Now that's a correction

In all likelihood, there is, in fact, an undercurrent, a trend, a strong or interesting comparison -- in other words, a story -- here.

The reporter just didn't get it. And worse, he didn't get it right.

Nonetheless, I'm with others who think the tone of this correction reads like a coerced -- read: ad- or community-driven -- concession.

There is genuinely regretting and taking responsibility for mistakes -- and the reporter/editors involved should all do that, or be made to -- and then there is collectively caving in.

 

I rescind that it was a bad idea to pursue the story. Comments and postings are OK when used as a springboard, but I don't think they should see print. They definitely shouldn't cause a reporter to force a story like this, and assigning editors shouldn't get too caught up with what people are writing anonymously on the Internet. That was my poorly phrased point.

 

Point taken, jlee.

 

There are just too many paragraphs in the story that smack of someone having an ax to grind.

Should the copy editor be fired? Call me biased if you will, but I can easily see this being one of those situations where the desk is told to grin and bear it because the story's running no matter what. I can see it because I've been there. Not with anything quite this off the wall, but still.

 

Copy editors here in News and Sports proof pages they didn't work on. My last two stops used the same practice. I thought it was SOP. No?

 

My experience is that many desks are so short-staffed that rarely is anyone free on deadline to proof a page. Or that the pages are done right on deadline so there is no time anyway.

And you can't stay late and do it because the OT isn't authorized.

And if they are proofed, it's a glance at headlines, cutlines and jumps.

 

I'm curious how others read those graphs. I didn't see anything particularly stilted about them. The crux of the story is people move to developments like these to get away from violence, but is anyone truly immune from violence and crime?

Those graphs may be a bit overdone, but I don't think they're terrible.

 

Personally, I think those grafs were probably the ones that got people riled up, not the incorrect sources/stats. After all, when a reader looks at numbers, it's just numbers; right or wrong, there are no emotions attached to them. These grafs, on the other hand, read like they were written by someone who just hates the community's lifestyle, who is basically mocking the people of the community for their fantasy of a paradise (as in: Did you rich a-holes really think you were safe in your little mansions? Oh no, now your dream is shattered. Poo-hoo.). That's why I wrote earlier that I would've had serious issues with this story if I had proofed it. It's one thing to say this community is upper middle class and thus perhaps felt safer from violent crimes, and quite another to express it in a tone that, to me, is dripping with disdain for the community. You want to wax poetic like that in an opinion piece? OK. But not in a news story. I took a look at some of the writers' other pieces b/c I was confused at first whether this was a column, and this just seems to be kind of his style. But those particular grafs seemed went farther overboard than his other pieces.

 

This did not occur for lack of proofing. Proofing is for spelling, last-minute headline-reading, page-number and jumpline-checking, style and punctuation (maybe, if it's glaring/important enough) and correct-placement issues (regarding photos with captions/credits, and the like).

This was caused by shoddy, unfinished reporting, an apparent attempt at a narrative style that was overdone and problematic because it was not backed up by better reporting, as well as a lack of subsequent editing -- and not just straight, on-deadline copy-editing, either.

It needed earlier re-working and re-writing, and should have called for a hard let's-sit-down-and-go-over-this-one kind of look between writer and first editor that it apparently never got.

But doing that probably would have caught the reporting problems, and would have checked, or else better supported, the direction/tone of the story.

 

You're right. And I wasn't blaming this on the desk. But I would hope that regardless of what stage in the process one came across this story, just reading those few grafs would've set off alarms in one's head. This would have been a case where, even on deadline, I would've said "We can't run this story like this, can we?" IMHO, a filler story would've been better than running this story in its present form. Maybe somebody at the paper did speak up and was overruled.

 

These are the first few graphs of the LVRJ's follow a few days after the shooting. The headline was taken from the Mom's quote:

'I never thought this could happen here'

Barbara Privett recalled what she and her husband were told before they bought their home in Summerlin seven years ago: It's the ideal neighborhood in which to raise a family. The schools were new, there were beautiful recreation facilities and, most important of all, it was safe.

On Sunday, an exhausted Privett was trying to decide when to hold a funeral for her 15-year-old son, Christopher, an honor student felled two days earlier in a drive-by shooting near Palo Verde High School.

Red-eyed from both crying and a lack of sleep, she stared at her son's picture on the kitchen table and spoke in a monotone.

"I never thought this could happen here," she said. "He was just walking home from school with his friends in a nice neighborhood. This is such a pretty place."

Reading those quotes from the Mom and knowing people who live in subdivisions like this, I just don't see how the other story is that biased. Once you have kids, this is what you do -- you bust your ass to make more money so that you can get your kids into the safest neighborhoods and best schools possible. There's nothing wrong with that ... I don't see how it's a slam.

The comments on the message boards were disgusting. But I think his descriptions of the area -- and people's motivations for moving there -- were probably pretty accurate.

 

Even with the mom's comments, the description of the community still is overboard and carries a sarcastic tone. When's the last time anyone described a good community in earnest as a "halcyon paradise"? And the focus on status symbols (BMWs, glossy Mercedes, heavily watered lawns) gives the implication that the writer isn't just painting this as a good, safe neighborhood, but a good, safe, and RICH neighborhood, and the tone in which he does it can easily be interpreted as condemning/mocking people who live in such a neighborhood. It almost seems he's not so much taking issue with their perception of their neighborhood as he is decrying their social status. Maybe one or two of those images invoked in those grafs would be ok, but the he piled them on was overboard.