Not your father's front page
Producing this morning's paper was different because of the series of screens our judgment passed through. I'd be interested in your take. (pdf of front page here.)
We chased the school lockdown story aggressively with several reporters and photographers. Once it was over without anyone being harmed, we talked about what we had and what stories we needed to write. Here's a story in which school was disrupted for several hours, parents were worried about the safety of their children, and traffic was rerouted. Thankfully, in the end, no one was harmed.
While it was an exciting story to chase and people hungered for accurate information in the early afternoon -- parents in the Grimsley media center during the lockdown went to our Web site to find out what was going on -- we knew that what was fresh at 2 p.m. Friday would be old by 6 a.m. Saturday. Television would report and report and report throughout the evening.
So we needed something different, something that advanced understanding.
We had strong photographs, excellent color and detail from inside the school. But how should we play it? How big should it be on the front page, when, after all, nothing serious happened? How old would the news be and what did we have that readers wouldn't know? What should the tone of the stories be? Deathly serious? A mix of serious and light-hearted, which is how some of the student treated it? What else was happening in the world? School administrators saved the life of a student at Western Guilford. We had a powerful story of two motorcyclists who were killed in Myrtle Beach. Riots at Gitmo. But that's a lot of death and destruction on the front page.
We decided to focus the front page on a feature-style retelling of the day. The hard news story of who, what, when, where, why and how went inside. We replaced that with a three-sentence copy block on the front page saying, essentially the schools were locked down and nothing was found.
The lead story started this way: A gun-toting man. Swarming cops. A food fight. Loud blasts. A power failure.
For a while Friday, it seemed like chaos reigned during a lockdown of Grimsley High School and two nearby schools. Rumors flew faster than a speed-dialed cell phone call.
My journalistic mentors cringed inside their safe havens of retirement. "Get to the point," they'd said. "Quit your throat clearing and tell 'em what happened." Had something tragic occurred or had a gunman been found and taken into custody, our decisions would have been different. But these are different times. Did it work? You tell me.
By the way, Edward Wasserman, a journalism prof. at W&L, has an interesting -- but, I think, ultimately wrong -- take on these different times.
Comments (4)
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These days we live in a world of fear .. starting with Mom: "You'll put your eye out .. " to hype from the local newcast: "Child Injured __ News At 11:00 ... " to spending Three Billion dollars to clean some postal bacterium out of Capital Hill - an unsolved crime, btw - and up to spending (depending on how well you can count) between a few Hundred Billion to a few Trillion dollars to chase faux WMD's.
Now there is real danger, witness Columbine, Oklahoma City, the Twin Towers. In each of these cases a few folks with focus and planning and patience wrecked great distruction.
What's my point?
We can expend great resources to try and prevent horrible things from happening - expenditures with slim chance of actually achieving results, i.e., the ROI is really really small ... or we can start becoming wiser in the portrayal of Fear and more thoughtful in planning and response.
I'll hold my breath on the latter.
Posted on May 20, 2006 12:25 PM
Um, there never was a gunman? At least one was never found?
So, THIS is the coverage?
I think it's overkill.
Blow it out big time online, sure, because it's still happening. Put it on the front page of the paper because it's certainly notable.
But, I FIGURED someone had died or there was -- at the least -- an armed person FOUND based on the coverage on the pdf page.
Why not put it at the bottom of the front page with a photo? That gets it out there without blowing it out...
The pdf will make a good page for a designer to submit when they try to get another job somewhere else (designers love those kinds of pages).
But, beyond that, it's just too much.
What are you going to do the next time there is a lockdown -- and a gunman IS found (yet no one is hurt)?
Posted on May 20, 2006 9:55 PM
As a designer, I can tell you that, yes, it's nice to have good clips when looking for another job. But when a designer gets hired, it's not like they just look at the pretty pictures and hire us. We are asked to explain decisions that were made about the page, why something was played a certain way, etc. There is a degree of news judgement involved in being a designer, not just artistic merit. As to this page, I wasn't there, so I can't comment on the decisions that were made.
Posted on May 20, 2006 11:37 PM
I suppose we'd take up the whole page if a gunman actually was roaming a school campus, Jim. The other question is whether there was another story that was more compelling to local readers. I'd submit there wasn't, but I know that everyone has an opinion on that.
I know one of your common themes is that everything our staff does is so that they can get jobs at larger papers, but that's just not the case.
Posted on May 21, 2006 8:30 AM