It may be difficult to remember in this era of blogs and talk radio and cable “news” networks filled with commentators, but there is a difference between fact and opinion. In newspapers, there is a difference between news articles and editorials. And there are differences among editorials, columns and letters to the editor.
A letter to the editor is a comment by someone not on the newspaper staff. A column can be written by someone on staff or off, but it represents the opinion of the writer. An editorial represents the opinion of the newspaper.
Newspaper staffs don’t vote on what each editorial will say. Generally, a small group, often called the editorial board, makes the decisions and writes the editorials. In theory — and mostly in fact — news and editorial staffs are completely separate. Reporters don’t suggest or write editorials. Editorial writers don’t suggest news stories or otherwise influence news decisions.
Higher up the chain of command, things get murkier. Someone inevitably sits on top of the pyramid, responsible for both editorial and news departments — and often the production, distribution, and advertising departments, too.
For The Cavalier Daily, like any newspaper with a relatively small staff, keeping news and opinion separate is particularly challenging. The paper manages to keep the producers and editors of news and opinion segregated, but Andrew Baker, the paper’s editor-in-chief, is responsible for everything that goes in The Cavalier Daily.
“Really,” he wrote in a recent e-mail, “the only place where any of the content converges is with me — the last step in the editing process.”
When there’s a particularly big or thorny issue with something that’s about to be or has been in the paper — comics spring to mind for some reason — the whole Managing Board, a collection of the paper’s top leaders, is often called on to discuss and decide what to do. Baker explains that as an attempt to get counsel and guidance from the most senior, most experienced hands in the shop.
At The Cavalier Daily, the Managing Board reviews all editorials, so the convergence of news and opinion Baker described involves more than him in some sense. But that’s the case anywhere. Someone — a publisher, an editor, an editorial board — has to decide what a publication will speak for and against. And at some point on the organizational chart, the news and opinion lines intersect.
Before this semester, the executive editor researched and wrote all the paper’s editorials. Now, teams of three or four people work together on three editorials each week. Executive Editor Annette Robertson writes the other two.
Robertson’s goal is to have the teams — collectively called the editorial board — write all the editorials. She and Baker would weigh in with each team. When that system is in place, editorials will represent the opinion of the Editorial Board, not the Managing Board.
As Robertson says, the Editorial Board will not only remove the managing editor — who is directly responsible for the news sections — from the editorial process, it will generate more and better ideas and editorials than one person working on her own. So it’s an improvement on at least two fronts.
There are some other interesting crossover responsibilities at The Cavalier Daily.
The operations manager oversees the web site, archiving, information technology, production, photography and graphics.
Those first four make sense to me as a package, but photography and graphics don’t seem to fit. Ideally, they would fall under an editor who could focus on coordinating them with the words that go in the paper, rather than a manager who would seem to have a full plate making sure the paper gets out in its paper and electronic forms.
Robertson is concerned because the graphic artists who produce comics and editorial cartoons also craft graphics to accompany news stories. Unable to fill two graphic staffs, she intends to make it clearer to readers that these folks do double duty.
Making it more transparent is a good idea, but editors should be capable of making sure bias doesn’t creep into a pie chart or illustration.
I fret about some things that don’t bother The Cavalier Daily’s leadership. They worry about things that don’t bother me much at all. And I think that’s okay.
The important thing is that the people in charge are aware of the perils of conflating news and opinion. They’re thinking about and discussing ways to avoid those perils.
Regardless of how good or bad the system may be, it’s the integrity of the people running it that matters most.
Tim Thornton is The Cavalier Daily’s ombudsman. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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