Josh wrote a lengthy article, complete with photos, of the progress Nathan West was making with its new hog production facility. He worked hard on the piece, which included quotations from Ed Clark. It was an objective piece; it included lots of facts and no opinions about either the positive or negative features of a large-scale confined hog operation.
In addition to the sidebar with the e-mail he’d received with the corrected survey results, he included another sidebar, one recounting some history of the Tamarack River Ghost with a photo of Mortimer Dunn’s gravestone.
He sent the piece over to the paper’s copyeditor for proofing, and an hour later he punched a button on his computer keyboard and the story appeared on the website.
Two minutes later, Josh’s phone rang.
“Could you step into my office, please?” It was Lexington. His office was two doors from Josh’s. Josh wondered why he hadn’t just walked the few feet and talked with him face to face.
Josh walked down the hall, knocked on the door, and heard “Enter.”
Lexington sat at his desk, staring at a computer screen. His black-rimmed glasses hung on the end of his nose and his nearly bald head shone.
“Just read your piece on the progress Nathan West is making. Good piece, a little long, but a good piece. You could have written something about what an asset the big hog operation will be to the county and the valley—something that would praise its efforts a bit more. We’d likely get more stories from NWI, stories the corporation would pay for, if you did that.”
“I wanted to keep the piece objective,” said Josh.
“Objective is yesterday’s way of doing things. Today people take positions, say what they think, share their opinions. It’s the new journalism.”
Josh stood quietly, not saying anything. He knew what good journalism was, and he also knew the difference between an opinion piece and a good piece of objective writing.
“Something else. Why in the world did you include the sidebar about the university’s correction of its early research report? All that will do is stir up people. And it’ll stir up Nathan West as well; the company won’t like it, you can bet on that. Once the company reads this, we’ll hear.”
Josh remained standing silently, thinking but not expressing his thoughts.
“And one final thing. What’s with this ghost? It’s not Halloween. Why are you writing about ghosts, tombstones, and cemeteries, for heaven’s sake?” It was obvious from the question that he had done little digging into the community’s history.
Josh opened his mouth to respond but thought better of it. He wanted to explain what journalism was all about, how it was important to try to remain objective when writing about something. And, as far as the sidebar e-mail of the agribusiness studies department confessing an error in its preliminary research report—well, that was news and must be reported, no matter who might be offended or might take issue with it.
But he said nothing, deciding this was not the time or the place. He could see that his boss was upset with him—no sense in fanning the flames.
“That’s all,” Lexington said, waving Josh away.
Josh returned to his office, not sure what he should do about the exchange—it really wasn’t an exchange, as the conversation was a one-sided dressing down. How should he help his new boss understand what the newspaper business was about, what Farm Country News had been doing for so long? He wondered if a confrontation was the answer. It might get him fired before he’d given the second reason for why he wrote the Nathan West story the way he did.
Before he’d had more than five minutes to think about a strategy, the e-mails began arriving.
To the Editor:
I knew something was phony about those university research results. I just knew it. My take was the majority of the people here in the valley wanted nothing to do with Nathan West and their truckloads of stinkin’ hogs.
J. Anderson
Tamarack River Valley
To the Editor:
What next? People who are against lower taxes are doing it again—now they say the majority of the people living here don’t want Nathan West to build. Well, Nathan West is building, whether 55 percent of the people like it or not.
F. Summerville
Tamarack River Valley
Thirty e-mails arrived within the first hour of the piece’s appearance on the paper’s website. The percentage for and against the new hog farm broke down almost identically to the survey results—more than 50 percent were against the idea. Josh wrote back to all of them, asking if they wanted their message to appear in the paper and explaining that the cost to do so would be 15 cents a word.
If hitting a hornets’ nest would stir up the wrath of hornets, the idea that readers should have to pay to submit a letter to the editor was like smashing into the largest hornets’ nest in existence. To a person, those for the new hog facility and those against were united in opposition to Farm Country News’s policy for charging people for their submissions. They were livid. Several wrote that they would immediately cancel their subscriptions to the paper, not realizing that the paper was free and that they no longer had subscriptions.
People didn’t seem to mind paying for advertising-type stories, or stories that fit into the “Remembering an Early Time,” “New Ways for New Days,” or any other section of the paper. But the idea of paying for a letter to the editor struck them the wrong way. Some readers reminded Josh that protest letters of the type they had sent were as old as the country.
One wrote:
This country was built on the premise that people have certain unalienable rights, that they have basic freedoms, and one of those is the right to express themselves—to state their opinions on something they feel strongly about. The newspaper, whatever form it might take, and it has changed considerably from the days of Benjamin Franklin, has a responsibility to share these diverse perspectives. It is an outrage that we must pay to have our opinions appear in print, even if it is only fifteen cents a word.
Josh showed this last response to his boss, who quickly read through it and then snarled, “Write back and tell this guy that freedom is not free. It costs money.”
Josh snatched the e-mail from Lexington’s desk without a word. He went back to his own desk, not knowing what to do. The writer surely had a point. Josh agreed with him, but how could he convince his boss of a newspaper’s responsibilities, in whatever form it took—paper or electronic?