When News Tribune reporters were ferreting out the troubled history of Tacoma Police Chief David Brame several years ago, readers didn’t get just the news stories.
They were also told where the facts came from and how those facts were reported. Thanks to today’s information technology, immense quantities of source data can be posted online. In the Brame case, thousands of pages of investigative reports from the Washington State Patrol were made available to our audience on www.thenewstribune.com, our Web site.
Similarly, The News Tribune’s major in-depth articles and investigative series typically come with short background primers on whom the reporters talked to and what documents they relied on. Readers can then independently evaluate our journalists’ methods and sources.
Our goal is to make our operations as open and transparent as possible. This has long been an important value at The News Tribune; we emphasize it today as part of our year-long commemoration of the newspaper’s 125th anniversary.
Beyond telling our audience where our stories come from, we push to keep ourselves open in many other ways.
When doing an investigative piece that focuses on an individual, for example, we invite the subject to read the story – prior to publication – to let him or her challenge the reporting. We do not practice ambush journalism. But we don’t let subjects rewrite the story. We make the ultimate decisions on content.
Members of the public have a standing invitation to observe The News Tribune’s daily news meetings at 9:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. Visitors can see exactly how our editors and writers make decisions about what stories to run the next day and where in the newspaper to run them.
Likewise, the editorial board’s daily 9 a.m. meeting – in which the opinions published on this page are planned – is open to visitors.
Those who follow the Web site gain access to yet more information. Nearly 30 blogs offer tidbits and outtakes that didn’t make it into the print edition. In our TNT Photojournalism blog, for example, The News Tribune’s photographers explain how they approach their art and post photos that weren’t printed.
Inside the Newsroom is a blog that details how news decisions are made and critiques previous decisions. The Inside the Editorial Page blog includes plans for the opinion pages as well as observations of opinion writers. A profile of The News Tribune’s editorial board can be found elsewhere on the Web site’s opinion section.
Our goal of openness isn’t confined to the practice of journalism. Some other publications are vague about the exposure they offer advertisers; our advertisers get rigorously audited circulation numbers. The distribution of advertising inserts are likewise audited to ensure that they go to the areas we promised they’d go to. Our targeting of inserts has been certified as more than 99 percent accurate.
The News Tribune also publishes a “rate card” that guarantees standard prices to all comers for every ad available. We don’t play favorites with our advertisers; everyone has access to the same deal.
Openness in both journalism and business is a matter of intellectual honesty and self-accountability. We believe it reinforces our credibility, which – as a news organization – is the chief thing we sell. We demand that governments answer to the public; we want to do the same for our audience and our customers.
COMING OCT. 5: Trust and integrity
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