Bob Lee Swagger has a devastating post — devastating to The N&O, that is — today. Here’s his summation:
On South McDowell Street in Raleigh, Publisher Orage Quarles and Editor Melanie Sill will cluck their tongues and reassure themselves … “Readers have short memories. We will publish a new paper tomorrow, next week, next year … they will forget … because we know:
“If we ever admit we made a mistake,
it might affect our credibility”.
But the amazing thing about Bob Lee’s post is the imagined scene (the green type) of a newsroom council of war at the beginning of a huge story. I have sat in many of those meetings at The Herald-Sun in Durham, and they were eerily word-for-word as Bob Lee imagines, except for the last sentence, of course.
Under the old leadership, especially during the early ’90s, we had many, many big stories that had powder-keg potential: the Barbara Stager case, a councilman accused of using cocaine, a police chief hiring cronies with false diplomas, an incompetent school superintendent. Later came the Michael Peterson story, another biggie. The councilman, police chief and superintendent stories were extra-explosive because they were black, but we handled those stories in such a way that our journalism could not be faulted.
Our executive editor at the time, Bill Hawkins, from whom I learned much about running a good newspaper, would never approach a huge story without precisely the kind of meeting Bob Lee imagines didn’t happen at The N&O. Because of that care and our planning, we never stubbed our toe.
Our old newsroom loved a huge story, and we did them well. I wish Hawkins had still been EE at The Herald-Sun, I had still been ME, and that Bill Stagg and Rocky Rosen were still AMEs when the Duke lacrosse story broke. It would have been an exciting story to cover, and we’d have done it right.
