Almost half our crew was in Boston last Thursday night preparing for the winter New England Newspaper and Press Assn. convention when Mike McLain lost his life in a tragic car accident in Bristol.
We responded the way we usually do: we assigned a reporter; that reporter called the authorities.
Meanwhile, while we were waiting, Facebook posts were flying back and forth much the way word of mouth rumors used to carry news around town. By the time the police released their official statement Friday morning, like many of our readers we already knew, unofficially, the young man’s name and the barest sketch of what happened.
In the days since, we have been debating internally exactly what kind of news organization we want to be.
Did we, do we, want to be the news organization that harangues officials for information, positing what we have as soon as we can get it, or do we want to go slower, post the complete story once we have a complete story? Is it more important for us to be first or right?
Though we want to be first and right every time, we think it is better to be right. We can’t and don’t print rumors, and until we know for sure, we are on tenuous ground.
In the news world there is a deadline for every week, and everything in the week builds toward that. If, by the time we put this print edition to bed, all we knew was there had been a bad accident, that could be all we report.
With the web, daily and weekly deadlines are a thing of the past. News happens when it happens and you get on it as fast as possible 24 hours a day. By that light, perhaps we should have had as much as we could get online last Thursday night and then followed with more as it came in.
Then too there is the issue that this is a community and we are a community newspaper. Unfortunately, the news everyone talks about too often involves a tragedy for someone else.
We can and have and will trample feelings to get a story, because that is our charge, but in this case a family has suffered the worst kind of loss. Just by the nature of our community, people on our staff know people in that family and like as not we will be seeing each other in the grocery store soon enough.
What it comes down to is what kind of news organization do we want to be? Like our industry, we are in flux.
