When I first started in this business 30 years ago, the first thing I put on before heading out to cover any civic board meeting was a scowl.
I didn’t smile at anyone and rarely exchanged pleasantries with board members. To be fair, I’m not particularly affable now, but I have friendly discussions with officials.
I think when I was fresh out of college, I felt like I had to be stern in order to be taken seriously. When I was a young reporter, it was more important for me to be respected than to be liked. An unflinching expression showed that I was all business – or that I had a headache. Either way, the message is “I’m not a man to be messed with.”
Journalism school fills your brain with the idea that public bodies are constantly up to something. Officials lie, cheat and steal, so you couldn’t be friendly with them because they would manipulate you. I was prepared for a scandalous story at every meeting, armed with a pen and a frown.
As it turns out, that idea was completely off base. Public officials, in general, are good people doing a thankless job. They hear a lot of complaints and rare praise. I enjoy talking to them outside of the meetings.
Being friendly also benefits our subscribers, because there are stories to be gained when officials trust you. They can clue you into informational stories that enrich the lives of readers. They can tell you when new restaurants are coming to town or let you know the location of a planned round-a-bout.
But relationships come with a cost.
Every reporter cringes when an official spouts off in a meeting, then turns to them and says “that was not for publication.” You can’t tell a reporter that something is off the record after you say it. That’s not how it works.
The process is, if you want to tell a journalist something off the record, you ask to go off the record. If they say yes, you can say whatever you want and it won’t be published. The reporter will let you know when they are going back on the record. If the reporter refuses to go off the record, don’t offer up whatever prompted the request. A real journalist won’t burn you on this. It’s the code we live by, as sacred as protecting the identity of anonymous sources.
Fortunately, 98 percent of the time, what they said doesn’t amount to anything anyway, so leaving the details out of a story concerns a lack of importance rather than influence.
This just happened a few weeks ago when a Marysville City Council member emphatically told a large audience that he hated the City of Dublin. He later tried convince our reporter not to use the quote and we didn’t – but only because we felt his words had no bearing on the issues being covered at the meeting.
Perhaps feeling that his powers of persuasion were strong, the same council member tried again more recently to influence coverage, to different results.
Our story about the recovery efforts for the remains of a pair of local airmen shot down during World War II took a long time to create. We had been gathering information and interviewing people about the strange circumstances for weeks.
When we eventually contacted the councilman about the problems and ongoing federal investigation, he felt there was no merit in the story and didn’t want us to run it. He told us other news organizations had agreed not to run the story, including a Columbus television station, despite having much more information on the matter than we had.
But we were running the story, regardless of what he felt. A Columbus newspaper has since followed suit. Whether the operation delivers any remains connected to Blackie’s Gang or not, the recovery process was botched (at best) or criminal (at worst).
It is news, solidly, and any media operation or journalist that agrees to help throw a smoke screen around the misuse of donated money is a fraud. Some media operations will bend to every whim of public officials, walking into meetings ready to type out exactly what their elected buddies tell them to. These types of operations might as well take handouts from the government while serving as its mouthpiece.
We didn’t. And, of course, now the council member wants to wag his finger at us, while never discounting the details in the story. If he still wants to claim donors didn’t deserve to know about his own concerns with the recovery, that’s his right. But he also intimated during a council meeting that his quotes in the story were given off the record. He later admitted that they were given on the record but he should have been more careful, like he was somehow tricked into making statements. Let me be clear, there isn’t one thing in the story about the Blackie’s Gang recovery effort that was handled inappropriately. There isn’t one detail we would change and we stand behind every word.
But this is the danger of being friendly with public officials. At some point they are going to ask you to do something that you just can’t do. And when you refuse, these once friendly individuals will try to drag you through the muck, tossing darts at your integrity or judgment.
And people wonder why I wear that frown at meetings.
-Chad Williamson is the managing editor at the Journal-Tribune.