Category Archives: Politics

It’s raining election spam

Sept. 12, 200810:41 a.m.

One potentially delicate issue to deal with around election time is the barrage of spam that friends and family members send on various campaign issues. I get a ton of them at work, but I figure that’s part of the job. It’s more of an annoyance, though, when I have to wade through them in my personal email at home.

So far, I’ve dealt with this by just deleting them. I’ve known of some family members or friends who have written back to spammers and (not always politely) told them to quit spamming. I find the sociology of political spam kind of fascinating – sending sometimes extreme views via email to friends or family whose views you are not familiar with. Do spammers wonder if they’re offending the recipient? Do they care? Or do they hope the email changes the recipient’s view?

I’ve never been able to figure out the purpose of political spam. Or any spam, for that matter. I rarely, if ever, forward any of the thousands of emails – jokes, photos, scams, urban legends, news-that’s-not-really-true, cartoons, etc. – that clog the world’s servers. I never feel the urge to “send it on” to 20 friends or relatives. It seems like a better idea, if you’re going to take the time to attach so many names to an email, to just send a note instead and ask, “How are you?” To opt instead for some substantive social interaction.

I’ve always believed political views are very personal, and I can’t imagine sending email like buckshot to dozens of friends or family members whose beliefs I don’t know. Judging by the inbox, though, not everyone shares that feeling. Do most of you mind getting those emails? If it bothers you, how do you handle it?

By Sherry Chisenhall | Filed under Current Affairs, People, Politics, Web/Tech | Comments

Planning election coverage

Sept. 10, 20088:14 p.m.

I had a phone call this week from a reader named Shirley, saying she loved the “true or false” piece we published Sunday on campaign claims. She hopes we plan to do more of this. We do. One key focus we’ll have this election season is trying to be as useful as possible in helping voters gather information they need to make decisions in the vast number of offices up for election.

One place we hope you stay in tune with is our election news page on Kansas.com. I’ll ask Jean Hays, deputy editor/news, to talk to you in this blog about plans for coverage through November. And if you have ideas for articles or features you want, let Jean know (jhays@wichitaeagle.com) or our assistant metro editor who is handling state and local election news, Marcia Werts (mwerts@wichitaeagle.com). We’ll do our best to find the information you want.

By Sherry Chisenhall | Filed under Current Affairs, Kansas.com, News content, Politics, Reader issues | Comments Off

Election season means barrage of bias claims

Sept. 10, 20088:04 p.m.

I love election season. For all of its flaws, it’s still democracy in action. And a presidential election carries with it the added excitement of history in the making.

It’s also the season for a daily stream of emails I get accusing the newspaper of bias for or against the writer’s favored candidate. Many are emotional and accusatory, built on the absolute certain knowledge that the news staff is laboring to execute an intricate conspiracy.

I take each one seriously. Sometimes, I quickly see how a writer came to his or her conclusion. A word we used may be a little loaded in meaning, or we left out a pertinent fact. Most of the time, these are errors of oversight or failure to anticipate how an article or headline would be perceived by readers. Sometimes, the writer or editor truly has bought too hard into one candidate’s argument, and we have to talk about how to provide better balance. And sometimes, the plain fact is that with so many offices up for election, some races are in danger of slipping through the cracks and not getting enough coverage unless we’re vigilant.

The hardest complaints to resolve, though, are the ones that are based on an unspecific perception the reader has about the intent of the writer. One article last week drew seething responses – and threats to cancel the paper – from two readers. One believed the article was grossly biased toward a liberal viewpoint. The other was equally passionate that The Eagle is “a conservative rage” and this story was another example of our right-wing bias.

The concept of bias is complex – both in its reality (no one can truly have zero beliefs and biases) and in the reader’s passionate perception that bias exists. Often, we see what we want to see or expect to see. It can be hard, when we’re pushed for specifics, to put our finger on the source of the slant we think we see.

One of my naive hopes each election season is for civility in our debate. I love debating ideas and viewpoints with friends and listening to them explain their beliefs. And I continue to be saddened and frustrated by the growing refusal of so many people to debate ideas without attacking people. I’ve had very enlightening discussions with people I respect greatly – I sometimes disagree completely with their view on a subject, but I don’t feel a compulsion to attack them personally, nor do I lose respect because our ideas might conflict.

We have a complicated assignment until November. We have to take seriously our responsibility for squelching biases, or the perception of them. At the same time, many readers today have a hair-trigger for proclaiming bias, and we’re not helped when whole political organizations establish a strategy of urging people to claim bias as a way to get letters to the editor published. (The MoveOn organization sent an email blast linking to instructions on how to do this for an orchestrated attack on Sarah Palin. A reader sent me the email, complete with a Web form for sending letters to the editor and a suggestion that the best way to get letters published is to pick an article and allege your viewpoint was excluded.)

For good and for bad, happy election season to all.

By Sherry Chisenhall | Filed under Current Affairs, Headlines, News content, Newspaper ethics, People, Politics, Reader issues | Comments

Update on press run for Biden news

Aug. 27, 20086:32 p.m.

Here’s some follow-up information for a couple of people who asked for more details about the press run last Friday night (see item below on the breaking news about Joe Biden).

Production manager Cindy Trenary tells me that the pressroom held the press as late as possible waiting for the updated pages, then decided they should start up the press without the stories or they would risk causing late deliveries for readers.

The press ran for only 5 minutes before the new pages arrived with news of Joe Biden’s selection as Barack Obama’s VP candidate. Our total Friday night press run is about 95,000 papers, and about 3,500 were printed in that 5-minute timefram.

The press prints about 1,000 copies a minute running at regular speed, but runs slower at initial startup and also during slowdown before stopping.

So we didn’t make every copy of the Saturday paper with the news, but we came pretty darn close.

By Sherry Chisenhall | Filed under Current Affairs, News content, Politics, Reader issues, Technology | Comments Off

How did late Biden news get into The Eagle?

Aug. 25, 20082:15 p.m.

A couple of readers wrote that they were pleasantly surprised to see that the late-breaking news Friday night of Barack Obama’s VP pick made it into The Eagle’s Saturday print edition. One reader noted that the story wasn’t in some of the country’s largest newspapers, including The New York Times.

How did we do that? Lots of hustle from our nightside editing staff and pressroom Friday night. And it helps to be in the central time zone, with later deadlines than the East Coast papers.

Michael Roehrman, our deputy editor for production, told me in an “overnight note” that about 10 people scrambled in the newsroom when a news bulletin moved on our wire services with word that Obama had picked Joe Biden. Our Saturday paper had already gone to press, so Michael’s staff asked the pressroom team to run the press slower until we could get new pages to them. That means some early copies of the paper likely went out without the news, but I haven’t been able to verify that yet with a production manager.

It’s amazing to watch an experienced night news team in action getting breaking news in the paper. It’s a very complicated undertaking, with designers remaking pages, copy editors writing new headlines, editors pulling together stories from often-sparse available information. That gets rushed into production, new plates are made, the press is stopped, replated, and then starts rolling again with the fresh news.

I’m proud of how well our team executed this maneuver Friday night, and to reader David B., thank you for the great note to start Monday morning. I’m glad we were there for you Saturday morning.

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

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

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

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 Off

Why we ran the photo containing a racial slur

July 27, 20085:54 a.m.

Some might find the photo on the front page of Sunday’s paper of a defaced Obama sign objectionable.
We debated whether to run a photo of something that we could so easily describe in words.
Tell someone that a campaign sign of a black candidate was defaced with a racial slur, and it’s not hard to imagine what the sign said or what it looked like.
On one hand, we thought that running the photo might be fanning the flames of racism. That we were insensitive to older readers who lived through some of the painful experiences of the civil rights movement. That we were helping to spread a message scrawled by a bigot that only a few people would have seen before the sign was taken down.
On the other hand, some felt strongly that we should shine a light on racism that still exists in our community and not hide it.
The article by Christina Woods states that the Obama campaign is furthering a dialogue on race.
The photo should also spark discussion.
By running the photo we are saying that this isn’t typical behavior. This is wrong.
We didn’t want it to be a dominant photograph on the front page, because we didn’t feel like the sentiment expressed dominates our reality today.
It is a vestige of an ugly past. But as Christina’s article points out, our future is much more hopeful.

By Jean Hays | Filed under Current Affairs, Newspaper ethics, Politics | Comments