Paper writes story of star high school player's failure to graduate

I was kinda confused, too.

 

Lots of places do stories on former prep athletes, like a "Where are they now?" piece. So it's entirely plausible to come back and do one two years from now, whether the kid is tearing it up at State U after a year in JUCO or taking out the trash at Taco Bell.

 

Seriously?

OK, allow me to break it down. We've spent the last six pages talking about this kid who didn't graduate on time, debating the newsworthiness and working under the now-corrected misconception that this story ran A1. One of the pro-story arguments is that sports shouldn't shy away from bad news, even involving teenagers. Which is only a tangentially-related argument, since it doesn't address the "is this actually news issue" only the "all happy, all the time vs. all news without fear or favor" debate, which isn't the point. But thread drift and all, I get that.

So you come in with "well, we mentioned this kid not graduating in a story we ran 20 years ago and we got flack for it but we'd do it all over again" then follow with "well, that's just the business we're in, and we've been the messenger during the Sandusky story too."

My statement (which, OK, could have been soft-pedaled a bit in retrospect) dealt with the relevance of the Sandusky story as it relates to this one. They draw different reactions kinds of butthurt from the readers. The Sandusky story reaction is mostly rooted in "You're biased against Penn State! Why do you always believe the worst about dear old Penn State! Death to the infidels!" But while there's some of that in the high school story, there's also people who have legitimate concerns about the newsworthiness of the story, and there's journos past and present that share that sentiment. Taken to its extreme, you could draw a parallel between the backlash against a school redistricting story and a centerpiece photo of 500 penises, and say "well, we're the messenger, we serve that role." But they're not analogous in the least.

 

Does shortbus get to say "we" in regard to the Sandusky story?

It was done on news side, wasn't it?

Why were you "proud of her ability"? What did you have to do with her ability? The "we're both members of the human race" thing? Perhaps you were "impressed" with her ability?

Sorry; just a little thing.

Anyway, those who scream "EGO!!!!" and such when they judge why a journalist would a story like you did, or like the one that started the thread, forget one thing:

It is very easy to get bored, especially when covering high school sports. For the most part, it's the same old stories every year. Little Johnny is a good running back; here's a feature. Little Jenny overcame the adversity of having her mom die in childbirth, and now is gonna get a scholarship for water polo; here's a feature.

Sometimes, we're trying to keep ourselves interested as much as the reader.

This story is interesting. It's out of the ordinary.

Same with the one that started this thread. Athletes fail to get the necessary grades with more regularity than I care to admit. But this kid has some stupid test to pass. It's a story about educational requirements as much as anything else.

And it breaks the monotony of the typical high school coverage cycle.

 

Piotr: All that would be OK if the article went that far, if the prominent athlete not graduating on time led to a deeper story about the NCLB-driven tests and the school-athletics-life balance issue and whether there's additional pressure to graduate if you're the best football player in the region, a cardinal of the de facto state religion. There's a lot of interesting places this story could go that would give it an array of arrows in the newsworthiness quiver.

Instead we get "Dummy McMoron didn't graduate. He says he'll try again. His academic problems scared off a bunch of big schools some time ago and he agreed to go to Oil Slick A&M Junior College in February." The only new information was the lede about not graduating. The only new information related to sports was ...

 

You put a hell of a lot more thought into that than your defense for jumping my ass deserved.

You. Were. Wrong.

 

Peace be with you.

 

I'm about as anti-bad-news-about-prep-athletes as it is possible to be, and I didn't say "never run a story like this."

I said I need to hear the justification. A good one. There are competing interests here, and they have to be weighed against each other.

People, especially high school kids, have a reasonable expectation that personal information remains private. Sometimes as journalists we have to violate that privacy because of the needs of the community we serve. For example, getting arrested is personal information you may not want others to know, but the community has a need to know about crimes committed inside the community, which is why the police blotter is sacred and nobody's name gets pulled for any reason.

There's a continuum of possible reasons to run this story, some that outweigh this kid's privacy and some that don't.

"The community needs to know about the education system possibly failing its athletes" is one that could supersede the kid's privacy interests, if done right.

"Because he's a celebrity and people like to know about celebrities" does not. Neither does "because we wrote something good about him in the past and it seems fair." Nor "if we don't, we'll be the toy department."

 

Public figure is a pretty strong defense, Rick.

 

It is against a libel suit.

But as journalists, I'd like to think our ethics are a bit loftier than "this is what we can legally get away with." Our ethical restraints should be a lot stricter than our legal ones.

 

You're saying the "celebrity" or "public figure" justification doesn't hold water. I'm saying it does. I know you disagree on an ethical level.

If the kid is a household name in his/her extended community, it changes their status when it comes to this. They become a newsworthy figure.

 

This Chronicle of Higher Education story was a much better example of how to write a story like this:

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Education-of-Dasmine/132065/