When I was first hired at The Jackson Post, I started asking Brandon some questions:
“What is our policy on posting mugshots?”
“How should we reach out to this person?”
“What do you think about door knocking?”
First, no one will ever describe me as “afraid to ask a question.” Second, Brandon didn’t have an answer to any of these (understandable).
Previously, he had covered sports, local government, and some other topics. Crime was seldomly ever one of them, and he will gladly admit that.
On the other hand, I have always been the one to show up at court, crime scenes, house fires, and all those other types of situations.
I’ll never forget one of my first stories as a reporter– being sent an hour away to cover a deadly house fire. When I got out of the vehicle, a woman came up to me in tears, screaming at me to go away. I sat in my car, shaken up, as the sheriff’s office was called in to help calm her down. I never wanted to hurt her, invade her privacy, or make her feel anything other than heard. But sadly, that was not the case.
There have been plenty of other times the exact opposite happened. People saw me and knew I was going to give them an opportunity to talk, to be listened to.
In just the last couple of weeks, there have been some difficult stories to cover. Do we show the picture? Should I reach out to her mother?
For each one of them, Brandon and I have talked about how we want to cover it. And in each conversation, someone has said, “What if it was my daughter?” “How would I feel?” or “I’ll let them know that it’s OK if they don’t want to talk. I’m not going to press it.”
Because while this is a newspaper, we are humans running it. And we also understand that there are real humans behind every story we write.
So will we post the mugshot? Reach out? Knock on your door? I can’t say for certain. But what I can say is that there is an intentional discussion behind our decisions.
We are not the nightly newscast, where the screen will presumably go blank if the block isn’t filled. We’re not the daily newspaper where there will be a blank spot on the page if we don’t get the story.
We are a brand-new weekly newspaper. There is no precedent for how we’ve covered certain topics.
We are absolutely making up the rules as we go along. But, these are rules I want to be proud of, and I hope you can support us in that. Julia Ewoldt is a staff reporter and marketing director for The Jackson Post. Contact her at julia@jacksonpost.news.
