Inside LINK is a weekly column from our CEO, Lacy Starling. If you have questions you’d like Lacy to answer, email her at [email protected].
There are times, working in the news industry, when we learn about – and then have to cover – truly difficult stories. Last week was one of those times.
Late Friday, we got a tip about an incident that allegedly occurred on a bus bringing Campbell County Schools’ football team home from an away game. We scrambled to confirm as many details as we could, speaking to the school superintendent, parents familiar with the event, and the police.
We treat all criminal investigations with great care, because both the alleged perpetrators and their alleged victims are humans, not just headlines. But this investigation was especially fraught, as most of those involved are juveniles, and the court system (rightly) treats juvenile offenders differently from adults.
The editorial team read and re-read, tweaked and re-wrote, until they felt they had a story that presented the facts without being sensational, and also met our standards for discussing ongoing investigations — and minors.
After hitting publish on the story, though, we realized something else – Campbell County had a big football game that night. They were playing Highlands, in what was expected to be an intense rivalry game. Rumors were flying about whether the game would even happen, or if the investigation would color the behavior of students from either school.
We cover Friday night football games every weekend, but this one was obviously different. We knew that it was important to be there, and not just because it was two powerhouse local teams playing each other.
But there was a significant question about how to cover a football game in the wake of these allegations. We knew that we couldn’t ignore what happened and print the usual “gamer” story, with some color commentary and stats. But we also knew that it wasn’t fair to the players who weren’t involved in the investigation to ignore their game play. (And that included the entire team at Highlands.)
So we did our best. We acknowledged the investigation in the opening of the story, and then we covered the game as we normally would, but without the usual color commentary we might have included. Lighthearted analysis simply felt out of place in this game story.
It was an imperfect solution, but there was no perfect one. There is no way to delicately mention allegations of assault, and then talk about a football game. But our other options were no better.
Had we ignored the investigation and treated this as a typical game story, we would have been guilty of sweeping a serious issue under the rug. And if we hadn’t covered the game itself, we could have missed something newsworthy, and would have done the players not involved a disservice by ignoring their game.
It is hard when something shocking happens in a community and everything doesn’t come to a halt while we deal with it. The world continues, and Friday night football games are played, even as we try to sort through the aftershocks. And we’re left to figure out how to cover normal life continuing without diminishing the severity of the incident itself.
I would just like you, our readers, to know that deep thought and consideration went into (and will continue to go into) our coverage of this investigation, and any others like it. We are members of this community, too, and our children attend the schools and play on the sports teams and ride the buses. This is personal for us, too.
It is heartbreaking to think that something like this could happen in our community. But we will continue to put our heartbreak to the side and do our best to report on it as completely and neutrally as possible.
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September 06, 2022 at 07:23PM
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Inside LINK: Tough decisions about truly difficult stories - LINK nky
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