City Pages has an article on Wednesday by Jim Walsh about the recent suspension of two Pioneer Press reporters for attending a political concert. More specifically, the article is about the Press not covering the story on its own pages until the paper’s editor, Vicki Gowler, wrote about why the disciplinary action was taken.
Since this story went public, or, as Walsh tells it, has “appeared in newspapers all over the United States and United Kingdom and popped up in several journalism and media websites and blogs,” a stack of letters to the editor have been sent to the Press in defense of the reporters. But as of today, none of them had run in that paper, as far as I can tell.
I reached out to Walsh this morning to ask if he had heard anything from the Pioneer Press about City Pages’ posting of the letters, but as of this morning, there was no formal response. After checking in with the Press, however, I received a copy of a letter sent by Gowler over to Steve Perry, City Pages editor. The full text of the letter is below.
Oct. 27, 2004
Steve Perry
Editor, City Pages
401 North Third Street, Suite 550
Minneapolis, MN 55401Following is the text of a letter to the editor from the Pioneer Press responding to today’s City Pages story by Jim Walsh. In fairness, I would appreciate posting of this letter online, rather than delaying publication until next week’s print edition.
To the Editor,
I am surprised and disappointed that City Pages did not contact the Pioneer Press for our position before publishing its story today about the recent suspension of two reporters.
I hope the following information will provide some perspective on the story by reporter Jim Walsh.
Our handling of this issue is consistent with longstanding practice. The situation involves a personnel issue at the Pioneer Press, and we do not cover such internal matters, including disciplinary actions involving individual employees.
On the related issue of what we choose to publish on our Viewpoints page, following is a statement from Editorial Page Editor Art Coulson:
“We do not publish letters about internal personnel matters, including individual disciplinary actions, at local companies. That would include the Pioneer Press. We also do not generally publish letters from out of state, as many of these were. We do not publish letters that contain factual errors, as several of the letters in question did. We receive more than four times as many letters as we have room to publish (that ratio is actually higher this election season) and we give preference to letters that are concise, local and on a topic of broad general interest.”
Finally, I’d like to point out that Walsh did not include in his story a letter to the editor that was supportive of the Pioneer Press.
Vicki Gowler
Editor
It looks like while some might criticize the Pioneer Press for not publishing a story about a staff issue, they do seem to have a policy on the topic, so you cannot fault them for it. I’m truly more surprised that Gowler didn’t take City Pages to task a little bit more for running the letters - but then again, someone at the Press had to have sent them over to the site, so that’s a just opening another can o’ worms.
