A Few Small Repairs
I was stumped. It happens so regularly, you’d think they’d all sort of run together. And they do. The running screenplay of my life carries the working title Stumped: A Life Not Quite Sure, Except For A Few Things.
The February 25, 2015 episode stands out though, because I have notes from it. A few verbatim notes, in due time. Sitting at the – really, do you think you could pour any more polyurethane over this wood? – conference table in the Quad City Times conference room, the Editorial Board was poking at the Davenporttoday.com undertaking. I had asked for the meeting to try to resolve some of their seething hostility towards the open government / community engagement / media resource effort. The peace-keeping met “mixed effect”, according to an e-mail of the day (here).
So I’m sitting there and they ask, “what’s your corrections policy?” In retrospect, that’s a funny one. It was like being asked about surgery by lumberjacks. Them with their chainsaws, chewing through lives and newsprint, blood and sawdust everywhere. Me with a scalpel and sutures, trying to stitch up carnage and not make a mistake. But I didn’t notice the false premise in the moment and I stammered a bit and said something like, that’s an excellent question, I’ll get back to you on it.
The truth was, they didn’t care much about correcting mistakes (well, there was that time the marshmallow proportion was wrong in the fudge recipe and they fixed that, straight away) and our “policy” was to not make mistakes to start with. I’m reminded of the moment by Ryan Foley’s article about the demise of Davenporttoday.com. It’s an AP story (here) so it’s available on more than a few websites. Ryan called a week or so ago, and I answered his questions, because when reporters call or email or stop by the office, that's what I do.
So Ryan’s story comes out and it’s not awful, and it has a bit of balance, and it has some facts right and some facts not exactly right, as articles do. Ryan reports the website cost “$178,000 annually”. Um ... sort of. By recollection, that was a budget number in its first year, including one-time equipment, design and other start-up costs. The davenporttoday.com effort only added two part-time employees to the City’s 850+/- FTE workforce, so it was hardly a budget-buster. If you take a few minutes to search the wreckage of the national award winning open government website, you can piece together Darryl and Kurt were paid a total of $97,412 annually. That, and few thousand for domain registration, etc. would be the annual cost.
In a budget that exceeded $223 million (here), was .00043 of it dedicated to leading the nation on government transparency excessive? Good ol’ Mark Ridolfi chimes in, saying it was. The Dr. Kevorkian of the editorial page, Mr. Ridolfi contributed to the loss of nearly a third of Quad City Times subscribers from 2001 to 2015. A guy killing a newspaper, working for a bankrupt parent company, giving advice to someone growing a Midwest manufacturing city, along with its financial reserves? Thanks for the expert advice, Mark.
Ryan doesn’t cover the QCTimes chainsawing through truth on their way to killing what they framed as competition rather than open government, but he does include some opinions from journalism wonks. Which is fine, but sort of makes the point about journalism not quite knowing what to make of the davenporttoday.com effort. There’s the ol’ “government propaganda” line, which would be fine except there’s nothing really to back it up. What posting on davenporttoday.com was “propaganda”? What posting was inaccurate, wrong, or politically aggrandizing? We took great pains to be accurate, and post information that was both good and not so good about the city. What part about creating a community conversations platform that didn't require a paid subscription was a bad idea? What part about a city manager posting every incoming* and outgoing e-mail is contrary to the public interest?
Sitting in the QC Times conference room that day was like watching “Who Moved My Cheese” as dinner theater aboard a Coast Guard cutter. Traditional journalists drowning in the internet ocean, demanding to know davenporttoday.com's correction policy, like desperate ship-wreck victims clinging to life-rings. Had I said “we don’t make mistakes to start with”, it would have been like tearing their floatation devices from them. But davenporttoday.com didn't make mistakes. We weren't in competition with other media (we weren't "media" at all). So we didn't rush things into print. We had experienced journalists who knew local government. We had the modus operandi common to local government, where we operate in the public trust, memories are long and what we do can make the difference between life and death. That combination tends to focus your efforts to get things right.
We weren't selling ads, operating as a private business or focused on short-term advantage with salacious takes on current events. It was open government, community engagement and media resource, not media competition. So, sorry to disappoint, but there's no "corrections policy" on open government or community engagement.
It's a different question to ask if I make mistakes. I do. Daily. Hourly.
Was one of them hiring not just journalists to staff davenporttoday.com, but former QCT beat writers who jumped the sinking ship? Maybe, but I wanted the credibility and skills that excellent journalists possess. It wasn’t a “PR” site, and I didn’t want any sort of propaganda vibe. I wanted journalists, and that they continued to use their journalism lexicon - stories, sources, scoops, news – was an issue that would solve itself in time as davenporttoday.com created something new, and not yet seen before.
It is hard to create something new, with old words. But new things have to be created, or we’re all just stuck with the past.
So, when Ryan asked if I had any regrets about Davenport Today … I wasn’t stumped.
* except two related to someone else's health
