Andrew Beaujon
July 26, 2012
4:35 pm
As Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli
promised Wednesday, The Washington Post is tightening its standards regarding
whether sources can see stories before publication. Such instances will be permitted "extremely rarely" by the managing or executive editor.
The paper also is clamping down on
quote approval:
We should not allow sources to change what was said in an original interview, although accuracy or the risk of losing an on-the-record quote from a crucial source may sometimes require it. A better and more acceptable alternative is to permit a source to add to a quotation and then explain that sequence to readers.
The full memo:
To the staff:
Over the last several days, there have been reports raising compelling questions of journalistic ethics in the practices of allowing sources to set rules on the use of quotations and the sharing of story drafts. We’d like to remind everyone of some core principles and lay down guidelines that should govern those practices at The Post.
The central principle of our journalism is to report the facts as closely as we can ascertain them. We should never do or promise to do anything that would shade the truth or call into question our commitment to reporting the
news accurately and fairly. That is essential to the trust we enjoy from the people we work for, our readers.
In response to the issues raised recently, we are modifying the relevant sections of The Post Stylebook. Please read this carefully. We encourage further discussion and will incorporate these specific points in upcoming sessions of Newsroom University.
Marcus Liz John Shirley Peter
Our objective in quoting people is to capture both their words and intended meaning accurately. That requires care in negotiating ground rules with sources. We do not allow sources to change the rules governing specific
quotations after the fact. Once a quote is on the record, it remains there.
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Steve Myers
July 18, 2012
1:28 pm
When I heard about the fifth-grade class that
sent The Washington Post an enormous, "adorable" correction letter, I thought they could be budding copy editors, should such positions exist when they enter the workforce. Turns out they were budding reporters.
Leslie Reed, their teacher at Burning Tree Elementary School in Bethesda, Md., told me that the class was working on informative writing this spring, focusing on topics like lasers and Saturn — you know, the major issues facing a fifth-grader. The anniversary of the Titanic's sinking fit the teaching, so she had the children research what happened, interview one another as if they had been on the ship, and write news stories. It was around this time that Reed saw The Washington Post story with the wrong date of the Titanic collision and brought the story to the class figuring they'd spot it. They did, hence the correction letter.
Reed scanned a couple of her students' news stories and emailed them to me.
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Andrew Beaujon
June 28, 2012
4:00 pm
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Andrew Beaujon
June 19, 2012
8:43 am
University of Northern Iowa |
PolitiFact |
The Huffington Post
Peter Dreier and Christopher R. Martin's study about the term "job killer" takes the news media to task for letting a partisan talking point slip by un-fact-checked:
The cavalier nature in which the “job killer” allegations are reported suggests that term is used loosely by those who oppose government regulations, and they can get away with it because news organizations fail to ask—or at least report – whether they have any evidence for the claims they make, and also fail to seek opposing views to counter the “job killer” claims.
Dreier and Martin write an engaging, thorough history of the term, from 1922 until its enshrinement in a Republican "framing strategy" in 1993. Since then, the academics write, it's been smooth sailing for the term, which they find has little correlation with actual unemployment. They studied its use in four news organizations -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press -- since 1984.
Some interesting tidbits emerge: The term's almost always used toward policies, usually those favored by the Democratic Party, and rarely toward individuals. Democrats and labor union officials, they note, each accounted for about 5 percent of its uses. And the term's use is higher during Democratic administrations. "In fact, the year 2011 was the biggest year yet for 'job killer' allegations," they write. "Given that Republicans and business organizations were the leading sources of 'job killer' allegations, this political explanation makes sense."
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- Between 1984 and 2011, the phrase “job killer” appeared in 381 stories from the four news organizations studied. "Associated Press news service had 115 stories, the New York Times 55 stories, the Wall Street Journal 151 stories, and the Washington Post 60 stories" using the phrase, according to the research.
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Andrew Beaujon
June 14, 2012
10:39 am
A memo from Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli and managing editors Liz Spayd and John Temple lays out a new structure for enterprise editing. The paper will hire an enterprise editor to oversee "large efforts"; Jeff Leen, who leads the paper's investigative squadron, will report to this person. The paper also plans to hire a digital enterprise editor and a vacant front-page editor (the latter has been vacant since last year).
We’re announcing today a new enterprise editing structure we believe will lift the ambition, quality and impact of our journalism, across the newsroom and across platforms. While The Post produces exceptional work on many, many subjects, this arrangement will enable us to do more of what is our core competitive advantage: original, well-conceived and –executed journalism. We aren’t after more long-form or multipart projects. We want to elevate the framing, the writing, the multimedia dimensions, the vitality and the essentiality of our enterprise journalism. (more...)
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Andrew Beaujon
June 12, 2012
8:56 am
Monday night I attended Washington Post Live's
40th anniversary celebration of Watergate, held in the Watergate office building on the 11th floor. For anyone with even a passing interest in the era, it was an opportunity to see a selection of its key players onstage as well as milling about the room -- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, John Dean, Egil "Bud" Krogh, Ben Bradlee, William Cohen, Fred Thompson. There were panel discussions. There was an open bar. And on the sixth floor, you could walk into the actual office burglarized on June 17, 1972, by people so inept their exploits are still reliable laugh lines four decades later. Herewith, an accounting of some of the evening's highlights.
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Bud Krogh stole the show. The former head of President Nixon's secret "plumbers" squadron who approved the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office joked, "It's a lot easier to get into this building with valet parking." Krogh, the third person in the
famous photos of Nixon meeting Elvis Presley, laid down a life lesson from that experience: Elvis wanted
a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Nixon asked Krogh if he could get the King one, and Krogh, a huge Elvis fan, said he'd make it happen without thinking things through. You gotta watch out for the urge to please both Nixon and Elvis, he said.
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Andrew Beaujon
May 17, 2012
2:36 pm
Elizabeth Flock, who resigned from The Washington Post in April after
a misattributed blog post drew a gnarly editor's note, has a new gig. She'll be lead writer on U.S. News & World Report's
Washington Whispers blog, which was written by Paul Bedard before he decamped for The Washington Examiner.
Reached by phone, Flock mostly referred me to
her tweet announcing her new job. She said the social issues piece would mean writing about race, gender and immigration.
Post Ombudsman Patrick Pexton weighed in on Flock's departure in April,
saying the paper had failed her. He wrote that he had spoken to other bloggers there.
They said that they felt as if they were out there alone in digital land, under high pressure to get Web hits, with no training, little guidance or mentoring and sparse editing. Guidelines for aggregating stories are almost nonexistent, they said. And they believe that, even if they do a good job, there is no path forward. Will they one day graduate to a beat, covering a crime scene, a city council or a school board? They didn’t know. So some left; others are thinking of quitting.
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Andrew Beaujon
May 10, 2012
2:28 pm
The Huffington Post |
The Washington Post
Jason Horowitz's
story about Mitt Romney's high school days includes the eyebrow-raising news that as a teen, he and some friends held down a student they thought was gay and cut his hair off. Horowitz found five Romney classmates who remembered the assault:
A few days later, [Matthew] Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
That epic story was not in the Post's print edition Thursday, something I noticed when I sat down to read it on a coffee break after seeing much chatter about it on Twitter Thursday morning. Kevin Merida, the Post's national editor, told me in an email why:
We were mindful of both the flood of news coverage yesterday surrounding President Obama's same-sex marriage remarks and the desire to give the Romney campaign as much time as possible to respond. It's also just a very long and involved tale, sensitive and complex, and it needed to be edited to our collective satisfaction. So that was yesterday's decision. That said, in the competitive real-time journalism sphere we operate in, we felt it was best to publish it when it was ready. Our online and print audiences are both important, though not overlapping, and both will get the benefit of Jason's extraordinary piece.
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Andrew Beaujon
May 9, 2012
1:45 pm
An email from Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli and Visuals Editor David Griffin to Post staff breaks the news:
It's with regret that we announce that Hannah Fairfield, Director of Graphics, is leaving us to assume a new role at The New York Times.
In her time with us she has led the graphics staff to new heights of excellence in print and online, with particularly robust interactive visualizations. There are far too many notable graphics to give a full accounting (the Japan earthquake, Congressional investigations, Occupy DC, census coverages, motion graphic explainers, Bin Laden's capture, political projects, including interactives on primary results and candidate ad spending), but what was constant to all the offerings, big and small, was Hannah's unrelenting eye for the kind of precise detail which keeps The Post at the very top of the game with information graphics and cartography. (more...)
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