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DARTS AND LAURELS
* DART to the Torrington, Connecticut, Register Citizen, for trying to make a grand entrance and taking a pratfall instead. On March 20, the six-day-a-week paper, a recent acquisition of the Journal Register Company of Trenton, New Jersey, introduced its new, first-ever Sunday edition. On March 21, it carried reporter Marsden Epworth's page-one follow-up on the paper's debut -- the welcoming reception by readers, the strong newsstand sales, the competitive reaction from such big-city dailies as The Hartford Courant (which had greatly expanded its regional coverage and had distributed its own Sunday edition to Torrington households for free), and last but not (as it turned out) least, the delivery problems that had left a number of Register Citizen subscribers waiting in vain for their historic first edition. On March 22, readers learned from the rival Courant that publisher Geoffrey L. Moser had ordered that Epworth be fired; that editor Elizabeth K. Healy had refused the order and quit; and that Moser hasubsequently done the deed himself. "You can't write anything," Moser was quoted as saying to Epworth, "that embarrasses the Journal Register Company." It was a policy that apparently applied to readers as well: on March 23, Moser killed a letter to the editor that criticized the paper for its handling of the incident, and Dolores Laschever, the opinion-page editor who had prepared the letter for publication, resigned.
* DART to the Baltimore Sun. Shortly after the paper's new publisher, May Junck, had settled in, one Ralph Gibson, her husband, showed up as a six-paragraph item (with photo) in the On the Move department of the Sun's business section. His newsworthiness, it appeared, derived from the fact that, having left his job in Wisconsin to join his family in Baltimore, and having "no firm career plans," Gibson was "exploring opportunities on the East Coast." The publisher's husband, in other words, was looking for a job.
* LAUREL to the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Advocate, and staff writer Greg Garland, for jackpot journalism. With the state on a recently legalized video poker binge and operators seeking even greater chances to provide themselves with winnings, the Advocate in a January series dealt out plenty of straight facts. Drawing on a computer-assisted, parish-by-parish analysis of video poker spending over a five-month period, as well as on interviews with economists, industry representatives, tax experts, and psychologists (whose experience with an ever-increasing number of addicts has led them to regard video poker as the "crack cocaine" of gambling), Garland's evenhanded report raised high-stakes questions about the impact of the electronic game machines on the economy of the state. On February 1, the day the series closed, lawmakers moved to raise the taxes on operators' profits, in hopes of discouraging more of them from getting in the game.
* DART to New York Newsday and ABC News, for skating on thin ethical ice. In an artful leap backward from the awkward constraints of cold hard facts, New York Newsday on February 16 got the drop on its competitors with a dramatic, front-page, four-color photo of an event that had yet to take place: bitter Olympic rivals Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan skating, as the caption put it, "together in this ... composite illustration. Tomorrow," the newspaper promised coolly, "they'll really take to the ice together." Meanwhile, in its slide down the slippery slope toward virtual reality, ABC News also presented a story the way it wasn't: in its January 26 newscast, correspondent Cokie Roberts, introduced as reporting "from Capitol Hill" and shown standing before the picturesque landmark and bundled in warm winter coat, was in fact standing before a projected photographic image of Capitol Hill inside the network's Washington studio. (After a Variety item turned on the heat, Roberts and the network apologized anvowed never to do it again. New York Newsday's New York editor, Donald Forst, however, refused to melt, telling The New York Times that he saw no ethical issue with its fantasy photo because it was clearly labeled. In that spirit, CJR documents below a winter event that under certain circumstances could quite possibly or even probably have taken place.
* DART to TV Update, a forty-page weekend supplement, and to the 120 papers that lend it credibility. In late December, readers were treated to a colorful photo cover celebrating the "Magic Moment" of Arsenio Hall celebrating his show's fifth birthday; to an inside "On the Cover" story celebrating the "Arsenio Hall show's five years on the cutting edge"; and to promotional teasers celebrating the TV supplement's celebration of the Arsenio Hall Show. What they were not treated to was a TV Update flyer to potential advertisers urging that they "Reserve Now" for "the best deal in television promotion: the color cover, the cover editorial, and the weekly teaser promos," and boasting, as an example, that "Paramount promoted Arsenio's 5th anniversary on our cover."
* DART to the New Haven, Connecticut, Register, for putting its advertisers in the driver's seat. To help fill the editorial space around the many dealer ads in the paper's special Sunday guide to buying automobiles, a copy editor picked up a wire story in which it was suggested that potential customers need not accept too readily the showroom sticker price. Within a month, complaints from outraged dealers were jamming the paper's corporate offices -- and the editor was riding out a two-week suspension for his exercise of "poor judgment." (As noted by the alternative New Haven Advocate, newsroom colleagues of the reckless journalist pitched in to cover his $ 1,200 loss of pay.)
* DART (belatedly) to such California papers as the Laytonville Observer, The Willits News, The Ukiah Daily Journal, the Humboldt Life and Times, The Humbolt Beacon, and The Redwood Record, for ratting on their readers. When a car bomb almost killed two environmental activists in the spring of 1990 just as plans for Redwood Summer protests were getting under way, Oakland police and the FBI promptly arrested the victims, charging that the blast had occurred while they were transporting a bomb. Three years later, in the absence of any conclusive evidence -- and in the presence of a multmillion-dollar lawsuit for false arrest -- the FBI quietly announced that it had closed the books on the unsolved case. Now, with a House subcommittee conducting an inquiry of its own, thousands of documents have surfaced that illuminate the ways of the FBI -- as well as the ways of the press. For instance, upon learning from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat that the paper's Mendocino county bureau chief had received a letter fr an anonymous "Lord's Avenger" claiming credit for the bombing and showing some knowledge of its details, the bureau pursued the clue -- and then some: it requested all the newspapers in the area to make available original copies of all letters to the editor on such controversial issues as the redwoods and abortion (two subjects on which the "Avenger" claimed to have been advised by his Lord). For its part, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat respectfully refused, choosing to protect its sources and noting in a letter to the special agent in charge "the problems which would be caused to our readers and potential letter writers if they learned that the newspaper was voluntarily giving to the FBI letters they had written to our newspaper, many of which were about sensitive issues and/or which were never published." In contrast, all of the papers named above readily (and in some cases eagerly) complied.
* LAUREL to the Bergen County, New Jersey, Record, for "Delinquent Justice," a fifty-pan series documenting the failures of the state in dealing with the exploding epidemic of juvenile crime. Based on a year-long investigation during which the Record's twelve-person team spent more than 5,000 hours in juvenile courts and juvenile prisons, in the homes of juvenile offenders and with them on the streets, the series found New Jersey's $ 443 million juvenile justice system guilty of serious lapses on every count -- in particular, an overreliance on probation and an undercommitment to rehabilitation that leaves juvenile arsonists, rapists, robbers, and murderers, protected by a cloak of confidentiality, free to strike again. The impact of the series was tragically enhanced when a judge revealed that a local teenager accused of sexually assaulting and murdering a six-year-old girl had had a (sealed) record of three similar assaults. On February 25, as the series progressed, the Record was reporting that the govnor had ordered a sweeping study of the system, including a review of laws barring the public from ever learning about the criminal histories of the violent youths at large in its neighborhoods and schools.
* DART to Time magazine, for taking its readers for a ride in a time machine. Filling up the space behind its April 4 cover line, "DEEP WATER: How the President's Men Tried to Hinder the Whitewater Investigation," was a photo purporting to capture the White House in the throes of Whitewater despair -- Clinton clutching head in hands, Stephanopoulos staring stonily into the abyss. In fact, as an angry administration soon made clear, the photo had nothing whatsoever to do with Whitewater and was, in fact, a relic from the past, having been taken last November at a meeting in which the president and aides were wrestling with problems in scheduling the president's time. The warped defense of Time spokesman RobertPondiscio, as quoted in The Washington Post: "I don't think the readers of Time expect the cover photo is going to be a representation of that event."
