AFTER DEADLINE
Columnists don't stick to facts — they go beyond them

By Anne Harpham

From their very first newswriting classes, journalism students are taught not to inject their own points of view into news stories.

News stories must be accurate and impartial.

They focus on immediate issues or events.

And they try to connect events.

Columnists have a different function, even when their columns appear on news pages. They share many parallels with news reporters. They must do much of the same legwork, and be accurate and diligent in getting the facts.

But columnists should, and do, write with a point of view. And they go beyond the breaking news.

Although their work is often printed on news pages, they are asked to have a distinctive style and a strong voice.

It's a distinction that sometimes troubles readers.

Columnists' work is always clearly identified and typically runs in the same place on specific days of the week. Columns are set apart as a place where the writer is given more freedom of expression.

Something I read in a Poynter Institute report "Believing the News" struck me as a good description of one distinction between news writers and columnists.

In his introduction to the report, Don Fry, who is affiliated with Poynter, was discussing the sometimes wide disconnect between the press and the public.

He observed: "The very processes of reporting news distort reality as ordinary human beings experience it."

He went on to observe that life, for most people, is a flow of events that are not necessarily causally connected.

The press, however, sees the world as stories, with beginnings and ends. So the reader is left thinking there's more to a story.

That "more to the story" is where columnists step in.

At The Advertiser, columnists are encouraged to develop a strong and unique voice.

Bob Krauss, who has written a column about life in Hawai'i for most of his 50-plus years at The Advertiser, has an instantly recognizable name. We hear from readers if his column doesn't appear and we forget to mention he is on vacation.

Ferd Lewis shares his expertise and point of view several times a week on events, controversies and issues in the sporting world.

Several writers contribute to the About Men and About Women columns in Island Life, in which they look at life from their own perspectives.

Advertiser columnist Lee Cataluna, whose work appears on the front of the Hawai'i section three times a week, has a unique voice and view that has often ruffled feathers. Cataluna cites the adage that newspapers should "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

"Something I read once always sticks in my mind — that columnists should never pick on anyone smaller than they are," says Cataluna.

"For me, that means taking on people, institutions, social trends that are bigger than the newspaper. If a columnist writes about an individual, a private citizen, it should be only to tell the story of how that person triumphed over adversity or set a good example for the rest of us."

As the new Krispy Kreme store geared up for its much-ballyhooed opening on Maui, many O'ahu residents remembered eating a similar doughnut years ago from a store in the Aiea Shopping Center. Several called to dispute claims that the Kahului Krispy Kreme would be Hawai'i's first.

Editors did some checking. Krispy Kreme's Winston-Salem, N.C., headquarters said there had never been a Krispy Kreme in Hawai'i.

A check of our own clipping files showed no mention of a Krispy Kreme in 'Aiea.

It turned out, after calling the Aiea Shopping Center, that the the store had spelled its name with a C, not a K.

In a letter to the editor published Thursday, the writer remembered the doughnuts the same way many callers did. However similar the doughnuts seemed to many of our readers, it wasn't the same Krispy Kreme. We let the letter writer down by publishing the letter even though editors knew the previous store was not connected with the new Krispy Kreme on Maui.