On Religion: Published by the NCJ Oct. 4, 2007

The Faithless Pages

by MARCY BURSTINER

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This was how the Times-Standard began a story about the Jewish New Year known as Rosh Hashanah: “The blast of the ram’s horn marks the end to the summer season. Jewish people around the world are roused by the piercing sound of this ancient instrument known as the shofar. The sound of the shofar announces the beginning of the Jewish New Year 5764.”

But we are now in the year 5768. The paper didn’t make a mistake. I’m quoting from last time the Times-Standard ran a story about Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, the single most important time of the year for Jews. That was in 2003.

It wouldn’t be so egregious an oversight, even though some 80 papers around California ran Rosh Hashanah stories this year, except that every week the Times-Standard devotes two whole pages to religion: Its “Faith” section. The U.S. Census doesn’t count religious affiliation, so it’s hard to know how many Jews there are in Humboldt County. But I counted seven Steins and six Goldbergs in the phone book, and those are just the ones listed.

But this column isn’t about slighting Jews. I haven’t been to a service in seven years, I spent Yom Kippur eating falafel at the North County Fair and I spent last Saturday at a Pig Pickin’ in Trinidad. It’s about how you measure the quality of a newspaper by the quality of its throwaway pages — the sections most people toss without reading. This is where they used to stick “women’s” news.

In 1989, I moved into a Midwestern town of 300 people. When I went to the town hall to get my water turned on the pleasant clerk handed me a list of the town’s 11 churches. When I moved my furniture into my rented duplex, the kindly man across the street invited me into his living room to play me an album his musician son had just recorded. It was gospel music, and he blasted out of speakers almost as tall as I was.

The world is now more religious than it was back then. The Humboldt County Yellow Pages has local church listings under 50 different categories. There’s a thriving Mormon population and a large number of Seventh Day Adventists. At a time when newspapers struggle to keep their circulation base and latch onto the new buzz word — “hyper-local” — I can’t fathom why our local papers do such a lousy job of covering the one thing most people care deeply about.

What’s on the Faith pages? Generally one photo profile of a church — a large photo or two over a a long caption that tells you where the church is located, who the pastor, priest, reverend or rabbi is, when services are held and whether it has bible study sessions and children’s programs. It also tends to give you a snippet of church history. And there’s one column each week written by a local religious leader. Then there are two much larger wire stories about some religious conflict from across the country and a bunch of briefs — some national, off the wires, and some local, off press releases.

In the 20 issues I scanned, there wasn’t a single story with original reporting. And that’s too bad, because the pages hinted at good stories. Did you know that Cindy Storrs replaced Kate O’Leary as reverend of the Arcata United Methodist Church? How’s that affecting the church? Or that the St. Innocent Orthodox church in Eureka has “acclaimed” gyros? Who makes them? Or that Easter and Christmas services are so popular at the Hydesville Community Church — some 800 people attend — that they have to have it in the River Lodge in Fortuna? I wonder about David Besanceney, the youth pastor there, and the challenges he has shepherding children and teenagers in such a rural outpost, where methamphetamines and marijuana are prevalent and immigration and the collapse of the lumber economy has transformed the community.

I’d like to know whether the churches are helping to integrate our increasingly ethnically diverse population here or whether they serve to segregate subsectors. These are the local issues the Faith pages should explore. I assume that’s why you have Faith pages in the first place. Instead, you can find out about the Hill Tribe Christians in Taiwan, the struggles of church bingo in Massachussetts and how, because of immigration, churches nationwide are recruiting clergy from Latin and South America. Are they doing that here in Humboldt? I don’t know, because when the paper rips off the wire story, it doesn’t bother to localize it.

Over at the Eureka Reporter, coverage of religion is left to reader submissions. That’s turned into an ongoing spitting match between a handful of people who each insist that the other writers are crazy and misinformed. It could be worse. Several years ago Channel 3 did a report on how local Jews celebrated Passover. Behind the newscaster was an icon of two palms held together in prayer, something you’ll never see a Jew doing.

Worldwide, there’s upheaval in the Episcopal Church and the Catholic Church. We can’t pull our soldiers out of Iraq because of conflicts between Muslim sects. There’s a Mormon running for president and a born-again Christian who is president. Fundamentalist Christians helped put George Bush in office. School boards across the country are dealing with parents who don’t want their children taught evolution. If relevance is the key to survival of a newspaper, there is nothing more relevant these days than religion. The media is quick to report negative news about religion — child molesting priests, corrupt preachers, Holocaust deniers.

But mostly good comes out of most churches and temples, and that’s rarely and poorly reported. Under each church steeple you’ll find happy stories and tragic stories. Churches are about births and weddings, communions and deaths. They are potlucks, raffles and rummage sales, food and clothing drives, soup kitchens and human rights campaigns. They are the heart of a community. We need thoughtful, substantive coverage.

That’s my prayer for the New Year.

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University. You can e-mail your comments to letters@northcoastjournal.com or e-mail her directly at mib3@humboldt.edu.

On California Coverage: Published by the NCJ Sept. 6, 2007

The Big Picture

by Marcy Burstiner

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Open any sports page in just about any newspaper and you get a great rundown on what's happening with teams from around the state and nation. But that's not the case for news.

The local papers here tend to give you a smattering of somewhat relevant local news, one or two of the biggest national stories off the wires and very little that happened elsewhere in the state. To stay informed, I read the Times-Standard, the Eureka Reporter, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Arcata Eye and I listen to National Public Radio. But I shouldn't have to. And I still don't feel very informed. Try this: Google the term Google News Map and you'll find a nifty site that ranks news stories in a visual presentation comparing news obsessions across the world. It gives you an idea of the stories you miss.

It is frustrating when a story not covered is one that is both important and relevant. That was the case with the state legislature's failure to pass a budget over the summer.

Considering that California is one of the world's largest economies, when legislators here leave for vacation without a budget in place it is a pretty big deal. For many people in Humboldt County, the state budget crisis equaled personal crisis, because payments from the state disappeared for almost two months. If you live paycheck to paycheck, that's a long time to be without one.

Between all the local papers there were just a handful of stories on the effects of the budget stalemate here in Humboldt County. I found that surprising. The state is the largest employer in the county and an awful lot of people here depend on state-funded social services. I have no idea how many small businesses supply goods to the state, but I'd bet the number is significant.

But then there's this: According to the San Francisco Chronicle on Aug. 14, a Harris Poll found that 51 percent of respondents said they paid no attention to the budget impasse and only 12 percent said they paid a lot of attention.

As a newspaper publisher, I might say that means that readers don't see the issue as important or relevant to them. The Chron said "The findings were not surprising given the often abstract nature of government finance ..."

Geographically, we are a long way from Sacramento. It seems like dollars take a long winding route getting from there to here. But I think we have a chicken and egg problem here. A story rarely becomes a story until a reporter does the story. If newspapers begin with the idea that government finances are abstract, that's how they will report them. And if stories are written that way, they will likely be dull and readers won't care about the issue.

It's the job of the press to not just report an issue but to get readers to care about news that's important. To do that it's the reporter's responsibility to spot the relevancy for the reader.

The combined handful of stories that the Times-Standard and Eureka Reporter did were good stories. They focused on real people hit hard by the budget crisis. T-S reporter Karen Wilkenson wrote about a child-care center operator in Briceland that had to borrow money to pay employees. Steve Spain from the Eureka Reporter noted that some state-funded children's centers were on such a thin thread they couldn't afford to make repairs or buy extra toilet paper. Carol Harrison at the ER reported how the stalemate cost Mad River Hospital $30,000 a month in interest payments on loans needed to cover lost Medi-Cal reimbursements, and how one nursing home in mid-August was waiting on $250,000 from the state that hadn't come.

But the impasse lasted almost two months. And it occurred during the summer when in Humboldt County, things couldn't get any slower. It warranted continuing coverage.

Here's some stories we missed:

On Aug. 10, the Sacramento Bee reported that a North Highlands computer company was waiting on $500,000 for hardware and software it sold to the state. An owner of a company that supplied water-softening salts to state prisons saw its cash flow evaporate. On Aug. 19, the Bee reported that some 266,000 college students in California might not get some $6 million in student aid in time for the start of the school year and 1,600 former foster kids wouldn't get some $6 million in aid owed them. The story reported that 70,000 community college students depended on state aid that was held up.

On Aug. 16, the Press Democrat reported that the stalemate was holding up some $10 million in Sonoma County roadwork projects, not counting Highway 101 projects. On Aug. 21, the paper reported that a women's health clinic in Santa Rosa was able to stay in business only because a small lender had advanced it an interest-free loan.

In the San Francisco Chronicle's Aug. 16 "Two Cents" feature, people expressed concerns that the budget impasse would disrupt chemotherapy treatment, Alzheimer's services, Cal State faculty raises, a small business' pending contract with the state and physical therapy at an adult day care.

The local papers should have seized the opportunity to explore how dependent we are on the state, and how many people and in how many ways politicians and policy makers in Sacramento can disrupt our lives. Instead of seizing on data that shows that people don't care about an issue that is really important, they should see it as a challenge: Here's an important issue that people don't understand. How can we, as the press, get people to care?

Here's what I'd like the local press to do next time a big story happens on the state level: Gather your reporters together from all your different beats -- schools, business, city governments, environment, crime, etc. -- and have them search out people on each beat affected by the state's action or inaction.

Or perhaps we have to take a completely different approach to state politics. After all, people are interested in the national sports stats not because they play sports, but more likely because they play fantasy sports. Perhaps we need to set up a fantasy league for lawmakers, with wins and losses measured by voting stats or the success or failure to pass bills and bring home pork. But wouldn't it be sad if the only way to generate more interest in state legislation was to give it a Second Life?

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University. She can be reached at mib3@humboldt.edu.

Complaining about long stories: Published by the NCJ Aug. 2, 2007

The long and long of it

by MARCY BURSTINER

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I reported any number of ridiculous stories over the course of my career -- all brilliant conceptions of bone-headed editors. There was the one on how corporate executives fit physical fitness into their busy work schedules, summer stories about desert heat, a feature about elevators in the TransAmerica Pyramid, interviews with mall shoppers about the invasion of Panama, a puffy profile of the potato chip king of Oakland who later turned out to be a fraud and the behind-the-scenes stories at the Bob Hope Golf Classic. There were worse, but to recall them I’d have to go into hypnosis to recover deeply repressed memories.

Here’s my nightmare. An editor says: “Marcy, give me 4,300 words on karaoke, 4,000 words on the thimbleberry plant, 3,900 words on folk musicians in Humboldt County and 4,300 words on the life of Bill the Chimp.”

Luckily someone else did all those stories. Each one was featured on the cover of the North Coast Journal over the last six weeks.

I can hear all 25 of you harmonica-playing, berry-eating, karaoke-crooning Bill fans groaning, but hear me out. I worship at the temple of Bob Dylan, I have nothing against karaoke or chimps and I wish I had the scientific aptitude to be a botanist. It’s not that a local paper shouldn’t write about any of the subjects. But 4,000 words on each story? For those of you who don’t measure the world in words or newsprint inches I’ll put it in perspective. A typical front page story on any daily newspaper might be 15 inches -- less for a Gannett paper, more for the New York Times. That’s roughly 500 words before the jump. Let’s say the jump triples the total length to 1,500 words.

That’s considered a very long newspaper story. A typical magazine story will run 2,500 words. When you get to 4,000, you better be writing for Vanity Fair or the New Yorker. Again I hear those groans, so let me state this: Until May, when my subscription ran out, I was an avid New Yorker reader for going on 20 years. Renewing it has been on my to-do list ever since. I particularly like those 30,000-word profiles about people I’d never heard of who do something I never thought I’d be interested in.

When you waste words you waste your reader’s time. It’s all about the reader, not the writer. Overly long stories say this about writers: They care more about writing the stories than they care about people reading them. They scream out that the writer thinks the reader has nothing better to do than read the story; that there is nothing more fascinating out there to read (let’s see, thimbleberry story or Harry Potter?), and there is nothing important or fun to do (let’s see, karaoke story or the Giants?).

Why is the New Yorker different? Because the reporting is so thorough and the writing is so good that every one of those 30,000 words matters. You get sucked into a New Yorker story. You start reading four paragraphs and before you know it you’ve been sitting on the toilet for half an hour. Now, the thimbleberry story was kind of interesting, but did the reader need to hear Heidi Walters call up restaurants to find out that no local bakers bake with the fruit or that Jerry Martien has never written poetry about it? Who cares? And the Bill the Chimp piece by Daniel Mintz. While the reporting is top-notch, it’s like Titanic, the movie. Engrossing until you’re two-thirds of the way through, then you just wait and wait for that damn ship to sink and Leo DiCaprio to die.

A story needs to deserve its length. A writer has to consider each word in it as if it were money -- it has to be well-spent. An overly long story says that the paper has nothing else to write about. It screams filler. If the NCJ had shortened each of those stories to a reasonable 2,000 words, it could have given us an extra story per issue for the same cost of the newsprint. When I went to grad school in New York we used to say there were eight million stories in the naked city. Here there are 130,000. Surely that’s enough potential stories to keep the paper filled each week. I’d like to read more stories like the June 14 cover story by Heidi Walters on Tyrone Kelley, the director of the Six Rivers National Forest. At 3,500 words I would have trimmed that one too, but as a story about someone important to the region, a decision maker over an area many people care deeply about, at least it deserved the length.

Another story this paper did recently that was worth its length was Hank Sims’ piece on the North Coast Railroad Authority v. hike-bike trail battle. Not only did every paragraph give you new, interesting and relevant information, but at the heart of the story was a compelling conflict -- the lost-cause fight to bring a rail line back versus the dream of biking and hiking along the bay from McKinleyville to Fortuna. Is there a similar conflict with thimbleberries or karaoke? Not quite. And forgive me, but when Bill died, so did the conflict.

There is a word for wasted words, and that’s “drivel.” Many of you will argue that’s just what I’ve written here. I teach my students that you can generally spot drivel in journalism if the article begins with the word “I.” But I just got you to read more than 900 words, and chances are you are still on the toilet.

– Marcy Burstiner

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University. If you want to comment on this story or let her know of some media coverage or issue you’d like her to look into, email her.

On crime stories: Published by the NCJ July 5, 2007

Crime scenes

by MARCY BURSTINER

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If there is anything that sets the Eureka Reporter and Times-Standard apart from each other it’s how each covers crime in Humboldt County.

Crime coverage is considered bread and butter to most newspapers as it’s the one thing that tends to interest all readers, regardless of what neighborhood they live in or their age, gender, ethnicity or socioeconomic status. Just consider the popularity of the TV shows “Law and Order” and “CSI”.

If you read only the Eureka Reporter for your news, you’d get the idea that we live in a crime-ridden county. If you read only the Times-Standard you’d get the notion that very little crime occurs.

How’s that possible?

It’s all about what stories a newspaper decides to cover and which stories they pass over to cover something else. First off, newspapers can’t cover everything that happens, even in a small town. Just look at the Arcata Eye. Kevin Hoover’s weekly always looks as if the pages will split open if he tries to stuff one more news item.

But I get frustrated with the two dailies because they each go about covering crime and the courts in a superficial manner. Now, before all you bloggers with too much time on your hands go ballistic on me, here’s the disclosure you want to see: My husband works as a deputy district attorney and he used to be a criminal defense attorney. You’d assume I’d be particularly interested in the courts. But tell me, how many wives of insurance salesmen are all that interested in insurance?

Here’s what both papers miss in their coverage or lack of coverage of crime and criminal justice in our county: The stories behind the crimes. The people involved in or affected by them. At their heart, crime stories are human interest stories.

Readers feel directly connected to stories about crime. Why? Because we have all been victims in the past or we fear being victims in the future. When we see people accused of crimes, there’s the feeling of “There but for the grace of God we go.” And if you’ve ever had a child, you can’t help thinking about the parents of both the crime victim and the criminal; both represent the deepest fears we have for our child’s future.

But a good crime story needs to be told, not reported. What’s the difference? The Eureka Reporter tends to report crimes. It’s like the old Dragnet series -- just the facts, ma’am. Take what was a top story in the paper in May, that of the trial of Thomas Applegate, a 44-year-old man accused of walking into a Bridgeville home and fatally shooting a man in front of his family.

In Kara Machado’s almost daily reporting of the trial from jury selection to the time a jury convicted Applegate and found him sane, you learn much of what happened through the testimony of witnesses and the statements of the prosecutor and defense attorneys.

But she never took the reader there -- to Bridgeville, to the scene of the crime. And for a crime, this was about as big as you get. It was the one many of us fear -- you sit in your living room one evening with your children, hearing how their day went, and a maniac walks in and starts shooting.

There’s an unwritten formula for how big a news story is: The bigger the crime or the smaller the town, the bigger the coverage. You couldn’t find a crime much bigger or a town smaller.

And it happened in such an odd little town -- one that was for sale lock, stock and barrel. Everything about that story is fascinating, but except for what is told in court, we, as readers, learn little.

What did this crime do psychologically to the people of Bridgeville? If I lived in a town of two dozen people and a stranger walked into a house and started shooting, I’m not sure I’d ever shake off a feeling of paranoia. A crime reporter covering the trial of a murder after four years should talk to the neighbors, the postmaster, pretty much every one of the 25 residents old enough to talk and willing to do so. Four years after this murder, has this town really recovered?

Who is Thomas Applegate, really? How did he get to the point where he could kill a stranger in front of the man’s family? How does something like that ever happen? For that you need experts -- psychiatrists, criminologists, sociologists who could help readers sort it out and try to understand something that seems so incomprehensible.

Meanwhile, the Times-Standard ran a handful of stories between April and June. None of them showed any depth and most were about the length of a news brief. Imagine if the T-S put enough time into and devoted enough space for the story of a murder as it does for its community profiles. It might be one hell of a story.

The problem with crime coverage in this area reflects the problem with much of the news coverage. Reporters go out and report what happened that day -- they go to the courthouse, the press conference, the event whatever it is.

But that’s different from going after the story. The story is almost never inside the courtroom, or heard at a press conference. The story comes from what people tell you in their living rooms and backyards or over coffee at the diner or in the break room of the police station. It’s what people tell you when you don’t rush them, and after they’ve seen that you’ve put in a lot of time and energy to find them, or that you’ve done sufficient research to ask the right questions. That demonstrates to them that you actually care about the story they have to tell.

In general, people are bursting to tell their stories. But they aren’t going to hold a press conference to do so.

– Marcy Burstiner
mib3@humboldt.edu

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University. If you want to comment on this story or let her know of some media coverage or issue you’d like her to look into, email her.

On high school papers: Published by the NCJ June 7, 2007

Youth scoop

by MARCY BURSTINER

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If you want to read some of the most interesting and relevant journalism in Humboldt County you'll have only till the end of the month. That's because this year it's been coming out of our local high schools and when the school year ends, so do the publications; many of the reporters and editors will then head off to colleges elsewhere in the state and country.

It is unfair to compare a high school newspaper with a professional publication. It comes out monthly, which is a lifetime in the newspaper business. On the other hand, the students have no advanced training or professional experience and have far less life experience than their professional counterparts. What they do have seems to be a fresh perspective on life around them, a healthy curiosity and the energy that we all seem to lose after our teen years.

One of the two papers, Arcata High's Pepperbox, received media attention last month after it printed a letter from a student that called homosexuality an immoral lifestyle. The letter offended many students, parents and teachers and led to a backlash against the paper and its staff and teacher. Editor Jesse Alm said he personally found the letter offensive, but the writer was exercising his right to freedom of expression and the paper would print all letters that came in that were not libelous. The teacher told the Times-Standard that she agreed to run it since it did not rise to the level of hate speech.

California's high school students enjoy greater free speech protections than do students in many other states. In a 1988 decision in the Missouri-based case Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the U.S. Supreme Court said high school administrators could curb student expression if they could show they had a valid educational purpose in doing so. But the California Education Code does not allow school teachers or administrators to censor expression simply because it is controversial or potentially disruptive. A California appeals court judge recently reaffirmed that in a case that arose out of Marin County involving two columns in a high school paper in 2002, one of which focused on immigration issues and which offended many Latino students.

Elsewhere, students face harsher curbs on their rights to free speech. In January, an Indiana high school teacher who advised her student newspaper was suspended and later transferred to another school for allowing the publication of a pro-gay rights column without first getting permission from the principal.

The attention the Times-Standard gave the Pepperbox controversy overlooked what has been a year of some terrific journalism from both that paper, overseen by teacher Joan Williams, and McKinleyville High's Pawprints, overseen by teacher Anne Sahlberg.

Earlier in the year, Pepperbox reporter Coral Bourne interviewed students who had family serving in Iraq or Afghanistan and quoted one student who explained how upset it makes her when she sees Humboldt County residents protest the war -- to her it is as if these people protest what her sibling is doing even as they say they support the troops. Reporter Zari Duff wrote about the local availability to students of the new human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, something a bit controversial since a girl is not at risk for HPV until she begins having sex. And Alm and reporter Charlie Hankin collaborated on a story about the problems of methamphetamine in Humboldt County. In the story, they interviewed the Arcata Police Chief and a man on probation for meth-related crimes.

Over at Mack High, the Pawprints published six stories in its December issue that focused on homeless students. They reported that 95 of 743 students at Mack High spent at least part of last year living on the streets or moving from one couch to another as they shuffled between the homes of anyone who would take them in. The stories profiled three students living at Launchpad, a transitional living program for 16-20 year olds, and explored how and why they ended up on the street -- one was kicked out of a foster home, another was living with her father in a van until she moved into the home of a family friend where she slept on the couch, and a third saw first his mother and then his sister evicted from apartments. Pawprints profiled Launchpad, and another support program, The Raven Project. In a story by Feature Editor Kalie Tomlinson which looked at the idea of what "system" to blame, she noted that since there are limited methods for finding needy students, there could be many more of these homeless students out there. Many teenagers, she said, don't know the support programs exist and struggle to get by with little to no guidance.

The reader finds out, through the interviews, that even as the students struggle day to day, they haven't stopped dreaming. One wants to go to College of the Redwoods and then transfer to a university, another wants to have a car and apartment of his own and become a marine zoologist, and the third wants a good education so that her future children will have a better life.

The great philosopher and innovator Buckminster Fuller once said that children have an incredible natural ability to learn and then we send them to school and teach them how not to. I sometimes think that way about journalism education and training. While some of the more important journalism tends to come from experienced reporters, much of the really interesting stories come from the ones with the least experience; they simply know a good story when they see it, and they haven't yet learned to train their brains to seek the stories that will get them promotions and journalism industry accolades.

Across the country newspaper readership is in decline. An annual report on the state of the news media by the Project for Excellence in Journalism noted this year that daily circulation dropped 6.3 percent over the last three years.

The future rests with our children and if newspapers want to be included in that future, perhaps newspaper editors should take a close look at what young people are writing and reading. They might learn something.

On marijuana coverage: Published by the NCJ May 3, 2007

Dope beats

by MARCY BURSTINER

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A small item in the April 21 issue of the Reporter began this way:

The unsanctioned celebration of the illegal drug marijuana on Friday commonly referred to as "420" didn't go unnoticed by the Arcata Police Department.

Forget the problem of the double negative. I ripped this 127-word brief out of the paper because it exemplified a problem in the local media. Here's what caught my eye:

Arcata's Redwood Park has become one of the main areas were [sic] celebrants congregate, according to the news release, and the crowd on Friday was estimated at approximately 3,500 people.

That's almost 4 percent of all people in Humboldt County 15 and over. The police were there, but the Eureka Reporter and Times-Standard missed it. So did the North Coast Journal, but that's because Heidi Walters was over at Clam Beach covering the several hundred campers over there. We don't know how many participated in 420-related activities elsewhere because the newspapers didn't follow it up. Omission of a newsworthy event is curious, but more so when the issue is one that affects a great number of readers, is controversial and, in this case, inherently sexy.

Consider another overlooked story. On April 18, the Lumberjack, of which I'm faculty adviser, reported that 80 people marched from the Arcata Community Forest to City Hall on April 4 to support the cultivation of medical marijuana. The march was in response to concerns HSU President Rollin Richmond raised earlier in the year that proliferation of indoor grows hurt the school's enrollment and added to the housing crisis.

I don't know how an assignment editor could ignore a rally of some 80 people in a town of 15,000. Years ago I covered a routine house fire. My managing editor asked me if I thought it should go on page one. I asked her what other stories she had, and she laughed. In Humboldt County on any given day, how many local stories are bigger than a march of 80 people from the forest to City Hall to counter HSU President Rollin Richmond, and how many are bigger than a gathering of 3,500 people at exactly 4:20 p.m. to illegally puff weed while police watch?

Last year I asked then Times-Standard editor Charles Winkler why no reporter on his paper covered marijuana as a beat, since it was an important part of the local economy. He said the Times-Standard did cover marijuana -- through its crime reporter. Hank Sims, editor of the North Coast Journal, suggested to me that as someone new to the area, I didn't know that much of the big production had moved away.

That could be. But consider this: I have the cleanest urine in Humboldt County and I see marijuana everywhere. A while back someone from a local fire department told KHUM's Mike Dronkers on air about dangers caused by people improperly rewiring rooms for indoor grows. He offered to personally check out wiring jobs to make sure they were safe, because he didn't want people to burn down their home and half the neighborhood. In 2005, County Sheriff's Drug Enforcement Unit Commander Sgt. Wayne Hanson told a Lumberjack reporter of environmental problems and fire dangers caused by marijuana growers improperly using petroleum generators in the tinderbox hills. And in last week's Journal, a long feature on a medical marijuana doctor who is prohibited from seeing female patients noted that a medical marijuana dispensary in Arcata has 1,000 clients on its books.

Meanwhile, the story didn't tell me how many other doctors in the county write pot prescriptions. Rumor has it that 215 cards are more common on the HSU campus than passing grades. Where do the students get the cards, and what ailments do they claim? I find it frustrating how little information the papers dispense on such an interesting and important topic.

Chris Durant at the Times-Standard recently did a story on indoor grows, but didn't follow it up. How much more do people pay in rent because indoor growers pump up prices? How much money does PG&E pocket because of all the electricity consumed? How much are indoor growers adding to global warming because of all that hydroponic lighting? How does a conscientious grower do it right?

Omission by laziness or naivete is bad enough, but I suspect willful omission. How else can you explain a profile about Honeydew in the T-S's community section a year ago that made no mention of weed, or a profile about Petrolia that included only this line:

One resident said this has caused many people to grow marijuana as a way to make ends meet and the practice has become widespread because of the area's secluded nature.

I e-mailed both Reporter editor Glenn Franco Simmons and T-S editor Rich Somerville about direction they give their reporters on marijuana coverage. Here's Simmons' response: "In my extremely quick research of The Eureka Reporter over the past three and a half years, I turned up more than 100 stories on marijuana that range from medical marijuana to busts," he wrote. "In the past two years, we have focused more on busts, it appears. This has not been by design, however. ... Each reporter has an assigned beat. If the subject of marijuana is newsworthy enough on a beat, it is up to the reporter to determine that and write about it."

Somerville noted that he'd like to see better coverage of the issue from his reporters. "You're right that most of our coverage is busts, with the occasional story about a CAMP raid or medical marijuana -- primarily by the cops/courts reporter, Chris Durant," he wrote. "It's hard to wean people away from that when they know any marijuana story on page one will sell a hundred more single copies. (No lie.) I would like us to do more depth, and I hope that we will in the next year."

Marijuana stories are difficult to do, because neither the feds nor HSU sanction either the growing or smoking; getting sources for stories is difficult. Only a beat reporter could cultivate those kinds of sources over time. The people who have stories to tell but are afraid to tell them need to have one person on the paper they know they can turn to.

We live in a county that officially condones the growing of medical marijuana. The newspapers need to educate readers how to be better growers and more educated consumers. There are important economic, health and environmental issues here. It's time the papers stop covering marijuana solely as a crime and dismissing proponents as a bunch of hippies blowing smoke.

Marcy Burstiner is assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State. While she serves as faculty adviser to the Lumberjack newspaper, she has no editorial control over its content. If you would like to comment on this story or give her ideas for future columns, e-mail her at mib3@humboldt.edu.

On balance: Published by the NCJ April 5, 2007

Overbalanced

by MARCY BURSTINER

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In the cardinal rules of journalism, balance ranks high. But it is a difficult thing for a reporter to achieve. Often that's because in trying to get two sides to a story -- or better yet, all sides to a story -- a reporter risks giving too much weight to representatives of one side, given how representative that opinion is of the general public.

There are a number of ways to tilt the balance -- the number and diversity of people quoted, the amount of words devoted to each side, whether one side is explained first in a story while another is buried, and whether the sources sought for one side are more articulate and/or credible than those sought for the other.

Consider coverage of AB 374, a bill working its way through the state legislature that would set rules by which doctors could help terminally ill patients end their lives. Since our assemblyperson, Patty Berg, is one of the bill's co-sponsors, reporters here have a much-needed "local angle." But it's of interest to people throughout the state, since if enacted it will make California only the second state in the country to allow terminally ill people to end their own lives.

The Eureka Reporter twice devoted stories -- one with a front page, five-column banner headline, above the fold -- to a group demonstrating in opposition. The Times-Standard ran an editorial that supported the bill, saying it came down to a matter of choice. Both papers focused on the controversial aspects of the story -- people adamantly for against those adamantly against.

The T-S editorial called the topic "an emotional and very sensitive issue." The paper also ran a long, front-page MediaNews wire feature that called the debate "a topic so controversial that experts agree there's not even a neutral term to describe it." The Reporter likened it to a revival of the abortion debate.

Yet each paper also noted in just about every story, that numerous polls show that some 70 percent of Californians support the measure. To me, that says that this issue, while arguably emotional, isn't all that controversial. Support for it is overwhelming. That's certainly not the sense you get from the Reporter stories. One story about a protest outside Berg's office quoted three people who protested and two reps from Berg's office, framing the issue as Berg against the people. The Times-Standard ran a similar story.

In another Eureka Reporter story headlined "Democratic lawmakers try again to pass assisted-suicide bill," ostensibly about support from Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, focused the first 256 words on support for the measure, but devoted the next 410 words to opposition; it quoted four opponents -- a woman who runs a center for independent living, an in-home care provider, the head of the California Catholic Conference, a Republican assemblyman from La Mesa -- and led the section this way: "Opponents include the California Medical Association, certain religious organizations and groups advocating for seniors, the poor and the disabled."

In this way, the story framed the debate as Democratic lawmakers versus not only Republican lawmakers but also all doctors, religious people, and old, poor and disabled folks.

When the California Association of Physician Groups, which represents doctors in some 150 medical groups, endorsed AB 374, the 270-word Eureka Reporter story was on page A10, with no byline.

Missing from the Reporter's stories was any in-depth conversation with people the proposed law will directly affect, terminally ill people faced with a terrible dilemma: whether to take each day they have left, possibly in great pain or incapacity, or to shorten that time. The Reporter devoted a Feb. 26 story on suicide to AB374 and began it by talking about a 73-year-old Eureka woman who had killed herself by overdosing on drugs days before scheduled cancer surgery. But there were no voices from terminally ill patients in the rest of the story.

The Times-Standard, in contrast, ran a wire feature from the Sacramento bureau of MediaNews, its parent corporation, that led with two men -- Walter Park, a 61-year-old San Francisco resident dying of AIDS who opposes the law, and Tom McDonald, a 77-year-old Oroville man with cancer who said he would shoot himself if the legislature failed to pass the bill. But starting the story this way also implied that support and opposition to the bill are evenly split.

And while the MediaNews story was fairly thorough, I would have preferred to have it localized. Are there no terminally ill people in Humboldt County with valid opinions on the subject? Are there so few people who have dying friends or families that they'd be difficult to find? Or is the problem that regardless of controversy, this is such an emotionally wrenching issue that reporters here are loath to go to someone whose wife, son or parent is slowly, painfully dying and ask that terrible question: Should the law allow your dying loved one to choose a quicker death?

As a police reporter for six months I had to go to people who'd just lost spouses, children or parents to shootings and car accidents and ask them questions. I hated doing that, hence my short stint covering cops and crime. But that was my job. It was vital for the coverage and so I did it, time after time.

Local coverage has failed to address some important questions as well: Should the law pass, would someone in Humboldt County even be able to find a local doctor willing to supply the life-ending drugs? Or would deciding to choose a speedy death mean you would have to leave home to die? That raises another question: If you'd have to leave the county to find the doctor who could help you die by choice, would that limit that choice to those who could afford to leave?

Missing from every story was a breakdown of support or opposition among terminally ill people. I'd like the Harris poll to go to every hospice across the state, and ask as many lucid, dying people what they think. Consider what difference it might make if, in contrast to the 70 percent of all residents in support, it turned out that 70 percent of terminally ill patients were against? Would some opposition soften if it turned out that 80 percent of terminally ill patients wanted the ability to choose the day to die? I wonder.

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University. Please e-mail her with comments about this column or with your take on local media coverage or issues at mib3@humboldt.edu.