Frank Taylor is a copy editor who makes a living in a key newsroom slot, combing through stories from around the world and helping to decide which ones get in the newspaper and which ones don’t.
“My philosophy in doing this is to ask what’s the big story we need to get out front or we’ll be embarrassed,” he said, talking about the front page. “Typically, when I asked that question in April, it was the Middle East.”
It certainly was.
The Israeli invasion of the Palestinian-occupied West Bank has dominated the news and the pages of this newspaper, which has devoted extensive space to the crisis.
Last month, Florida Today ran 110 stories on the subject, 22 of them on the front page. The other 88 stories frequently filled the Nation/World page or were put on a special page labeled “Mideast in Crisis.”
That’s more than any other story in the past year except Sept. 11 and its aftermath.
The job of squeezing all that in fell on people such as Taylor and news editor Joelle Moran, who had to pick from dozens of stories each day and select the ones they felt were the most important and gave the best insight into specific aspects of the struggle.
The task required give-and-take among editors, and a constant need to delicately cut parts of stories to make room for others.
That editing process meant “making a lot of judgment calls,” but it was the only way to handle a story so far reaching and complex, said Moran, who noted articles ranged from the historical context of the fight to the fallout on gasoline prices.
A guiding principle was to look for “high impact stories with a lot of reader interest that won’t go away,” said Taylor. Among those stories were the siege of Yasser Arafat’s compound, diplomatic negotiations and the standoff at Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.
When it came to allegations about an Israeli massacre of Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp, the choices grew tougher because information was limited. That made editors worried about whether the stories had the proper balance, Moran said.
The reason was early reports were based on claims by Palestinian officials that thousands had died, a charge strongly denied by the Israelis but one that could not be dismissed by reporters because Israeli troops barred them from the camp at gunpoint.
It wasn’t until nearly three weeks later that investigators from the U.N. and human-rights groups concluded no slaughter had occurred. Rather, as many as 100 Palestinians were dead and missing, casualties of house-to-house fighting.
Editors also tried whenever possible to put a human face on the suffering, Moran said.
One story was written by Tom Clifford, Florida Today’s assistant managing editor for presentation, who did a telephone interview with his cousin, a priest assigned to the Church of the Nativity who found himself holed up with wounded Palestinian militants.
There also was a piece that looked at the tragically short lives of a young Palestinian woman who blew herself up and a young Israeli woman whom she killed in the suicide attack.
“It’s easy to get used to Palestinians killing Israelis without knowing who these people are,” Moran said. “It gives the human side of people who do many of the same things that Americans do every day, only they live in that climate.”
