Making this change runs contrary to some of the points I made about the database when we posted it last Friday. Namely, by reducing full names to abbreviations, we prevent citizens from scrutinizing city spending to the level of specificity to which they are entitled. Every citizen has a right to know exactly how much she pays Jane Doe, not merely J. Doe, because for all we know, J. Doe could be a fiction. Anything less than complete disclosure that can be verified means we are taking the city’s word for it. Or taking the Gazette’s word for it, which is no better. The Gazette is not a stand-in for government; we are — or should be — a transparent conduit, transmitting government information to citizens. We do not exist to vouch for the government; we are here to enable citizens themselves to hold government accountable.

It is, admittedly, a purist position. I continue to believe that it is, journalistically, the correct position.

Which is not to say it is a comfortable position. We understand that publishing names and salaries makes city employees uneasy. But in the end, it is not any claim of privacy — there is none when it comes to a public employee’s paycheck — that has prompted this change. I’ve made the change after hearing from a small number of city workers with sincere concerns about their safety.

It’s easy to minimize those concerns. Newspapers in Houston; Los Angeles; Albuquerque; Milwaukee; Raleigh; Memphis; Louisville; Phoenix; Tulsa; Columbia, S.C.; Minneapolis; tiny Burlington, N.C. and many more places publish online databases of the full names, job titles and salaries of local and state employees. Indeed, in Iowa it is state law that a complete roster of state workers and their pay be published each year. In Iowa City, you can look up the name and salary for your kid’s kindergarten teacher, your firefighter neighbor, the nurse at the local VA hospital, and the history professor at the university. As far as I know, every last public employee in Iowa City is safe and sound.

I’ve spoken with folks in those places during the past few days. None has reported a single case of harm befalling any public employee as a result of the publicity. In cities where this kind of information has been published for several years, it has become part of the background. No big deal.

Such evidence is not comforting to the few who told me they worry about being that much easier to find by someone who, for example, is the object of a restraining order. It’s easy for me to say they have nothing to worry about; it’s also arrogant. It’s also easy to tell a nurse that, if avoiding detection were truly that important, she wouldn’t seek employment at a public hospital. See: arrogant.

So, a compromise: J. Doe. Call it the “police badge” standard: In Colorado Springs, an officer’s badge displays his or her first initial, and last name.

The Gazette will continue to obtain public-employee salary data and post them in our info center. The lists we obtain will contain full names, and we will shorten the first names to initials. We will spot-check the salary amounts with a number of people on the list, to verify that their pay amounts are correct, and we will report our findings to readers. That’s not complete transparency, but it is our good-faith effort at verification. Anyone who doesn’t believe our database or the city is free to get the same list from the city. My guess is it will be good enough for most people.

Does this change matter? After all, any person can obtain the same list of (complete) names and salaries we obtained. It’s public information. Any person with an Internet connection can post that list, names and all, for all the world to see. In fact, I predict it will happen. The relentless digitization of information, especially public information, makes it inevitable. Eventually, every public employee will have to get used to the idea that his or her name and pay is part of the public realm, searchable and downloadable. If not from us, then from someone else.

Futhermore, haven’t we already let the cat out of the bag? The gazette.com database itself does not cache, so there is no full-name version of it available. If someone has downloaded it and made it into their own spreadsheet, they’ve done something they could do anyway by asking the city for the document.

Some will ask if we made this change because of customer backlash. A few dozen readers have canceled their subscriptions. But we’ve lost more when we’ve modified the layout of the paper or started charging for the Sunday TV programming guide.

As my publisher said to me, we’re making this change not because it feels correct, but because it feels right. Someday, we may conclude that the community is ready for full disclosure. Conditions change. Standards change. For now, we’ve settled on this one.

Post from: The Newsroom

What angered one reader, however, was the use of this photo with the story:

Here’s what the reader wrote to me in an e-mail:

“On page 13 of this morning paper, what do we have ?  A large photo of a junkie shooting himself up in broad daylight, in a public setting.  This is disgusting and depraved.

“There are so many other articles that could have had photos instead.  A photo of a junkie shooting up is not morally or socially acceptable in the United States, especially in Colorado Springs.

“Jeff - Do your job and EDIT photos for our community as well as the text!”

We had five other photos to choose from:

Would you have published any one of them? Which one(s), and why?

UPDATE: I asked the Gazette Community Advisory Board to weigh in. A sampling of their responses:

1. I think this is an issue of the reader’s comfort level with the picture.  It’s real life and I think it should be covered.  I have the same issue with hiding the coffins of war dead returning to this country.  People need to dwell in the real world and not one that is filtered.  That’s not the work of the media.  There is a difference, however, between sensational pics and those that convey reality and contribute to a story.
2. After reading the article and viewing the photographs I will say that I would have chosen photographs which did not depict the actual use of a drug.

The photographs would be more than appropriate in a magazine or other similar publication but a newspaper must target a larger less specific audience, many of whom would find the images disturbing.

Would I find the images upsetting?  No, but I am relatively sure that my mother would and most certainly my 7-year old daughter.

We expect our news sources to provide factual and timely articles and these articles are not always pretty or easily digested but I think this could have been accomplished just as well without the inclusion of these photographs.

Nonetheless, I found the article quite informative.

3. Putting one’s head in the sand doesn’t make the issue go away.  Legalizing drugs presents specific public issues.  This is one!  Print it.

4. I think the pictures of the drug addicts were very appropriate.  Substance addiction is a major issue in the US and other countries, and the pictures accompanying the story were an important part of illustrating one aspect of that problem.  Good Work.
5. I don’t have any problem showing the pics.  My question is are they legitimate and not staged in view of the fact that the person doesn’t seem to mind being photographed.
6. I have to look at this in two ways: personally and the public good. Personally I am nauseated seeing people shoot up. I avert my eyes when it happens in the movies. I can’t even watch my boyfriend, who has MS, take his daily injection. So, personally (and I assume the person who commented on the blog was talking personally), I’d say, yuck–leave it out.

Now, the public good, which is the business you’re in. In this regard, I wonder, how does this photo help tell the story, the change in the Mexican law and how it might affect Americans?  Is the photo saying this guy would not be shooting up if the law hadn’t been changed, or that he wouldn’t be doing it in the open? I guess it depends on the caption (which I didn’t see). Now, if you had a photo of a guy like this pushing drugs to a clean-cut American college student, that would help tell the story!

Here is the full AP news story. It was shortened for publication in print, because or space limitations:

				Date: 8/26/2009 3:21 PM

BC-LT--Mexico-Decriminalizing Drugs/1025
Mexico's new drug use law worries US police
JULIE WATSON,Associated Press Writer

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico now has one of the world's most liberal laws for drug users
after eliminating jail time for small amounts of marijuana, cocaine and even heroin, LSD
and methamphetamine.

"All right!" said a grinning Ivan Rojas, a rail-thin 20-year-old addict who
endured police harassment during the decade he has spent sleeping in Mexico City's
gritty streets and subway stations.

But stunned police on the U.S. side of the border say the law contradicts
President Felipe Calderon's drug war, and some fear it could make Mexico a
destination for drug-fueled spring breaks and tourism.

Tens of thousands of American college students flock to Cancun and Acapulco
each year to party at beachside discos offering wet T-shirt contests
and all-you-can-drink deals.

"Now they will go because they can get drugs," said San Diego Police Chief William
Lansdowne. "For a country that has experienced thousands of deaths from warring drug
cartels for many years, it defies logic why they would pass a law that
will clearly encourage drug use."

Enacted last week, the Mexican
law is part of a growing trend across Latin America to treat drug use
as a public health problem and make room in overcrowded prisons for
violent traffickers rather than small-time users.

Brazil and
Uruguay have already eliminated jail time for people carrying small
amounts of drugs for personal use, although possession is still
considered a crime in Brazil. Argentina's Supreme Court ruled out
prison for pot possession on Tuesday and officials say they plan to
propose a law keeping drug consumers out of the justice system.

Colombia has decriminalized marijuana and cocaine for personal use, but kept
penalties for other drugs.

Officials
in those countries say they are not legalizing drugs — just drawing a
line between users, dealers and traffickers amid a fierce drug war. Mexico's
law toughens penalties for selling drugs even as it relaxes the law against using them.

"Latin
America is disappointed with the results of the current drug policies
and is exploring alternatives," said Ricardo Soberon, director of the
Drug Research and Human Rights Center in Lima, Peru.

As Mexico
ratcheted up its fight against cartels, drug use jumped more than 50
percent between 2002 and 2008, according to the government, and today
prisons are filled with addicts, many under the age of 25.

Rojas has spent half his life snorting cocaine and sniffing paint thinner
as he roamed Mexico City's streets in a daze. Most days he was roused awake
by police demanding a bribe and forcing him to move along, he said.

"It's good they have this law so police don't grab you," said Rojas, whose
name, I-V-A-N, is tattooed across his knuckles.

Rojas hit bottom three weeks ago when he could not score enough money for
drugs by begging and found himself shaking uncontrollably. He accepted
an offer for help from workers from a drug rehabilitation center who
approached him on the street.

"Drugs were finishing me off," said
Rojas, whose 13-year-old brother died of an overdose eight years ago.
"I lost my brother. I lost my youth."

Juan Martin Perez, who runs
Caracol, the nonprofit center helping Rojas, said the government has
poured millions of dollars into the drug war but has done little to
treat addicts. His group relies on grants from foundations.

The
new law requires officials to encourage drug users to seek treatment in
lieu of jail, but the government has not allocated more money for
organizations like Caracol that are supposed to help them.

Treatment is mandatory for third-time offenders, but the law does not specify
penalties for noncompliance.

"This was passed quickly and quietly but it's going to have to be adjusted to
match reality," Perez said.

Supporters
of the change point to Portugal, which removed jail terms for drug
possession for personal use in 2001 and still has one of the lowest
rates of cocaine use in Europe.

Portugal's law defines personal
use as the equivalent of what one person would consume over 10 days.
Police confiscate the drugs and the suspect must appear before a
government commission, which reviews the person's drug consumption
patterns. Users may be fined, sent for treatment or put on probation.

Foreigners caught with drugs still face arrest in Portugal, a measure to prevent
drug tourism.

The same is not true for Mexico, where there is no jail time for anyone caught
with roughly four marijuana cigarettes, four lines of cocaine, 50 milligrams
of heroin, 40 milligrams of methamphetamine or 0.015 milligrams of LSD.

That's what concerns U.S. law enforcement at the border.

"It
provides an officially sanctioned market for the consumption of the
world's most dangerous drugs," San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore said.
"For the people of San Diego the risk is direct and lethal. There are
those who will drive to Mexico to use drugs and return to the U.S. under
their influence."

Don Thornhill, a retired Drug Enforcement Administration supervisor who
investigated Mexican cartels for 25 years, said Mexico's
rampant drug violence will likely deter most U.S. drug users, and the
new law will allow Mexican police to focus on "the bigger fish."

The Bush administration criticized a similar bill proposed in Mexico
in 2006, prompting then-President Vicente Fox to send it back to
Congress. But Washington has stayed quiet this time, praising Calderon
for his fight against drug cartels — a struggle that has seen some
11,000 people killed since Calderon took office in 2006.

"We work with Mexico
every day to combat illegal drugs and cartel violence," State
Department spokesman Ian Kelly said when asked about the law. "And we
look forward to continuing that cooperation."

_____

Associated
Press writers Marco Sibaja in Brasilia, Vivian Sequera in Bogota,
Harold Heckle in Madrid, Elliot Spagat in San Diego, Olga Rodriguez in
Mexico City and Matt Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.

Post from: The Newsroom

But in our view, it isn’t news. That’s why, even though we have a copy of the same draft lawsuit, we haven’t published anything about it.

People threaten to sue all the time, and we could waste a lot of readers’ time every day with “news” of lawsuits that might be filed. But talk is cheap. Call us when you’ve paid your filing fee at the courthouse.

The still-theoretical lawsuit does not contain the name of a plaintiff. It does not name a defendant. There has been no action, and thus, no one has been harmed and there is no basis for a claim. It is a blank form, waiting for names to be filled in.

That may change, if the city follows through on the deal. If it does, we’ll report about it.

Or, the city might take evasive action, changing the proposed structure of the USOC deal to avoid a lawsuit. If it does, we’ll report on it.

It may be real. It may be a bluff. Until it causes something to happen, it’s not news.

UPDATE: It’s been filed. Story is here.

Post from: The Newsroom

Fair? Unfair?

It was the object of discussion among editors and reporters on Tuesday, as the story was being prepared. It was the subject of critique, both internally, and by readers, on Wednesday. Here are some of the arguments:

****

They just happened to be in the military stationed at Fort Carson or Peterson AFB.  Were the other 11 unemployed? If not, why list just the 4, is it that because there are in the military? I have noticed over the years that other reporters, like yourself, seem to pick out those in the military that have done something wrong with out indicating the employment of others that have done something just as bed if not worse.  Why is that?

****

I must take issue with how this story is being reported. Because of how the the gazzett turns the story into a personal vendetta agenst the military. Why not tell us where all the perps work. The fact that 4 of them were in the military was only repersentive of the ratio between civilian and military person in the area. As prior Military I will personaly assure you most who serve are honorible and loath those that abuse children. I think the local meadia is trying to give the military a black eye in the way this story was reported.

****

It would make sense that if we were going to call out the military connection for the four individuals we should also call out the employers of the other folks that got arrested. It should be an all or none call out to make it fair.

The implication of the call out is that the military connection has some special connection to the issue.

****

I would argue that military members fall into the same “interest” category as police officers, firefighters, prosecutors, doctors, clergymen – that is, they are widely viewed as standard bearers of responsibility and integrity and as such are held to a higher standard by our readers.
This is partly a matter of perception, of course, but I think it’s more substantial than that:  Just as police officers are charged with protecting order in our cities, our military people have agreed to be the public face of the U.S. abroad.  We delegate a tremendous amount of authority, power and money to them, just as we do the cops, etc.   We have a clear interest in how they conduct themselves.

If we apply the same restrictive standard, we’ll be hard-pressed to justify alerting our readers the next time a middle school band leader gets in trouble for child pornography.  In that case, there was no connection to the school.  But people are interested – and worried – because of concerns about how the guy used (or misused) the authority and privilege he got through the schools. It doesn’t spark the same concerns if the guy’s a butcher or a baker.

****

By legal definition, they are public servants set apart from others by the powers invested in them by their nation. They hold power of command over lesser-ranking service members, which is unique. Those empowered to issue orders and punish those who do not obey have accepted a burden of authority that necessarily comes with increased scrutiny.

We ask much of our military. We as a society do expect them to possess morality that may not be present elsewhere. Those who meet expectations are rewarded for their sacrifice, while some may say that reward is inadequate. Those who meet the standard can expect promotion. They’re paid by tax dollars, with annual raises in the past decade that have dwarfed those received by their civilian counterparts.

Commanders especially understand this. In a culture where absolutely accountability is crucial, scofflaws must be rooted out. For a unit to achieve the life-saving cohesion and the élan that is often the difference between victory and defeat on the battlefield, they must hold their soldiers to the highest of standards.

****

For the record, we did request the occupations of the others who were arrested. The information was not provided to us.

Post from: The Newsroom

This fire killed young Whitney Hendrickson, only 18, pinned between a toppled gas pump and her car. There are no words.

The question often goes like this: How would you feel if it was your daughter in that fire and you saw that photo?

The answer is, I’d feel sick. Anyone with an ounce of humanity, whether related to the victim or not, feels deeply for the woman and her family and friends.

Journalists do not wish for this kind of news. But when confronted with anguishing reality, we are obligated to report it to the community at large, with honesty and with relevant detail. Our first obligation is to the community, and we try to balance that with respect for the individuals affected by tragedy. But because we can’t publish one version of a newspaper for the victims and another for everyone else, that dual responsibility makes it impossible to completely withhold everything that might distress the victims. It’s not possible to inform the community by holding back information. We refrain from gratuitous detail and imagery; this photo would not be published if the victim were visible. In the past, for example, we have cropped photos that contain images of dead shooting victims so that they were not visible.

Tuesday night, we gathered several editors and discussed how to report this tragedy in the printed edition. We knew we did not want to simply print the same urgent, breaking-news approach we had taken throughout Tuesday online at gazette.com. We knew TV news would stress the drama and horror of the event throughout Tuesday night, and that by Wednesday morning, residents would want a story that, while still reporting the facts, came from a different place. This was the result:

We deliberately decided to stress the photo of Ms. Hendrickson and her friend over the fire photo. The headline was deliberately crafted to reflect Whitney’s life, not the tragedy. The story itself was written as a remembrance, not a rehash of a horrible event that everyone already had played in their minds. It was a factual eulogy, if you will. Online, this version of the story supplanted the previous day’s version, and the fire photo sank several links into the gazette.com website.

And it should be said that today’s printed presentation, one that I think treats this loss with respect and dignity and affirmation, was possible only because the family and friends of Ms. Hendrickson were so generous, and brave enough to talk about their daughter and their friend. It would be understandable if parents were too grief-stricken to share so soon after a tragedy. It also would make it very difficult to report and write a story such as the one we published today. Because the family has been so open, the entire community is able to genuinely share in the grief. And shared experience is one reason why we have journalism.

Post from: The Newsroom

How to choose?

You can go for posterity, the historical document, the image the captures “the moment” that sets this president apart from all 43 before him, and that marks the precise point in our country’s 232-year history where something profound changed:

Or you can go for emotion, the meaning of the moment:

. . . or for grandeur, a sense of weight:

. . or maybe you want to go for a sense of celebration and humanity:

It’s hard to go wrong, but still, only one photo can be the biggest on the page.

Post from: The Newsroom

Here is our policy: We do not include the race or ethnicity of a person in a news story unless race is pertinent.

Notice I did not say “crime story.” I said “story.” We leave race/ethnicity out of every story unless race itself is the issue.

For example, we do not identify Colorado Springs Mayor Lionel Rivera as “Hispanic Mayor Lionel Rivera.” His ethnicity is irrelevant. The mayor also appears to be about 5-feet, 10-inches tall (although I’ve never measured him and am a lousy judge of height). We don’t identify him as “Five-feet-ten Mayor Lionel Rivera.” These very precise characteristics – the mayor is very precisely Hispanic and very precisely five-feet-ten – have absolutely no relevance to just about any story involving the mayor.

A number of years back, The Gazette published a profile of then Vice-Mayor Leon Young. He had been appointed interim mayor for a short time, and the story made his African-American race a prominent part of the story. Indeed, it was the reason for the story. Young was the first black person to become mayor of Colorado Springs. Race had played a significant role in shaping his politics and policies. So for that story, we paid attention to his race. It was relevant. In other stories, however, where we reported on Young acting in one way or another as mayor, such as presiding over the most recent City Council meeting, we did not identify him as “black Interim Mayor Leon Young.” He was simply “Interim Mayor Leon Young,” because his race had nothing to do with the reasons why he had voted one way or another on a motion before the council.

We apply essentially the same standard to our reporting on crime. Imagine a person who has been arrested, charged and is now standing before a judge entering a plea. The person’s name is, say, Jeff Thomas. Does it matter that Thomas is white? Black? Asian? No. What matters is that this specific person stands accused of a specific crime and must answer the charges. The law will be administered, presumably, without regard to the defendant’s race, so race is irrelevant.

Now we come to the different situation of police trying to find someone who has committed a crime. No longer is a person’s race necessarily irrelevant: it can be a crucial distinguishing characteristic that separates the potentially guilty from the innocent. Doesn’t it make sense to tell readers the race of the person(s) the police suspect of committing the crime?

Our position: In most cases, no – not unless there is other unique identifying information about the person.

Our reason: In most cases, race by itself is far too crude a characteristic to be of any value singling out any individual.

Consider that, as of the 2000 census, El Paso County was home to 516,929 people. Of those half-million souls, 81.2 percent were white. Keeping that fact in mind, imagine reading something like this in The Gazette:

“Police suspect the burglar is a white male.”

Well, that effectively narrows it down to about 40 percent of the population, or 210,000 people. It certainly doesn’t aid the police – or Gazette readers — in the business of finding the man they’re looking for. Information like that is so useless that a reasonable reader would wonder why a mention of race was included at all. A good number of readers, I’m certain, would rightly complain that the Gazette was simply trying to cast whites in a bad light.

African-Americans, meanwhile, make up 6.5 percent of the area’s population, so a Gazette story that said “Police suspect the burglar is a black male” would create a pool of about 11,300 suspects. That number is still far, far too large to serve the purpose of finding the one person responsible for the crime.

Even in smaller subsets of the city, race doesn’t really help single out a suspect. In and around Rockrimmon, for example, the 2000 census counted 655 blacks. If police were looking for an adult black male and suspected that person lived in Rockrimmon, the field of potential suspects would be roughly 2/5th of that number, or about 262 black adult men. That’s still way too many people to make the description of any value — unless you think the police would be justified hauling all 262 down to the station for questioning.

And if whites have good reason to be upset with The Gazette for tainting all whites by reporting the lone fact that a suspect is white, then blacks are entitled to be equally offended by a story that taints all blacks by reporting that a suspect happens to be black. To take the Rockrimmon example, it simply would be unfair to the 261 innocent black adult males of Rockrimmon to give their neighbors a reason to look upon them with unwarranted suspicion. More to the point of public safety, it would do almost nothing to help single out the true criminal from the much larger group of innocents.

Some will say: Well, 261 black men is such a large group that no single one of them would or should feel he is under suspicion. OK, fine, but that argument essentially concedes the point that racial information alone does not narrow down the field sufficiently to be of any benefit in tracking down the actual criminal.

Even the police regard race by itself as only part of the information they need to track down suspects. That’s why they collect not only the race of a suspect, but every other possible identifying feature they can obtain: height, weight, hair color and style, eyes, scars, tattoos, clothing, jewelry, limps, right- or left-handedness, speech accent, and on and on. It’s the combination of personal characteristics that create a unique individual, not any single characteristic alone.

Usually, the particulars contained in police reports – height, weight, hair color and so forth – are so average as to describe the vast majority of people. A description along the lines of “five-feet-10, 180 pounds, brown hair,” is not specific enough. To write a story that says police are looking for a “white male, five-feet-10, 180 pounds with brown hair” is to say that police are looking for about 20 percent of the men in Colorado Springs.

For example, the police blotter on the crime reported today identifies the suspects as “a black male wearing a black jacket and black jeans,” and “a black male wearing a red jacket over a black hoodie. both suspects had handguns and wore bandanas over their faces.”

Well, the bandanas are gone now, for sure, and just about every American male owns black jeans or a black jacket. And there’s no clue about whether the suspects are short or tall, big or small.

By contrast, here is the police-blotter description of the suspect of a robbery that occurred Tuesday afternoon:

The victims described the suspect further as a Hispanic male with dark hair, about 5’5” tall, weighing 130-140 pounds. He was wearing blue pants and a blue down jacket with a “Broncos” emblem on the back.

That’s more precise, but still too vague to be of much use. The height/weight information helps, though plenty of folks around here wear Broncos jackets.

In those cases when the police do provide The Gazette with uniquely identifying information, we do include it in our news stories. Here’s a sample of a story where we did just that. This story, published a few years ago, was about police investigating the potential of a link between an earlier sexual assault and a more recent kidnapping:

The man was described as white with a light to medium complexion. He is about 5 feet 6 inches tall, 180 to 200 pounds, with black hair, dark brown eyes and a protruding stomach. He had facial hair and pockmarks on the lower part of his face. His teeth were stained brown, and he smoked Doral menthol cigarettes, police said. He drove a tan, older-model small pickup.
 
In this case, race was a useful identifying characteristic because it was accompanied by a host of other, precise characteristics. If you happen to know two 5-foot-6, 200-pound people with black hair, brown eyes, pockmarks and a taste for Doral menthols, you can eliminate the African-American one and instead focus on the white one.

A final point about police information: Citizens grant police officers certain powers that are so potent that we don’t allow just anyone to use them. A police officer can arrest and incarcerate someone. Citizens expect anyone entrusted with such powers to use them judiciously. We hire those people carefully, send them to police academies and train them. And judicious exercise of their power to incarcerate relies, in part, in precise information. Surely we don’t want police officers rounding up every five-feet-10, 180-pound man with brown hair until they finally get the right one. And, indeed, they don’t, because so often, the descriptive information they have on their own incident reports is not very descriptive after all. They need more than a mere height-weight-hair description to find the one person they’re after.

Certainly, we as a newspaper have an obligation to behave just as judiciously with such information. Just as the power to arrest is potent and needs to be controlled, so too is the power of information (and more to the point here, misinformation) potent and needs to be employed carefully.

Post from: The Newsroom

Understood. The idea of such a lavish soiree does clang against the current times.

Which is a big reason why it is a story in the first place. Not a huge story, not a front-page story, but a story worth the Life section, anyway. It is naturally interesting when events run against the grain, as this one did. While everyone else is zigging, this girl zagged. And to the family’s credit, they addressed that point directly in their quotes.

The editor of the story, Warren Epstein, makes another point: Some will read this story and say, At least someone is spending money. As Warren notes, we have not received any complaints from the limo driver or caterer, each of whom were provided with a bit more job security because of this party.

Some of the comments under the Sweet-16 story provided us with another good story idea: About people who have decided not to exchange gifts within their families this year and instead will donate their gift budgets to charities.

That’s a good story, too, and if it took the Sweet-16 story to make us aware of it, I’d call that a worthwhile exchange.

Post from: The Newsroom

Case in point: On Monday, a 19-year-old automobile passenger was killed when the driver, police say, drifted onto the shoulder, right into the back end of a stationary 18-wheel truck. We posted a short video containing some eyewitness and police accounts, and footage of the traffic backup.

Also Monday, a 45-year-old former stuntman named Eric Scott strapped on a 135-pound rocket pack fueled up with hydrogen peroxide, stepped to the edge of the Royal Gorge near Canon City, then flew across the chasm and landed safely on the other side.

When our newsroom got word of this upcoming rocket-pack demonstration, we all had the same thought: We simply must get this on video.

We did. It’s as amazing as you’d imagine. A guy steps on to the the rim of the 1,100-foot deep chasm and just . . . levitates and, well, flies to the other rim. Like any comic book you ever read as a kid.

By Tuesday morning, more than three times as many people had clicked on the video of the I-25 crash aftermath as had clicked on the video of Scott’s flight across the canyon.

All of this probably comes as no surprise to our TV partners at KOAA-TV Channels 5 & 30. I’m out of town and haven’t seen their newscasts this week, but I’m betting they aired the tape of the crash aftermath before they aired the footage of rocketman.

Still, it’s instructive. Or it seems so. I mean, on our homepage are two still images, frozen from the respective videos, which serve as hyperlinks that start the video rolling. The image associated with the crash video is mundane: some police cars parked on the side of the road. The image of the Gorge flight shows stuntman Scott in midair against the blue Colorado sky. Even as a still image, it’s a stunning sight: a man in midair, with no visible means of support. Everything newspaper people know about photography says it’s a better, more powerful photo than the comparatively ordinary image of some police cars. But it attracted only a third of the clicks.

As to why readers hit the crash link more often, my wife has a disquieting theory: The headline on the rocketman video is, simply: “Record jetpack flight.” The headline on the I-25 video is: “Fatal crash on I-25.” It implies that the video shows the actual crash, and that’s what attracted so many more clicks.

I guess that shouldn’t be surprising. I can’t help but wonder, however, what lessons like this will teach us about the kind of news we publish at gazette.com.

Post from: The Newsroom

Personally, I am weary of the saga. And I anticipate many people will send us comments saying the same thing. Yet there are 171 comments on the story at abcnews.com, and even our three-paragraph summary at gazette.com, which contains little more than a link to abcnews and a promise that we’re trying to get our own interview, has attracted 33 comments. It’s been on the site only two hours and already is the No. 1 story at gazette.com.

Post from: The Newsroom