March 28, 2007

TIME OUT: Eat It

Today, I ate it.

At The Ledger, my editor and I worked on a HUGE story. At the least, it would've affected the Board of Trustees election April 3. At the most, it could've destroyed a man's life.

But we had to
kill it.

No, no one censored us this time or pressured us into killing the story. It’s not that we don't believe the source; we simply could not triangulate the source's information in the time we had to work the story.

We just didn't have the time to delve as deep into these people's lives that the story requires for us to verify the incredible allegations.

Allegations. God, how many times in the past year have I written that word?

This is a new experience for me. I've never had to kill a story because I couldn’t verify the information or because I didn't have the documentation.

Unfortunately, I know exactly where the story went wrong …