Last week, I traded some emails with Ashley Robertson, The Cavalier Daily’s sports editor. I had written a critique of a pair of sports section columns that discussed Mike London’s performance as the University’s football coach (“Playing fair,” Nov. 27). Robertson’s column (“I believe in Coach London,” Nov. 24), while pointing out what she sees as the coach’s shortcomings, was, as the headline suggests, a defense of London. A column by the Sports senior associate editor Fritz Metzinger (“An avoidable collapse,” Nov. 26) was not so supportive. My complaint was this: “The man at their collective focal point wasn’t there. There was no quote from London about late game time management or any other problem the writers found with this season’s football team.”
Robertson eventually agreed that the quotes the coach offered in his defense — weak though they may be — should have been in there somewhere. I allowed that, while I thought my column made it clear her column was a defense of the coach, perhaps I could have made that clearer.
There are still some things that Robertson and I perhaps haven’t come together on. For instance, Robertson wrote in an email, “We also would have loved to write a follow-up article on the game, including quotes from London, but unfortunately London was not available to the media this week and Virginia media relations does not make him available to us (or most papers) on a one-on-one basis.”
My response was, “Journalists don’t wait for people to be made available. They contact people on their own. If those people don’t respond, journalists put that in the paper.”
The paper’s obligation is to give people a chance to speak. If they pass up that chance, well, that’s not the paper’s fault. The columns could have used the quotes London offered at the post-game press conference and they could have included a line that said London declined to respond to the writers’ questions — if the writers had asked the questions. Maybe it’s next to unthinkable that London would respond to the University’s student-run newspaper. But it’s certain he won’t respond if he’s not asked.
Some glitch in the credentials request process kept The Cavalier Daily out of the Lane Stadium press box, so Metzinger wrote a game story — Robertson called it a brief — and Robertson wrote her column after watching the game on television. It was clear that Robertson did that because she wrote about yelling at the TV. It wasn’t clear to me that’s what Metzinger was doing. When Cavalier Daily staffers report on an event they weren’t at, it generally says the report was compiled by someone. That apparently happened in print, but not online, so online readers might think Metzinger was at the game. It was a mistake. Mistakes happen. But there is apparently another rule about these things. Cavalier Daily writers don’t use quotes, such as those available through transcripts of post-game press conferences, for fear they will confuse readers. If they have the quote, they must have been at the game, right? I disagree with that policy. If the quotes are available, if the stranded staffer can hear the post-game talk by radio or by television, there’s nothing wrong with using those quotes, as long as it’s clear how the writer obtained them. The goal is to put together the best report or column possible. That should mean using whatever tools are available to accomplish that.
Because of whatever glitch that kept the sports staff away from Blacksburg, they had to scramble to provide some kind of coverage. They did a pretty good job. The fact that I think they could have done better in one aspect doesn’t diminish that. It’s clear that Robertson cares about her section and the work it turns out. It’s easy, when the crisis is passed and the stories and columns have been published, to find a thing or two that could have been done better. Sometimes those flaws or the ways around them aren’t so easy to see when the crisis-fighting frenzy is going on. The most important thing, so long as everyone survives and no one gets libeled, is to learn from the experience — to figure out how to deal with the crisis better next time and to devise ways to push the next time as far into the future as possible.
I think it’s very unlikely the credentials snafu will be repeated. I think the shortcoming I saw in the columns is less likely to happen in the future. I’m not sure Robertson agrees with my opinion about using quotes from an event the staff didn’t cover in person, but that’s the smallest of those three issues. It is clear that Robertson was polite enough to avoid pointing out that I did to her and Metzinger something similar to what I accused them of doing to London. I shouldn’t have done that.
Tim Thornton is the ombudsman for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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