Going public

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

By Matthew Irwin

My publisher says that I sometimes use this column for “liberal rants.” I’m not sure how she confuses the truth for a rant, but anyway . . .

In JH Weekly’s ongoing attempt to create dialogue, take the argh out of argument and shed some levity on the big things in our little town, we’ve hired a public editor, of sorts.

As Mike Bressler points out in his inaugural column as public editor, a person of his typical stature at a newspaper holds the measuring stick of journalistic principles over the bloody knuckles of reporters.

But as I explained to Mike, JH Weekly doesn’t exactly hold the same standards as The New York Times, which expects its freelancers to stay in line even when they are writing for other publications.

The Times is also very aware of conflicts of interest, nepotism, back-scratching and blatant boosterism, which, of course, so are we. However, a reporter can hardly finish a sentence in this town without it crossing someone they know, “crossing” being a double entendre for “intersect” and “upset.”

So what do we do? We call attention to it. This might be our tagline, “JH Weekly: Calling attention to it since 2002.” “It” includes a lot of things, including objectivity, our position being that it is an empty banner of days gone by. We want to take sides, but we want our sides to be informed by our reporting, not the other way around. We also think our community could benefit from taking itself less seriously.
Enter: the public editor, version JHW.

The tricky thing about bringing on Mike in this role is that we want to provide him direction on the kinds of things he should be looking out for without specifying what he should target. Sure, we might regret it (The public editor of Seattle’s The Stranger seems to hate his paper.), but after taking a few soft jabs at the News&Guide and JH Underground recently, we thought it only fair to have someone look at ourselves, as well.

Think of Mike as a reader’s advocate - your advocate. He’s under strict instructions to not take any more instructions from us, but he’ll take your questions, comments and threats directly to us, get some answers, then respond in his column the following issue.

Email Mike Bressler at publiceditor@planetjh.com. His address will be printed at the bottom of his column every week, as well.

Now, on to conservatives: man, they really just burn my boat . . . JHW
PERMALINK:
Going public | Planet JH News Article: Editorial

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