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April 28, 2006

First impressions

Who says young people are spurning newspapers?

Jan Smith’s combined class of kindergartners and first and second graders from Concord’s Kimball School toured the Monitor the other day with Managing Editor Felice Belman and Human Resources Director Tracie Wajer. Belman also helped them put out their own newspaper. The children wrote her thank you notes sharing some impressions of the day. Here are excerpts from a few of them, as written:

“Hooray we got to go to the Concord Monitor. It was the best day of my life. We saw a humungous stack of newspapers. And a truck that was carrying a box of newspapers. It was humungous, too. It was incredible.” – Sammy

“A factory! We went to the Concord Monitor. I saw a spinning wheel and people were putting magnets on it. Then we went down stairs and Tate and I saw a huge ramp that was connected to tanks. The paper went down the ramp and into slots and you put the advertisements in the slots and, TADA!, you have a newspaper.” – Jacob (This one came with a drawing of Tate and Jacob, the stairs and the inserting machine.)

“I could not imagine how much paper there was. I learned it took 7 rolls of paper to make one news paper.” – Peggy

“Bumpitety, bumpitety, bump. Down the roads we went. But then finally we got to the Concord Moniter. . . . Wow! Look at all those big machines and computers and print pressers. I learned that there are alot of different groups. Some are reporters, some are editers that look at the reporters writing to see if they need any corrections, others control the metal machines.” – Colin (This one came with a line drawing of a “print presser.”)

“I learned that it takes a lot of money to get the machines.” – Tyler

“Boy it is noisy. Machines made extreme amounts of noise. I could bearly even hear the teacher. . . . The printing press is very big and correspondingly noisy. The only thing that isn’t noisy is the computer. It’s really quiet.” – Eliot

“I was excited to see my writing in the newspaper. Thank you, Ms. Belman.” – Kaya

“Ms. Belman put all of the Veterans writing and Rookies illustrations on the computer and made them as a Concord Monitor Newspaper! It wasn’t the real newspaper though.” – Sophie M.

“The workers stay up until 3AM in the morning. I don’t think I could stay up that late.” – Samuel

“We made a funny news article on the fire at donkin donuts. I got (to) think up (a) headline. I choose Fire Stikes Back in bold letters. I learned about the six questions a newspaper reporter asks: who? what? where? how? when? why?” – Aidan

“We got to see the funnys which will come out on Sunday, and we were the only ones! I felt excited when I saw the news paper that Ms. Belman gave us. ‘Is my work in the newspaper’ I wondered. When I saw the first page I knew it was everybody’s work. I felt proud.” – Srilekha

“I was about to burst with excitement. I was amazed when I saw all the machines. . . . Ms. Belman gave us a tour. She worked so hard on printing and fitting our multi-age news on three peeces of paper. But don’t think it was easy and you could do it in 2 seconds because there were 24 news articles! Thank you Ms. Belman. I learned alot!!!” – Della

And thank you, tomorrow's readers . . . and reporters.

Posted by Mike Pride at 08:34 AM | Comments (1)

April 27, 2006

Readers first

You can read Concord Hospital’s response to my Tuesday blog entry by clicking on “Comments” at the end of it. Other than to say that I stand by what I wrote in “Missing voices,” I don’t want to get into a public back-and-forth with the hospital. But I think it is worth adding a few words on the way I think our relationship with the local medical community should work.

I say this, I believe, as a representative not only of Monitor journalists but also of the public. Readers of the Monitor and patients of Concord’s medical community are the same people. As editor, I try to put readers first. They have an interest in Monitor reporters having good access to Concord Hospital doctors.

When the Monitor reports on a medical development – say a story from the New England Journal of Medicine on a new asthma or autism study – the paper’s readers want to hear what local physicians have to say. It would be a simple matter for a reporter to call the Family Health Center or Penacook Family Physicians and leave a message at the desk that she would like to talk to a local doctor about the new study. If the doctor had time to call back, she could. If not, we’d go without.

The same is true for our Sunday story about patients’ increasing use of the internet to research their medical conditions. The reporter could call 10 primary-care practices. She would get a range of responses. Some wouldn’t call back, some would say they had no time, three might return the call.

Over time, the reporter would develop a source list: primary-care physicians who are accessible and don’t mind discussing medical issues publicly. This is the way reporters on all our other beats – from politics to business to education – do their job, and it serves them and the public well.

I appreciate the need for a PR office at the hospital. The professionals there – and they are professionals – have sometimes helped us gain access to report on medicine as it is practiced in Concord. When we have a complaint about a simple matter like getting the condition of an accident victim, they respond promptly and helpfully.

I understand that they -- and we -- have to work with patient privacy concerns. I understand that there are other restraints on access. But filtering every request for a conversation with a Concord doctor through the PR office is burdensome and unnecessary. It obviously causes more work for the PR office. And clearly, in many cases the PR office has more important things to do than find a physician willing to talk to a reporter.

The system hasn’t worked for us, and it is not in the public interest – the reading public or the health-care-consuming public. It is hard to see how it is in the medical community’s interest either.

Posted by Mike Pride at 07:16 PM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2006

Missing voices

“Concord Hospital declined to make any primary care physicians in hospital-owned practices available for this story.”

Maybe you noticed this sentence near the top of Anne Ruderman’s story in the Sunday Monitor on patients’ increasing use of the internet to research their own medical problems. It is hard for us to know how readers react to such a statement, so I thought I’d provide a little background.

It is unusual for us to include a statement of this nature in a story that is essentially a consumer-oriented news feature. More often, you’ll see us saying we could not reach a person for a story when a reader would expect to hear from that person – a public official criticized for a position she took, for example.

Some months ago, we determined as part of our content-driven redesign project that one subject on which we needed to improve our coverage was health care. We created a medical beat and assigned Ruderman to it.

Obviously, the most important institution on this beat is Concord Hospital. This is especially true because many formerly private medical practices in Concord are now owned by the hospital, and their doctors and other employees are employees of the hospital.

But Concord Hospital forbids its doctors to talk with Ruderman or other reporters unless the reporter first goes through the hospital PR office. And the PR office generally does not respond in a timely manner to requests for interviews with doctors.

Doctors are busy people. They need to spend as much time as possible with patients. But a call from a professional reporter takes little time. Ruderman isn’t looking to pester the doctors she calls. She just wants to tap into their expertise, and she’s proficient at doing so.

It is also an important duty of Concord’s biggest medical institution to help inform the public, through stories in the Monitor, about health issues. Certainly we would rather quote Concord physicians on these issues than physicians outside of Concord, many of whom Ruderman can easily reach.

The story on patient use of the internet as a source for medical information is a case in point. Every primary-care physician has dealt with this issue in recent times. A big part of Ruderman’s job in the story was to give examples, positive and negative, of doctors’ experience with this phenomenon. Quoting more local doctors – and Ruderman did quote a few, including one ICU doctor she contacted through the hospital PR office – would have made the story more relevant to readers throughout the Monitor’s circulation area. The hospital did not make one of its 63 primary-care physicians available to her.

This was not a deadline story. Ruderman made her first contact with the hospital’s PR office on April 10 and made several subsequent attempts to reach primary-care physicians through the hospital. The story did not appear until 13 days after that initial contact.

In the end no interviews were set up. We thought readers might wonder why no Concord primary-care physicians were quoted in the story. That’s why we included the sentence saying the hospital had declined to make this happen.

Posted by Mike Pride at 06:59 PM | Comments (1)

April 22, 2006

Kerry's bold stand

I wrote yesterday about the lack of Shermanesque defenses of the New Hampshire presidential primary against Democratic efforts to dilute it. Today’s Union Leader carried a story on just such a defense from 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry. Check it out.

Kerry won the 2004 primary. He also carried the state in the general election – New Hampshire was the only state that switched from red to blue. And I’m pretty sure Kerry would like to win the New Hampshire primary again in 2008. But his stand on the primary will not endear him to top pols in the states hoping to stick it to New Hampshire. So, whether you like his defense of the primary or not, at least you can’t say he loved the primary before he hated it.

Thanks, Senator.

Posted by Mike Pride at 06:05 PM | Comments (0)

April 21, 2006

Driving the lane

Here’s a novelty: A U.S. senator from Oregon showed up at the Monitor yesterday, and (apparently) he wasn’t running for president.

He was Democrat Ron Wyden, a one-time college basketball player. He had come, he said, because to score you have to drive the lane, and in national politics New Hampshire is the lane.

Wyden did not give us the Shermanesque defense of the New Hampshire primary that we crave from all Democrats these days. But then neither did John Edwards, the 2004 vice presidential candidate, who was also in Concord yesterday.

We’re stressing here about Democratic Party efforts to front-load the nomination process even more by jamming a couple of state caucuses between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary in 2008.

This is being done in the name of diversity, and it’s hard for Democratic contenders to speak against diversity. So they whisper sweet nothings about New Hampshire’s sacred role in the process but won’t criticize efforts to undermine it.

Still, they honor us by their presence.

Wyden’s over-arching mission, he said, was to say that Democrats won’t get anywhere next fall or in 2008 merely by trashing President Bush. The party needs a positive message, he said.

His hope is to wrest tax reform from the Republicans, who have fallen silent on the issue. The main features of Wyden’s plan are to reduce the brackets to three (15, 25 and 35 percent), to treat all income the same and to simplify filing. His appeal is to the middle class, a phrase he utters every other sentence and a group he defines broadly. If you’ve seen your income stagnate in recent years while more affluent people around you benefited from Bush’s tax cuts, Wyden wants your ear. And did he mention that his tax-reform idea is much like Ronald Reagan's of 20 years ago?

It’s hard to tell from Concord whether Wyden has any support even within his own party for his proposal. But his overall idea seems right. If, in the mid-term elections, Democrats want to take advantage of Bush’s drooping popularity, they need to arm themselves with policy alternatives that appeal to voters.

As for our parochial interests, it would be nice if Democrats realized that they can’t, on the one hand, praise New Hampshire’s record as a place where all presidential candidates get a fair shake while, on the other, seeking to undermine the state’s role in the nomination process. More early caucuses won’t get Democrats a better nominee, but wedging them in will diminish the value of the New Hampshire primary in testing how well candidates for president connect with real voters.

Posted by Mike Pride at 09:52 AM | Comments (0)

April 19, 2006

Rock on

A cab driver from New Jersey asked me last Friday what it was like to live in Concord. We were in heavy traffic on the way to Penn Station, and he had told me about his visits to a friend in Vermont. Trees, small towns, fresh air – the usual bucolic amenities that we who live in northern New England sometimes take for granted.

I filled in a little bit: good schools, a pleasant downtown, a short commute to work, interesting politics at every level, Concord’s 64-square-mile area and the many long walks you can take in the woods without leaving the city.

When I got home that night at about 8:45, a rock-’n’-roll band was playing behind my house. I like all kinds of music, but this was unusual in my quiet neighborhood. When I walked in, it was the first thing I asked my wife about. In response she showed me a strip of paper she had found tucked into our screen door. Here’s what it said:

“Dear friendly neighbor,

“Tonight from seven (7) to nine (9), there will be a small show featuring a few high school bands, held at 20 Pine Street. This notice is to give you some warning about the noise occurring during this time. I hope this doesn’t cause any major problems. If there are any questions, you can contact ---- ----- at --------.”

Now, if this had happened the weekend before, I would have known exactly how to answer the cabbie’s question about life in Concord: This is a city where people care about other people, and if you don’t believe me, get this . . .

Posted by Mike Pride at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)

April 18, 2006

Free? Think again

Because my wife is a teacher, my radio alarm goes off before 6 on weekday mornings. One recent morning, the first New Hampshire Public Radio news story I heard was about Jim McGonigle, the Allenstown police chief and Concord city councilor. In a few sentences the news reader explained that McGonigle was under investigation and on leave from the Allenstown job and had decided to resign from the city council.

This was not news to me. I knew from the Concord Monitor’s news meeting the day before that this story would be above the fold on page one of that morning’s Monitor. The story had been reported and written by our city reporter, Sarah Liebowitz.

The radio station had done no reporting. It had merely picked up the news from our website, our front page or the Associated Press and read the report as though it was the product of the station’s own work.

I’m accustomed to this. It is part of my morning ritual to curse rip-and-read local news reports that do not credit the source of the reporting.

I’ll spare you my diatribe on this subject and get to the point: To quote Jim Amoss, editor in chief of the Times-Picayune of New Orleans, getting the news to the public is “a mission that is sacred to us.” The event that occasioned this statement was the two Pulitzer Prizes the Times-Picayune had just won for its Katrina coverage, but the mission Amoss described is in the soul of every newspaper journalist every day.

The big news in our industry is that the economic model that enables newspaper journalists to carry out their mission is breaking down. Technological advances have created an atmosphere that says the news is instant and free (even though consumers pay for cable, cell-phone and internet access). Newspapers are struggling to get the most out of the old economic model while adapting to a new and ever-changing one. Their future depends on creating new revenue streams to support their core mission.

This year’s Pulitzer Prizes are a statement of how much that mission means to American society. I agree with Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times. In telling his newsroom what he thought the Pulitzer results meant, Keller said: “The country has never needed us more than it does today.”

You can check out the list for yourself (go to this site and click on "What's new"), but allow me to cite just a few examples.

It was newspapers that got to the bottom of widespread congressional corruption last year. The investigative prize went to the Washington Post for an “indefatigable probe of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff.” This coverage led to the downfall of Tom DeLay and showed how money trumps the public good. The San Diego Tribune and Copley News Service won the national reporting prize for work that led to the disgrace and resignation of U.S. Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, whose vote was, quite literally, for sale.

The Bush administration’s extremes in pursuing the war on terror were the subject of two other winners. Dana Priest of the Washington Post uncovered a program under which the United States secretly imprisoned terrorism suspects in Eastern Europe. James Risen and Eric Lictblau of the New York Times exposed the administration’s program of secret domestic wiretapping.

This work and that of other winners – Nicholas Kristof’s campaign to keep the Darfur atrocities in the public eye, the New York Times reports on the harsh, unstable Chinese legal system and David Finkel’s brave look at U.S. efforts to sow the seeds of democracy in Yemen – helped Americans understand their country and its role in the world. These journalistic efforts held elected officials to a high standard. They applied a reality test to the rhetoric in which politicians clothe their actions.

For the Pulitzer winners and all newspaper journalists, the traditional newspaper economic model has created the ability to do their work without commercial considerations. Yes, a reliable news report produced over time for an interested auduence will have economic benefits for the newspaper. Yes, newspaper editors have budgets. But no reporter goes to Darfur or Iraq or Yemen – or develops a story on Jim McGonigle’s problems in the Concord area – thinking about whether his or her work will make money for the paper. In fact, good news coverage costs money – a lot of money.

That’s why I get irked when a radio or TV station repeats a condensed version of one of our stories without saying where it came from. In a world in which all news seems instant and free, the casual listener doesn’t think twice about where the story actually came from. Almost always, it originated with a newspaper.

Posted by Mike Pride at 10:17 AM | Comments (2)

April 17, 2006

Two links

I'll be posting further thoughts about the Pulitzer Prizes, but for today just two links:

- First, to Final Salute, Jim Sheeler's Rocky Mountain News winner in feature-writing. The photographs with this amazing series, by Todd Heisler, won the feature photography Pulitzer Prize.

-- Second, to David Finkel's series for the Washington Post on a grant awarded to help implant democracy in Yemen. Finkel's work won the Pulitzer Prize in Explantory Journalism.

Posted by Mike Pride at 07:17 PM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2006

And the winners are . . .

Tomorrow is a big day in journalism. It is the day the Pulitzer Prizes are announced.

I am a member of the board that selects the winners. I have pored over the finalists in all 14 categories. That is a total of 42 entries with as many as 20 stories per entry.

I am glad to be finished with the reading but even gladder to have seen once again the undiminished quality and importance of American newspaper journalism.

The problems of U.S. newspapers – flat and declining circulation and advertising, squeamish investors, even great metros in peril – make the headlines. But these are not simply newspapers’ problems; they are also the public’s problems. That is because the work newspaper journalists do remains absolutely essential to the republic.

And, as reading the Pulitzer finalists each year reminds me, they are doing it amazingly well. Newspaper journalists go where bloggers and flap-jaws never do. They dig into public records, hold politicians and government agencies accountable and report and write stories that people in power would prefer to keep quiet. They risk their lives to uncover hard truths.

Until the winners are announced, I’ll have to put off a discussion here of the winners and finalists, but I will tell you a bit about the process by which the Pulitzer are chosen (for a fuller explanation, see the Pulitzer web site).

Between 2,000 and 3,000 entries are submitted each year for Pulitzer Prizes in letters, music and journalism. Juries of distinguished writers, historians, composers, critics and journalists review the entries and select three finalists in each of the 21 categories.

The board that decides the winners comprises 18 voting members and the chairperson of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, where the prizes are administered. Board members generally serve three three-year terms – nine years. I have just finished my seventh year.

The board that met last week to decide on the winners included several names that you might know. The chairman was Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard humanities and literary scholar; the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman; Pulitzer Prize-winning Stanford historian David M. Kennedy; Nicholas Lemann, the Columbia journalism dean who also writes for the New Yorker; and Donald Graham, chairman of the Washington Post.

The bulk of the board’s membership comprises working editors like me. I won’t name them all, but they include Ann Marie Lipinski of the Chicago Tribune, Amanda Bennett of the the Philadelpia Inquirer, Greg Moore of the Denver Post and Anders Gyllenhaal of the Star Tribune in the Twin Cities (Anders is the uncle of Jake and Maggie).

In December, board members receive the first of the finalists in the letters categories. Between then and early March, we must read 15 books and three play scripts (we also see the plays if they are in production) and listen to the music finalists. In early March, the finalists selected by the journalism juries arrive in large, stapled, xeroxed sheafs. Increasingly journalism entries also include components from the newspapers’ websites. We receive the photography and editorial cartooning finalists on CDs, but we also look them over during our meeting in traditional portfolio form, which shows us how the competing newspapers used them.

Then the board meets to decide the winners. We started last Wednesday night with dinner and, for most of us, a trip to one of the drama finalists. Then, during 12 hours over the next two days in the World Room at Columbia, we argued over and decided on the winners.

In part because the board meets in secret, it has for many years been subject to criticism about insider trading and other sins. All I can tell you about that is that last week – as in my previous six times at the April meeting – the board took each category seriously and individually. Following a long-standing policy, anyone affiliated with a nominated entry left the room during the discussion of its category. Allies in one category became adversaries in the next. In each category, the board’s purpose was to hear out everyone’s praise and criticism and arrive at the best choice. And we all won some and lost some.

If experience is any guide, we then went home brain-dead on Friday night, savoring the winners and swallowing the disappointments. And one more thing: marveling at the quality of American journalism.

Posted by Mike Pride at 04:27 AM | Comments (0)