Category Archives: News content

Why we are publishing government salaries

Aug. 15, 20088:33 p.m.

On Sunday’s front page you will find a package of stories that will be controversial for some and interesting for others.
We’re writing about how much individuals in government are paid. Also beginning Sunday you will find searchable databases on Kansas.com containing the salaries of city, county, school district and state government employees.

Some employees may question whether this respects their privacy.

Salaries are personal. We understand that.

But public salaries also are public information and are paid for by public tax dollars. Taxpayers have a right to see where their money is going.

A few state governments, such as Georgia, Iowa and Missouri, have put salaries for state government employees online for all to see.

The state of Kansas plans to do the same through www.kansas.gov/kanview a new site designed to promote transparency in government and budgets.

There are several reasons for making the information available:

1. Government is one of the largest employers. Wages it offers can help influence the pay scale for the rest of the area.

2. Salaries are a large part of a government’s budget, just as they are for any private company. For example, the city of Wichita spends more than 70 percent of its general fund, which is fed by property taxes, on salaries.
Ed Flentje, a Wichita State University professor who served as interim manager, warned in his proposed city budget that the amount the city pays in wages is increasing faster than the amount of money flowing into the general fund. If that trend doesn’t change, the city will either have to cut spending or increase taxes within three years.
Recent elections indicated that taxpayers are expecting local governments to be more accountable for how they spend money. It’s hard to tell just where tax money is going, if salary information is kept secret.

3. Finally, it’s interesting. KU athletic director Lew Perkins is paid $646,281, with about 28 percent of that coming from the state’s general fund. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is paid $106,948. Here’s a question for the next dinner table debate — what makes an athletic director worth six times more than a state’s governor?

By Jean Hays | Filed under News content, People, Reader issues | Comments (17)

Eagle ethics policies govern meals, gifts

Aug. 11, 20086:31 p.m.

I have a couple of great ethics questions from a reader puzzled by two posts on our Business Casual blog recently. Barry read posts by Carrie Rengers, our business columnist, referring to a lunch she had with a local businessman. In a previous post, Carrie said she flipped a coin with the businessman to determine who would buy lunch (she lost). She was soon leaving for a vacation in Las Vegas, and the man also gave her $100 and asked her to bet it for him.

Barry asks what our ethics policies are regarding sources buying lunch for Eagle reporters, columnists or editors. What if she had lost the coin flip? And, he asks, “Secondly, is it acceptable practice to receive ‘a crisp $100 bill’ from that source?”

We do have a specific ethics policy regarding a wide range of issues, including meals and gifts, and we are in the process of updating that policy. As soon as the revisions are complete, I’ll post the entire policy on Kansas.com for readers to see.

Our current policy on buying meals says it’s preferable to pick up the tab or split it. If paying or splitting isn’t feasible, or the source insists on picking up the tab, then make plans to reciprocate and take the other person to lunch in the near future. This is fairly common practice in our newsroom with sources we meet frequently for lunch or dinner.

Our policy on accepting gifts is also clear: We don’t. In this case, the businessman did not give the money to Carrie as a gift. He gave it to her asking her to wager it on his behalf in Las Vegas. Our ethics policies are clearly not meant to cover every imaginable situation, and do not address what to do if someone asks you to bet money for them.

But here’s the “however” – I still wish we had not accepted the $100 and agreed to wager it. It doesn’t violate the letter of the ethics policy, but, simply put, it looks bad. It opens us to the perception, as Barry interpreted it, that we took money from a source. It could potentially compromise our impartiality in the future. The best course of action in this case would have been to explain that we can’t accept the money or bet it for him.

But here’s another “however” – those types of decisions are difficult to think through on the spur of a moment when a source is asking you (with no ill intent) to bet the money for him. I know Carrie to be an ethical journalist who takes great pains to discuss potential conflicts with me or other editors. Many readers don’t know that about her, and know only that she wrote about taking $100 from a source. Given the benefit of time to discuss that decision, I believe she would have handled it differently.

Hindsight, as always, is much sharper than foresight.

By Sherry Chisenhall | Filed under Kansas.com, News content, Newspaper ethics, Reader issues | Comments (2)

Magazines struggling at the newsstand

Aug. 8, 200812:28 p.m.

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 Off

What’s new on the complaint desk today

Aug. 8, 200812:18 p.m.

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 (2)

Michael’s 2 cents on the election headlines

Aug. 6, 20088:11 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

Aug. 6, 20086:48 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 Off

Here’s what political journalists are reading

Aug. 6, 20086:30 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 Off

Some thoughts on Gene Stephenson coverage

Aug. 6, 20085:24 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 Off

Story/advertisement placement

Aug. 5, 20087:48 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 Off

Stories on suicide, aviation strike draw complaint

Aug. 4, 20087:59 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 Off