News-Record.com

Two stories:

My friend Sam Zealy was killed last week in a traffic accident. I got a phone call about it late Thursday night from a friend of the family. We had a story about the accident online late Thursday and it was updated first thing Friday, but we didn't include his name either time because police had not released it.

Victims of the Ocean Isle fire tragedy are identified in today's story from The State newspaper. The State didn't get the information from the police, who hadn't released it. The paper credited "other officials, family members, friends and other sources."

Why identify one set of victims and not the other? The Ocean Isle fire has gotten national media coverage since it happened Sunday morning. There is intense public interest. Because the victims were identified only as attending South Carolina and Clemson, tens of thousands of people -- students, friends, parents, other relatives, alums -- were left wondering, who? The paper could answer that for those of us who didn't check Facebook and MySpace.

Sam's death, while tragic, was smaller in scope. The old-fashioned grapevine moved quickly. My guess is that lots of people knew Friday morning. I don't know why the police hesitated in releasing his name -- his family certainly knew -- but out of respect and caution, we waited, too. There didn't seem to be a public hunger for the identification.

But I could be wrong about that. Consistency in policy is something I like. It makes decisions easier, and it sets forth clarity when others are deliberating. This isn't consistency. On the other hand, it's a judgment call, which I also like.

Want to help clarify?

Visitors here have strong opinions on when to publish and when not to publish.

So if you're the editor who is asked not to publish Prince Harry's whereabouts in Afghanistan, what do you decide?

In a series of meetings at the Ministry of Defence late last year, British media and selected international outlets agreed not to report Harry's deployment in exchange for getting regular pictures, video and text of his day-to-day activities once the planned four-month assignment was completed.

Apparently, the Drudge Report wasn't one of the outlets.

He's coming home now.

Update: It's quiet. Too quiet. C'mon, it's not that hard.

When I was a reporter, the school superintendent told me, another reporter and two of his department heads an off-color joke that belittled African Americans and women. (This was not in Guilford County.) The reporter and I were in his office at the time, interviewing him and the aides about test scores. After he told the joke -- he saw me making a note -- he declared it off the record. I shook my head and said that we had made no such agreement. We argued about it briefly -- the department heads both looked horrified; they knew a faux pas when they heard one -- and I finally told him that he had been a public figure longer than I had been a reporter and he knew the rules: You don't declare something off the record after the fact.

I thought of that as I read about Samantha Power's statement about Hillary being a monster and her immediate declaration that that was off the record. Glenn Greenwald at Slate uses that example to write about one of the weaknesses of the American press.

It's extremely likely, though, that had Power been speaking to a typical reporter from the American establishment media, her request to keep her comments a secret would have been honored. In one of the ultimate paradoxes, for American journalists -- whose role in theory is to expose the secrets of the powerful -- secrecy is actually their central religious tenet, especially when it comes to dealing with the most powerful. Protecting, rather than exposing, the secrets of the powerful is the fuel of American journalism. That's how they maintain their access to and good relations with those in power.

And then he cites other persuasive examples.

I wonder if it is yet another one of those big city inside-the-beltway deals that those of us in the sticks don't get. Dan Gillmor describes his practice, which is precisely what I was taught 30 years ago and what we practice here.

I just received an e-mailed news release from a Raleigh group called Action for Children North Carolina about its new report on corporal punishment. A few minutes before that I got a news release on the local winners of the National Merit $2,500 scholarship winners.

Today is Monday; both releases are embargoed until Wednesday.

Normally when information with strings attached is exchanged, both sides agree to the strings. Given that I did not agree to embargo the information from National Merit or Action for Children -- both releases were sent unsolicited -- am I bound to honor the embargoes?

We don't care for embargoes, although we agree to them on occasion. They rarely help us or, more important, our readers.

But the tradition, I think, is to adhere to the requested embargo date, although I can't think of a good reason why. Now, with publishing in the hands of many, rather than few, isn't it time for this practice to go away?

Mark Binker gets his hand slapped by Clinton press folks for acting like a citizen of the United States -- going to the Clinton fund-raiser along with 700 people yesterday and then writing about it.

I have resisted, until now, pointing out the fact that there were 700 people in that venue, 95 percent of who were toting cell phones with cameras and recorders, a bunch with personal cameras and all, I would think, with decent enough memories to relate the event to friends and neighbors. So since everyone invited to the event was potentially a reporter, that "closed press" thing seemed pretty laughable.

I think it has been suggested before that the Clintons are working under a 20th century media mentality which is no longer operable in the age of citizen journalism. Yesterday was an up-close taste of that.

An editor asked me this morning why we were not giving this homicide of the A&T student the same visibility in the newspaper we gave this homicide of the UNC student body president.

Stories about Eve Carson's murder in March were on the front page a couple times. Stories about Derek Hodge have been on the Local front.

Both deaths are tragic for all the reasons you can think of. But for both philosophical and procedural reasons, the two were not judged the same way when we're putting the paper together. At least, that's how I responded to the editor. Here's why the difference in the coverage:

* Eve Carson was student body president and held a variety of high-profile positions within the university community. She was a mover and shaker who made news often by the things she did well before her murder.
* Her murder went national quickly, creating an interest in the story well beyond the Triangle or even North Carolina.
* A murder in "idyllic Chapel Hill" seems less common and therefore more newsworthy than one in Greensboro.
* The Chapel Hill police held regular news conferences and were relatively forthcoming with details and progress. That's not how Greensboro police do things.
* The case moved fast. Homicide of student then photos of suspected perps then arrests...all over the course of a few days. The progress created a sense of momentum.

But Hodge was a student at a local university, which carries a lot of weight here. Should we raise the visibility of his case?

Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic has an interesting post about what he calls an online mugging by another blogger.

What bothered me about Mr. Haber's post was not its insults (a couple of which were funny) but that he repeated a discredited accusation made by an ethically-challenged journalist about my reporting without having sought my comment. I called Haber to complain. He said: "I just wanted to promote your new blog." ... Then he said that, while the Observer "does reporting," the blog for which he writes "is a looser, more fun kind of way of writing things." Fun, in Haber's view, includes slander.

It has always been a curiosity to me that some bloggers feel no responsibility to ask for information or an explanation before they write something negative about me or the reporters here or the newspaper. The responsibility then falls to me or someone else here to correct the record or at least present an explanation for what we're being accused of. Of course, that requires us to know that the post has been written in the first place. (And for sure, it is not just me or the paper; there are some public figures and other bloggers who get reamed without being contacted for comment. I can only speak for myself.)

Most recently, one blogger headlined a piece saying we had censored his comment. Actually, our spam filter snagged it because it had several links in it. When I read his post, I suspected that had happened and resurrected the comment. I explained what happened on his blog and asked him to change the headline, and he graciously did. That's hardly slanderous and isn't a big deal. But it was factually wrong and could easily have been explained and fixed. I'm not linking to him because in the past he has asked me via e-mail for a comment about an issue he was interested in.

We aren't difficult to reach. Writing a fuller, fairer piece seems a reasonable motivation. It brings the blogger more authority and credibility. It would make the local blogosphere a more inviting, civilized place. Is that just the traditional journalist in me?