Slipping though the cracks

Amid the frenzy of last week’s daily news cycle, my fellow editors and I let slip through the cracks an article that lacked an important viewpoint on a particularly controversial topic. It was only a matter of minutes before an executive from our parent company, which had its own skin in the game, came calling. While their opposition dealt more with our right to run the article in general—a charge which we vehemently and rightly defended—the concern was warranted nonetheless.

How could we, a start-up news organization that has garnered considerable respect in our industry, run an incomplete article? The excuses, at that point, were moot. We screwed up, and we immediately updated the article once the necessary comment was obtained.

But our error did raise an important conversation on what we as a news organization stood for. Amid some constructive debate, our editorial director spoke up: “From day one,” he said, “I’ve told people we are an organization that promises two things above all others: integrity and fairness.”

And despite our momentary lapse, it’s something, we all agreed, that we worked hard to preserve: integrity in that our reports are accurate, adhere to basic journalistic principles and are never compromised by advertisers, and fairness in that we represent all sides of an issue or angle.

Those are two tenets that I’ve worked hard to preserve on an individual basis while working in the field. In doing so, I’m exercising another very important principle: hard work. It’s a unifying theme that ties both my professional and personal lives.

While sitting behind my editors desk, it’s hard work that pushes me to pursue all sides of a story (though as the above can attest, I’m not infallible in that aim), to push our news organization through evolving technological hurdles and to never have a second wasted. In my personal life, it’s hard work that helps me be the best spouse for my wife, to be a good son for my parents, and to be a reliable companion for my friends.
This principle isn’t driven by ambition—a mere mean’s to an end. Rather, it’s to constantly keep working to better myself.

I’m never going to be the perfect journalist, the one who never makes a mistake or errs. I don’t think any practicing journalist can boast those things. But by working at it, maybe my colleagues and I can inch a little bit closer to that aim—or at least be a bit more careful when sourcing particularly controversial articles in the future.