The caller identified herself as the mother of Jay Smith, the Lake Taylor High School football star, and she was steaming. The Pilot, she declared, had no business running a photo taken at her son’s press conference to announce his decision to play at North Carolina State next year.
The photo ran five columns wide on Page A15 of the Nation & World section Nov. 19 and showed Jay pointing to a jersey held by his father, Mordecai Smith. His mother, Dorothy, and his sister and brother also were shown.
The reason for Dorothy Jones’ anger: The photo accompanied a long article by investigative reporter Bill Burke detailing how her husband “bilked dozens of people out of thousands of dollars.” The next day, he was sentenced to five years and four months in prison for his crimes.
Dorothy Jones asked several times if I thought it was “right” for The Pilot to publish the photo. I told her I’d let her know later.
This is later, and my answer is no. I understand why the paper did it, but I wish we hadn’t.
Burke’s story mentioned, in the next to last paragraph, that Jay is “one of the top football recruits in the nation.” Burke wrote that Jay had announced the previous week that he would attend N.C. State on a football scholarship. He noted that Jay and his father visited the campus in July.
A story about Smith’s N.C. State selection appeared Nov. 16 in the Sports section, with a head shot of the Lake Taylor wide receiver. No mention was made of his father’s troubles.
Using the photo with Burke’s story was “a way to illustrate the connection without belaboring it in the story,” said Maria Carrillo, The Pilot’s managing editor. Also, she added, “it was a happy moment for them, which provided a contrast to the story.”
Actually, a sidebar about Jay and his father’s efforts to promote him was to have been published along with Burke’s story. It would have questioned whether Jay deserves the billing he has been getting. That’s a “fair question,” said Carrillo, who opposed the story duo.
But that would have “unfairly painted the son with the same brush as his father, as if the son, by association, had done something wrong,” said Pilot editor Denis Finley, who pulled the sidebar.
“But we all thought the photo by itself was fine,” Finley said.
I disagree. The temptation to run it was so great, I think, that newsroom leaders yielded while congratulating themselves for rightfully yanking the sidebar.
In a letter to the editor, Theresa Jackson-Pope said that The Pilot owes Jay an apology “for such a distasteful decision. Why,” she asked, “must this child pay for the sins of his father?”
Good question.
TROOPER HILL: I was relieved and glad that the story about the memorial service for Robert A. Hill, the Virginia State police trooper who was fatally struck after a traffic stop Nov. 24 in Southampton, ran on the cover of Wednesday’s Hampton Roads section.
The initial story Nov. 25 of Hill’s death was “buried in the back of the local section,” to quote reader Mary Turner.
Said another reader: “This gentleman was a trooper for 19 years and gave his life doing his job, and I think the story deserved more than inside local coverage.”
“If this were my family or loved one and he died in such an accident while serving his community,” said Bruce Skunkwiler, “you can bet I would be deeply offended to learn that stories about traffic delays, black bear activists, canceled cycling events and a massive photo of people moving a washing machine took the front page” of the Hampton Roads section.
“More respect should have been shown,” said Skunkwiler, who said a police officer dying in the line of duty should be a certainty for the local cover. One might think so. But myriad factors – including circumstances, where it occurred and whether that’s in a paper’s “circulation area,” and who’s involved and their connection to that area – come into play.
Such was the case with the initial Hill story, Pilot editors say.
“We did give it a nice play inside the section,” said Carrillo, who doesn’t think the story was underplayed. She added that the accident “happened outside our circulation area, and it was an accident, not an officer slain in a crime.”
The accident happened on U.S. 58, near Adams Grove, about six miles south of Emporia. Hill was born in Courtland, raised in Franklin and graduated from Franklin High School. The Pilot’s net paid circulation for Southampton County is 1,190 daily, 1,202 Sunday. In Franklin, it’s 1,845 daily, 1,892 Sunday.
Like Carrillo, Pilot night metro editor Brian Root doesn’t think the Hill story was underplayed. But they agree that a promo (or Bazemore, as we call it) should have appeared on the local front to direct readers to the story at the top of Page B5.
The initial story could have appeared on the Hampton Roads cover in lieu of a one-column article about Hampton Roads’ inclusion in a federal study for clues as to why violent crimes are up nationally. The wire story with staff inclusions was, Root says, “the weakest link.” The study, the story noted, was announced last month.
Thankfully, Root saw Hill’s memorial as a cover story.
