Wall
Street Journal closes Boston bureau, nine laid off
The
Wall Street Journal is closing its Boston bureau Dec. 31, a decision
affected by economic conditions.
Nine of the Journal’s
12 reporters and editors in the downtown Boston bureau will be laid
off, The Boston Globe reported. Those laid off will be able to apply
for other openings at the Journal, the Journal’s managing editor,
Robert Thompson, said in an Oct. 29 memo to employees.
The Boston bureau’s
investigative team of two employees will remain Boston-based, The
Boston Globe reported Oct. 29.
The Journal’s education
team, based in New York City, will be enhanced to be able to provide better coverage of Boston-area colleges, The New York Times reported.
Boston’s mutual fund businesses will be covered by the Journal’s
Money and Investing team.
The Journal’s
Boston bureau has won two Pulitzer Prizes in the past five years.
Vt.’s News and Citizen reporter covers friend’s
assault case
The News and Citizen of
Morrisville, Vt., wrote in an Oct. 15 editorial that one of its reporters,
Mickey Smith, is a friend and former roommate of a sexual-assault
suspect whose case Smith had been covering for the News and Citizen
since the suspect’s arrest Sept. 14, according to The Stowe
(Vt.) Reporter.
Smith
rented an apartment from January 2006 to July 2007 with Shaun Bryer,
28, who faces 17 felony charges, including 10 counts of aggravated
assault on a minor under age 16, according to the Reporter.
According to the Reporter,
Smith wrote in a News and Citizen editorial: “During that
time and since then, I considered us friends and we did the type of
things friends would do … socializing, helping each other out
around our respective homes, going out to dinner, and the like. I
can count on one hand the times I saw Shaun with the original two
victims in this case. In none of those situations did I see anything
I would have considered strange or troubling.”
Smith
told the Reporter Oct. 22 that when Bryer’s arrest was made
public, the News and Citizen editorial staff, made up of Smith, reporter
Amy Kolb-Noyes and J.B. McKinley, the paper’s editor, collectively
decided that Smith would write stories on criminal elements and court
proceedings about the case and Kolb-Noyes would handle public reaction
stories. McKinley told the Reporter that he knew of Smith’s
friendship with Bryer since the case against him began, but ultimately
the News and Citizen staff decided against reporting the information
sooner.
Smith told the
Reporter: “I guess it wasn’t thought of as being an important
piece of news.”
In an e-mail to
the Bulletin, McKinley wrote, “Mr. Smith has never been investigated
nor even questioned by police regarding his relationship as a co-renter
(with a third 
man)
with Mr. Bryer several years ago. This despite the fact that Mr. Smith
is our police beat reporter and visits with local police every week.
Despite this truth, I decided to restrict Mr. Smith to writing only
the parts of the Bryer stories that amounted to rewrites of court
documents.
“We are
ignoring the self-serving accusations of ethics ‘violations,’
as we published accurate, unbiased stories about Mr. Bryer’s
case that have remained uncriticized on their merits. Our ethics were
sufficient to protect the public’s interest. They are my responsibility
as editor and I stand by my decisions.”
Walter Robinson, a Northeastern
University journalism professor who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for
his work on Boston Globe coverage of sexual abuse of children by Roman
Catholic priests, told the Reporter: “The conflict
is so obvious here that … disclosure alongside the first story
would have been insufficient. On a matter of such importance
and urgency to the community — the safety of children from predatory
adults — Mr. Smith should not have been allowed anywhere near
the story.”
Traci Griffith,
an ethics and media law professor at St. Michael’s College of
Colchester, Vt., told the Reporter: “There is already a perception
that the news media has a bias one way or the other and we certainly
don’t want to feed into that. Being transparent is the best
way to go. You have to give the readers all the information that’s
out there, and this was a big chunk of information that was left out.”
Maine
newspaper carrier hospitalized by attack
Joseph Paul Yager, a 60-year-old newspaper
carrier for the Kennebec Journal of Augusta, Maine, was hospitalized at Maine Medical Center in Portland after a brutal
assault. The assault occurred Oct. 20 as he delivered the Journal,
according to a Journal report.
Rollie Pelkey, a colleague
of Yager, discovered Yager at 2 a.m. lying on a road, disoriented,
and Pelkey immediately called for help.
Yager later recalled more
details of what happened in the time leading to Pelkey’s discovering
him lying on the road. Yager provided a description of a person and
vehicle he encountered in a confrontation immediately before the incident.
The Journal reported that
Yager’s daughter, Lisa Spencer, and her family were shaken by
the attack on her father. According to Spencer, Yager’s assault
injuries are so severe that he will eat through a straw for at least
a month, and for the next few months any sudden movement, like a sneeze
or cough, might leave him vulnerable to additional injury to his eye
socket, shattered in the assault.
Kennebec County
Sheriff Randall Liberty was investigating the incident.
Mass.
fire marshal extinguishes Globe’s fiery pumpkin head
An Oct. 19 report by Boston
radio station WBZ-AM said the Massachusetts fire marshal complained
recently to The Boston Globe about the Globe’s Halloween pumpkin
design suggestions.
The design called for a
pumpkin with a three-foot-high flame.
Bob Powers, a spokesman
for the Globe, told WBZ that although the design called for a flaming
pumpkin head, the Globe had warned that it should only be attempted
outdoors, away from flammable materials, and with a fire extinguisher
handy.
After the fire
marshal communicated his concern, the Globe removed the pumpkin design
from its online edition, Boston.com, to the fire marshal’s satisfaction.
N.H.
college paper’s sports editor let go for plagiarism
Sean Berry, sports editor
for the Keene (N.H.) Equinox, Keene State College’s student
newspaper, was dismissed for plagiarism Oct. 22, according to the
Equinox.
The Equinox reported that
Berry, a Keene State student, violated the paper’s plagiarism
policy in three instances, in pieces published between Sept. 24 and
Oct. 15 in which Berry lifted content from the work of Matthew Berry
on ESPN.com.
Content written by Sean
Berry has been removed from the Equinox’s Web site, and the
paper has updated its policy so that future content will be cross-checked
with a plagiarism search engine to ensure its integrity, according
to the Oct. 22 Equinox.
Berry issued an apology
on the Equinox’s Web site Oct. 22.
The items above were written, at least in part, from published reports
by Cecilia Akuffo and Bret Silverberg, graduate students at the Northeastern
University School of Journalism and members of the Bulletin staff.
