On Television News: Published in the NCJ March 6, 2008

On TV

by Marcy Burstiner

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Eureka's KIEM-TV, Channel 3, isn't in the smallest television market in the country, but it is near the bottom of a 200+ deck. Why should you care? The bigger the TV market size, the more money a station can command in advertising fees and the more it can spend on its evening and morning news. There shouldn't be a connection between money and quality, but of course there is. A big one.

That means that you can assume that the owners of this NBC affiliate, Pollack/Belz Broadcasting, LLC, which owns only one other TV station, don't pull in huge amounts of money from this station. So they won't likely devote a huge amount of money to improve it with better technology and staff training for the producers and reporters of its news operation. The quality of the broadcast screams low-cost operation.

Until now, I kept myself from criticizing the news team at Channel 3 in print. I try not to criticize what I can't improve, and I figured that if I couldn't suggest zero-cost improvements I might as well put my typing fingers to other uses.

But I'm now addicted to the 6 o'clock news. I find it tells me things I didn't know, such as the status of the closed Martins Ferry Bridge, which the Eureka Reporter and, until Monday, the Times-Standard have all but ignored. I can't help wanting to make the newscast better. Plus, since early December I've read The Little Train That Could at least a dozen times, and the story is insidious. I now think almost anyone can get over any hill with just the right amount of grit.

So here is my list of tips for the overworked, ridiculously underpaid team at Channel 3, who I know try the best they can with so very little.

1. Assume your viewers know nothing. When you tell me about Martins Ferry Bridge, tell me where the heck it is. I happen to know that the bridge is in Hoopa and affects a too-often ignored population of Native American people. But most of your viewers have no clue. So ...

2. Never forget the basics: Who, What, Where, When, How and Why for every story. If you can't find out that basic information you shouldn't run the story. That brings me to the Who ...

3. Identify people you interview on video. It frustrates viewers to no end when you show someone saying blah, blah, blah, blah, but there is no name or title or town of residency for that person.

4. Give me pertinent details. Roughly how many people live on the wrong side of Martins Ferry Bridge? From the multiple stories I saw on Channel 3, I have no idea whether we're talking five or 500 people stranded without access to schools or markets.

5. Don't show dull video. Want to send your viewers to Cold Case Files or Tucker Carlson? Show them video of a roomful of people's backs at a meeting of the Board of Supervisors, or a panel of city council people who you don't identify, or unnamed students walking down some path at HSU or College of the Redwoods. Take a minute while you are out on a shoot to be a bit more creative with the video camera.

6. Think multi-part series. Since you cover some stories over and over again, you might as well think about covering the story as a multi-part series. Let's get back to Martins Ferry. I've seen three broadcasts on this story. But the station reported the story the same way many newspapers handle ongoing police investigations. Newspapers slap two inches of new copy on top of what is basically the same story they've run over and over again. The TV station seems to give me the latest action or inaction of the Board of Supervisors over the same old video of an empty bridge, or of unidentified people crossing the bridge.

Instead, think about covering any story that you think might have legs as a five-part series. There are five days in the week, and each day you do a short piece on the subject focusing on a different part of the story.

Monday: The who. Tell us about some of the people the problem actually affects.

Tuesday: The What. Give us a rough summary of what's going on.

Wednesday: The Where. Tell us a little bit about the unique problems that are occurring because of where the problem is taking place. The problem with Martins Ferry Bridge is that it's located an hour from Eureka. If it were located 10 minutes from Eureka it would already be fixed.

Thursday: The When. Find some expert who can give us the skinny on when we can see some real action.

Friday: The How and Why. If the supervisors finally agree to fix the bridge once and for all, how will engineers go about doing that? Why fix it like that?

The beauty of a five-part series, based on five days of the week, is it gives you some economy of scale for news. Each interview makes each other interview easier, because you don't come in cold. Each person you interview can give you the name and contact number for the next person to interview. If you shoot a good amount of video the first day, you can use it throughout the week. You probably only have to do reporting for the first three days but you'll be able to fill up five days worth of airtime. And even as you actually save yourself time and labor you give your viewers deeper coverage. You can put the pieces all together on your Web site and give Web surfers the idea that you are a sophisticated news operation. And your viewers will appreciate it. Believe it or not, some of us actually do watch you.

Speaking of the Little Train That Could, I can't end this column without setting aside some space for my students at the Lumberjack newspaper. On March 1, Humboldt State's student-produced, student-run newspaper took four awards at the California College Media Association awards for weekly college papers: First Place for feature photograph, First Place for best back-to-school issue, Third Place for best editorial and Third Place for general excellence. You won't find a news team more overworked, underpaid and less appreciated in Humboldt County, or one that I criticize more severely week after week. Congratulations. You earned it.

On Clarity: Published in the NCJ Feb. 7, 2008

Be Clear

by Marcy Burstiner

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One day my not-quite-three-year-old daughter looked up at her father with big brown eyes, tugged at his shirt and said: "Daddy, what are you talking about?"

That's how I feel sometimes when I read newspapers, and not just the Times-Standard or Eureka Reporter. I often want to tug at the shirt of the San Francisco Chronicle or New York Times and ask the reporters: What are you talking about? Newspapers exist to inform their readers. But often they leave us more confused than before we picked up the page. A newspaper's survival depends on relevancy to readers, but you can't have relevancy without clarity, which is the ability to explain something without confusing the hell out of your reader.

When readers see big headlines and front page placement, they understand that a story is important. But when they read the story and don't understand it, they end up feeling ignorant or stupid. And I would bet that's not the reaction the reporters and editors hoped to get. Newspapers are more prone to this than radio. With radio, when listeners don't understand what they hear, the topic changes so fast they forget what it was they didn't understand. In print, when readers are interested but confused, they reread. So the newspaper confuses them over and over.

Mastering clarity takes time. It means giving the reader just enough but not too much information. It means pacing out information in chunks so that the reader can digest it. It often means sacrificing elegant wording for clunky copy. Imagine yourself trying to tell a great story, but you tell it to someone who keeps interrupting your story with questions that seem basic. Telling the story takes more time than you anticipated. The tale turns tedious.

It means spending more time on topics that are real for many people, but not very sexy from a storytelling perspective. There you are trying to tell a great story about something that happened at work the other day and the listener seems fixated on how you got your job in the first place, even though that's irrelevant to the story you want to tell.

Within stories, reporters tend to skim over and bury the information they don't find interesting to spend more space and time on what they consider more interesting. But folks who work on newspapers need to understand that readers have different rating systems for measuring the importance of different issues than do the reporters and editors. Readers get confused when newspaper stories seem to overrate issues they don't think are important or when they underrate issues the readers think are critical. And if readers think that an issue that a reporter skimmed over is important, they will want to tug at the reporter's sleeve and say: "Hold on now, what was that you said back there?"

Let's look at two recent stories in the Times-Standard about confusing issues: Schwarzenegger's proposed state budget and Proposition 93, which was on the Feb. 5 ballot.

A three-person team of Jessie Faulkner, Karen Wilkinson and Thaddeus Greenson put together the Jan. 11 state budget story. But first consider the challenge of reporting the California budget to local readers. It is so immense and contains so many pieces reporters must summarize an awful lot and then piece out parts relevant to different readers without boring the math-challenged. And they must do all that in about 1000 words.

The reporters start out well. All the elements of why local readers should care are in that story — 20,000 prisoners to be released, education to be slashed, parks to be closed. High up they tell us exactly which local parks will be closed. But then they take too much time space telling us about process — what it will take for the governor to get it passed — and too many paragraphs telling us how much worse it could have been.

It isn't until the jump (paragraph 18, to be exact) that we find out that Schwarzenegger plans to cut $4.5 billion out of K-12 schools. But it doesn't give us a per capita figure — in other words, how much Humboldt County schools must trim to make those cuts. And it isn't until paragraph 22 that you find out that free and reduced meals in the schools will be trimmed and that 47 percent of our school kids here are eligible for reduced price meals.

When I read that I just wanted to tug at the sleeve of all three reporters and say: "Hold on now. Does that mean kids will go hungry? Does that mean some kids won't get the meals or that all the kids will get 10 percent less food on their plastic trays?" But then the story ends and I'm left feeling ignorant.

Remember how the story began? Those early-release prisoners are all non-violent offenders. So from a get-real perspective, what's more of a concern? Early release for non-violent offenders (and without further explanation I might guess a bunch of those are drug users or small-time sellers) or hungry kids? What's more important to the reader, finding out what programs won't be cut or learning how badly our schools will be cut?

Now let's look at Greenson's Feb. 2 story on Proposition 93. Depending on how you read the information sent out with absentee ballots, the measure would lengthen state legislator terms in office or shorten them. Until I read the T-S story I didn't understand what the opponents were griping about. The way I saw it, it would result in more continuity with overall shorter terms. As a term limits proponent who understands the problems term limits have caused, this seemed to make sense.

In his story, Greenson explained the issue neatly and with nice local relevance. He showed how the measure would add years to the terms of our legislators. And he found an HSU professor to tell me what it means. After I read the story I said: "Now I get it! The fat cat lawmakers give themselves more years in office but screw future legislators."

This time I didn't feel ignorant. Whether I feel stupid for the way I cast my absentee vote is another story. But I do wish the article had come out before I mailed my ballot. Note to news editors for November: Assign election stories early and often.

– Marcy Burstiner

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University. If there's something about the media that confuses you, e-mail her at mib3@humboldt.edu.

On Top Ten Lists: Published in the NCJ Jan. 3, 2008

The Real Top Ten

By Marcy Burstiner

A friend once labeled me the ultimate optimist. That was after I confessed that I never threw out unmatched socks; I kept expecting to find their mates. But generally I’m a pessimist. I expect the worst to happen. To me, each New Year’s is the start of what will likely be a worse year than the one that just ended.

I face the same contradictions with the news media. In some ways I’m the ultimate optimist. While media blogs moan and groan over layoffs and cutbacks in the newspaper business, I believe the Internet will force the need for differentiation. A new system of rewarding quality reporting and writing will replace a system that tended to reward reliable mediocrity.

But in other ways I’m a pessimist. Publishers of old-fashioned newspapers, particularly ones with heavy newsstand sales, know little about their readers. So advertisers expect only one thing — big numbers. To get big numbers, newspapers must interest as wide a range of people as possible. When the formula works well, all kinds of readers learn all kinds of things about all kinds of people from the newspaper.

With Internet publishing, sophisticated algorithms allow publishers and advertisers to know an awful lot about their readers. Since advertisers only care about reaching the people who will buy what they advertise, publishers can all but abandon everyone else. We live in a new era of media selectivity. In it, the reader, not the publisher or journalist, defines what is important. This forces publishers to focus on stories that cater to the interests of those with money.

It was the North Coast Journal’s “Top Ten Stories of the Year,” published Dec. 20, that got me thinking about this. In brief, the 10 stories were: The Pacific Lumber bankruptcy, the trails v. rails battle, marijuana grow houses, the settlement over the Klamath River, the new Eureka police chief, timber protection zoning, the housing bubble, the dispute between Robin Arkley and Larry Glass, the collapse of Reggae on the River and the deaths of Bill the Chimp and Kinetic Sculpture Race founder Hobart Brown.

I made my own list: Palco, budget cuts at HSU, the financial crisis at College of the Redwoods, marijuana grow houses, the zoning battle over the Teen Challenge drug and alcohol recovery center, the state budget crisis, the eviction of the Arcata Endeavor, the Cherilyn Moore case, the immigration sting in Fortuna and homelessness, not in any order of importance. They were all important. I think the difference with the Journal’s list is the definition of a “top story.” Hank Sims seems to have included stories that people liked to read about along with some stories that were important for people to read about.

He left homelessness off his list even though the Journal devoted a terrific cover story by Jim Hight to the subject of homeless students in the Eureka school system last April. Karen Wilkinson of the Times-Standard did two stories — one on new state poverty figures that showed that some 700 students at the Eureka schools system are homeless. She followed it up Dec. 27 with a story similar to the one in the Journal. In 2006 the McKinleyville high student newspaper did a story on the 95 homeless students that attend that school. Combine those stories with those of the upcoming eviction of the Arcata Endeavor and the financial problems of the Multiple Assistance Center in Eureka, and homelessness is clearly a top story.

I couldn’t help pairing the stories about homeless kids with the marijuana stories — hundreds of grow houses in subdivisions taking up needed housing. I picture an awful lot of people with cash stuffed under their mattresses living next door to children who don’t know where they will be tomorrow. I’m all for the legalization of marijuana, but in my book that’s a social crime.

The mainstream press too often assumes that because people don’t want to read downer news, they won’t. If you ask people if they like reading bad news and they will say they don’t. (Would you date a guy that said “I love reading bad news”?) But when the Washington Post broke the story about appalling conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center last year and the terrible treatment of returning Iraqi vets, readers ate up those stories. It was the reaction from the general public that led to an overhaul of the U.S. Army top command. Though people don’t want to read downer stories, they will if those stories are important and if the stories help point the way towards achievable reforms.

The North Coast Journal recently launched a redesign and seems to have adopted a new direction, striving to be the intellectual center of Humboldt County. As a free weekly the Journal has a more difficult problem identifying its readers than even daily newspapers. Because the Journal’s readers pick up the paper at news racks, they can’t be tracked except by location. I hope that with the new direction they don’t forget that as many people read the paper in the Summer Street Laundromat as in Brio. And I hope that as part of a long history of alternative weeklies, it persistently prints stories that force the people at Brio to see the people at the ’mat.

With two daily newspapers, one regional weekly and an assortment of community weeklies we should have one of the most informed readerships around. But I fear that if papers focus on what people think they want to read about rather than what they should know about, we will have this: A blissfully ignorant readership in a very mediated region.

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University. She wishes everyone the best of news for the New Year.

On competition: Published in the NCJ Dec. 6, 2007

Pray for the Reporter!

by MARCY BURSTINER

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In my favorite movie, Three Days of the Condor, the assassin Joubert advises Robert Redford’s character, Joe Turner, to leave the United States. Turner says “I’d miss it if I were gone.”

Turner knows that people within the U.S. government hired Joubert to kill him, but he still doesn’t want to leave. He’d miss it. That’s how I feel about the Eureka Reporter.

For those who like to bash the Reporter, consider Humboldt County without it. When a newspaper goes from publishing seven days a week to five, that’s a sign of hard financial times. There are others. Its reporters are disappearing and more articles in the paper now carry no byline than stories that do carry a byline. (Generally that means that what you think is an article is just a printed press release.)

To many people, that’s reason to celebrate. A local boycott of the Reporter is a running joke — you can’t boycott something that’s free. Advertisers can, however, although I tend to think that the failure of the local business community to support the free paper has more to do with the problems of measuring the readership of a free paper than it has to do with dislike of its political slant.

I’d rather have a conservative paper than no paper. I’d rather have a paper owned by a conservative zillionaire than no paper. Consider that Dean Singleton owns the other paper. He lives in Colorado even as he owns just about every local paper in California.

There’s a rich history in the media business of newspapers founded on the egos of crazy rich men. In my short journalism history I worked for four crazy zillionaires — Charlie Munger, Bruce Wasserstein, Jim Cramer and Sy Newhouse. All four operated good publications. I avoided working for Singleton, not because of politics but because of his disregard for quality, his focus on newspapers as product and his tendency to pay reporters little, work them hard and bust their unions.

These days, with newspaper circulation falling across the board, you’d have to be crazy to get into the newspaper business. Consider the Bancrofts and the Wall Street Journal — a whole family of crazy rich people getting out of the newspaper business.

The Eureka Reporter recently attempted to survey its readers. Unfortunately, it was a case study in how not to do a media survey. First, it distributed the survey only in the Sunday newspaper, so it eliminated people who didn’t pick it up that day. You had to return the survey by hand delivery or mail.

In a note to readers Sunday about changes at the newspaper, publisher Judi Pollace said this: “The most fun a publisher can have is reading comments about how much you love us, and there were hundreds.” That’s backwards thinking. To grow newspaper readership you have to reach disgruntled readers and find out what they want and aren’t getting. Readers rarely love good newspapers. They read them, utilize them and act on what they read. Journalism is a masochistic profession. We’re the messengers people often want to kill. We strive to tell a truth people often don’t want to hear. Journalists understand that if too many people love what we’re doing, we probably aren’t doing the job right.

The survey’s multiple choice questions focused on what people did or did not read in the paper, rather than why they did or did not read it. For example, it asked you to check off whether you regularly, occasionally or never read the Humor Column by Nathan Rushton. But I didn’t know that Rushton’s column was supposed to be a humor column, so the question confused me. And it didn’t ask me whether I would regularly read his column if it were actually funny.

But don’t write off the paper yet. It eliminated paper publishing on Mondays and Tuesdays, but it recently added a fourth member to its editorial board: Peter Hannaford, a key adviser to Governor Ronald Reagan and a former partner to former Reagan adviser and lobbyist extraordinaire Micheal Deaver.

It makes for some interesting dynamics on the paper. The way editorials used to work involved a majority vote from the members of the three-person team. That led, at least once, to managing editor Glenn Franco Simmons writing a separate column opposing the paper’s stand. If they still use the voice vote, I’d like to see how they get out of a split.

I like having the Eureka Reporter around. It gives jobs to my current and former students. And it prints any opinion out there. For those who see it as a bullhorn for Arkley, they ignore how it prints columns by Amy Goodman, Dave Berman and others. It gives a forum for the 911 Truth folks — those pushing to reopen the investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Centers — who can’t get their voices into the North Coast Journal or Times-Standard. My stand isn’t whether I support the opinions or not. What I support is the forum for expression.

Until Heather Muller’s byline disappeared, it was the only paper that consistently covered our courthouse and kept an eye on what cases our district attorney prosecuted or pleaded out.

It also serves as a check on how the other paper treats its reporters. It is hard to tell your editor to screw himself when the other publications pay writers $25 a story or 10 cents a word. Feed your kids on that.

While you can’t boycott a free paper, there’s an effective way of opposing it. Support the other paper. Arkley subsidizes the Eureka Reporter. When someone will rather pay for the competition than get his paper free, that’s a quantifiable protest. Arkley loses money with every issue printed. You don’t like what the paper says? Write it a letter or column. He’s paying for the ink and newsprint and the energy and labor it costs to run his beautiful press. I’m betting the Reporter will print it. They’ll print just about anything.

– Marcy Burstiner

mib3@humboldt.edu

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism at Humboldt State University. You can contact her at mib3@humboldt.edu, but better yet, get your opinion publicly aired at the Eureka Reporter, the Times-Standard, the Journal or the Arcata Eye. Support your local press.

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.

The tedium of daily news: Published by the NCJ March 1, 2007

Nuts and bolts

by MARCY BURSTINER

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The problem with a daily newspaper format is the reporters feel compelled to report news daily, and readers get the impression that they need a daily news feed.

In a rural area, where for 50 years people from Cloverdale to Trinidad have talked about the anticipated start of the Willits Bypass, how important is it to learn every new fact about Humboldt County the second it happens?

Reporters at dailies tend to work so hard producing daily news that they don't have time to live life the same way as their readers. Most of us don't sit in courtrooms or city council meetings. We're at jobs where not much changes on a daily basis, and back home we watch our children and plants grow. The result is a daily disconnect between what's important and relevant to readers -- such as the opening of the House of Omelets in Arcata, potholes in front of our homes and new programs for our young people and seniors -- and the crime and court stories the newspapers feed us.

Consider a few of the big stories here locally this past month.

First the Eureka Reporter covered daily a misdemeanor trial in Ferndale. Then the Times-Standard did a series of stories on grand jury charges against the Blue Lake police chief over a suspended driver's license. Meanwhile, the weekly North Coast Journal spent 2,400 words on a tiff between Sacred Grounds and Bayside Roasters that led to a libel suit over a hijacked website and a $37,000 libel verdict.

Now, I know that even as I harp on relevancy, many readers came to this column only after satisfying their appetite for the latest tidbit about Anna Nicole Smith's baby.

It's not that the papers should self-censor news when a police chief in Ferndale tosses the dad of a wayward infant in jail overnight for body language that he felt translated into an unspoken obscenity. Or that it's not serious if a Blue Lake police chief improperly wields power.

But a reader often doesn't need more than the initial story and a clear definitive wrap-up when it is over. In the meantime, it's nice to know about street repairs, new houses going up, stores opening and closing and what's going on in the schools. If it weren't that the Arcata Eye's layout is so hard on the Arcata eye, I'd argue that Kevin Hoover's little rag is the most relevant read in the county.

Outside of a couple of dozen people in Ferndale and about a dozen people in Blue Lake, I can't imagine that many people were at the edge of their seats waiting for the latest news on those cases. The Ferndale stories only became a good read because of a strange in-print dustup between Ferndale Enterprise editor Caroline Titus and Eureka Reporter Managing Editor Glenn Franco Simmons over whether the Reporter's reporter made mistakes, and whether a letter to the editor from jailed dad Sean Marsh written in the third person was in fact sent to both papers and printed in only one.

As for the Journal's story, Hank Sims knows how to tell a good tale. But it suffered from the same flaw I've seen in much of the local coverage here: It missed the bigger picture. What's important about the coffee roaster libel story was this: That anything people do on the Internet is potentially libelous. That means that if you go around dissing your co-worker, neighbor, ex-boyfriend or boss in a blog or by shooting e-mails to everyone on your Outlook address book, someone could sue you for libel. Just check out some of the local blogs. There's small-town nastiness out there that that could result in serious libel sanctions.

Here's the bigger picture: Instead of one distracted dad and a rambunctious toddler on a Victorian Main Street, how many Humboldt County children are endangered because their parents in fact, or all but, abandoned them?

Instead of one guy in Blue Lake with a suspended license, how many suspended licenses do we have in Humboldt County? In November, the Times-Standard reported this in a 164-word piece about a sting the Eureka police set up: More than half of the people who get their licenses suspended in traffic court drive away from the courthouse.

Here's an example of how to do it right. On Feb. 6, Heather Muller of the Eureka Reporter covered the abandonment of a 5-year-old German Shepherd after its owner killed himself. Eight stories later (a ninth was expected Tuesday, after this column went out) her readers know not only that Humboldt County has a per capita suicide rate that's twice that of both the state and nation, but who the victims are, what their deaths do to their surviving relatives and friends and the many possible causes for their demise.

The research behind it is impressive, the writing terrific and the reader leaves each 1,500-word-or-so piece wanting to find out more. In trying to find an explanation, she even went to the National Weather Service with the data she compiled and had meteorologist Treena Hartley analyze weather factors according to the date and location of the suicide to try to rule out or nail down gloomy weather as a factor. And she took the time to track down and interview those left behind, which had to be a heart-wrenching experience.

What makes the thoroughness of this series so good is that it is about a serious topic that hits hard for all readers in Humboldt County. Many of us have had or known people who have suffered from depression, and I would guess that most people have had thoughts of suicide at least once in their lives. It's mysterious and dreadful and something we need to know more about.

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University.

Enterprising problems Part II: Published by the NCJ Feb. 1, 2007

What lies beneath?

by MARCY BURSTINER

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You know that the fight between the Times-Standard and Eureka Reporter is getting down and dirty when the Reporter follows the T-S's multi-part series on homelessness with a three-part series on dioxin in the bay.

Like the homeless series, this is a subject that deserves serious discussion. If there is one thing that connects us it's the water. If our living doesn't come off the bay, our dinner often does. And many of us spend our weekends wading in it, or surfing or paddling around on it.

Dioxin is one of those things most people would rather not think about, especially while biting into that grilled oyster burger at the Waterfront Cafe. That's because dioxin has been shown to affect a person's immune system and increases their risk of getting cancer. The county's business boosters don't want you to think about it either. More importantly, they don't want people outside the county, who might think of investing money or spending vacations here, to think about dioxin when thinking about Humboldt Bay.

So you have to give a newspaper credit for devoting three issues and almost 4,200 words to such a downer of subject. The trouble is that you get the feeling from reading the three stories that the Reporter would have ignored the subject altogether had not the State Water Resources Control Board listed Humboldt Bay as impaired for dioxin contamination under the federal Clean Water Act.

It's an odd series. To begin with, the controversy, as the Reporter sees it, rests with the negative impacts of the listing, not of the dioxin. And the solution it focuses on is a possibility that the county can get the state to reverse its decision, not on ways to clean up the water. It reminded me of stories I used to have to write when I worked for a San Francisco business weekly, which would focus on such topics as the difficulty corporate executives have managing a company after they've laid off hundreds of workers. But there, arguably, our subscriber base of 15,000 Armani suit-wearing execs would be more interested in evading a regulatory process than fixing an environmental problem. The Eureka Reporter's readership base, on the other hand, consists of residents of all stripes. One would think they would be at least as interested in the health and environmental ramifications of dioxin in the water as in the economic effects of the listing.

Now, I confess that I've given money to Humboldt Baykeeper, because of a naïve concept I can't shake that ocean water should be clean. If you read the Reporter stories, you'd know that it's Baykeeper's fault for causing this whole dioxin listing problem, by having the nerve to send the worst of its samples of dioxin-tainted bay water to the state water board. I also admit that as someone who came pretty darn close to dying of cancer not too long ago, I'm a bit sensitive about cancer-causing chemicals in my Crab Louie.

On the other hand, my father, grandfather, uncle, grand uncles and step-uncles were all in the food business. The livelihood of my family depended on people eating food and feeling good about the food they ate. Had New York State listed Bronx County for nitrate impairment, our small delicatessen would have been a goner.

The whole point of in-depth reporting is to get at all sides of a controversy so that the reader comes away with a good understanding of a complex problem. While I think objectivity in journalism is a farce -- a reporter stops being objective when she chooses one story to cover over another, and one source for information over another -- all stories require balance and proper perspective. What's more important: The listing under the federal Clean Water Act, or dioxin in the water? And in considering balance and perspective it's important to go back to the reader. How would your reader answer that question?

Often news organizations avoid reporting bad news because they think readers don't want to hear it. But I think they don't give their readers enough credit. Readers, I believe, want news agencies to report problems without inflating them, and to explain both the problem and possible solutions. What was most missing from the three-part series was a layout of what has actually been done in the past to clean up the bay, how effective those steps have been and what could and possibly should be done in the future.

Could the listing be a good thing in the short and long run, by bringing in state and federal dollars? The Reporter said this: "According to county officials, economic impacts to the area as a result of the listing might mean additional and costly scrutiny for dioxin testing for development permits and restoration activities for wetland and marsh habitats." For developers that's bad news, but for those in the area who like wetlands and marsh, that sounds as if dollars will be headed for good projects. The series says that the listing will force the regional water quality control board to initiate a plan to identify the contamination and plot a course to clean it. Maybe I'm crazy, but couldn't that be seen as a good thing?

Emphasizing only the economic ramifications of listing Humboldt County for dioxin impairment is a little like the mayor of Amity screaming at Chief Brody for closing the beaches during tourist season just because a 30-foot Great White shark had discovered that the shoreline was an all-you-can-eat buffet. Whether you sided with the mayor or the chief, I'd only hope the Amity Herald had reported both sides with balance and perspective.

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University.

Enterprise problems Part I: Published by the NCJ Jan. 4, 2007

A questionable enterprise

by MARCY BURSTINER

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Mention the words "focus group" to most reporters and they'll groan. That's because for years, the focus groups whose opinions publishers sought wanted articles short and sweet; happy stories about dogs and babies that would fit easily on one page.

That was before the Internet siphoned off readers with more timely and customized news. Fearing extinction, newspapers are turning to the Readership Institute, a think tank out of Northwestern University supported by newspaper publishers. It's telling them that to attract and keep readers, focus on substance rather than speed.

If you've been reading the Times-Standard, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, the new trend is obvious: long, multi-part front page stories. The Chronicle came out with multi-parters on San Francisco General Hospital and homicides in Oakland. The New York Times spent a week with three sisters in a Mexican family split by the U.S. border. The Times-Standard put two of its reporters on the street to give us a look at homelessness in Eureka. In journalese, this is called "enterprise reporting." Enterprise stories are in-depth and proactive rather than reactive. That means that the news organization sought out a story rather than responded to a press release or event.

New Times-Standard Managing Editor Rich Somerville is a former research associate of the Readership Institute and a true believer in enterprise reporting. It's great news for Humboldt County readers that MediaNews owner Dean Singleton thinks he can fight his newspaper battle against Rob Arkley on substance.

This represents a major change. Over the past two decades, most newsrooms, especially in Singleton-owned papers, became workshops where reporters were expected to turn out as many as four stories a day. When at Gannett in the early '90s, I was once given two days to do one story. I considered that a great luxury.

I cheer on all enterprise reporting initiatives. But if you have any real respect for your readers, enterprise reporting requires time and resources. If a newspaper isn't willing to give it and reporters aren't willing to do the hard work, they shouldn't take on the project.

So let's get back to the Times-Standard's story on homelessness.

We need more in-depth reporting on this issue. In 2005 I sent 24 students out into Humboldt County to report on poverty. They conducted more than 100 interviews and we barely scratched the surface on what it means to be poor in this area. We did discover that poor people want their stories told, if only someone would seek them out and listen.

That's not what the T-S's self-described "Fat Guys" did. In their story, they talked to few people. You learn from the articles how being on the streets affected James Faulk and Chris Durant, but little to nothing about how actual homeless people think or feel.

In a good first-person story, the "I" is never the story. That the Fat Guys told us more about themselves than about street people is a result of the second problem with the series. They spent only two days on the street. How can any reporter expect to earn the trust and respect of people on the street in only two days?

But it is the third problem that's the most egregious. The Times-Standard began its investigation with a lie. If the Jason Blair scandal at the New York Times taught us anything, it's that honesty is everything. It's the first rule of journalism -- above accuracy, above clarity. I tell my students that honesty comes before all other journalistic rules, because you can't earn credibility without it. The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics says this: "Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty." It also says, "Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information."

This is what the Fat Guys said: "We concocted a story to fit in as best we could. We understood that Eureka's homeless population was small, and the community tight-knit, so we decided to be from out of town, and headed to Alaska to fish. ... Conversations with people at various locales told us that if we had claimed to be from here, we would have stuck out as interlopers."

How could they have gotten around the problem honestly? They could have flown down to San Francisco and hopped the bus north. If anyone asked where they were from, they'd have been able to say without lying, that they were just off the bus from the Bay Area. Or they could have done that from Crescent City. Or more effectively, they could have driven north or south and thumbed their way back. That would also have given them some good stories to trade with the people they met.

I don't think I'd have the guts to do that story, but if I did and someone asked me who I was, I think I'd have to say that I was a journalist spending some time on the streets to see what it is like being homeless. As a journalist, I've found repeatedly that only when you fess up do people offer you their own honest take on a situation. You can't expect people to be honest and open with you if you aren't honest and open with them.

In 2005, the Spokesman-Review in Washington hired a private detective to adopt an online persona as a homosexual minor to see if the mayor would try to entice him into having sex. The newspaper industry trade magazine Editor & Publisher then asked 10 respected newspaper editors across the country about that tactic, and not one of them approved. Anders Gyllenhaal, editor of the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis, said this: "Fundamentally, you don't misrepresent who you are. That is a problem." And Amanda Bennett, then editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer said this at the time: "I don't permit deception; I would not allow it. We go into reporting in a straighter way. We are not private investigators, we are journalists. Undercover is a method of the past."

Still, I would like to see more enterprise reporting from the Times-Standard. I'd like to see more from the Reporter, the North Coast Journal, the Arcata Eye and the Lumberjack as well. But the stories have to be done right. That requires time, effort and guts.

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University.