Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Covering diverse communities

Thoroughness has always been a hallmark of good journalism. So has self-criticism.

In an effort to ramp up our efforts at both, Free Press staff recently met with representatives of Mankato’s growing diverse community, and we discovered we can improve our game, and our business.

The epiphany for me arrived a few months ago when I examined the picture the newspaper was portraying of the communities of color in our region. It was an exercise for a Blandin Foundation leadership program for editors, but it also allowed me to take a look at the broad picture we were drawing.

It also was prompted by a study of our newspaper by the Center for Small Towns at the University of Minnesota Morris. That study showed that compared to other things we covered, we were a little light on page one stories that showed diversity was valued.

While newspapers publish daily, the message we portray to the community is a story that develops over time. People don’t forget yesterday’s news. In fact, the continuing cycle of a newspaper paints a picture for people that leaves a lasting impression. My own realization suggested our picture of the people of color in our community was not so much inaccurate as it was incomplete.

We’d have a story about a cultural event, and then three crime stories involving minorities. Another good story, three negative. At the same time, numerous positive human interest feature stories in our newspaper involved white people that equal or outnumber the negative stories.

This is not a sin of commission, but rather one of omission. While we tell the “true” stories of people of color involved in crime, we often let that news dominate the painting of the broader picture. We do indeed cover so-called “positive” events of the diverse community, but they are often weekend features that one could view as a token way to cover the community.

Too often we neglect to depict people of color in positive roles, and where we do, it may not be enough, again, to help paint a broader, balanced picture.

These kind of omissions of coverage have lead many in the community to believe the people of color are the main crime problem in the city.

Too often, they are all painted with the same brush.

Young school children should not have to hear they are the problem in the community when they walk through the doors of our schools. They shouldn’t have to hear that they should “go back where they came from.”

That’s happening, and the sobering truth is that the newspaper is contributing to part of that, even if we’re not doing it intentionally.

The kids are blamed for crimes committed by “their people” even though they may have had nothing to do with those acts.

This change of thinking on our part doesn’t mean we’re not going to report crime. It does mean we’re going to try to paint a balanced picture of the diverse community like we are painting a balanced picture of the white community.

We’re able to more easily paint a balanced picture of the white community because, by and large the people who write Free Press stories are white and live in white neighborhoods. As one astute observer told us: “Where does the paper live.” He was saying, we write about places that are familiar to us and where “we live.”

So we’ll have to engage the diverse community, by inviting them to places the newspapers “lives,” but also going out to where they live.

Engaging works. Through meeting with the representatives of the diverse community, we found at least three or four good stories. These families who immigrate to Mankato have tremendous stories of struggle. They are overcoming odds to succeed in America, not unlike the immigrants of years past who came from places such as Norway, Ireland and Germany.

Many come from cultures with strong family bonds, something we in American could do better at ourselves. There is true value in the diverse community. The newspaper is one place that can help show that value, and create a more complete picture of the community as a whole.

Monday, October 19, 2009

We're not in Kansas anymore Toto

Mankato crime may not be like New York, Chicago, or even Minneapolis crime, but we're also not "in Kansas anymore."

That was one of the favorite phrases of former Mankato Public Safety Director Glenn Gabriel when he came across a crime that was more serious than one would expect in a town like Mankato.

It was a reference of course to the line in the movie Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and her dog Toto discover the tornado that hit their home has landed them in a very different place, much less innocent than the proverbial Kansas.

We've begun tracking crime in Mankato through police reports in an online crime map that we keep updated as crimes occur. We don't report every assault, only the more serious ones that seem to be done in more public places.

In October, we've tracked four serious assaults and one robbery through the 19th. In September, our tracking showed four assaults, five sexual assaults, a car crashing into police and two other instances of drunk drivers hitting pedestrians or other cars, and two robberies.

This seems above the norm from what I'm used to seeing. The robberies could be related to the economy. Some of the assaults are related to excessive drinking.

The crime map details each crime, with time, date, place and circumstances.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Hockey goalies and editors

My time as a high school hockey goaltender has served me well in life.

The hockey culture of my hometown - St. Paul, Minnesota - is well known. And kids, almost all kids, grow up on the outdoor rinks at the many recreation centers in one of Minnesota's most beautiful and safe cities.

Youth had something to do besides drink. I lived within walking distance - imagine that - of three St. Paul recreation centers - Rice, North Dale and Front street centers. Usually, each center had at least two boarded hockey rinks and a "general" rink for those who did not take their winter sports as seriously.

Not only did each recreation center have its smattering of youth hockey teams, the many Catholic schools, one for each neighborhood it seemed, had at least one hockey team. St. Andrews, where many a storied Minnesota hockey player got their blades wet, had four or five teams, starting with sixth graders.

In all, I played about eight years of competitive hockey, ending my career on the MSU JV in 1978-79.

But I can still remember the drill. A goaltender is a special person, we were told. You must have the steel constitution to face down the rest of the maniacs who get to crank slapshots past your eyeballs. I have the lifetime experience of hearing the whiz of a 4 in. hard, black rubber disk flying past my ear at 80 mph.

I have the experience of one of those shots landing under my left eye on the cheekbone. This was before caged masks. You can feel this kind of shot with a fiberglass form-fitted goalie mask that I'm sure the State High School League would now outlaw.

I'm not sure how the physical experience of taking a slapshot to the face - in the context of good sportsmanship - prepares one for handling life's experiences as a newspaper editor, but I'm sure there are some.

Maybe once a goalie, always a goalie. There's just not much that rattles you when you came of age overcoming the fear of a 4 in. black rubber disk traveling 80 mph and headed for your nose.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Fact and opinion: "Truth" can be fuzzy

The angry politician couldn't believe it.

We just published a letter to the editor where the writer launched a "personal attack" on him that he characterized as inaccurate and false. We violated our own standards of requiring letter writers to cite the source of their facts, the politician argued.

Well, not quite. We require people to have sources for the facts they present, but opinions are an entirely different things.

The attack may have been personal, and clearly, the official didn't think it was very flattering. But it wasn't false or inaccurate. That's because there are no "false" opinions.

The Supreme Court has said as much in a series of cases where the principle of "fair comment and criticism" became a defense against libel. In a case where longtime conservative commentator William F. Buckley was called a "fascist" the court found that it was not libelous, but rather protected by "fair comment and criticism."

In the same case the court found, that while "fascist" was an opinion word, accusing Buckley as a journalist of lying and committing libel was something more provable and therefore, not a defense against libel.

Essentially, law evolved suggesting it's mostly not libelous to call a politician inept, or even unintelligent, but it is libelous to say they made off with city funds unless one can prove that.

So while the letter writer had an opinion that the politician was "off-base" and questioned his qualifications to hold office, there were no incorrect facts presented, only opinions the politicians didn't like.

Then the public official suggested I have great discretion to publish or not publish letters and that I should be judging the quality of one's argument. That may be a worthwhile goal to a point, but one that can also be prone to filtering or censoring views based on assumptions I don't agree with.

I later explained to this official, that they probably really did not want me or anyone else here to start making judgments on whose opinions are "true" or "accurate" or even if they are drawn logically from a set of facts.

That would create a system where letters were filtered through the views of one person, and their view alone, of whether an opinion was derived from facts and built into a reasonable argument.

I'd rather let readers decide if an opinion has merit and draws logical conclusions from the facts of a case. People can read. From my experience, most readers can tell B.S. when they see it or smell it.