|
|
We
welcome your letter to the editor.
Letters
should be no longer than 300 words and must be signed and include
a phone number. Longer letters may be edited for clarity and space.
Submissions should be typewritten if possible.
Deadline
for submission is noon on Monday.
Perspectives
by Patti M. Clark
NH Publisher
News
coverage a balancing act
Earlier this month, I received an e-mail from a reader who wants
more sports coverage in our newspaper. The suggestion was that
we do away with Kays Branch, Monterey and Old Monterey News to
make more room for features on junior varsity and freshman players.
The reader didn’t sign his or her name, and that’s
OK, but there was no way to respond to the e-mail and let the
writer know why suspending those columns isn’t going to
happen.
Instead, I decided it was time to share with our readers how we
decide what will run in the paper each week.
You see, just two weeks ago, I received another e-mail, one telling
me how much the reader enjoys those columns from the communities
in our county. Sure, they are a little reminiscent of the olden,
golden days of newspapers, but for local residents who have moved
from Owen County, they offer an opportunity to keep up with the
goings-on at home.
Finding ways to balance the needs of these two readers and the
more than 4,000 others is what we do at The News-Herald each and
every week. We try very hard to get as much of a variety in the
paper as possible so that as many readers in our community will
have a little something to satisfy their reading experience.
But we’re not the Lexington Herald-Leader or the Courier-Journal.
We don’t have the newsroom full of reporters who are ready
to run at the first phone call to cover an assignment. And we
have to consider the space that’s available as well, space
that occurs when our advertisers place ads in our newspaper.
Therein lies the balancing act.
We must balance the news we have to cover with the space in which
it will be printed with the time our staff has to make it happen.
We can’t cover every ball game. We can’t be at every
meeting. We can’t write stories about every person in Owen
County.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to try to cover
the things that are most important to each of you — just
that we have to balance the desires of one reader with those of
another.
In the meantime, there are some things that are going to get space
every week, and there are some things that aren’t. We’ll
cover varsity sports and have room for the community news because
our readers have consistently told us that’s what they want
to read. We’ll try to slip in some JV and freshman stuff
when the space and time is available and there will be features
of other community interest as well.
We’ll cover the big meetings. We’ll follow local candidates
as we head to toward the May primary. We’ll try to localize
some state and national issues as they impact local residents.
And we want to hear from you. We want to know what you want to
read. Please let us know what that is, and we’ll do the
best we can to make it happen. But we won’t be able to honor
every request — we won’t be able to do every story.
But if we don’t know about them, we can’t cover them
at all.
We’ll try to balance them out, so that we meet the needs
of as many readers as possible.
••••••••••
Speaking of explaining how things are done, this is as good a
time as any to outline how we’ll be handling election coverage
over the next few months.
Each of the candidates in each race will have the chance to sit
down for an interview with me or Tim Mandell for a story about
their experiences and the platform they bring to the table in
the upcoming elections. Those will be completed over a period
of time in the coming months between the filing deadline of Jan.
31 and the primary election in May.
Our plan is to have those stories written and published by April
26, two weeks before the election.
Beyond that, we’ll cover the campaigns and election process
from a news angle. Candidates won’t be permitted to write
letters to the editor. An organized letter-writing campaign is
discouraged as well.
Letters to the editor will be accepted in support or opposition
of candidates through May 1 for publication in the May 3 edition.
Candidates only will have the opportunity to respond to any negative
letter submitted for publication in that final week. The letter
and the response will run at the same time. No letters to the
editor dealing with candidates or election issues will be accepted
for the week of May 10, the Wednesday before the election.
We will do everything in our power to ensure that information
submitted via a letter to the editor is correct, and we will be
calling to verify where the information came from. If a letter
appears to be libelous, we will not run the letter. Instead, we
will look into the submission from a news perspective to see if
there’s information included that the reader needs to know
about. If that’s the case, it will run as a news story and
each side will be given the opportunity to comment before the
information is printed. If the information cannot be verified,
we will not print the letter.
The goal is to provide as much information as possible to voters
as they head to the polls for the primary election. It’s
also to eliminate as much negative campaigning as possible from
the process.
The next few months offer Owen Countians the opportunity to select
the candidates that best fit the job description for the offices
they are seeking. We, at the newspaper, will do everything we
can to make sure the information we publish is as straightforward
and as accurate as possible.
|
