We buckled to pressure on Sheryl Crow event

By Anne Harpham

On Sept. 12, we incorrectly identified the sponsor of a private concert by Sheryl Crow at the JW Marriott Ihilani Resort & Spa at Ko Olina.

AstraZeneca, a Delaware-based pharmaceutical company, paid for the concert as part of a sales meeting held in Honolulu. An estimated 5,000 people attended the private concert, which was one of the biggest corporate events held on O'ahu this year.

Trouble was, we reported that Centocor, a different pharmaceutical company, paid for the event.

How did we get it wrong?

Editors assigned a story about the event because there was a lot of interest in it, even though the concert was private. Sheryl Crow is a big name and people living at Ko Olina had watched for several days as hundreds of workers built a huge set, and landscaping was installed near the resort.

On the night of the concert, a reporter and a photographer went to Ko Olina to get as close as they could to the action and report on what they saw. Everyone the reporter talked to at the event, including those connected with the concert setup and Ko Olina and convention participants, refused to say who was sponsoring the concert, except that it was a pharmaceutical company.

The reporter, writing on a tight deadline, filed the story without information on who was holding the event. An editor correctly insisted we find out who was paying for the concert. That's where things started to go wrong.

A staff member who lives at Ko Olina, a veteran journalist known for his attention to detail, passed on the fact that he had seen the name "Centicor" on the badge of someone setting up the concert earlier in the week. A check on the Internet came up with references to a pharmaceutical company with that name, although it later turned out that those references apparently were misspelled references to Centocor.

Scraps of circumstantial information, unhelpful sources, some bad assumptions and the pressure of deadline added up to the wrong answer.

Those involved in the story got together last week, talked about how the reporting and editing process broke down, and agreed it was an embarrassing mistake — but one we can all learn from.

Anne Harpham is The Advertiser's reader representative. Reach her at aharpham@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8033.