Junk science salesman makes my day on the fluff beat a pissy affair

NOTE: I’m withholding names and other details that I’d like to include in this entry because of contractual obligations to the newspaper at which I am a reporter.

FROM JASON’S BULLSHIT DETECTOR — An unwitting editor didn’t do due diligence before sending me on a fluff assignment Saturday, and I was livid.

Upon arriving at the church — a dire sign to start — to cover a conference about inner and outer beauty, I found quacks peddling junk science.

My job (ostensibly) was to talk about how women were trying to boost self-esteem by getting makeovers at a “You Are Beautiful” event. I’m normally a cops-and-fire beat guy, so I was already jaded against writing a cheese-filled frill-fest for the “Accent” page. That didn’t help when a publicist greeted me at the door and led me straight to the conference’s star speaker: A “doctor” pushing several natural medicine books he sells online.

His sales pitch started immediately when I met him backstage: He jumped into a wrote speech about how he wants to help women reach their true potential by uncovering all of the “secrets” that “they” don’t want you to know.

That’s when I got wise and asked what kind of “doctor” he is.

“A chiropractor,” he said.

His eyes narrowed when I clarified as a follow-up that he wasn’t a medical doctor and asked whether his dietary advice was backed by studies or FDA research.

He further bristled when asked how his licensing as a chiropractor qualified him to make claims about general health; there started his ranted about how “the AMA is just a fraternity and has no real authority. They just want to keep us down.”

“Doctors just want to prescribe. They don’t want you to have a good diet and they’ll never tell you to change how you eat. They’ll only tell you what chemicals you should put in your body,” he said, ignoring the fact that I was scribbling pretty hard in my notebook.

From there he went on to rail against thyroid medicine, Lipitor, and toxins in everything from bananas to candles to chlorinated city water. He shamelessly plugged ionizers and water filters. He used cheap scare tactics to try to convince these gullible Christian women that everything and anything could kill them.

There are many who accuse the mass media of helping to perpetuate bad science. But my photographer and I decided immediately to ignore the conference “headliner” and interview only women involved in the makeovers. It still wasn’t a meaningful story, by any stretch — it was schlock entertainment at best — but at least it didn’t prop up snake oil shenanigans.

Even after all these years, news myths thrive

FROM JASON’S SNAP-BRIM HAT AND TRENCH COAT — Seriously, folks. The first American newspaper, Public Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick, was printed in Boston in 1690. You’d think 317 years would be long enough for people to figure out how this business works.

But no — those old misconceptions about non-existent laws that supposedly limit what may be published continue to prosper. Many still don’t understand exactly what it is that reporters do. And too many people out there still think they are entitled to absolute privacy, no matter what the circumstances.

I run into these misguided myths and attitudes of entitlement nearly every day in the course of my work as a journalist. They annoy me. Hopefully, these few points will enlighten the billions who read Quaedam every day:

1) “You can’t print that! It was off the record!”

There is no such thing as this chimerical “record” that pop culture has created. But thanks to old noir films featuring grungy, stereotyped reporters with press cards in their hats, people believe that “on the record” and “off the record” are relevant and binding concepts.

The Deep Throat scenario from All the President’s Men has ingrained this fallacy into the minds of three generations. Woodward and Bernstein’s method was the gross exception that proved the rule.

True, we do use the term as an informal agreement of confidentiality, but the fact remains that the record has no legal bite. Stating that something is off the record does not necessarily make it so. It is up to the reporter’s discretion to decide whether to grant a self-imposed moratorium on information.

If ever we do accept a statement as off the record, it is in exchange for either better information or a favor. I’ve agreed to put irrelevant information off the record just to bank against a source I may need down the road.

The only negatives consequences of using of-the-record info are loss of reputation and potential loss of that source in the future. Sometimes those losses are acceptable if the trade-off is big enough.

Statements made in public are never off the record, though. I once had a police chief walk by me in a city council meeting, muttering under his breath that a council member was an idiot because he would not increase his police budget. I printed that the chief called the legislator an idiot in public, and the he was irate. He tried to claim the comment was off the record because he did not intend for it to be heard. Too bad.

2) “You’re not allowed to put my child’s name in the paper.”

There is no law against publishing the names, crimes, or other actions of juveniles. Newspapers typically volunteer to withhold the names of people under the age of 18 who are charged with a crime or sexually victimized.

This, however, is not an absolute, and is left open to the discretion of the editors and publishers. Often, children who are charged and tried as adults will be named. Young people who are hurt in accidents or by criminals may also be named.

Reporters do not need special permission from parents or guardians to print the names of children. In some cases, however, there may be special rules surrounding coverage of juvenile courts. As always, judges have the final say in how proceedings are covered. There is also an element of forgiveness on the part of newspapers — mine, for example, does not cover juvenile courts unless there is a compelling public interest.

I recently covered an incident in which a 16-year-old boy was accused of shooting his parents. His mother was killed almost instantly, and his father (who was shot in the face) survived after being hospitalized for a month. We thought it prudent to print the boy’s name when he was charged.

3) “Reporters are private investigators.”

I am not Clark Kent, nor am I Kal El. It is not my job to solve crimes or catch criminals. I do not track down leads about where your husband is sleeping these nights, unless your husband is a an on-duty police officer soliciting prostitutes instead of patrolling the streets.

If you don’t want it published, don’t call me. If you want someone to help you find order, call the police. If you want someone to help you find justice, call a lawyer.

Many callers to my office want an intermediary to help make their problems go away. That is not what reporters do. We take information and transform it so the masses care and understand an issue. Reporters are professional gossipers with social and financial agendas.

A couple once called me complaining that a city had violated a contract to build a road in front of their house (they allowed the city to build a water tower on their land in return).

I made inquiries at the mayor’s office to find whether the allegation was true, and the next day cement trucks rolled into said neighborhood to pour the road. Once they were gone, the couple called to tell me they didn’t want the story in the paper, and even mentioned legal action.

I laughed and ran the story. I didn’t put pressure on the government for their gain. I did it for mine.

4) “My paycheck is none of your business.”

Anyone can be elected to public offices in America — that’s the biggest advantage and most dire curse of a democratic republic.

Unfortunately, it means too many yokels with no understanding of civics or the law gain power. I deal all the time with backwoods office-holders who don’t understand public records and attempt to deny access. The big-time politicians also try to claim ignorance of the Freedom of Information Act and open meeting laws.

“Sunshine Laws” (like Ohio Revised Code section 149.43) make it very clear what are the rules of the game. Any document used in the course of conducting public business is a public document. That means e-mails, pay stubs, budgets, court papers, police reports, internal memos, personnel files — even Post-It Notes! — are open to purview.

Every last scrap is my business, with notable exceptions: Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, and information related to security measures may be redacted.

A city auditor once refused to tell me to whom the government was loaning tax money. She said finances and loans were not the media’s concern. I quickly disabused her of that notion. She refused to comply with Ohio law several times (while I recorded her refusal), but reneged when I contacted county and state ethics authorities. I found out she was loaning thousands of dollars to business owners so they could fix their facilities.

5) “You ruined my life by putting that in the paper.”

No, I didn’t. You ruined your life by having sex with that high school principal on his desk during school hours. It was already over when that teenager walked in and saw you; all I did was tell the people who pay the principal how their tax money was misspent and their trust was violated.

There is an implied Constitutional right to privacy in the no-quarter clause of the Second Amendment, but that does not compel the media to help the accused or public figures save face. Once an individual gains a certain amount of notoriety, is given responsibility to uphold the public trust, or is charged with a crime (this is not an exhaustive list), they are subject to scrutiny.

The public’s right to know how its resources are handled and what events have or could compromise its safety outweigh the right to an individual’s privacy.

Newspapers: Are they dying or just evolving?

FROM JASON’S PAYCHECK — Yes, I am a journalist. No, I am not worried about the protracted decline of American newspaper circulation.

I’m not going to ignore the reality: Daily print readership continues to dwindle at a stately but concerning pace. Morning papers have reached a near-homeostatic state at about 47 million readers per day in the U.S., constituting about a sixth of the population.

In the past three years alone, the market has been slapped with a 6.3 percent readership reduction. Much of that can be attributed to the expansion of online news sources and Web 2.0 aggregating sites like Digg. An equal amount of lost circulation, though, can be chalked up to the federal Do Not Call Registry, which has crippled direct subscription sales.

The good news is that the big losses are, for the most part, limited to the largest corporate news providers. Metro papers lost the greatest portion of circulation and revenues in 2006, especially in big markets like Philadelphia and San Francisco. Personally, I think it has to do with unionization out-pricing the product amid declining demand.

Those same metro papers also have the highest concentration of broadband users, and the erudite demographic most likely to read newspapers (62 percent of readers are college graduates) is also likely to use the Web with great frequency.

In that respect, the problem isn’t so much that the news industry is in decline — just the ink-and-paper end of it.

The county where I live on the outskirts of Cleveland has a little more than 300,000 residents, but the daily newspaper at which I work had roughly 816,000 hits on its website in July. Publishers should be happy — after all, it takes much less energy and money to make content available on the Internet.

The only thing standing in the way of a paperless print news industry is a working business model. Advertisers haven’t made the jump from paper pages to HTML pages yet, and with good reason — tangible over-the-counter sales are often impulse buys, whereas it takes much more work to get people to log on and visit any given site. What’s more, only 73 percent of Americans have daily access to the Internet, cutting a quarter of the salable print market out of the picture.

But as ‘Net usage continues its steep upward growth — about 2 million new users a month, and generally blind to income brackets — newspapers are experimenting with new methods of content delivery.

Anecdotal evidence from my interaction with other Ohio Newspaper Association employees shows that across the state reporters are being trained en masse in the use of video cameras and digital editing software. Posting such supplemental content (footage of fires, police dash cam tapes, surveillance video, statements from crime victims, fluff segments of pets and high school sports) could well be the key from getting people to log on.

It’s all about incentive.

People are starting to see television news for what it really is: Entertainment. They enjoy seeing pictures of suspects in handcuffs and man-on-the-street opinion pieces. What they want from TV news coverage, though, is what TV doesn’t have time to do. They want in-depth investigative coverage of events. There is a larger calling than ever before for a multimedia experience, and technology is making that cheap and easy to provide on-the-fly.

I carry a camera like the one above at all times; the video is trivially imported, edited, branded with corporate logos, and hosted on YouTube within minutes at my office. I’ve noticed that stories with accompanying video get about 20 to 30 percent more hits than those without.

Subscription-only sites are disappearing rapidly, too, as publishers see the financial benefits of providing free access to at least some of their content. No newspaper would be so daft — yet, anyway, as the online business model is still being hammered out — to put all of its content online, but more and more is added. After all, additional virtual space doesn’t cost anything, really.

Conversely, newsprint costs are exploding as demand decreases and gas prices increase. North American mills cut newsprint supplies by 19 percent in 2006, while at the same time attempting a per-ton hike of $30 — the second such in the past year.

Personally, I think a general decline in literacy in the U.S. is as much to blame as anything else. Let’s face it, the newspaper industry was fated to suffer some kind of customer loss sheerly through market fragmentation. The more sources of entertainment there are, the fewer people will participate in any given one. Television has wrestled with this as the four major networks became five, then again with the proliferation of cable-exclusive channels in the 1980s.

Couple that with shoddy education; the U.S. ranks 10th of the world’s 17 richest nations in adult literacy, and even lower among the same pool in functional comprehension. Perhaps that’s why in 1998 journalism majors were being taught to write for an eighth grade reading level, and by 2006 the standard had lowered to fourth grade.

I’ve been told to cut “complicated” words from news articles: Opaque, inert, anomaly, culpable, obviate, emulate, innocuous.

Despite reworking business models and falling standards, I think newspapers will always have a profitable place in the American economy. People are curious. They are nosy. They want to know what’s going on and what it means.

The Internet is good at providing that at a macro level, but very bad about providing information at a micro level. While big players like Gannett, Tribune, and Knight Ridder have and will continue in the foreseeable future to endure losses, the market can’t help but eventually self-correct because the demand for information is inherent to human nature.

There must always be gatherers of that information, especially at the local level. Regional and small-town dailies will thrive, and weekly rags are seeing a renaissance because of their unique specialization. The news business isn’t going anywhere, it’s just changing with the face of modern America.