Journalism Students: Don't Do This

forget about the ethics, it was just a bad, boring column. he needs to give back part of his paycheck because he certainly didn't work that day.

 

Bad column. Bad idea, bad execution, bad decision to run it, bad decision to awkwardly qualify the mistakes as, yeah, um, at least 30 years ago at another paper. (Miss Belding 1981, seriously, that's a working e-mail)

Here's a lesson to journalism students: Don't read that column, or anything else the guy writes.

 

The editor responds with a column of her own.

http://www.monroenews.com/news/2012/jun/30/mea-culpa-column-disturbing/?news

 

Whoopsie. So why didn't she say if she plans to take any action? I'm sure the editor on duty is in some deep doo-doo as well.

 

Interesting that she didn't mention anything about discipline. And, I was wondering why it took so long for her to opine (she was on vacation).

Betcha there's no disciplinary action coming out of this, but there should be.

 

For discussion: What should the discipline be?

Most of the events he copped to were from a previous paper, NOT his current paper.


Obviously, his past history throws everything he has and will write into question, but should there be punishment for something done at a previous stop?

 

I really wonder why he hasn't been fired yet. Could it be that the Evening News is an insular place?

 

Unless you're explaining what you learned from those mistakes, that's not something you need to write. Even if it happened 30 years ago. Reputation is the easiest thing to lose, but the toughest thing to build. Once it's gone, it's gone in an instant of bad judgement. This guy just destroyed his reputation with one very badly written column.

I've done the quotes from memory thing, but that was more a matter of my digital recorder giving up the ghost right after I talked to the guy. Nothing was wrong with the story and he was never the wiser, but I was glad what he said was sufficiently memorable that I could easily recount it. A lot of writers have done that and never misquoted someone (Truman Capote supposedly did that), but that's not a practice I'd use very often.

 

I suspect somebody higher up the food chain said,

1) "Meade, if we ever catch you doing anything like this HERE, you'll be out of here like shit through a goose. You're not fired, but you are on Double Secret Probation from here on out."

2) "Saul, this thing only grows legs if people keep talking about it. The only people who care about this stuff read Romenesko and SportsJournalists.com. What percentage of the general public do you think that is? About 0.00000003%. Let it die and it will go away, but double-and triple-check everything Meade turns in."

 

If nothing else this was a spectacularly bad time to write this column, since it is the time of year small-daily sports departments can most easily replace staffers (as opposed to the middle of football or basketball seasons).

 

I'd suspend the guy for a week or so just for being stupid enough to write this for publication. And I'd reprimand the editor who didn't have sense to kick it back and say, ummm, let's not run this idiocy.

 

huh? when have reporters ever been thought of as supermen? and the incidents weren't funny.