Has Al Thompson even bothered to look at the BBC documentary about the Jena 6 the link for which I sent him last week? The BBC reporter does an interview with the local paper editor and it showed the local editor to be biased against the black young men. There is no good reason why the all white local jury ruled so severely on a minor. The African Americans from the area tell a different story than this white local paper. The claims the editor makes are almost exactly the same as those made by racist white local newspaper editors in their vilification of Civil Rights protestors. SHAME ON YOU AL for supporting and rationalizing for the poor, little, racist newspaper. Al have YOU taken Keith Woods course on reporting on race? It doesn't seem so from your column. We sometimes have problems with our server rejecting incoming email. If your reply to this email is returned to you, PLEASE call me at the number below. Apologies...We are working on it. Sincerely, Rev. Dr. E-K. Daufin, Professor Department of Communications Alabama State University 915 South Jackson St. Montgomery, AL 36101-0271 334.229.6885 Thank you in advance for your Scholarly & Creative Activity Referrals - Lectures, Performances, Workshops, Consultation Related Info: http://home.earthlink.net/~ekdaufin/ -----Original Message----- From: Poynter Institute [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2007 6:11 AM To: E. K. Daufin Subject: Al's Morning Meeting - Tuesday Edition: A Small Paper's Lessons from the Jena Six Story Poynter online Al's Morning Meeting Posted, Oct. 2, 2007 Updated, Oct. 2, 2007 Tuesday Edition: A Small Paper's Lessons from the Jena Six Story A community paper's take on why coverage of the Jena Six matters. By Al Tompkins (http://www.poynter.org/profile/profile.asp?user=1557) (more by author (http://www.poynter.org/search/results_article.asp?cdl_userID=1557&btn_s ubmit=true) ) I really want you to read today's column, all the way to the bottom. Today's content is an e-mail interview I had with Paul V. Carty, executive editor/local information center director of The Town Talk (http://www.thetowntalk.com) newspaper in Alexandria, La. A week ago, and for a nanosecond or two later, the national media paid attention to a story in Jena, La., where protesters said they had lost faith in their legal system. Blacks said the Jim Crow South had never died, young people were fighting one another and prosecutors said they were doing their duty. While most of the world has only recently heard of the Jena case, (which is referred to as the "Jena Six" case -- a throwback to the "Little Rock Nine" moniker), The Town Talk has been on this story for more than a year. The paper has published more than 110 stories in 12 months related to the case and the many events that surrounded it. Carty's staff has been threatened, and the community his staff covers has been shaken. Is this case really the opening salvo of the Civil Rights Movement of this century as Rev. Al Sharpton said? Or is it a diversion while OJ is on bail and Brittany has her clothes on? I also noticed that the phrase "Jena Six" first appeared in The Town Talk 's stories in May of this year. That was just about the time the rest of the country began to catch on. I am convinced that the marketing phrase helped propel the story. It became easier to explain with a catchy title, even if the title oversimplified the story. Here is my exchange with Carty: Q. Your paper started covering the story that became known as the Jena Six in September 2006. Why did it take so long for the rest of the country to notice this case? What finally pushed the case into the national spotlight? A. You could write a dissertation on why it took "so long" for the rest of the nation to notice this case. Some of the chapter headings would have to be: Readers are too busy to read, listen or watch. "It doesn't affect me, so I don't care." They have time for the headline or the sound bite, but not for the facts. They are unwilling and, in many cases, unable to think critically. It hasn't really happened until it's made the rotation on CNN's "Headline News" -- and stayed there long enough without the distraction of the "naked-drugged-out-pop-star" story of the day. That's not meant to be cynical. These things simply reflect the lives so many of us have carved out for ourselves. If it's not on your iPod, it doesn't exist. The Jena Six case made it into the national -- and global -- spotlight for two reasons: people, and the Internet. People everywhere started talking about the Jena Six online -- many of them for reasons that reflected their own life experiences and hopes, and plenty of others for specific political, social and activist reasons. The evolution of the coverage of the Jena Six story -- the micro and the macro of it -- is the quintessential example of viral marketing: A piece of information was dropped into the "social network" that is the Internet, and in an instant it became its own, unique brand. Everybody who wanted to associate it with -- for whatever reason -- did so. That was the "big bang" that forced the story onto the radar of the traditional "big media." Q. What are the guiding principles that your paper has tried to follow in covering this story? A. The principles that serve us well every day have been followed throughout. They should be familiar to anyone who respects the practice of journalism and embraces the unique First Amendment responsibilities and obligations of the press. At The Town Talk , we adhere to the high standards set and championed by Gannett Co. Inc., our parent company. I know that you, your colleagues at The Poynter Institute and many of your readers are familiar with them. They start here: We seek and report the truth in a truthful way. We serve the public interest. We exercise fair play. We maintain independence. We act with integrity. Q. How has your coverage been different from that of the national media? A. The Town Talk 's coverage has been fundamentally different, for two key reasons: 1.) Because we are located here, we are better able than all other media to put the news of the day into context. For us, it's a local story. That means the online updates must have the right links to provide readers with relevant background information; and our print story or package must be longer or bigger so the contextual elements don't get lost along the way. 2.) We start from a differently biased point of view. You read that correctly -- differently biased. The Town Talk is Jena's daily newspaper, even though Alexandria is 32 miles from there. That means we have the cumulative experience of having covered that community in other ways and across time. We have covered more than polar extremes of the news that attract other, non-local media -- the big (good) annual fair and the big (bad) crime or tragedy. Our experience on the local streets is hardly complete, but what we have makes it much more difficult for us to be persuaded that one side of a story is right or wrong. Of course, no self-respecting journalist ever makes an assumption like that -- right? Right. That said, it's much easier for journalists who come into the story from a distance to arrive at conclusions that are based on less information, or to agree with someone else's conclusions (prepackaged and e-mailed, thank you very much). The probability of assuming information and drawing conclusions increases significantly with physical and chronological distance from any story. Living inside that reality is a journalist who has parachuted in on a big story from far away has had to get up to speed, make sense of the facts that can be gathered, find a way to advance the story or at least make it appear the story has been advanced, make a deadline and then make some calls on an unrelated story. That is some context for this thought, which has been nagging at me: In 27 years of working for community newspapers in six states, I have never seen a story become so distorted by what John and Jane Doe call the "national media." The problems I have read, seen or discussed by phone fall into several categories: Accuracy without truth: Facts get reported with no context. For example: Yes, there was an all-white jury in the trial of Mychal Bell, the only one of the Jena Six defendants who has been tried so far. That got reported incessantly and in a vacuum, and it became a rallying cry among civil-rights activists. What didn't get reported effectively in the national media was why there was an all-white jury. Most people, I am willing to bet, still do not know the answer to that. Assumptions and skewed reporting: Lots of people working for major media -- and others working with small advocacy journals and point-of-view e-zines -- already "knew" the story by the time they started asking questions about it. They made assumptions based mostly on selective information -- the headlines and sound bites that most people were ingesting -- and based on some stereotypes about the South that I worry may never be overcome. (I do feel somewhat qualified to make that statement, as I am a Yankee whose roots are in Boston and Philadelphia and who today has the honor of steering a news organization in the Deep South.) The assumptions made by some people in the "outside" media provided the starting point for their reporting, which included this unfortunate question from a network reporter's live camera shot: "How long has Jena been known as a racist town? Q. Why have there been no interviews with any of the teens, white and black, directly involved in this case? A. There have been some interviews done -- remember, you have to consider who's talking on MySpace -- but access to the defendants to conduct traditional interviews has been restricted for a number of reasons -- some reasonable, others less so. Initially, the defendants followed standard legal advice: Don't talk about this with anyone but your lawyer. Who can argue with that? We're talking about serious criminal charges. That posture changed when several nationally recognized figures -- notably Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King III and Al Sharpton -- were persuaded to comment on what they thought might be happening in Jena. A decision was made -- by someone, somewhere -- to make the Jena Six the centerpiece of a motivational and operational strategy. To quote the Rev. Sharpton, who spoke at the Sept. 20 rally in front of the LaSalle Parish Courthouse in Jena: "This is the beginning of the 21st century's civil-rights movement. In the 20th century, we had to fight for where we sat on the bus. Now, we've got to fight on how we sit in a courtroom." By the time of the rally, anything to be said by a defendant was being done in a forum arranged by the activists, and the defendants' families were being chauffeured to airports and flown to Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Baton Rouge. The victim, in a notable exception, granted an interview to Richard Barrett, the founder and leader of The Nationalist Movement, a white supremacist group. Barrett also is the editor of its publication, The Nationalist . The victim and his family say they did not know about Barrett's point of view and the organization he leads. Q: I notice you have archived every story you have published about this case online. Why did you do that, and how important has your online site been to your coverage? A: We have archived all of our coverage of the Jena Six on www.thetowntalk.com for one reason: It needs to be there. It also needs to be there for a while. No one will read every word, look at every picture, watch every video, listen to every audio clip or follow very link -- but they could, if they chose to do so. Right now, too many people believe that the story of the Jena Six is about race first and criminal behavior second. Could that prove to be true? Yes, it could. Has that been demonstrated? No, not at all. Indeed, the few people who have read the statements made by people who witnessed the assault have a very different take on this story. The Web site has been -- and continues to be -- fundamental and essential to our coverage. Our coverage plans start with the online pieces, and then we build to print. On our best days, one piece complements the other, and the whole package is coherent. The thing about online publishing is this: It's just the latest thing. Newspaper newsrooms have always been information centers that found ways to make intelligent use of any means at their disposal. Think about the paperboys (I used to be one, 100 years ago) who once stood on street corners and yelled out the headlines. That worked. Today the Internet works. Tomorrow? Who knows. The platform is important, but it will always be secondary to the quality of the information. Q. How has this story affected your staff? A. Some of us are tired -- physically and mentally. Some of us are invigorated and filled with a sense of purpose. The big story always takes its toll on any staff, and especially a small one. My experience supports that -- in Florida, when a phosphate freighter took out a 1,200-foot chunk of a bridge and 35 people fell to their deaths; in Kentucky, when 27 local kids and several chaperones on a church bus burned to death in a crash caused by a drunk; in Pennsylvania, when a college student sat down under a bush outside the student union building on a big campus and opened fire with a rifle, killing one student; in upstate New York, when the terrorist attacks against the United States became a local story in every newsroom in every community; in Louisiana, when first Katrina and then Rita shattered much of the state. Some of us, including the lead reporter on the story and the switchboard operator, also are dealing with threats from a couple of different camps. If you had to label them, you'd call them militant whites and militant blacks. Some of us also are trying to help our readers and the community at large understand why we must continue to report the story and why the story continues to make page one. Most of the callers, letter writers and e-mailers care about the people involved, and they say so, but they think we at the paper make matters worse by covering each and every turn of the screw. I understand their anxiety. Q. How has Jena changed since this story broke? A. I wish I knew the answer to that. I don't, but we will try to report it. We are fortunate to have an assistant managing editor in charge of local news whose family has deep roots in Jena. While growing up, he spent summers there with his grandparents, and his parents live there today, right on the street where about 20,000 marchers carried signs, sang songs and called out: "No justice, no peace." In fact, he coordinated our live coverage of the demonstration from his parents' house. That proved to be convenient and very valuable when the cell cloud over Jena maxed out. (Hard-wired Internet access is rare in Jena and elsewhere in rural America.) I will offer this anecdote, which relates to your important question: I have been visiting the Burger Barn (good burgers and good people) in Jena off and on since the story of the Jena Six started more than a year ago. A young woman who works there, who happens to be black, says she knows some of the defendants. She says the same thing today that she was saying a year ago. To paraphrase: This is about some guys who got into a fight and who have gotten into trouble before. No one in Jena is surprised by what happened. Likewise, she has said since the story became superheated, no one in Jena is surprised that "the media" have made things worse. I am not sure what to say or do about that last statement other then to share it with other journalists. We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links. Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends on the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected. http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=130598 (http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=130598) Copyright © 1995-2007 The Poynter Institute _uacct = "UA-2072784-1"; urchinTracker(); _userv=2; You have received this newsletter because our records indicate you selected it. 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