Rather than explain what a newspaper “ombudsman” generally is and how this space will differ from that in the months to come, why don’t I just get started, and we’ll find out together.
During the last few weeks of summer publishing, the Emerald ran an advertisement for Divas, a local adult club featuring erotic dancers. The ad featured a nearly naked woman wearing football pads and boxer shorts.
Some members of the community felt the ad was in bad taste, and they let us know about it. Here’s the instructive part: Becky Merchant, our advertising director, was responsive. She heard the complaints and let the advertiser know the concerns.
We are a community newspaper, and we do take into account the community’s standards as they are expressed to us. In this case, Merchant and the advertiser got together and decided to change the ad. It will no longer feature the image that some readers found offensive.
Now, on to the riots. First, I just want to re-clarify an error that caused some confusion. And I guess I should preface it with a little explanation of the Emerald.
While the Emerald is an independent newspaper, the newsroom is staffed entirely by students. Monday was our first issue with a whole new staff, and we are learning as we go.
Long story short, mistakes will happen as we learn our craft. We have a swift and certain correction policy, so let us know when we get something wrong.
Now, back to the confusion. During the layout process, a few paragraphs were accidentally cut out of our first article about the riots (“Partygoers turn violent near campus,” Sept. 30), and the result made it look like a Subway employee said something he didn’t. For the record, Brett Michel did not express any enthusiasm for the riots. He simply explained what he saw. The missing paragraphs had set up quotes obtained from a videotape of the event. The corrected story is on our Web site.

Ordinarily, the copy staff only cuts stories for space. The copy editors read all the stories and know what can be cut without causing confusion. In this case, the cut was just a mistake, and we ran a clarification in Tuesday’s paper explaining the situation.
Finally, I want to begin a discussion I expect will cause some disagreement. Our riot story on the Web featured extra photos of the event, and we included an editor’s note explaining that in all of the photos, the identifiable faces had been blurred.
Since then, I’ve heard from people who wondered why we blurred the faces. I’ve heard that it was censorship — although I disagree with using the word that way — or that we were hypocritical given our editorial stance against the rioters. The decision to blur was mine, although some staff members expressed their support.
My reasoning was this: I believe the Emerald represents the students. In the craziness of after-the-riot Saturday morning reporting, I didn’t want us to publish anything that could be used by the authorities to implicate students (or others) in actions that weren’t entirely clear or that those people may not really have been involved in.
On the other hand, I thought the photographs by Norman Mesman (who worked at the Emerald in 1994) were compelling and illustrative for people who weren’t at the scene Friday night. I don’t believe blurring the faces reduced that understanding significantly.
My judgment call, then, was that we should run the photos but blur the faces and say that we did so. Many newspapers in these situations choose instead to run photos where people are not identifiable, or (like The Register-Guard, who used the same photos we did) to run them without alteration.
I am positive that people in the community, and probably some journalism professors, will disagree with my decision. But I wanted to err on the side of student interests.
We are not an arm of law enforcement, and we don’t want to be seen that way — however tangentially — by students, who we hope will continue to talk to us candidly about large-scale events of this sort. We also withheld some identifying details from our story for the same reason. It is not yet clear who is responsible for what, and we didn’t think our job was to provide investigative assistance to the police.
The police took their own video and photographs of the event, and the editorial board and I both hope that they use those resources to identify and prosecute the people involved in the riots.