An obscure news item appeared on sacbee.com on Sept. 9. I doubt that more than a few people noticed it. But one reader who did notice it brought an ethical lapse to my attention.
The lead paragraph of the item read, “The Sacramento Municipal Utility District was given final approval by the California Energy Commission to build the first phase of the 500-megawatt Cosumnes Power Plant.” There’s nothing obviously wrong with that sentence — until you read the press release distributed by the utility district. Its lead sentence?
“The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) was given final approval by the California Energy Commission (CEC) to build the first phase of the 500-megawatt Cosumnes Power Plant (CPP).” Much of the rest of the news item, which carried the byline “By Bee Metro Staff,” was also taken verbatim from the press release.
It was only a few weeks ago that I wrote about the suspension of a Bee sportswriter for lifting directly from press releases and attempting to pass the work off as his own. In that case, The Bee’s editing safeguards prevented the fraudulent work from getting into the newspaper.
So how was it that The Bee’s editors didn’t prevent a press release reprinted under the guise of “Bee Metro Staff” from getting on its Web site? It’s because an editor in the newsroom responsible for making sure that kind of thing doesn’t happen was the transgressor.
The problem here is that some editors at The Bee can unilaterally post items to the Web with no additional oversight. That’s directly in conflict with standard editing practices.
When a reporter files an article for the newspaper, it is usually read by the editor who directly supervises that reporter, then by a copy editor and a copy desk supervisor. On major stories, more editors are involved.
But, before the press release incident, breaking news that The Bee wanted to get on its Web site quickly was churned out by a reporter and sent to one editor for review. That editor would send the story directly to the Web site. (While there are employees at the Web site with backgrounds in journalism, their duties do not necessarily include editing in the traditional sense.) It’s the equivalent of giving individual editors the power to place articles in the newspaper unseen by anyone else, and that simply wouldn’t happen. It shouldn’t happen with the Web site, either.
I don’t want to imply that every article on sacbee.com was essentially unedited. Most are sent over to the Web site after going through the standard editing process. But with breaking news, The Bee continues to risk sacrificing standards for speed.
In the case of the SMUD release, the reporter assigned to do the article for the Sept. 10 newspaper was not immediately available to do a quick piece for the Web. The Bee wanted to get the news of the final approval for Cosumnes out on the Web before a SMUD press conference scheduled for a few hours later, so the editor posted SMUD’s press release with only minor rewording.
“It was bad judgment,” said Executive Editor Rick Rodriguez. “His goal was to get it out fast.”
Why? With 24-hour news cycles the norm now, I can understand the need to keep pace on major stories, like the court-ordered delay in the recall election. But an announcement of a new power plant could certainly have waited until the reporter returned from the press conference. What made the decision worse was that there was a very simple solution. If it had been made clear that the posted information was from a press release and a staff-written update from the press conference was pending, this would not have been an issue. Further, while the editor said he confirmed the information in the release with the reporter, he did not make it clear in the Web item that The Bee had independently verified the facts.
Rodriguez said disciplinary action against the editor is pending (I’m not naming him because it remains an internal personnel matter). While that editor was at fault, Rodriguez said, The Bee might have inadvertently left the impression among its staff that the standards for Web postings aren’t as strict as those for published articles.
Given the way the system is set up here, I’d say that’s correct. It’s unfathomable to me how any media outlet could allow its newsroom to publish unedited content, whether in print or on the Web.
The Bee got a further lesson in the pitfalls of that recently when columnist Daniel Weintraub included a contentious statement in his Sept. 1 Weblog, which is posted on sacbee.com.
Weintraub wrote that Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante “certainly owed his elevation to the job of Assembly speaker to his ethnic background and to the support he received from fellow Latinos. If his name had been Charles Bustmont rather than Cruz Bustamante, he would have finished his legislative career as an anonymous back-bencher.”
Further, he alleged, “it’s indisputably true that the Legislature’s Latino Caucus advocates policies that are destructive to their own people and to greater California, in the name of ethnic unity.” The caucus protested in a letter to Bee Publisher Janis Besler Heaphy.
Make what you will of Weintraub’s statement, and of the caucus’ protests. No matter what I or anyone else thinks, he has every right to analyze the political scene and reach those conclusions. But no newspaper should publish an analysis without an editor’s review. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Weintraub’s blog should have been reworded, but an editor should at least have had the opportunity to question his conclusions.
Since these incidents came to light, The Bee has instituted some reforms. Weintraub’s blog now goes to the editorial page editor or his deputy before it’s posted on sacbee.com. Editors will not be allowed to write items for the Web without another editor’s review.
That’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. Part of the problem is that no one in the newsroom is assigned full-time to oversee and disseminate Web content, and no reporters or editors work at the Web site.
Ed Canale, The Bee’s vice president of new media and strategic planning, said that at the inception of sacbee.com, “We made a decision not to replicate the newsroom.” The “290 trained journalists” in the newsroom, he said, provide much of the content for the Web.
That’s not good enough, in my view. Rodriguez said The Bee did once have an editor in the newsroom dedicated full-time to Web content, but after some newsroom restructuring the job was appended to the already considerable responsibilities of the editor who posted the press release.
Let me put it as plainly as possible: Half-measures don’t work. The newsroom needs someone (and probably more than one person) with full-time responsibility for and authority over Web content. I hope that The Bee considers that its credibility is worth more than the cost of one full-time employee.
