As Senior Writer of Fluco Blog and the Fluco Blog writer who covered the Dr. Smith retirement announcement, I felt it was important to explain how and why I made decisions I did on coverage.
Whenever a major event happens, especially one that catches everyone off guard, it is important that the media covers it fairly, unbiased and thorough.
When the media fails at one of those, the coverage loses credibility. That’s why at Fluco Blog I went to extraordinary measures to make sure that, to the best of my ability, the coverage was fair, unbiased and thorough.
I would like to explain how this process was handled as it was handled with many sleepless nights, long work days and many phone calls.
The first article, the basic news article
The first and maybe the most important thing was to report the item when it happened and report it as timely as possible. When Smith announced his intentions, immediately I updated twitter and Facebook. When I returned home after the meeting, I ate a quick dinner then worked on the article. By 1 am the article was complete.
I did not have time to interview School Board members or even talk to Smith. When a public School Board meeting is complete the board goes into a closed session immediately. Waiting another hour or more is not a very good use of time when the news article is not reaction to the retirement but the fact a retirement was announced.
School Board reaction
After a few days of the excitement around the retirement settled down, I spoke to each School Board member. Trying to write a worth while article with six “voices” in it is very difficult. It is even harder when each person said similar things but maybe one small difference. I hope the article showed each person’s thoughts as best I could.
Did each member get an equal number of quotes? No. It would have been impossible to manage that. I tried to pick the best quotes because, like I said before, they all said similar things.
Smith’s reaction
This was the hardest piece to write. It was the hardest interview I have ever done. A lot of good and bad things have been said about Smith and even more now after his announcement. The last piece I wanted something original. I didn’t want just a five minute interview where he said bing, bam, boom. This had to be carefully constructed from interview to writing process.
I met with Smith for over 40 minutes. I asked him questions from why he was retiring to his salary to his future plans. I wanted to ask the questions people have asked rhetorically to each other. I wanted him to respond to the statements people have said.
It was an excellent interview in terms of how it progressed. Judging his answers is not in my job description as reporter. I let readers make their own decisions on what sources say.
What’s missing?
What have I missed in all of this coverage? I think nothing. Others will say I have not given people/citizens a space to talk. There has been no article written with a reaction from a citizen. There will not be one written.
My reason is there is a comment section on all three articles that give much more space than what I can in an article. There are postings on twitter and Facebook.
I could not go and meet with over 25,000 citizens of Fluvanna to gauge reaction and be fair. Remember, the most important things in dealing with major news (and any news for that matter) is to be fair, unbiased and thorough.
I hope everyone enjoyed the articles. If you have suggestions or comments, please feel free to leave it here.
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