Plus, there’s satisfaction in the careful practice of active listening that inevitably turns a shouting mad caller into a mere grumbler who can even concede that their worthless &%*! hometown paper does indeed need to report unpleasant facts about Uncle Fraud or Brother Jailbird.

Weepers are more difficult. Telling a neighbor (several homes ago, so stop trying to guess!) that I couldn’t pull her DUI arrest from the weekly dispositions was no fun at all.

But I digress…There may be a business lesson in the evolution of my system for keeping track of those calls.

First, I scribbled everything into Franklin dayplanners. But time, being a scarce commodity, runs out and so I found myself copying messages forward in the book, a waste of time.

Palm Pilot

I bought one of the early Palm Pilots, taught myself to write on its screen, synch it with my computer, manage calendars…but I still was spending time managing my management system when I could have been talking to readers. It wasn’t making me any faster. In busy seasons it could take me a month to answer every call.

“Eureka!”, I thought when I got my first Blackberry. NOW I’ve got it…phone, calendar and notebook all in one. But it actually takes longer to key in notes on a Blackberry than it did to write them on paper, and the value of permanent storage is slim when phone messages need only survive until answered…

Blackberry

Then I began reading about the PDA rebellion of certain Silicon Valley tech geeks, the bleeding edge of the Personal Digital Assistant market. They had moved their to-do lists, phone call-back lists and daily reminder notes to….index cards.

Applying engineering analysis, they concluded most of a PDA’s chores can be most efficiently handled with a pocket-sized stack of paper.

Which is why I’ve started carrying a pocket notebook. I log in calls from my answering machine and then cross them out when I’ve answered them…It still takes a lot of time to answer all those calls, (and in a lame attempt at levity I occasionally open with “I’ve got a message here that you called in 1951) but with a simple notebook, now more of my time goes to the phone than to some over-hyped efficiency system. Now, if only I could take a similar approach to email handling. Hello keyboard, meet Mr. Hammer.

High-efficiency device: notebook

Greatest game ever...Boise won

Terrifies infants

Antler w/working lights

Last seen @ Longfellow Elementary

What becomes a legend most

Feliz Navidad

For speed-runs to UPS

I just deliver the boxes

Like I said...no dignity

How to beg forgiveness after foregoing permission

Whoville refugee

The ad ran Thursday on Page One: “…El Post Register ha contratado a un reportero en el estado de Tlaxcala para cubrir la legada de los paisanos a Mexico…”

It explained, in Spanish, that the Post Register has hired a reporter in Tlaxcala to write about the annual Christmas trip some Idaho families make to Mexico. That was too much Spanish for some readers, but not always for anti-immigrant reasons.

This editor is too Spanish?

Larry from Rigby was still cussing when I returned the message he left. “This is the United States of America,” he hollered, adding that he would cancel his 70-year subscription if we continued to use Spanish in the paper.

A very stern woman who did not give her name, caught me late in the day yesterday and asserted that if governments in the U.S. have to print ballots and other information in two languages, then the newspaper should translate, too. She said it was humiliating to not be able to read what was in the paper.

Another caller was a little less hot under the collar: “I can’t read that mumbo-jumbo, excuse me, Mexican, uh-Spanish,” said a younger woman named Delores. But she wasn’t angry and when she heard what the story was, seemed interested.

So far, no eastern Idahoan has called to actually participate in the story.

But I still have high hopes. We’ve arranged with our occasional correspondent Alexis Charbonnier in central Mexico to write about the annual influx of Idaho license plates into Mexico as temporary workers and Mexican-American citizens alike head south for Christmas with family members in Mexico.

Charbonnier has already found neighbors of his down in Mexico with family in Rexburg, Driggs, Felt and Ashton, but we wanted to make sure to connect with as many as possible on this end of the story, so we’ll keep running our little notice.

A short translation in English is in order, though. Two friendly callers wanted to check to see if they had translated correctly, so not everyone loses their temper when they encounter a foreign language.

The number of complaints wasn’t large, but I was surprised by the vehemence of those who called in. Would they be as angry if we were a Northeast Kingdom newspaper in Vermont, running an ad in French for homeward-bound Quebecois?

Most of the baseball box scores are a mystery to me, as are some of the fashion articles and most of the reports on commodity prices. They may as well be in Urdu.

But Spanish, being a romance language, is close enough to English that I thought folks could puzzle it out. I’d love to hear from other readers about what their reaction is…or was. Here’s the text of the ad.

Quieres estar en el periódico?

            El diario Post Register planea publicar un artículo sobre las familias del  ste de Idaho que se regresan por carretera a México para pasar la Navidad con sus familiares. Llama a Dean Miller al 542-6766 en Idaho Falls (o mándale un correo a dmiller@postregister.com) si quieres que tu y tus familiares sean incluidos en la nota. El Post Register ha contratado a un reportero en el estado de Tlaxcala para cubrir la llegada de los paisanos a México.

I was probably motivated  by vanity (I hate to be wrong about a staffer), but we re-learned an important lesson: Feeling vindicated should refresh our commitment to independent buttressing of reports that bear on people’s character.

     This started after I threw a fit when a local agency witheld a customary report we think is important to the public.

     A public servant told us -and his boss- that we were full of it. He was adamant that he had given our reporter the information face-to-face, early on the day in question. We disagreed. We only got the information after a tipster alerted us to call the public servant, who never volunteered the information until we phoned to seek confirmation of what the tipster told us.

    On its face, it’s a squabble over who said what when. But the official, a senior and powerful person, was bluffing and his boss accused our reporter of covering up a mistake.

    We put our reporter through the wringer, found no inconsistencies and then realized a phone log could settle the question. It took QWest a couple of weeks but when they produced the log, the codes clearly showed our reporter’s three minute, fifteen second call to the official’s cellphone.  He swore they hadn’t talked. Clearly, they had.

   Now, no one lasts very long in journalism if they can’t handle being called a liar. You grow a thick skin because people casually dump on your credibility, often to protect themselves.

    A stipulation: Being human, journalists do commit typos, transpositions, math mistakes and blunders. We publish corrections and keep track of who is making mistakes. Those reporters who prove sloppy with the facts find other work.

    But in a decade sitting in this particular uneasy chair, I’ve only caught one real liar: a columnist I fired when I learned his tear-jerker about a broken-hearted Little Leaguer was utter fiction.

   Most of the accuracy complaints I field arise from things people wish they hadn’t seen in print, wish they hadn’t said or wish we wouldn’t focus on. When we simplify complex ideas, condense long conversations or leave out what seems extraneous to us and vital to readers…people call it a lie. I’ve learned to hear what they mean and stay calm until the phone call moves from accusation to constructive critique of journalism. Those conversations are worth every minute because our good intentions don’t matter if our journalism doesn’t capture the essence of events and people.

   And that’s the value of a $150 phone log: For starters, it verified that our reporter was telling the truth, which allowed me to call out the fibber with an ace in the hole. Better yet, it gave us a personal jolt of the kind of independent verification that is the bedrock of excellent journalism.  I hope you’ll hold us accountable to that standard.

Shackleton's "Endurance

    Shackleton is one of my heroes, so I often cite him. The leader of the sailing ship “Endurance” was my bible lesson when I was invited to speak at Morning Prayer, the quick hymn-and-homily service that’s been held every morning before class at Harvard for 370 years. Hell didn’t freeze when I stood in the chapel pulpit at Memorial Church , nor did lightning strike the spire.

Memorial Church, Harvard Yard

It was finals week and a certain glumness had settled on faces around campus, so hope was my theme. A year later, I see headless chickens on the loose in Congress and in American newsrooms, so again I offer Shackleton as the model for leadership of uncertain enterprises. Here’s my sermon:

“When hope is a problem, I think about Ernest Shackleton, a British explorer whose goodness was not of the sweetness and light variety.
His story comes to mind when I feel I’ve put myself in an impossible position and others are depending on me.
I am the editor of an obscure newspaper in a state most people can’t properly locate on the map: Idaho…not Iowa or Ohio… We are one of a very few employee-owned independent papers in the country, competing with corporate radio, three national television chains and neighboring papers that draw on the resources of conglomerate media companies. I’ve spent a dozen years there, hiring the smartest young people I can find and teaching them the discipline of verification, the power of multiple revisions and the habit of dogged public service.
A couple of years ago, I had to cut my already-meager staff by almost a quarter. I fought despair. Only an investment banker or a Harvard MBA believes you can do more with less. Every gain we had made was threatened. At first, I felt like a wrecker. I had to lay off good people I had recruited and trained, most of whom I had invited into my home for brunches, dinners and cocktails. I knew their kids’, the name of their dogs and many of their parents.
Looking back, I’m ashamed to say I wasted time in self-pity. Luckily, though, at the time of the lay-offs, I had just been to an Antarctic Exploration Exhibit at the Seattle Museum of Natural History, and I had started reading Alfred Lansing’s book: “Endurance”.
It’s the story of Ernest Shackleton’s cursed journey to Antarctica. His ship froze into the pack ice near the South Pole in 1914, was crushed to kindling and the crew had to abandon it and take their chances, living on the floating ice for five months.
Shackleton and his crew were alone in a bitterly cold place about which almost nothing was known. All were there by choice. Most were experienced expeditioners, with useful skills and knowledge about the earth and sky.
But most important of all, they had clarity. When the ship was wrecked, they used the salvageable pieces to make shelter and feed fires. When food ran short, they killed their sled dogs…and ate some of them.
Purpose bound Shackleton’s crew together: Bring everybody home alive. Keep gathering (and protecting) the photos and field observations that were the reason for the voyage.
Purpose enabled them to control their internal weather, not letting pack ice and other forces beyond their power extinguish hope. Certainly this required a strong leader. But Shackleton’s crew seemed to intuit the necessity of fighting despair in themselves so as not to drag down their comrades, who would in turn buoy them up. Good humor proved contagious.
In the end, they rescued themselves.
The crux move was an open-sea crossing in a tiny rowboat, navigating only with a sextant (while underway) to the one island whaling outpost in the vast ocean wilderness at the end of the earth. In five months shipwrecked on the ice, they did not lose a single member of the crew and they brought home invaluable photos and scientific data that continue to thrill students of Antarctica a century later.
In my business, Journalism, hope is in short supply. Our elders and high priests obsess over the mythic past, and heap coals on the heads of those who seek the way forward. American politics indulges in despair these days, too, choking on our legends instead of our future. And maybe, facing a deadline, the crush of the holidays, or even a term paper, you feel a little hopeless this morning as you make your way across the icy and cheerless Harvard Yard.
Our circumstances are not quite as dramatic as Shackleton’s. I’ll stipulate that mine is but a wee paper in the middle of nowhere. Many of you in range of my voice have great responsibilities and worries. But Shackleton’s story reminds us, in hopeless moments at work, that none of us are actually stuck here. We all choose our dangers and that’s the first thing to remember when our luck runs out.
Certainly, what we do matters and so focusing on our mission is immensely important. The crew of Shackleton’s lost ship “Endurance” demonstrated the wisdom of the good books of many faiths: You can’t control circumstance, only your reaction to it.
At my newspaper, we never regained the staff we lost…But in the intervening years we’ve done better work than in the years before, largely because of the way that adversity focuses one’s attention. Clarity is a skill you can learn from Shackleton.
Our enterprise is now growing. So, we were right to have hope. It’s not the journey any of us expected, but now that we’ve survived some bad weather, we wouldn’t give up the lesson learned: You gotta find your own way, which means you have to be clear about where you need to go…and you can’t read a sextant in rough seas if you’re busy crying.
I have no idea what the world or even my life will look like in five years. But I am accumulating skills and knowledge and experience every day. I have the happy clarity of a person with a family to support.
When hope is a problem, I think of hard-eyed Ernest Shackleton and I believe I’m up for what storms may come.”

“…utterly disgusted and appalled,” wrote one Idaho Falls man. “…to be so blatantly biased by printing only the names of the people who supported Prop 8 is unbelievably reckless and irresponsible reporting. Where are the names of the people in Southeast Idaho that were against Prop 8 and how much did they contribute? Don’t you think that would be a fair question to ask?”

Actually, we had asked that question a week earlier, when we did the original follow-the-money story. On that day, we reported eastern Idaho had spoken loudly in California’s gay marriage debate. Dozens of supporters of the ban donated about a quarter of a million dollars. Opponents of the ban made little impact. We found a pair of donations under $200 and reported that, too. That was news: historic, unique, definitive of local political trends during seismic shifts in national voting patterns.

A week later, when we began planning to cover the Idaho Falls rally, I asked the weekend crew to be sure to include a summary of the donations. I’ve never seen Idaho, much less eastern Idaho, show so much interest in a ballot measure in another state and the “Join the Impact” rally was at least in part a reaction to that. Gay marriage advocates in California have, since Election Day, organized nationwide protests of the ban. Some have targeted the Mormon Church, which is credited (by both sides) with mobilizing a vital cash infusion during the final push. If you’re going to explain the story, you have to provide the underpinnings and that list of donations makes it clear the California law is a local issue. When I walked callers and emailers through it, most of them saw our point.

Ironically, we had spent far more time thinking about how we would handle anti-Mormon slurs, if any. Our code of ethics calls us to “tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of the human experience…avoid stereotyping…support the open exchange of views…” even repugnant views.

 That’s a tall order when heated rhetoric starts to fly. At rallies earlier in the week, protesters resorted to hate speech (one sign said “My two mommies can beat up your 14 wives”) and we lined up spokespeople to reply. I’m a student of Poynter Institute scholar Keith Woods’ very useful ideas about what he calls “writing across difference.” I wanted us to be ready to explain why cracks about plural marriage promote hurtful stereotypes. Fortunately, local protesters stuck to the issues in exercising their free speech rights and we didn’t have to explain people to each other in that way.

By Monday afternoon, most of those I talked to by phone and those who had written angry emails seemed satisfied that our aim was righteous. What’s remarkable is how quickly people holler “media bias” when they don’t like a story, and how quickly they back down from that charge when we explain our journalistic purpose.

What that tells me is that we could have labelled the list better to signal to readers that we were placing the nationwide and local protests in local context, not targeting people for their political contributions.

What he referred to was the habit of newspaper people to adopt a defensive crouch, holding their readers at a distance and (after a few too many abusive or ill-informed phone calls) even disliking readers. Yeah, those folks who pay the bill.
Benton illustrated this change by reading from the transcript of a 1995 newspaper conference on the internet, an exchange between online Esther Dyson and New York Times scion Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.
At that time, Sulzberger said he doubted journalists would be online or would daily answer dozens of emails from readers. Dyson, prescient as she often is, suggested that more and more of a journalists’ day would be consumed by direct contact from readers.
Benton shared the transcript not to make anyone look dumb, but merely to demonstrate how things have changed.
Benton then told stories from his own tenure at the Dallas Morning News, where the nature of his relationship to readers changed when he began writing a column…with a photo above it. Suddenly, he was more human to readers. Inviting conversation with readers, he said, changed another colleague, an education reporter, who started a blog. That reporter has begun sharing documents online to ask readers for advise and expertise. It works and as a result, the reporter’s work is better and his relationship to readers - once defined by his hard-boiled investigator’s pose - has changed.
Maybe love isn’t the exact word. But it’s no longer a relationship in which one party talks at the other. It’s a conversation.
Any reader of a small-town paper like the Post Register is giggling. That’s what the editorial page is for. And if you don’t write letters, you can always jump the Editor in the checkout line at Albertsons…
Which is not to suggest we’re miles ahead. But those of us from America’s outback surely recognize the truth of what Josh Benton said. We do better work when we have help from thoughtful readers.
Even an intimate community like eastern Idaho feels too pushed away by its newspaper and our experiments with reader-submitted photos, blogs, social networking and other new media are, we hope, going to involve eastern Idahoans more intimately in the job of serving the public’s need for information about its community.
As a side note, we have, at the Post Register, published our staff’s direct phone numbers and email addresses at the end of each story for almost a decade. Here’s hoping we move further toward the process of enlisting the public every day in the process of getting the facts right and getting the right facts.

Full disclosure: Josh Benton is a friend of mine, a fellow member of the Nieman Fellowship class of ‘08.