Misery's company

Maybe you were up late last night obsessively going over your lede in your head, or wondering if the verb you chose to describe a politician's decision on a controversial item truly captured the audacity of the moment without stepping over a line.

Was it an "avenue" or a "boulevard"? Was he accused of three felonies or four? Should that quote have gone higher up in the story?

Well, Jack Shafer at Slate does a good job describing something that most non-journalists don't get about the job and it's worth sharing. It's from a piece on Politico and The Atlantic publishing a memo they could not authenticate.

Not to let Politico and the Atlantic off lightly, but show me a journalist who has never published something he later regretted, and I'll show you a piker or a liar. The conscientious journalist—no matter whether he does his work on the Web, in print, or via broadcasting—goes to sleep every night with the dread, boiling in his belly, that he didn't check this thing or that thing closely enough before he filed his story.

Enjoy the glamor, citizen journalists.

Looking for the line

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt suggests the paper replace Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner because his son has joined the Israeli military. Hoyt says the appearance of conflict is enough to warrant reassignment:

The Times sent a reporter overseas to provide disinterested coverage of one of the world’s most intense and potentially explosive conflicts, and now his son has taken up arms for one side. Even the most sympathetic reader could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father, especially if shooting broke out.

I have enormous respect for Bronner and his work, and he has done nothing wrong. But this is not about punishment; it is simply a difficult reality. I would find a plum assignment for him somewhere else, at least for the duration of his son’s service in the I.D.F.

Times editor Bill Keller responds, "... our policies are designed to make us alert, not to preempt our professional judgment." He goes on to say that Bronner will be staying on the job because the family connections create no more of a problem than the other life experiences reporters bring to their beats:

Nazila Fathi, our brave Tehran correspondent, was hounded out of her native country and into exile by the current regime. Does that “conflict of interest” disqualify her from writing about Iran? Or does that, on the contrary, make her more qualified, knowing as she does how that regime operates? Would you prefer to have a correspondent in Tehran who had NOT been persecuted by the Iranian government?

Whatever side you come down on, it's good to see a public editor sparking a vigorous debate inside the newsroom and forcing news editors to be accountable, rather than letting them sweep this under a rug.

WaPost's newsroom spotlight

Ever wonder how many bad ideas journalists have before they land a good story idea? Well, the Washington Post has a new venture called Story Lab that's supposed to help answer that and other questions for readers. The idea is to let readers watch, and even participate in the construction of a story "from conception to publication."

From Marc Fisher, who's overseeing the project:

We’re hoping to demystify the work of a big, sometimes-anonymous institution and give readers a way to connect with the people who report and write the news.

We’re really going to try to have a number of stories each week that are, from conception to finish, formulated on Story Lab. A reporter says, “Here’s what I’m thinking of; here’s the story as we see it. What do you think?” I fully expect that stories will evolve.

I wonder how much interest there is out there for this.

(found via Nieman Journalism Lab)