Interesting report about how the DSM story got to the strib

[question everything]

by the Readers' Rep. Kate Parry. Indeed, it first was reported on May 13 and only today, a month later, in the San Diego Union Tribune:

startribune.com

Readers' Representative: Downing Street memo's route to paper

Published June 12, 2005

The U.S. media, as a whole, have been in slow motion reacting to the Downing Street memo, a highly classified report the London Times published May 1.

Word of the memo did not appear in the Star Tribune until May 13 -- and that was way ahead of most American media.

Is there something wrong with the story? Is the memo fabricated? Are readers uninterested? The answers are no, no and no.

The back story reveals a lot about how news travels traditional routes and cyberspace at different velocities, about how the Internet is being used to influence media and about how those on the left and right have learned to puff up their feathers or grow small -- to foment coverage or strangle it.

(snip)

The British and U.S. governments were mum on the memo, as if hoping the story would just wither away if not fed with comment. Curiously, that silence extended to most of the U.S. media -- including the Star Tribune. For days, it appeared the story had no legs. Unless you went online.

(snip)

So, what was going on here at the Star Tribune?

A week after the London Times printed the story, reader Jim Bootz, 48, a system administrator in Minneapolis, sent me an e-mail: "Please consider printing the story on the leaked memo. ... I forwarded it to nation/world editor Dennis McGrath and asked if he knew anything about the topic. McGrath knew about the memo -- but not from the traditional news wires. In this country, wire services had provided only a brief mention of it May 2 deep in a New York Times advancer on the British election. McGrath knew about it because he had started getting the e-mails, too. He and his wire editors began watching for a wire story. A week later, they were still watching.

"We were frustrated the wires weren't providing stories on this," McGrath said. Finally, he gave up waiting for the wires and assigned reporter Sharon Schmickle to write about it -- despite the geographic disadvantage of reporting from Minneapolis on a story breaking in London.

(snip)

Even after the story ran, the Downing Street memo campaign continued, morphing into demands for a page-one story. In a decision separate from the newsroom, the editorial page published an editorial referring to the memo on Memorial Day. When readers called wanting to know more about it, the editorial page staff published the whole memo on the June 3 op-ed page -- as near as I can tell for the first time in a U.S. newspaper.

(snip)

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5451062.html

[jean]

1. Kudos to Jim Bootz, who got the Strib to make a move

[chalky]

2. This is very educational.

Interesting to note the deafening silence while they waited for the story to appear over the wire.

Also interesting to note that they showed the balls not to wait for a story that was never going to appear, and put their own reporter on it.

[katinmn]

3. Kudos to the Strib for having Perry as its FT reader's ombudsman

She is adding transparency while encouraging journalists to do their jobs. They have to change the way they work to take into account breaks and leads found on the web.