Today, I attended the UO School of Journalism’s Payne Awards luncheon, where about 50 guests and I were introduced to the distinguished award winners, who were recognized for their commitment to ethics in the field, even when facing insurmountable economic, psychological, financial and some times legal challenges.
Concordia Sentinel editor Stanley Nelson (above) worked tirelessly to provide justice for the family of Frank Morris, a shoe store owner who was killed by the Ku Klux Klan when his store was set on fire. Photo courtesy of the Shreveport Times.
The first winner, Stanley Nelson, was lauded by the Payne Awards committee for his excellent reporting skills in helping police solve the cold case death of Frank Morris, who was killed when the shoe store that he owned was torched and burned to the ground by Ku Klux Klan Members. During the course of his three year investigation, Nelson and his employer, The Concordia Sentinel, successfully overcame a significant amount of obstacles in the pursuit of the truth and justice for the victim’s family, including death threats, break-ins, and cancelled newspaper subscriptions. Among one of the biggest challenges that Nelson faced was the opposition raised by his community where KKK violence was rampant during the 1950s and 1960s and in an era where memories of such incidents had been put on the back shelf in hopes of being forgotten.
Photo courtesy of Andrew Cusack (AndrewCusack.com)
The second place recognition went to the staff of the Yale Daily News at Yale University for their coverage of a high-profile public suicide that took place in New York City. At the time, news of the suicide dominated the headlines in throughout the Northeast, especially in New York City. While other news organizations focused on the teen’s suicide itself and often times provided gruesome details of the suicide itself, the Yale Daily News consulted with the Center for Disease Control’s recommendations on how to handle a suicide and focused more on the types services that the university provides for students who are in similar situations and the changes that would be occurring to these programs as a result of the teen’s suicide.
In particular, the predicament that the Yale Daily News faced is one that I can personally relate to. Several days ago, I was assigned a story to report on, which on the surface seemed simple enough — a summary of the University’s Suicide Awareness Week events that officially kicked off on Monday. Unfortunately for me, I question whether I had made the soundest judgment when I decided to correlate the university’s events to a tragedy last week in which a teen’s death attracted national attention to the town of Bend. Retrospectively, I would have certainly took a look at the CDC’s recommendations on reporting suicides in hope of preventing “suicide contagion” or “copy cat” suicides, which may result from the reportage of certain parts of a suicide. Although I was not even aware that such a manual on reporting suicides existed until the luncheon today, ignorance certainly should not have certainly clouded my judgment, which I believe was a tough one to have made at the time.
On one hand, I was trying to bring attention to the effectiveness of the school’s prevention program and methods by highlighting a case in the community, but on the other, I was aware that suicides are rarely ever covered in newspapers, unless it is the death of a well-known person or, in this case, a public suicide. Most of the details in the story could have been found and verified on multiple news sites; however, was it right for me to have done what everyone else was doing and reporting what everyone else had already reported? Maybe not.
For the Yale Daily News, the editorial board made a decision for the publication’s coverage of the tragedy to be vastly different than that of many major news organizations. Instead of focusing in on the tragedy itself, the Yale Daily News went out and highlighted solutions to the problem while maintaining a distance from details of the story in order to protect potentially vulnerable readers. In this sense, I think there is something very significant that I took away from the luncheon — as the well-known maxim reads, “Sometimes the right thing isn’t always the most popular.” Although it is true that journalists have an obligation to report the news and find the truth behind the issue, journalists also have an innate obligation to be sensitive to their readers as well. Some times it is easy to overlook this concept in the pursuit of the truth, but sometimes in order to find the most productive and helpful truth, one must look elsewhere in order to protect the interests of the people that we — as journalists — serve.
darinmoriki 