Sports Editor, Richmond, Va.

Disagree with you here, Frank.

Yes, Newspapers don't want to reveal all of their inner secrets, like any business. Unlike any other business, it's difficult if not impossible telling reporters not to be quoted, since reporters are people whose job it is to find out how things work and get beyond PR to provide insight. I can recall being in a newsroom where they posted a memo like that, and thinking it was foolish.

Second, a lot of magazine writers are people who have graduated from newspapers. Having somebody who never worked at the paper would mean that person would start a quarter mile behind someone who knows the people.

Third, if you are a publisher or an executive editor and you can't handle questions about your operation, you are bush league and don't belong in that position. Anybody can do a negative story about a person without talking to the person, so unless the reporter is COMPLETELY unethical, it is always better to talk to a reporter. Heck, they talk to reporters from high school newspapers. What, the pubisher can only handle softball questions? Do elected officials get the same treatment from newspapers? That's a real circle the wagons mentality, and it's why a lot of people find newspapers less relevant.

 

"Reputable" is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, but Style is owned by Landmark Communications, the same outfit that owns the dailies in Greensboro, Roanoke and Norfolk. Style has been nipping at the heels of the T-D for years. It's essentially the alt-weekly in Richmond - think the New Times weeklies, but without 8,000 pages of personal ads in the back.

 

Gold, you hit the nail.
Why can't these guys talk to the media? What are they hiding? If the T-D were any other major downtown business, which had a change at the top, and a journalist called to talk and was told there was essentially a gag rule were in place, we'd as journalists would wonder what they were hiding.
And I'm sure the T-D will be fine without me. And I'll be fine not working for a publication that feels the need to set policies to silence its employees. I mean, how can we as 1st amendment advocates, not be bothered by this?
If I were a reporter there, I guess it would be fine to tell the editors I couldn't get the story because the high school I cover has a gag rule on the players.
If the editor has a problem with it, I'd simply state that if the policy works for us, why not respect it for other people?

 

Oh, Landmark owns it. I still don't buy the story. Why trust the media?
And I'm sure things aren't that bad, I mean, I'm sure life is wonderful at the T-D. How long do you think it takes for the censor police to arrive at your desk and toss you onto Broad Street for talking out of class?

 

Oh come on. If you're a reputable news organization, you try to avoid obvious conflicts of interest like using a disgruntled former employee to write the piece. I think the T-D management felt this guy had an axe to grind and chose not to cooperate. I'd do the same thing. If my paper were doing a piece on Microsoft, a former Microsoft employee wouldn't get the assignment, he'd brief the reporter on what he knows, but no more than that. To me it seems that the Style Weekly folks need some lessons on ethics and common sense. That they'd use a former employee to write about the T-D erodes any credibility I might have assumed on their part.

 

To me, this sounds like a case where there is a fire, and someone, the competition, is fanning the flames. Truth and lies on both sides. :-\

 

from reading the piece, it did not sound like he had worked at the T-D recently. The guy seems to be a journalism professor at Virginia Commonwealth, and j-school profs often fill this kind of role. Whether they are on target or not is generally tested in the work. Frank, you're better than this - if I carry your logic farther, Gay Talese should never have written "The Kingdom and the Power". Jill Nelson should never have written "Volunteer Slavery" by that logic. They have editors at the magazine, and they should be asking questions. A magazine staff is smaller. Someone else wouldn't have had the contacts or relationships with people.

 

Well, Talese wasn't disgruntled and the book was positive in tone. Top people spoke to him on the record and gave him access to personal files and memos -- I just looked, and that's what he wrote in hsi "Author's Note." There have been other books about the NYT that didn't have that kind of access and cooperation, especially Edwin Diamond's in the 1990s. Obviously they trusted Talese to be fair and get the facts right, and they trusted other authors far less.

I think the subject of any story has the right to refuse to talk, especially if they believe the reporter is not going to be objective or is going to twist a person's words.

 

It's ALWAYS better to give a statment. Isn't that what we tell our sources? I guess it just doesn't apply to Richmond. If the gag rule is true, I think the T-D has sullied itself. This leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.

 

Hi, this is Jason Roop, editor in chief at Style Weekly. I hope you'll excuse the post to your board. A colleague who is a member of the forum had mentioned it to me, and I've enjoyed reading the discussion you're having about journalism. I don't want to interrupt, but I feel obligated to make a couple of points in response to some of the questions that have been raised, especially for those of you outside the Richmond market.

It is true that Greg Weatherford has worked for a number of Richmond news outlets, which is disclosed in the story -- Style Weekly, Inside Business, the Associated Press, Richmond magazine and the Times-Dispatch, and he now advises journalism students at Virginia Commonwealth University. Although he was a business reporter at the T-D in the late 1990s, he is not a disgruntled employee, as someone suggested. He enjoyed his time there, and left to take a job as a business editor at another publication. He did not work for the current editor, nor was the new publisher the publisher while he was there. Greg is a widely respected journalist in Richmond, and has won numerous awards from the Virginia Press Association, including at least one Best in Show in writing among all nondaily publications in Virginia. He also spent time between being a reporter and his life in academia as a media columnist for Richmond magazine.

As for balance: Although I'm disappointed that the Times-Dispatch's new editor and publisher declined to be interviewed, it is certainly their right. Despite their decision, I am pleased that Greg went out of his way to include their point of view -- at least as much as we could get across under the circumstances. We used e-mailed information from the promotion manager about circulation, quotes from Mr. Silvestri's column, and so forth. We also pointed out that some reporters and others have appreciated some of the changes under way. Of course we would have loved to share with our readers the complete picture from all sides. Decisions made by the Times-Dispatch executives prevented us from doing that. We respect the work of our colleagues at the daily, and as evidenced by the time and space we devoted to the story, we believe in the importance of the daily to the region. In a town our size, many of us also know each other, have worked with each another, went to school together -- and in some cases, worked for one another.

We did have one update: After we went to press, the person identified as the "star reporter" in the story agreed to be identified. He's Mark Holmberg, the newspaper's Pulitzer-finalist city columnist.

I invite any comments about the story, or any questions about Style Weekly. I can be reached by e-mail at: jason.roop@styleweekly.com.

All the best --
Thanks.

 

Two things that sort of out me, but at this point does anyone REALLY care?

* I knew Greg Weatherford from when we both attended VCU and worked at the Commonwealth Times (which produced some decent talent ... and me). He's a good egg with a good head for the business, or at least he was when I knew him back in the day. Unless he had a horrible parting with the T-D, such that he couldn't be depended on to write a fair and impartial story, I don't see that having a siginificant impact on his ability to pound out a decent piece, or at least no more so than having a recent UF grad cover the Gators for one of the biggest papers in Florida.

* He's not only the director of student media at VCU, he's also the media reporter for Style. If he doesn't write the story, they have to shop it out to another VCU professor or have someone without the expertese to handle it (like Edwin Slipek the architectural guru?). Of course, Style doesn't mind tweaking the T-D every so often. So in that respect, you wonder that even if the writer is a straight arrow, the powers that be are playing this for all the wrong reasons (it's worth noting that Landmark owns not only the Pilot in Norfolk, but Port Folio, the Norfolk alt-weekly. Their relationship is far less acrimonious than that of Style and the T-D -- big shock there, huh?)

* Bonus observation: I may be remembering incorrectly, but I believe Weatherford was a member of Cracker, leaving them to go to school shortly before they went national. Get off this, indeed.

* Double bonus observation since Jason Roop got his post in whilst I was composing mine: If anyone has the gravitas to speak frankly and publicly about his employer, it's Mark Holmberg.