:: everyday journalism ::

This morning I got up, looked forward to a productive day of freelance work, when I came across this story about the U.S. women’s soccer team in my newspaper and almost choked on my Cheerios:

First thought: Wait… whaaaaat… Did I just see that? Is that… um… WHAAAT?

Second thought: No.. I must be overreacting. There’s a logical explanation for this.

I looked up the word at Merriam-Webster, then at Urban Dictionary, (generally NSFW), just to be sure I wasn’t misunderstanding. Oh no, I wasn’t misunderstanding.

I couldn’t possibly be overreacting. This is serious, like employee-discipline serious, right? I posted my shock to Twitter and got these responses:

	boml @suzanneyada Wow, that is bad. And not an isolated case http://tinyurl.com/6rs8kt
	byline25 @suzanneyada That headline is tasteless. It is seriously one of the most offensive headlines I’ve ever seen in my life.
	MaryTrigiani @suzanneyada Where is Visalia? Don’t blame you for being irate.
	pickoffwhite @suzanneyada I find it pretty offensive. Especially as someone who plays/loves soccer.
	mikeoz @suzanneyada eeek. yeah, that’s not good. woobie @suzanneyada Yeah, that does seem to cross a line — would the run the same headline for the men’s team?

Boml’s link lead to a blog post about another paper in Australia who wrote a similar headline:

The debate with this one, though, is that “digger” has a different connotation down under. But even so, the caption on the news website has since been changed anyway.

So what excuse does that give a Californian paper? None.

I called up the senior editor, whom I respected when I worked there. He’s one of those old-time journalists, the kind who knows the news industry inside and out, has a million stories to tell, loves whisky and wears suspenders.

And he just… didn’t… quite… see… the problem… of that headline. And I had a hell of a time convincing him.

The first problem was that he told me I was the first person who called in to complain about the headline. I don’t believe that for one second. I called him at 11 am, well after the issue hit the streets. And this at a paper whose phone lines were flooded with calls once because someone put the word “freaking” in a headline. As in, “freaking cool.” Yeah.

So I had to explain to him the meaning of the term “gold digger” and that it’s a derogatory term for women who date richer men just for their money. He said he understood it could be taken offensively and tried to explain it was not meant to be taken in that context. I told him there was no other context to take — the headline would have never been used for the men’s soccer team. He tried to say it was for effect, that if they wrote the headline “Women’s Soccer Wins 3-2″ it wouldn’t have made as much of an impact. By then, I truly believe he forgot he was on the phone with me, someone that’s written headlines for them for three years. I know why they write headlines that aren’t straight-forward, I know how much labor it takes to making one headline as accurate as possible in the space allotted. This one seemed to be a filler headline the sports desk put in until they thought of a better one — and they never did change it.

He seemed sympathetic but wanted to stand his ground in the headline’s defense. I don’t think I made my message clear enough until I told him that there’s a strip joint in Bakersfield [my bad: Fresno] called Gold Diggers. That seemed to shut him up a bit.

I wonder if I spoke to the executive editor — a woman — I would have had a different reaction.

I just… I just can’t believe for a second I’m the only one in Visalia who called in. I’m outraged because a) this is MY paper, that I love and respect, b) I know the people behind it, and c) THEY KNOW BETTER!

…Or do they?

EDIT TO ADD: I’ve called a couple other editors and confirmed that yes, there pretty much was only one person who called in to complain. I don’t consider myself (or those who responded to my Twitter) a femi-Nazi-type. Am I off? Or is the town?

I was also told that the editor who wrote it truly didn’t realize how offensive it would be and meant no harm. I am just… confused. Really confused. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the one living in an alternate reality.

Volumes have already been said about Twitter in journalism. Poynter, Harvard and PBS chimed in, and Ryan Sholin gives journalists concrete ideas here.

My two cents:

• Twitter is only as useful as the people you follow and the people who follow you. If you don’t have the right people on either side of the equation, forget it. (Want a list of great journalistic Twitter users? Go here.)
• I found out about John Edwards’ affair, both Bernie Mac’s and Issac Hayes’ deaths and the Russia/Georgia conflict first on Twitter. But that’s not Twitter specifically — I find headlines on Yahoo, from people’s Myspace bulletins and Facebook status updates, in a local news email newsletter, AND in the dead-tree newspaper I read at the breakfast table. It just so happens that I’m addicted to Twitter and I check it more often than others. It’s just one more source of news to add to your arsenal.
• Unless it’s an earthquake and a million people are twittering the same thing at the same time, how is a news event going to be immediately dispersed to an audience as large as it needs? Twitter still has a comparatively small number of users. And unless the news itself has viral qualities, it will be broadcast to someone’s Twitter network and stop there.
• Only news stories that require just headlines and no context will be able to scoop the Associated Press (like the afore-mentioned OMGWTFBBQ EARTHQUAKE!!).
• We are taught in journalism school to answer who, what, where, when, why and how. Twitter forces us to distill all that information into 140 characters, which is a good thing, but also contributes to the ADD-like consumption of news, which is bad.
• Having said that, people do not use Twitter one tweet at a time. Many journalists see Twitter as nothing more than a headline-pusher. MISTAKE. It’s more than OK to have consecutive tweets that build off of one another, rather than having each news story self-contained.
• Ironically, instead of limiting reporters to 140 characters, Twitter frees reporters up to post little blips of color and context that would normally be edited out of the dead-tree edition. This excellent reporting experiment by Ron Sylvester shows how he used Twitter to update the public on a capital punishment trial. He published micro-bits of color and context as the trial went along. He says, “I cut and pasted all my ‘tweet’ updates into a traditional story file. It measured 80 inches.“
• The real power of my Twitter list is when people post a headline and follow it with a tinyurl to an interesting news story, blog or discussion. It’s like sending links to your friends without spamming or being intrusive — you can always unsubscribe.
• People, please don’t use Twitter as simply a way to rewire an RSS feed. RSS feeds often lead to too many tweets. And if you tweet too much, I de-friend you. Simple as that. Have an actual person be behind it — one of the reasons people will subscribe to your Twitter feed is because it seems so much more personal and one-on-one with the people behind the news media.
• Don’t ever, EVER call me a Twitterling, a Tweetster or Tweeple. I am a Twitter user, not a member of the Mickey Mouse Club.