Irresponsible.
They used that word a lot. Along with expressions like:
- “Insensitive, horribly disgusting, frightening.”
- “Totally unnecessary, absolutely disgusting.”
- “Just plain stupid and unfeeling.”
- “Absolutely ridiculous.”
Wednesday’s banner headline might have sold extra papers, but it upset many readers, especially those with young children, judging from calls and e-mails to The Virginian-Pilot. Even several Pilot staffers expressed outrage.
The offending headline: “Your children are not safe anywhere at any time.” With this overline in red type: “Sniper’s Warning.”
“Why should The Pilot promote panic and fear in its reading public through such an emotional headline?” asked a Chesapeake reader.
Said another reader: “We, along with every household that we know of with children, threw away the front page before our children awoke this morning.”
Complaining readers said the banner headline was alarmist and undermined their efforts to keep their children calm in the face of growing fear about public safety and the media’s 24-hour spotlight on the sniper situation.
Surely, we could have conveyed the information in a more responsible fashion, some readers said.
Unless, of course, they added, our aim was to sell more newspapers.
That wasn’t the motive of the editors who approved the headline. Their objective, they say, was to convey, in a compelling way, the most important news of the day. They wanted a headline that would drive home the biggest development in the sniper case.
The decision to go with the headline — an unfortunate decision, I think — wasn’t made in a vacuum or cavalierly, says deputy managing editor Joe Coccaro, who was the lead editor in charge at the time.
“We didn’t say, `Hey, we’ll sell newspapers!’ There was a lot of discussion,” Coccaro explained.
In the end, he said, those who argued for using the headline were passionate in their beliefs, while the few expressing reservations were lukewarm in their position.
Both Coccaro and Denis Finley, the paper’s deputy managing editor for presentation, agreed that the headline was alarmist. But Finley defended it by saying, “It’s an alarmist story.”
Besides, Finley said, “it wasn’t like we were publishing something people hadn’t heard. I think that argues against the sensationalist argument.”
I think not, especially when the headline is combined with the large, five-column photograph of the Montgomery County police officer, automatic weapon at the ready, inspecting a motorist’s vehicle.
And Pilot editor Kay Tucker Addis agrees.
“I thought our approach did come across as sensational, a bit too strong,” said Addis, who didn’t see the headline until she picked up Wednesday’s paper.
“Sometimes, when you have an inflammatory topic or highly emotional event, that’s exactly the time when you need for your approach to not add fuel to the fire. The combination of our bold visual design and the sniper’s threat combined to create a look and feel that was too in-your-face, too threatening.”
That, said Addis, is “not the tone and feel I want The Virginian-Pilot to have.”
Addis was especially bothered by readers saying they cut out the headline or hid it from their children. Noting that “this is a very, very sad, scary time,” Addis said The Pilot would have been irresponsible if we had “hidden the news and not mentioned the [sniper's] threat. But I would have preferred that the exact words be in smaller type, as a secondary headline.”
Which is what many newspapers did, although some — like The Philadelphia Inquirer — used the sniper’s quote as a main headline.
Clearly, the quote makes a compelling headline. It’s the equivalent of the sniper speaking directly to our readers, said one Pilot editor, who criticized the headline.
Finley, while supporting the headline, says there was no right or wrong decision. I asked Finley and news editor Paul Nelson, who argued for its use, for an alternative headline that would have conveyed the same information.
Both said, with slight variation: “Sniper threatens to kill children.” With the quote as a subtext.
That doesn’t “grab you,” as journalists like to say, as much as the offending headline. But it is less alarmist. And a whole lot more responsible.
