I guess it could be if you were expecting a 30-point win and thought you squeaked one out. I’ll invite Michael Roehrman, our deputy editor/production, to share his two-cents’ worth also.

By Sherry Chisenhall | Filed under Current Affairs, Headlines, News content, Politics, Reader issues | Comments (0)

Here’s what political journalists are reading

Wednesday6:30 p.m.

Now that we’re in the thick of politics season, here’s some food for the junkies with major politics appetites. American Journalism Review asked seven political journalists what they consider must-reads online. Here’s what they said.

By Sherry Chisenhall | Filed under News content, Politics, Web/Tech | Comments (0)

Some thoughts on Gene Stephenson coverage

Wednesday5:24 p.m.

A reader (and former Eagle reporter) wrote yesterday asking me to discuss why, in her view, we did not thoroughly cover the stalking allegations against Wichita State baseball coach Gene Stephenson and why the coverage ran in a non-sports section. Her feeling was that media in town ignored or “glossed-over” the story and she wanted to know more about the case.

One thing we can agree on is that we’d like to know more, also.  The reason The Eagle has consistently fought to open court proceedings and records is that we believe there is an inherent public interest in an open and transparent legal system. In this case, however, the lawsuit against Stephenson was ended with a confidential out-of-court settlement, and neither party has agreed to talk to us. I understand why that may frustrate readers who want to know whether the allegations against Stephenson had any basis, or whether the accusations were false.

As our Opinion page staff noted today, accountability is particularly important in this case because Stephenson is a very public figure representing a taxpayer-funded institution.

We would love to have more information to publish, too. But I disagree that this equates to The Eagle treating Stephenson with kid gloves, as this reader believes. In fact, the day we learned of the lawsuit against Stephenson, we published a front-page story on the allegations. Readers sometimes assume that sports writers, who often have less-formal relationships with their sources (teams and coaches) then news beat writers, seek to “cover up” for coaches and players in trouble. No doubt that occasionally happens, but it’s not the norm.

We assigned the Stephenson story to a metro desk reporter who had never met Stephenson and doesn’t recall ever even attending a WSU baseball game. There is no favoritism at play.

After that initial front-page story, we published a second front-page “follow-up” story on the lawsuit. We also published a few small updates when the court case was postponed. The story on the out-of-court settlement ran in the Local & State section.

I agree it’s a judgment call on whether to publish that story there, on 1A, or in Sports. With no details on the settlement available, it didn’t meet our requirement for a front-page story. We published it in the Local section because Stephenson is a more widely known public figure in Wichita and that section has a larger readership than the Sports section. Generally if a sports figure is known only to sports readers, we would run that story in the Sports section. In our view, Stephenson merited a story position to a more broad audience.

By Sherry Chisenhall | Filed under News content, Newspaper ethics, People, Reader issues | Comments (0)

Story/advertisement placement

Tuesday7:48 p.m.

The caller Sherry refers to in her previous post had another concern. She thought it was inappropriate that the suicide-rate story continued to a page across from an advertisement with the headline “Doctor, I’m going to kill myself! . . .”

When the first papers from our state edition came off the press, members of the copy desk were aghast. They worked with our page designers to swap the rest of the suicide story with the rest of the truckers story.

That was an embarrassing juxtaposition, but we kept it out of the majority of our papers.

By Michael Roehrman | Filed under News content, Reader issues | Comments (0)

Stories on suicide, aviation strike draw complaint

Monday7:59 p.m.

I had a voice mail message today from a reader upset with us for running a front-page story Sunday on Sedgwick County’s rising suicide rate while also publishing a story about an impending machinists strike at Hawker Beechcraft.

She suggests that suicides increase during an aviation strike and that it was insensitive of us to publish the suicide story during a strike.

A couple of thoughts come to mind. One is that, if there truly is a correlation between increased suicide and aviation strikes (I’m not aware that we’ve researched for such a connection), then Tim Potter’s story, which included resources for suicide prevention, would seem particularly well-timed, not poorly timed.

Additionally, though, it’s probably safe to say that the safeguards in our editing process would not typically flag such a potentially tenuous connection of two unrelated news stories. Our copy desk, which is the last line of defense against errors or inadvertently embarrassing juxtaposition, does a terrific job of looking for potential connections before words and images on a computer screen become a printed newspaper.

As a former copy editor, I’m not surprised that someone didn’t suggest a connection between the two stories. I wouldn’t have, either. (And to the caller’s question, no, I’m not new to Wichita.) Tim’s story is a weekend “enterprise” story which, for the Sunday paper, is typically written and edited ahead of the usual daily news production cycle. Longer Sunday stories are generally ready for publication by Friday if not earlier, and often the reporter and editor are not in the office on Saturday when the newspaper is being produced - in design, and on the copy desk, where headlines are written.

The Hawker strike story was “live news,” a story covered on Saturday by reporter Molly McMillin. By the time the strike vote was final and Molly’s story was written, Tim’s story already had been written and put into the production process. I explain this simply to illustrate how two news stories can end up on the same page, but take widely varying timelines to get there.

None of this is to say that I don’t believe a strike is a hardship on the striking workers, as well as a company’s non-striking employees. Sometimes, though, a reader may have a personal connection to a story and see a relationship with other news that most readers, and most editors, don’t see on first inspection.

By Sherry Chisenhall | Filed under Current Affairs, Headlines, News content, Newspaper ethics, Reader issues | Comments (0)

A tip of the fedora to the newspaperman

Aug. 1, 20087:00 p.m.

I recently spent a week with Steve Smith and 10 other editors and their top Web editors at a Knight Digital Media Center conference in L.A., focused on the digital future of the news industry. Steve is a former managing editor of The Eagle, now executive editor of the Spokesman-Review in Spokane.

As soon as I read Steve’s recent late-night blog post waxing nostalgic for the dying breed of hard-bitten newsman, I knew his post would draw some predictable criticism. Yes, those good old days tended to shut out anyone who wasn’t a good old boy, and the arrogance that has been an albatross for the news industry grew deep roots through that era. Some of the posted responses are the typical, “this is exactly what’s wrong with your business.”

I read Steve’s post as a harmless piece of end-of-the-day whimsy. Much of the good old days weren’t all that good. But Steve touched on something that another former Eagle managing editor, Theresa Johnson, and I talked about occasionally. Newspapers don’t really have many odd characters anymore (some of you who’ve been to the newsroom might dispute that). At least, they don’t make up the critical mass of the staff. Steve’s post reminded me of a story that a colleague from a small newspaper in North Carolina once told me, about an angry city editor who threw half of a wax-paper-wrapped sandwich at a reporter. The sub sandwich hit the reporter in the head, and then everyone went back to their business.

I enjoyed reading Steve’s post, but I don’t feel all that nostalgic about many parts of the good old days. Like any industry, changing times mean letting go of some parts of what we were — the hardest pieces are the ones that disappoint readers. We tend to think the news business is a little different in the changes to its culture and character, but as I look across the downtown skyline on a Friday night, I’m thinking the stories would be just as colorful in all those buildings emptied out for the weekend.

By Sherry Chisenhall | Filed under News content, Newspaper ethics, People | Comments (0)

Readers give voters guide a thumbs up

Aug. 1, 20085:48 p.m.

I came back Monday from two business trips to find a string of thank-you emails from readers who love the new interactive voters guide at Kansas.com. I’m delighted that so many Eagle readers and Kansas.com users like the new online voters guide, which is a significant improvement over what we have been able to offer in the past.

Marcia Werts, an assistant metro editor, and Nick Jungman, deputy editor/interactive, did most of the work to bring you searchable profiles on 713 candidate running in 410 races in Sedgwick, Butler, Harvey and Sumner counties. Along with biographical information, profiles include candidate responses on key election issues. We were able to create this site with a lot of hard work by Marcia, Nick and other newsroom staffers, plus a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to our Web partner, E-ThePeople.org, to build the site with us.

Feedback on the site has been terrific, and to answer a couple of readers’ questions: yes, we plan to do it again for the November elections. Several readers appreciated that the “build your ballot” feature found candidates for them when they weren’t sure which district they lived in for a particular office. Another woman wrote, “Because of this site I was able to persuade my husband to peruse his parties races and to do an advance vote in the primary since we will be in Colorado on the day of the election.”

The way we see it, that’s the ultimate success for us with this election toolkit: Giving citizens the information they need to help them take part in the democratic process. To all who dropped me a note, thanks for the feedback.

By Sherry Chisenhall | Filed under Headlines, Kansas.com, News content, Politics, Reader issues, Technology, Web/Tech | Comments (0)