Read all about it (revisited)

I was interviewing Ann Ormond (prez of the local Chamber of Commerce) today, and before we got started on the interview, we were talking about the blog.

This blog. Which she says she reads, so I'd better mind my p's and q's (that's me talking, not her).

But it was not the substance of our conversation that got me thinking, it was how easy it was to write the subsequent story without expressing (I hope) therein any of my personal opinions.

It really is not difficult to be objective when writing a newsy story because if you just stick to the facts, there is no way it will spin away from you (unless the subject is doing the spinning, of course, which is a whole other cup of tea).

But what are the facts?

In my earlier post about the WPA and the stadium at Newburyport High School, I included a paragraph from a story I had written for the Current.

Doing a Google search today, I concluded that most of the background I used for the piece must have come from the website of the group trying to raise money to restore the stadium - or rebuild it, as the case may be.

There was a dearth of information on line about the stadium or the WPA. So now readers come along and sort of challenge what it says on the Restore our Stadium website. Not that they're against the restoration (or whatever), they just don't get why it's a war memorial stadium, when it was built in 1938.

I'm not going to debate the merits of the plan again, I just wonder if I should have trusted so much what it said on the website, as my source for background. Of course, I was not told to write a story debunking the whole project.

Actually, I'm not sure I was told anything. I think it was one of those cases where I said, "Here's a story," and the editor said, "Thanks!"

On the other hand, newspaper reporters are paid so little (especially around here, I think) that there is little to encourage them to scrounge around verifying facts ad infinitum. I once figured out that for a story with an average of 500 words, calculating the time it took me to interview persons or persons, do research, and write the story - it turned out I was making about $8 an hour.

Anyway, does this mean that these days, it's easier for people to get their own spin on things, because they said this or that with authority on their website? I'm not including blogs, because blogs are inherently slanted towards the writers' points of view.

Or does having something you said with authority appear on the Internet leave you wide open to questions about that authority? Macy Swain addresses this in a post on her blog, Night Blind.

She is quite surprised at some of the reaction to her piece about the newspaper industry that was published in The Christian Science Monitor. I must say, I was quite surprised that someone snarked about her writing that she and her husband read to each other from the newspaper!

What couple doesn't do that?

Again (as I'm so fond of saying lately), I don't know the answers to these questions. If people are going to rely on someone else to be their news feed, they need to find someone they can trust, at least most of the time.

But, as Ann kindly noted, we the people who live here and know the players involved in things, are at least fairly reliable. Even when we disagree ... now fancy that.

If you put all us news-type bloggers into one place, you'd get every angle - not only from us, but from our extremely astute readers.

If that's not the whole story, I don't know what is.