14th Monthly Milestone Message

Last week I experienced my first pot of Jasmine Pearl tea. I say “experienced” because it was like watching performance art: dried leaves as tight as tiny ballbearings, doused with boiling water, slowly unfurling into something more akin to seaweed as the clear water turned a pale shade of green. Nice.

I’d sourced the tea from Jeremy Lopatin of Arbor Teas, so I emailed him to say how cool it was to watch the tea transform in my glass pot. He emailed me back and said that among tea enthusiasts, there’s a term for this process: the “agony of the leaves.”

The agony of the leaves. Maybe because of the week The Chronicle spent steeped in controversy, it struck me as a perfect metaphor for other transformations, too. In this monthly milestone message – our 14th for The Chronicle – I’ll touch on a couple of those.

Elections: Are They Over Yet?

We’ve enjoyed some animated comment threads on our articles and columns related to tomorrow’s elections, regarding both the countywide school millage and the city council election in Ann Arbor’s Fourth Ward. [See also Chronicle editor Dave Askins' column regarding two proposed city charter amendments that are on Tuesday's ballot.]

In particular, we’ve taken some heat for the way we responded to the decision by Hatim Elhady – who’s challenging Marcia Higgins in the Ward 4 city council race – to refuse a request for an in-person interview with The Chronicle. Elhady said he would answer our questions only via email. We had asked Judy McGovern, a former Ann Arbor News reporter and colleague of mine, to write the election preview report on a freelance basis.

After declining an on-the-record interview with McGovern, Elhady emailed The Chronicle asking for a different writer to be assigned the story – but still attached the requirement that questions be emailed,  and specifically stated that he would only be willing to talk on the phone if the conversation were off the record. The Ann Arbor Observer had a similar experience.

It’s interesting to me that our position has been characterized by some as essentially “old-fashioned.” We’re told that it’s a new world, with new ideas and new ways of doing things. I agree that these are definitely transformative times, but avoidance is an ancient political ploy. There are simply new tools available to achieve that goal.

But what’s been almost as interesting as the attempted spin by the Elhady campaign is the reaction that some readers had to our decision to publish a column by Judy McGovern about the situation. While many of the comments are based on disagreements with our position on the issue of whether an email “interview” counts as an interview, some readers criticized McGovern’s column because it presented not only a description of her efforts to interview both candidates, but also her opinion about what happened.

The criticism of “bias” in a column reminded me of my years working at the Ann Arbor News. For the last three years of my tenure there, I was in charge of the opinion pages. We published letters to the editor, essays from readers, columns from syndicated writers like George Will and Maureen Dowd, and editorials. (Whenever I talk about my work there, at this point in my narrative I always pause to point out that I was not in the job for either the 2004 Bush endorsement or the 2008 presidential non-endorsement – I hope someday I won’t feel so compelled to make that point, but I’m not  quite there yet.)

My assumption, going into the opinion page job, was that the mission of the News opinion section was clear to readers. The word “opinion” was emblazoned on the top of the pages – it was straightforward, I thought. And editorials are a concept as old as newspapers themselves – surely that was clear?

So I was initially surprised, dismayed and ultimately resigned to receiving regular criticism that the editorials, columns, essays and letters were biased. Some readers weren’t only upset about the opinions expressed, but were critical that the editorials and other op/eds dared to express an opinion at all. It wasn’t fair for the newspaper to express an opinion – even in the opinion section!

I found that criticism puzzling.

And so, when some of our readers levied a similar charge against McGovern and The Chronicle, I had a distinct sense of déjà vu. Here are the ways we explicitly alerted readers the fact that she was writing an opinion piece: 1) by starting the headline with the the word “column,” 2) with her own words – explicitly stating in the lede that she was not writing a straightforward election report, but rather “a column that gives an account of an unusual situation …” 3) by asking McGovern to write the piece in the first-person, 4) by including a column headshot of McGovern, and 5) by slotting it into the “opinion” category. Yet the inclusion of all of these clear signposts – which pointed to the fact that there would be opinions expressed – were for some readers insufficient.

One reader suggested we needed to do even more – perhaps by shading the background a different color to indicate that it wasn’t a news article.

Based on my past experience as opinion page editor, however, we could have attached a red, bold-faced, all-caps [WARNING, OPINION CONTAINED IN NEXT SENTENCE, READ WITH APPROPRIATE CAUTION] in front of each isolated opinion in McGovern’s column, and it wouldn’t have prevented the criticism we’ve heard – that an opinion was presented as if it were something other than an opinion.

Why Should We Care? Living the Agony

In their dried form, the jasmine tea “pearls” are easy to manage and to recognize for what they are.  By “manage” I mean counting them, making piles or little miniature pyramids out them, putting them back into their bag with their clear label: “Jasmine Pearl,” or whatever else a creative mind might want to undertake with these little green dried balls. But that’s not what tea is for – it’s for brewing and drinking. And once hot water gets dumped onto those leaves, they’re a complete disaster for counting, stacking or anything else.

Without the aid of a package label, that hot green liquid with leaves floating around in it might not be recognizable as Jasmine Pearl tea – except to a tea aficionado. And if those tea leaves are strained out of the hot liquid, it might not be recognizable to some people as tea at all. Maybe it’s dishwater.

So how are consumers of hot drinks supposed to figure out what they’re drinking? Taste and smell, sure. But if you see it being prepared, and you know where it came from, you’ve got an advantage. We strive at The Chronicle to make clear where a story comes from, why we’re publishing it at all, and why we’re publishing it at a particular time. For much of our coverage, that background is baked right in: We’re publishing a report about city or county government, because a public body just met and here’s what happened there.

So where do stories come from in general?

This topic came up at a forum hosted last month in Ann Arbor by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit that provides training and other resources for journalists. It was a small group of local media types, bloggers and others from the community. The event – titled “What Now?” – was designed to discuss what the world might look like in a community that has lost its traditional daily newspaper.

Part of that discussion looked at how institutions like local governments and schools are finding ways to reach their “audience” directly, in the absence of coverage from a news organization. The Ann Arbor Public Schools, for example, has launched a newsletter for the community – its inaugural edition came out today. Another example: People can sign up for email alerts from the city of Ann Arbor, on topics ranging from notices of crime to public meetings. They’re sending out information directly, that in the past people might have expected to find in the local newspaper.

There’s no need to have the middleman of traditional media, if these organizations can disseminate their information directly to people who want or need it … right?

But some participants in the forum expressed concern about the blurring of lines between traditional media, blogs and PR – this is a pretty common complaint. The forum’s moderator, Poynter’s Kelly McBride, also pointed out the growing phenomenon of people getting their news and information from social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter. If it’s really important, people figure it’ll show up on Twitter somewhere – that’s one approach to staying informed.

In the face of these trends, media users are being asked to bear a burden for sorting out what’s important versus what’s trivial, what’s worth reading in its entirety and what can be dismissed – just like newspaper readers have always been asked to do. I don’t think that sorting through what are now perhaps unfamiliar forms of media requires some set of advanced, new skills – though we’re learning new “guideposts,” for sure. Weighing the information we receive, evaluating its source, discerning its intent, drawing conclusions based on context and experience – all that is an old-fashioned set of basic critical thinking skills.

When guideposts are there that can help people parse what they are reading or listening to or viewing, they should be used. If a hot greenish liquid is served in a teacup on a saucer, there’s a good chance it’s tea.

If the server gives you a peek at the process of that liquid’s preparation, and you’re able to watch as Jasmine Pearls unfurl themselves into a weedy tangle, then you can be sure it’s tea. Maybe not your cup. But still tea.

About the writer: Mary Morgan is publisher of The Ann Arbor Chronicle.