AFTER DEADLINE
Daily decisions encourage discussion

By Anne Harpham
Advertiser Reader Representative

There's nothing a journalist likes more than a good story, a story that gets at the truth and helps clarify an issue or controversy. But sometimes for good journalistic reasons, newspapers choose not to publish information they know.

It usually produces heated — and healthy — debate within a newsroom.

During closing arguments in Clyde Arakawa's manslaughter trial, defense attorney Michael

Ostendorp raised more than a few eyebrows when he suggested that the victim, Dana Ambrose, might have been under the influence of the drug Ecstasy at the time of the crash in which she was killed. Prosecutor Peter Carlisle did not object to Ostendorp's statement, so jurors were left to consider whether it was true and whether it was relevant to the case.

The next day, our reporter called the medical examiner's office and found that the autopsy found no drugs or alcohol in Ambrose's body. So why didn't we put that in the paper?

By then, the jurors had started their deliberations. Editors then were torn between the desire to set the record straight and the concern that while the jury was deliberating we should not inter-ject ourselves and report on information that was not in the testimony. Editor Saundra Keyes made the decision that we would report the autopsy results as soon as there was a verdict.

It was a judgment call and a tough one, Keyes said. And opinions were split in the newsroom, with some feeling we should have run with the story when we learned about the autopsy results.

• On Monday morning we surprised some of our readers with this headline on Page 1: Retirement fund in tailspin. Some readers disagreed, arguing that the losses sustained by the public employees' retirement fund, at a time when the stock market has been down, fall short of a "tailspin," especially because the fund has grown at 6.8 percent over the last five years. In retrospect, some editors agreed.

News editor Brad Lendon, however, believed the headline was right on. Lendon said the story clearly made the point that the fund isn't doing well and that its losses are significant.

There was much discussion about the appropriateness of "tailspin" among the editors who wrote the headlines on Sunday night, including deputy news editor Robb Todd. Todd said the consensus among editors was that the headline fit the story, which reported a $1.4 billion loss in value in 18 months.

Perhaps "slump" might have been a better word, he concedes.

The bottom line: In my view, the headline conveyed a degree of trouble that the story did not reflect.

• Decisions about how to play stories often bring about as much discussion as headlines.

Editors debated the story Friday on a Kailua teenager hospitalized after he ate petals from the flowers of the poisonous plant Angel's Trumpet. It was a busy news day with at least a half dozen local and national stories competing for Page 1 and some editors believed the poisoning story wasn't strong enough for the front page, especially because we had written a similar story last year.

Others argued it should be on Page 1 because it was a public service to warn parents. A few argued that giving the story such prominence would just encourage others to eat the flowers. In the end, the public service argument won out.