Editor’s Note
Back in the old days — that’s less than a decade and before there were such things as blogs and interactive conversations with readers — editors used to respond to their newspaper readers with an “editor’s note.” Sometimes it clarified a point made in a letter to the editor. Sometimes it offered a correction. Sometimes it was just a simple explanation. An editor’s note was a handful of sentences; maybe a four or five paragraphs. It was always a personal link between the editor and the reader. Only difference between it and today’s blog is the immediacy and the platform. Welcome to Editor’s Note.

Archive for June 15th, 2009

April’s Mom: One more wool-over-your-eyes blogger

Add comment June 15th, 2009

A decade or so ago a group of Rockford Register Star editorial page readers told me during an advisory board meeting: The local byline counts. If we know the person who wrote the story, they said, then we trust what was published — or at least we know whom we can call if we don’t believe it or understand it.

That was BITOOL (before Internet took over our lives). In the days BITOOL, when it was reasonably easy to attach a human being to the byline on a story, one could pretty much trust that what the eyes were reading was actually true. There were — with the occasional exception of someone gone over the deep end — clear lines between fiction and non-fiction. Newspapers are, by definition, non-fiction, so what’s in them is real.

Newspaper journalists put their names on their stories. The newspaper puts its name on their stories. We generally get it right. And, for sure, we get it a lot more right than the anonymous bloggers, who have become the Internet devil’s spawn.

Like good ol’ April’s Mom, the Chicago woman who for two months paraded as fact a pregnancy that was wholly fiction. She got caught last week and admitted she’d made the whole thing up, but not before she’d hoodwinked thousands of heart-hurting people whom she’d ask to pray for her and her unborn — and terminally ill — baby.   (If for some reason you missed the whole thing, click here.)

How could they have known it was a hoax? Well, start with this: Anything too good (sad, bad, smart, great, amazing, horrible, etc.) probably isn’t all that true. Truth almost always lies somewhere in the gray middle. Then ask this: Why do you trust the source of this information? Do you know the person behind the post or byline? Do you know the organization that pays that post or byline?

And, then this: Can you pull into the visitor’s lot at the News Tower and ask to see the person behind the byline? You might have your quibbles with what my staff and I do all day, but you know where to find us.