Here's why The Eagle got it wrong - editTeach



Here's why The Eagle got it wrong

BY SHERRY CHISENHALL

Wichita Eagle editor

If you saw today's printed edition of The Eagle, you saw a front page headline and story that are flat wrong. Our paper reports this morning that miners trapped in a West Virginia coal mine since Monday were found alive late Tuesday. We now know that's not true, and in fact 12 of the miners did not survive.

I'll explain why we (and newspapers across the country) went to press last night with the information we had at the time. But it won't excuse the blunt truth that we violated a basic tenet of journalism today in our printed edition: Report what you know and how you know it.

Here's the timetable our editors worked through last night:

At 10:54, our night city editor received what we call a "news bulletin" -- a short sentence from one of our five news wire services alerting editors that news is breaking and that a story will be "moving on the wire" shortly. The night city editor phoned two key news editors shortly after 11 p.m. to tell them that the Associated Press, as well as national TV stations, were reporting that the miners were found alive. Collectively, the editors agreed to change the lineup of stories on the front page to move the story from inside the front section to the front page.

Deadline for the press to start was rapidly approaching, and changing the stories on the front page at such a late hour is a major undertaking.

Typically, it means waiting for the wire story to be transmitted to us electronically; editing that story and trimming it to the space we have available; designing a new layout for the front page; reconfiguring the pages where all of the front-page stories were continued to; and writing new headlines for all of those stories.

The first AP story we received was short, and came in a little after 11 p.m. A longer version moved about 11:20, and our editors began preparing it to be published.

As our presses started printing Wednesday's paper with the story, TV and wire service reports continued to update with news of jubilant family celebrations. Long after our night news staff had gone home for the night, AP moved a new "bulletin" at 2 a.m. saying that family members now said they were learning their loved ones had not survived.

Shortly after 2 a.m., the first new versions of the story were being transmitted with news that the miners had not survived. By that time, most of today's Eagle was printed and copies were in the process of getting to your driveway.

Keep in mind, though, that The Eagle is no longer just a printed newspaper. We also publish -- continuously, day and night -- an electronic news report at , which was updated with an accurate story shortly after 3 a.m.

The printed copy, of course, is an enduring and unchangeable medium. With the knowledge of the printed paper's timeline, it would be easy to say we did what we could to get late-breaking news to you. And we did. But back to "report what you know."

Our deadlines would not have given us the time to update the paper with the news at 2 a.m. that the rescue reports were wrong. We published what we believed to be true at the time. But unfortunately, we failed to make clear exactly where those reports were coming from and that they were not confirmed. Instead, our story and headline reported them as certainty.

Many newspapers and TV stations reported exactly what we did today. But being wrong in crowded company is still being wrong. Our commitment to our readers is to tell you exactly what we know and how we know it. Today, we fell short.

[pic]email this

[pic]print this

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download