Media: The Whole Story?
by Tim Post
April 2000
Big crime, small town. According to our romantic image of life on Main Street,
the two aren't supposed to go together. In fact, when a sensational crime occurs
in a small town, the reporters who know that community the best can face
enormous pressure covering the news. Small-town journalists wrestle with how to
report news that people don't want to hear.
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Clif Cline is news director for Long Prairie's KEYL AM. Cline is the only person on the station's news staff.
Photo: Tim Post
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SMALL-TOWN NEWS
is usually pretty sleepy. On the front page of the newspaper, a
picture of someone receiving a check, maybe the agenda for an upcoming public
meeting. And on some days, the newscast on the radio is a little thin too. It's a
challenge for the staff at KEYL-AM in Long Prairie; to offer compelling local
news on a daily basis.
Clif Cline is news director, and he's in charge of the station's
operations and production. When big
news breaks in this town of about 3,000, Cline is on his own, and
confesses there's not much time to devote to covering the story.
There are other challenges - pressure from city leaders and community members
that comes in the form of polite suggestions that not all the news is worth
reporting. It's not that people want their news censored, they just don't want
to know all the bad news. Cline once reported on an incident about a Long
Prairie man who held his girlfriend at gunpoint and then threatened to kill
himself.
"A week or two after that news story, he committed suicide," Cline says. "He went
through with it, and I had a person from the community say, 'It was that news
story that You did that pushed him over the edge.'"
Cline says that sort of talk has made him think about how the news he reports,
affects the town. He wants to balance his job with the rest
of his life in a way that lets him fit in.
Even in small towns, big news can happen. Long Prairie has been home to a
recent rash of high-profile crimes. In February, Connie Sarff was kidnapped by
her estranged husband. She was found alive a few weeks later on the U.S. - Mexico
border. And last October, Lisa Patchen - a young mother in Long Prairie - drove her
car into an area lake; killing one of her daughters and seriously injuring
another.
The Twin Cities media swamped Long Prairie and brought statewide
attention to the community.
The town's newspaper, The Long Prairie Leader, carried both stories. The stories contained
the basics - who, what, where, when and how; not much about the "why."
"My personal mission is to try not to ever hurt anybody and to validate the
lives of the people that live here," says the Long Prairie Leader's editor and reporter, Sue Farmer. "I'm really a good news kind of person, so when bad things happens, it's hard. You just do your job."
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"Is it easy? No. Will we get nailed on it? Yes. Sometimes we are going
to get fired for it. The alternative is something that we would rather not
be dealing with, which is shoddy journalism, shoddy information that is put
out to people out there."
- Bill Babcock
University of Minnesota journalism professor
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Farmer says she will cover that bad news, but won't report everything,
especially if it might cause problems in the community.
"People in small towns are very open when they talk to me. They may
tell me things that people don't need to know; maybe things that happened in
their life. Maybe someone would say something incredibly
dumb, that would cause problems. I just don't put that in."
Leaving information out of news reports to protect residents from embarrassment
is a bad idea, according to Bill Babcock, journalism professor at the
University of Minnesota.
"It is very easy not to report on some of those issues, but on the other
hand it is more important to report on those issues, because if you don't. no one
probably will," says Babcock.
The weekly newspaper and the AM radio station may be the only news sources in a
rural town. Babcock says even though it might seem like a tough assignment,
small-town newspeople need to push the envelope.
"Is it easy? No. Will we get nailed on it? Yes. Sometimes we are going
to get fired for it. The alternative is something that we would rather not
be dealing with, which is shoddy journalism, shoddy information that is put
out to people."
Publisher Terry McCoullough is the third generation of his
family to put out the Brainerd Daily Dispatch. McCoullough knows the
challenges of practicing journalism in a smaller community. He's seen the angry
looks shot his way after a controversial story and has spent time explaining to
community members why the story needed to run.
"I think sometimes the pressure may be greater where we know many of the
people," he admits. "Sometimes the pressure is greater for us to hide some of the facts, or
not talk about something. It's often too easy to bend to those pressures.
Sometimes you'd like to bend to them - but in the long run, you're better off not
doing that."
Yielding to the pressure, according to McCoullough,
lowers the community's trust in the local media, and doesn't give the public all
the information. McCoullough counters that local reporters have a unique
opportunity to cover crime stories better than the bigger out-of-town news
operation.
They can use their contacts and sources to provide a more-detailed
and even-balanced report. McCoullough
says small-town editors, publishers and reporters need to stick to their guns.
"You are better off to set your standards early," he says, "let people know what they
are, and stick to them. You have a marvelous opportunity to say, 'This is who I
am, this is how I'm going to run the newspaper.' I think if you talk to people
and explain to them in detail that the most complete news report possible is
best for the community, it'll work. It's one of those things that is very hard to
go back and change later if you've strayed from those principles."
News Director Clif Cline at KEYL-AM in Long Prairie says if a small town
reporter decided to tackle the untouchable topics in his town, they would likely
be shunned and probably lose a lot of advertising revenue.
Reporting about crime or any news in Minnesota's small cities and towns requires
that journalists sometimes write about people they know. It makes the job
tougher; but according to some, the end result is more rewarding.
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