How Newsrooms Should Cover Themselves

Looking beyond a mess at the Washington Post to more general rules

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

One of the hardest questions editors can face is how to cover their own newsrooms, or their parent companies, when they find themselves in the news. The Washington Post, which can’t seem to get out of its own way these days, even as its owner debases it and himself before Trump, recently took an extreme view on this issue, and it provides what I think is a good jumping-off point to look at the question more broadly.

The Post’s latest mess

Let’s start with the background: As you probably know, the Post’s longtime cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned earlier this month after the paper’s opinion editor refused to publish a cartoon of hers that charted one of those episodes of Jeff Bezos’s debasement. (It came before Amazon ponied up $40 million (!) for a movie about the wonders of Melania Trump, which doesn’t involve the Post, but does seem a new low.) The opinion editor offered what I view as a unpersuasive excuse, but that’s not what this column is about.

What it’s about is that the Post chose not to cover this dispute, even as its competitors did. The editor, Matt Murray, a former colleague of mine at the Wall Street Journal, told another Post opinion staffer, Erik Wemple, that he had made the decision, “weeks ago,” that the Post “should not cover ourselves.” He added that, “Most news orgs have the same or similar policies of course.” That’s just not true. Here are some examples from the New York Times, NPR, the Guardian and, yes, Murray’s alma mater, the Journal. (Bloomberg may be the big exception here.)

I don’t think what Murray told Wemple is even really Post policy. The paper covered the abortive London phone hacking trial that threatened to implicate its embattled publisher, Will Lewis, although he was only mentioned once in two stories. It ran an AP story about the Telnaes resignation. In recent years, its news pages have published celebratory stories when the Post wins Pulitzer Prizes. I’m confident it would do that again (even if, one hopes, it would forego the bizarre “WashPostPR” byline it published under Murray’s predecessor).

the challenge of confronting yourselves

Horses for courses

Beyond the beleaguered Post, how should newsrooms think about covering themselves? Let me offer a few guidelines, breaking the question down by the sorts of stories involved:

• On garden variety spot news, straightforward, unembellished stories make sense. If a new publisher or editor is named, for instance, or a new product launched, readers should be told, and biographical or functional details provided. If awards are conferred, take a brief bow and say so. Having done that, such pieces can largely spare us the self-promoting quotes (or even critical balancing ones); readers looking for perspective can seek it elsewhere. Newsroom rank and file should understand that even these stories will be sensitive internally, and top editors will want to review them personally.

• When a newsroom’s coverage spurs change, that’s part of the running story of the coverage itself, and it’s fine to cover it, usually employing the same reporters. But know that modern readers may come to such stories with heightened skepticism—and that journalists should approach them with modesty (and receipts), claiming credit only where it’s due.

• Less happily, if something that’s happened at a news organization is attracting criticism or controversy, a duty to readers—the foremost duty any newsroom has—dictates alerting them. Doing this will enhance reader trust; not doing it will threaten that trust, for the same reason you share bad news with close friends and family before they hear it elsewhere. Such stories need to take care to be even-handed, offering both fairness and its appearance.

• Coverage of parent companies is tricky. Yes, the newsroom has a conflict, but recusing top editors doesn’t really solve the problem, as reporters may share corporate loyalty or even a union’s adversarial perspective. The answer is probably not to cover the story if it is a small one, or to adopt the straightforward no-frills approach if it’s larger. The Journal isn’t expected to lead the way in covering Fox, nor the Post with Amazon. Important note: the same rules should likely apply to the publication’s or its parent’s key direct competitors, e.g. Bloomberg or CNN for the Journal or Politico or Space X for the Post (given Bezos’s big bet on Blue Origin); stories about these businesses should all prominently note their competition with the interests of the newsroom or its owner. The New York Times’s coverage of other news businesses, including the Washington Post, sometimes seems to me to fail this test.

• In the worst cases, where mere bad news has been elevated to serious scandal, I have long thought that newsrooms benefit when they lead the coverage themselves, offering comprehensive reporting that would, almost inevitably, eventually be done by others if they opted to forego it. Leading examples have been the Post’s own soul-bearing account of Janet Cooke’s fraudulent Pulitzer from 1981 and its investigation of its 2009 “salon” sponsorship, the New York Times’s 2003 expose on Jayson Blair and the Los Angeles Times’s investigation of its 1999 Staples Center fiasco. (The Journal more or less pioneered this approach, I believe, with its 1984 coverage of the arrest of reporter Foster Winans in an insider trading scandal, but that story seems not to be online; earlier coverage of damaging strikes at the New York Times (1963) and the Post (1976, and also not online) are also precedents.)

In all of this, the key for decision-makers is to focus less on what newsroom senstivities, or even social media pressures, may demand, and more on what readers, listeners, viewers and users deserve. That remains our lodestar— or at least it should.