‘If you can’t be first, be better’

Sometimes folks seem to believe we journalists are supposed to be all-knowing, but unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), we aren’t.

Take for example, the recent situation at Aase Haugen here in Decorah.

The local senior care facility was cited by state inspectors following a resident’s death, and journalist Clark Kauffman with the Iowa Capital Dispatch published a story on the citation last week. Kauffman’s story was posted literally minutes before I put down my red pen and gave the green-light for most of the pages in last week’s edition of the Decorah Leader to be sent to press. However, by the next morning, multiple people were calling and emailing our office, asking why we hadn’t reported the citation like Kauffman had. 

Now, dear reader, I love the Iowa Capital Dispatch. They’re a great resource for small newsrooms in need of reporting on broader state issues, and I’ve seen fit to reprint quite a bit of their reporting over the years. But needless to say, I wasn’t browsing their latest headlines during the weekly scramble to get the Leader to press. However, as you’ll see if you look at this week’s front page, we not only published Kauffman’s work in the next available edition, but we put in some extra work and added other quotes and information local readers might find relevant. 

Still, as we were working on that, some folks expressed their dismay that my staff and I aren’t regularly sifting through hundreds upon hundreds of state records each day in hopes of finding something connected to our community — we’d love to of course, but we can’t hope to do so and still maintain the necessary focus on timely and informative local news, though obviously they will overlap from time to time. One caller even went so far as to say our alleged lack of coverage on the state’s citations was all because we are — in her words — “a (insert expletive) Republican paper.” 

I’ll be frank, that one was upsetting — but at the same time, I’d love for her claim to reach the ears of certain GOP members elsewhere in Iowa who, for the last eight years or so, labeled me a bleeding-heart liberal snowflake (I guess those two viewpoints must mean the middle-ground approach I strive for is indeed working).

Journalism isn’t an easy job, and doing something right doesn’t always mean doing something right away. That’s something my past editor – and dare I say mentor – Russ Mitchell taught me early on in my career. 

“If you can’t be first, be better,” he’d say (he probably still does). 

What I took that to mean was this — even if someone beats you to the punch and scoops you on a story about your own community, you can always get out there and ask more questions, you can always get more information, you can always take the time and put in the work to get the reader an even better picture of what’s going on. 

So that’s what we did when we heard about Aase Haugen.

Some might disagree with my call (and that’s fine) but I decided I couldn’t, in good conscience as an editor, simply reprint the Iowa Capital Dispatch’s story without at least offering the staff at Aase Haugen a chance to comment. The home is, after all, only about three-quarters-of-a-mile from the newspaper office. And honestly, I expected they’d turn me down when I walked through their doors last Wednesday, but by the next afternoon (that’s less than 48 hours after Kauffman’s story was published, for those keeping score at home) the staff there had made some time to talk with me. 

As I mentioned, you can read what they had to say elsewhere in this very edition, and dare I say no other news organization can say the same. 

Now, to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with what the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported. Even Aase Haugen’s staff said the facts in that piece were accurate. It’s just that sometimes being the local newspaper comes with additional responsibilities, and in this instance I felt it was our responsibility to reach out for added context on something that had caused concern among friends and neighbors.

The trade off is that dong so takes time, so time is what we gave this story.

We didn’t wait to publish the story out of some kind of alleged ineptitude. We didn’t wait to publish the story because we don’t care – quite the opposite – and waiting to publish it certainly wasn’t a sign we were planning to ignore the story in some show of political allegiance.

It was because we knew there was more information to be had. We knew that our readers would benefit form more information, and we knew we could get it for you, dear reader. 

We did it because we know we won’t always be first, but we can always be better.

Agree with Seth? Think he’s got it completely backwards or he’s missed the point entirely? Let your voice be heard. Letters to the editor may be emailed to editor@decorahleader.com or dropped off at 110 Washington St. Suite 4 in Decorah.