hawkins

Headline Problem?

Overt Racism?

I received an e-mail yesterday from a “proud graduate of Burke High School” taking us to task for our headline in last Saturday’s paper that read: “Burke grad accused of killing family.” He pointed out, rightfully, that the alleged Georgia killer had graduated ten years ago and said we chose the headline “to show our school in a negative light.” In so doing, we committed what he called “an overt act of racism.”

What really happened here is that the headline writer, trying to find a local hook to the story, chose to pull from the article the fact that the accused was a former Burke football player. The truth is, if the accused had been a Wando High School graduate, that editor would have written a headline that read: “Wando grad accused of killing family.”

But does that resolve us from criticism that we should be more sensitive to concerns about how we depict an African-American institution in our community? No it doesn’t.

The lesson in this is that we can be accurate, but still open to criticism about our motives.

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Future Of Print

Devoured by the Web?

One of the favorite guessing games in newspaper offices involves how long it will take for print to be consumed by the Web in this age of the Internet.

To that end I was interested in a recent Christian Science Monitor article spun off the annual whining session of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

The author, John Hughes, former editor of the Monitor and a past president of ASNE, came to the defense of our print futures at a time when some newspapers are struggling to keep their readers and high profit margins.

It is also a time when newspapers are taking advantage of the Web to grow new readers and advertisers, which is certainly the case at The Post and Courier.

Most interesting to me are figures he gleaned from a report called Project for Excellence in Journalism that concludes that even if newspaper Web sites continue to grow revenues at the current rate of 33 percent a year, and print lags at 3 percent, those Web sites would not reach the revenue levels of print until 2017!

“All of this suggests, he concludes, “that the newspaper is far from an endangered species.”

It also suggests I’ll make it to retirement! 

 

OPEN MEETINGS

College President Search

The search for a new president of the College of Charleston will be a much more open process, following a meeting yesterday at The Post and Courier. Our reporter, Diane Knich, her editors, and the attorney for the South Carolina Press Association, worked out an agreement with college officials to adhere to the state’s Freedom of Information Act http://www.scpress.org/foia/foialaw.html as they continue the process of selecting a new president. Diane will have a story on the meeting and the outcome in tomorrow’s newspaper.