The details of the news story were so grotesque, Editor Nancy Barnes recalled that she froze when she heard them, unable to absorb the facts.
A 17-year-old had given birth to a baby in the laundry room of her home, noticed the baby’s finger moved and then allegedly stabbed the newborn 135 times.
Where does that story belong in the newspaper? Barnes couldn’t help but wonder: If that was the reaction of a seasoned editor, then what kind of pain was she going to inflict on readers the next morning?
Still, it was news so unusual, it seemed to warrant front-page coverage. Barnes and other editors discussed putting a warning on the story. Instead, they decided to use the headline to signal to readers that there was “hard stuff to read in the story.” The headline, “A newborn’s grisly death in Oakdale,” ran at the top of page one the next morning, on April 13.
The issue of where to run violent crime stories came up again and again in April. Three times the newspaper’s editors had to decide where to run stories about dog maulings. Two men were murdered execution-style as they walked home from a bar. A teen was shot on a bus in St. Paul. A dead baby girl was found floating in the river near Red Wing. Then there was the horror of the Virginia Tech shootings.
As April ended, Barnes looked at a story atop the Twin Cities and Region cover about a dad charged with beating a 4-year-old son who ended up in critical condition and on a respirator. She looked up at other top editors gathered for the morning critique of the newspaper and said, “We’ve got to develop some guidelines for what we’re going to do with crime stories.”
Despite the grisly month of April, the Star Tribune has hardly become the Police Gazette. With space for five headlines on each front page and each Twin Cities and Region cover, there was potential for 300 headlines on those pages in April. Of those, 25 were about violent crime — including six headlines about the Virginia Tech shootings. But those headlines and accompanying images were among the most vivid and disturbingly memorable of the month.
There are media that would view a month of news like that as a bonanza. “Some news outlets make a deliberate choice to play up crime. If we were to do that, it would be irresponsible in terms of how it portrays our community,” she said.
Yet, looking back over a month of coverage, Barnes didn’t second-guess putting those stories in prominent places. “We’ve had a lot of horrific child abuse cases. I tend to feel they should go on page one. But then we subject readers to pain,” she said.
That is the conundrum about crime coverage: How much is required to inform readers and how much is too much for readers to stomach? The public good behind reporting crime is that a community can’t solve its problems unless it knows about its problems. But what about crimes that are simply a single crazy or depraved act that doesn’t seem to fit into some troubled societal pattern in need of fixing? Do those stories also belong on page one?
When the Virginia Tech shootings happened the same day as the execution-style slayings of two men locally, both were on page one. “We made the right choice, but you pick up the paper and it’s dominated by crime,” Barnes said.
Her biggest concern is that sometimes the inside pages of the Twin Cities and Region section are filled with crime news. “Do you cover every murder? Not every paper does. This one does,” she said. “Is it disproportionate to what’s going on in people’s lives?”
Readers contact me often about crime stories. For days after the story about the teen allegedly stabbing her newborn, readers called and e-mailed. They were furious that the adults in the teen’s life hadn’t provided support that might have prevented a 17-year-old from panicking in a crisis and causing such a tragedy. Some were unhappy that the newspaper wrote about the teen’s life, which they found intrusive.
Barnes has asked Dennis McGrath, the assistant managing editor for local news, and Jill Burcum, the deputy metro editor, to develop guidelines this year for how the paper should cover crime and how different kinds of stories should be played.
On Wednesday, reporter Myron Medcalf did a smart piece looking at dog attacks in the metro area after coverage of the three dog mauling cases last month. He found attacks by dogs were actually down.
But unlike initial coverage of the maulings, this story ran on page B4. I hope McGrath and Burcum will look not only at how to cover breaking news, but also how to treat some of the excellent follow-up stories reporters have done to put the crimes in perspective. Too often, stories exploring solutions to violent crime or providing meaningful context aren’t played nearly as prominently as the initial, shocking news.
If you would like to join these discussions about crime coverage, there are several ways to do that. You can send me an e-mail at readerrep@ startribune.com or call 612-673-4450. You can also join a discussion on the topic with other readers at my blog at www.startribune.com/omblog. I’ll make sure your remarks are heard by the editors developing the new guidelines and by the rest of the staff through my daily report.
They’re called guidelines, rather than policies, because it’s impossible to anticipate every kind of news. Inevitably, some crime story will hand editors a decision they haven’t anticipated.
“Crime coverage hasn’t been particularly scientific. It’s been by the gut,” Barnes said. But the guidelines should help ensure that when news breaks and quick decisions are needed, they’ll be sound decisions that weigh the need to know and readers’ sensibilities.
