I’m back from my week’s vacation and sifting through the 2,365 e-mails I got while I was gone (half of them telling me my mailbox is over its size limit). Also navigating our voice mail system to retrieve all the calls I missed.
You know, it’s strange. I left just before my Sunday centerpiece, “Why Do Kids Join Gangs?” was published in the News & Record. I was convinced that it was going to get major blowback — from people who would accuse us of trumping up the gang issue, those who thought the piece made sympathetic characters of gangbangers, some who would ask why we didn’t concentrate on the good things being done to help these kids rather than their criminal lifestyle. I thought there would be criticism of our use of anonymous sources (were we saying gangbangers deserved anonymity, but the many other people to whom we won’t grant it don’t?).
But here’s the feedback score for the gang piece, which took up about half the front page last Sunday:
E-mails not from co-workers praising the piece: 3
E-mails not from co-workers damning it: 0
Weird, I thought. Almost no reaction at all. I get more e-mails than that from car crash stories — even if they’re just from people taking 20 minutes to tell me about the dangerous curve in THEIR neighborhood. Is it possible my mailbox got so full (I’m on a lot of listserves, get a lot of press releases, mugshots, etc) that some of the mail bounced back when the box went untended for a week?
The e-mails I did get were very nice. One, from a cop who was kind of skittish about dealing with the media, complemented the work and said I could call him any time. Another, from a Massachusetts reporter and friend-of-a-friend I haven’t spoken to in years, said of the story: “It’s times like this I still have faith in journalism.”
The fact that I didn’t get buried in criticism may mean I just overestimated how much people would cared about the things I’d worried about. Huh. Weird. On to the voicemails, I thought.
Voicemails not from co-workers praising the piece: 1
Voicemails not from co-workers damning it: 0
Voicemails of people hanging up when they got my voicemail message: 5
Now this is really strange. The number of people who will sit down for even a few minutes to write an e-mail blasting or praising you is almost always dwarfed by the number of people who will see your number at the bottom of the story and go to their phones immediately. People over 60 especially. Some have nothing at all to say — they just called to say they read your story, as though the “contact Joe Killian at…” tag at the end of the piece was a command.
One voicemail? On a story about (largely) teenage gangbangers? Creepy.
But poking around the web a bit, I noticed the lack of reader reaction there too.
Comments on N&R editor John Robinson’s blog post about the piece: 3 (two very nice ones, including one from the past president of the National Alliance of Gang Investigators, one that seemed to be criticizing us for not attacking the city council and the Housing Authority in the piece — as best I could tell).
Comments on Ed Cone’s blog post about the piece: 1 (from me, saying thanks for the kind words)
Comments on Ed Cone’s blog post about the behind-the-story blog post I wrote: 0
The blog post I wrote and e-mailed on my first day of vacation (I was covering a murder the night before I left) wasn’t set up to receive comments — but based on those I’m not sure it would have generated many anyway.
(UPDATE: May have spoken too soon. It seems there was quite a gang discussion over on Dough Clark’s N&R blog.)
Which just goes to show something we sort of see every day in the newsroom: there is just no way of predicting what people are going to care about. Sometimes you’re buried under calls all day when you do a simple weather story and that long, investigative piece you’ve toiled over passes without anyone seeming to care one way or the other. That doesn’t mean one’s better than the other or that stories that don’t generate letters or online discussion don’t matter.
People in Greensboro do care about gangs — as evidenced by a recent workshop at NC A&T. The story I wrote did what I wanted it to do — it asked important questions about gangs to those best equipped to answer them (gang members themselves, gang experts, the cops who study them) and put that information in front of the largest audience it’s had in Greensboro to date.
I’m shifting from the night cop beat to High Point next week — but I’ll still be living in Greensboro and working from the main office one day a week. I hope to keep reporting on the gang issue as Greensboro puts together two dedicated gang squads.
And, hopefully, I’ll be doing more stories like this on my new beat. I’ll still be working with Whitney Cork, the amazing editor who was the midwife on my gang stories, always telling me to breathe and gently encouraging me to push.
People who haven’t worked for newspapers — or who haven’t worked at newspapers with really great editors — may not realize how important a good editor is to a good story. I’ve had some stories that could have been great gutted, I’ve had some never get off the ground because the editor couldn’t see what I was seeing. I’ve also had stories I didn’t really believe in turn into something great because my editor pushed me, encouraged me and showed me new ways of writing, reporting and thinking about stories.
Whitney is one of those editors every reporter dreams about having. I don’t think she’s ever just shot down one of my story ideas out of hand — and the ones that are only half-formed when I come to her with them always end up being better for her helping to shape them. On the gang centerpiece and a number of other gang stories that were difficult to report and write, fraught with tough ethical decisions and hell to pull off the way we wanted to she was a champ. We stayed in the office riffing and tweaking until well after midnight a few times, when we were both technically off the clock but had a good thing going and didn’t want to stop until we’d seen it through. She was patient with my shortcomings, made great suggestions, encouraged me to take chances and fought for the vision of the stories I had and the way I felt about them.
I feel really great about the new job — which, among other incentives, is during the day — the editor I’ll be working with and the stories I think I’ll be able to tell. Am going to try to incorporate a more interactive blog component with some of them, too. Let me know what you think.
2 Comments
September 4, 2007 at 1:17 am
Bro, the story was well reported and passed the sniff test. There weren’t any footholds for people to start climbing on it. It affirmed what most newspaper readers think about gangs. Why would you think there’d be blowback. But then, I told you that before we published it.
Nice words about Whitney, too. Dead on.
September 4, 2007 at 2:38 am
It wasn’t that I thought people would necessarily take issue with the reporting. I just thought that maybe some of the race/class stuff that came up on Doug Clark’s blog might rear its head in the form of angry calls and letters and, as can often happen, it would become about why I chose to report these kids saying these things rather than why they actually said them.
The story had all of the elements that I’ve come to expect will cause strong reader reaction in Greensboro — race, politics, police, questions about social issues. If the story had a religious component it would have been a perfect storm.
You and Whitney both told me I was worried for nothing and (surprise, surprise) you were right.
The words about Whitney are the tip of the iceberg about how I feel about the editing job she did here. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a positive editing experience. It was very collaborative and she put in a hell of a lot of work on it.