Talk to me; don't threaten my staff

By Joel Summer, Publisher

As Harry Truman says, the buck stops here.

I'm the publisher of the Curry County Reporter. At the end of the day, the decision to run the Marlyn Schafer story and the way we ran the story was mine, and mine, alone.

Which leads me to what I need to say to a number of you.

Leave my employees, alone! If you've got a beef, the beef is with me – and only me.

My non-editorial employees had nothing to do with the decision to run the Schafer story. They are regular working folks just like you with families to support, groceries to buy, and kids' activities to attend.

My employees have been threatened this past week. People have come into our office and screamed at our front office ladies. People have called my staff and have threatened them with bodily harm, or "looking to get us", or "get something on us", or any number of other threats. The threats have come in the morning and have lasted through the late hours of the night. They come to us on business lines, at our homes, and on our cell phones.

The people who call us never leave a name, restrict their caller IDs, or if they leave messages, never leave a call-back number. People who do that are cowards. Their intentions are to scare, intimidate, spook, or anger our staff.

So please stop. You're barking up the wrong tree.

If you want to ostracize anyone in the community then ostracize me.

A lot of you are angry that we ran this story at all. A lot more of you are angry in the way we ran the story saying we sensationalized the story and we were worse than the National Enquirer. Some of you think we are dirtier than pond scum.

A huge number of you have written letters to the editor, and we will leave room inside our newspaper to run all of them, some this week and some the next. You absolutely have a right to your opinion and we will leave you ample space to speak your mind about the Schafer story, or anything else you want to opine about.

Others of you have made your feelings known to us in e-mails not for publication. We will honor your requests to keep these thoughts, opinions and criticisms between you and me.

However, you have no right to threaten us. And, particularly, you have no right to threaten my staff.

It takes a tremendous amount of courage to publish a story that will be controversial. We knew that when we published this story we would receive push back from members of the community, some of it fierce. We knew we would take our lumps.

And just so you know, I absolutely defend my editor who wrote this story. He and I consulted every step of the way. Our sources are very reliable and very credible. And we do have documents to back up what we published. However, we chose not to quote from documents because some people then might be able to "connect the dots" back to our sources.

As journalists we have an absolute right to protect our sources.

We did not rush our story to print. In fact, we held the story for two to three weeks as we checked, double checked, and triple checked our facts, each fact being verified by more than one source.

Our story was repeatedly vetted. We spoke to other journalism professionals, lawyers and risk managers.

As we said in our story, we spoke to some 30-plus people. And all of these people would be in a position to know various facts that were in our story. Needless to say, we were very careful.

We're a newspaper. Sometimes we have to report the blemishes and warts as well as the beauty of our community.

We also need to again stress what we stressed in our story. We repeatedly attempted to contact members of the Schafer family including her daughter and son-in-law and we have telephone logs to prove it. We spoke to Commissioners Nowlin and LaBonte. They would tell us nothing more than Ms. Schafer was on medical leave – and to contact the family. What they said in the Curry Coastal Pilot article on February 9 was not forthcoming to us -- and we asked.

Based upon the reaction of many of our readers, there were many of you more upset with how we displayed the story than the contents of it. Many readers said we were sensationalizing the story making our publication look like a shopping checkout-stand tabloid.

We made a decision some months ago to change our Page 1 layout style using bigger headline fonts and larger photographs. We started doing it when the Panthers won the state title, and we continued doing it through the storm damage, the tsunami false alarm, marine reserves, the charter school, the oceanfront development story and the Schafer story. The display of the Schafer story was consistent with our other weekly lead stories. And by the way, until last week we only received compliments about our new Page 1 style.

We did debate long and hard about using a different picture, a smaller picture, smaller headline, displaying the story "below the fold," etc. And we all did not agree on how the story should be displayed. But our final decision was that it was a big story and it should be displayed as a big story. Yes, the picture was unflattering, but it was a real picture, not altered, not "photoshopped," taken at a Board of Commissioner public meeting, and we had used that picture before in a story we ran in early January about our top stories of the year.

Would we have done it differently had we known the reaction from members of the community? We can't say, but as they say, hindsight is 20-20.

The other subject brought out by the Schafer story, is what the role of a community newspaper should be and, in particular, what the role of a community newspaper in Gold Beach should be?

Some of you are of the opinion that a story like the one we ran on February 6, should never appear in a community newspaper. Some of you feel that we should run stories of public meetings and just the "softer" personality and business features – and of course, the good old home spun stuff from Agness and Pistol River.

And we do publish lots of that kind of news. Lots of it. And our community events pages are much expanded and we have repeatedly received kudos for this.

But there are important issues facing Curry County. There are important issues that will determine the survivability of Curry County and Gold Beach – marine reserves, forest management, affordable housing, building development, county payments, tourism, and whether our county commissioners are suited for the difficult and complex financial future we face.

We will not shy away from the hard stories. They need to be told and debated. If that is not what you're looking for in a community newspaper, we're sorry you feel that way.

There are lots of small businesses in Gold Beach that are closing, want to close, or the proprietors of those establishments are living from day to day in the "off season".

The Curry County Reporter is a small business like most every other business in town. We're not owned by a big newspaper chain like the Curry Coastal Pilot. We're owned by my wife and me. We struggle to keep the presses rolling in the winter just like the rest of you struggle to keep your doors open from September through April. We struggle to jam pack our newspaper with every conceivable event going on in our town with a very thin staff, and a cadre of contributors.

It can sometimes be a very fragile – and stressful -- existence. And, needless to say, this week was more stressful than others.

When passions cool, we hope many of you are still of the opinion that we put out a good product and get your message out to the community. We try hard to do that.

But, again, as this editorial stated, that's my picture next to my words. Take up your issues, criticisms, and complaints with me. Leave my front-office and back-office staff alone. They should not have to bare the brunt of this.

Finally, we'd like to leave you with this thought. Many of you who are friends, family and business associates of Ms. Schafer are furious that we made public a substance dependency issue. Some of you pointed out that others in our community have these same issues, or members of their families do.

Rumors of this issue have floated around our community for years. Our question to you is why didn't you try to help your friend and colleague with this issue? Why did it have to come to this?

There is a public service campaign that has been in the media for years. "Friends don't let friends drive drunk."

Only Ms. Schafer's friends, family and colleagues can answer the question whether they gave Ms. Schafer the support she needed then.

From what Stacy Punch told the Pilot last Saturday, we know Marlyn Schafer is getting the support now and we are truly grateful for that. As we said last week, we pray for Ms. Schafer's full recovery and we truly mean that as well.