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.