Travel and tourism professionals promoting Keene, N.H., are hard-pressed to avoid cliches. The city’s arterial streets spoke off a shady green main square, where a fountain bubbles in front of a stately white gazebo. Main Street is lined with historic brick buildings, a long, tree-filled median and wide sidewalks.
The geographic and economic center of southwestern New Hampshire, Keene is home to, among many businesses and civic institutions, the Cheshire County courthouse.
When reports came over the police scanner last Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. that there was something on fire outside that courthouse, no one knew that it was a person
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- Photo by Michael Moore/Sentinel Staff
.The next morning, the newsroom at The Keene Sentinel, the 9,000-circulation daily paper that serves Keene and the surrounding towns, buzzed as reporters tried to get any information about who this person might have been, and editors tried to put out the day’s paper. The medical examiner told reporters he’d be looking for the victim’s family, dental records, etc., and had no plans to release an identity any time soon.
The Sentinel is an afternoon paper, one of the last left in New England. Reporters gather news throughout the afternoon, or go to meetings at night, and arrive at the office around 7 a.m., to write and work on copy with editors. Pages are sent to the press at 11 a.m.
At almost 10 on Thursday morning, a package arrived. It contained the last statement of a man saying he was going to set himself on fire on the courthouse steps Wednesday night.
What happened next shows that even at small papers in idyllic towns, the rare big breaking news event can and will happen. And when it does, it will test the filaments connecting the daily-deadline print world and the content-devouring, 24-hour Web.
Managing Editor Paul Miller grew up in Keene, and has worked at The Sentinel his entire career, more than 25 years.
He and the paper’s interactive media designer Jessica Garcia spoke with me about the paper’s decision to post the victim’s statement in full on its website.
Word that the newsroom had received a “manifesto” spread through the Sentinel’s office within minutes that morning.
“As soon as I heard that, [Interactive Media Director Ellen Driscoll] and I right away said, ‘Let’s see if we can get it online, let’s see if we can do something with it,’ ” Garcia told me.
She climbed the spiral staircase to the newsroom to talk with Miller, who told her, pointedly, to go away.
“I just said, you know, ‘Good grief, who told you about a manifesto?,’ but sure enough, there’s an envelope on my desk,” Miller said.
The envelope contained a compact disc and a letter with bullet-points of charges against the judicial system, domestic violence counseling agencies, and the child custody and child support system.
A 10,600-word statement, signed Tom Ball, was on the CD.
Garcia said she thought the letter, in addition to answering the traumatized community’s many questions, was a valuable opportunity to beat competitors who had gotten ahead in the game.
“We didn’t even have a photo of even the courthouse or the police tape or something to go along with the story. We were a little disappointed, to tell you the truth, when other news sources such as [state-wide TV station] WMUR and even [local blog] Free Keene had video from the scene,” she said. “When we heard word of the manifesto, that we got it, we knew we wanted to act on it quickly … to be the source. Since this is Keene, we want people to come to us first, not WMUR.”
But Miller says he had two priorities that ranked above beating the competition: Finishing the day’s print edition, and vetting the letter thoroughly.
“They said if someone else has it, they’re going to put it up, and I said ‘I don’t care what everybody else is doing. We’re going to look at this and we’re not going to do it hastily. I’ll get back to you as soon as we get the paper out and I have a chance to read this.’”
The paper’s publisher, Tom Ewing, suggested including one sentence in the print edition coverage, telling readers about the letter, and saying the Sentinel was working to verify the author’s identity.
Looking back, Miller says he’s not sure what would have happened if a reporter hadn’t been able that morning shortly after the deadline to reach Ball’s brother, who said the family received a similar note, and believed Ball was dead.
“That would have been the great ethical dilemma. Had we not been able to confirm this individual’s identity, but we’re holding onto this compelling manifesto from this traumatic news event, when do we go with it? Or do we go with it? Do we not? Do we wait 48 hours if that’s all it takes the medical examiner?,” he said. “Would any newsroom have put that up, just because there was a guy who had taken his life in this way and the manifesto matched? To me that would be highly irresponsible. The reason we were able to get it up so quickly and the reason it’s been what it’s been is because we did the hard reporting to confirm this guy was who the letter writer was.”
With that information in hand, and after checking to be sure the letter didn’t call for violence against any particular individual, the newsroom turned the CD over to Garcia’s department. The entire document – with some names redacted – appeared online less than two hours after the print deadline.
“I did agree with Paul that they needed to validate the source,” Garcia said, “although I knew it was highly unlikely that it could have been a fake, since it came in the mail, and it happened late the day before. I totally get having to validate the source. Other than that, we had less reservations down here about posting it.
“Upstairs in the newsroom, this is the deadline, (content) has to be ready for print. But for us down here, we are constantly working, always trying to get things online as soon as we can to try to compete with things like WMUR,” Garcia said.
Within minutes, the paper began receiving responses in the comments section of the posting.
Less than one week after the statement first appeared on the site, nearly 160 people have commented on it, some writing lengthy diatribes supporting Ball in his crusade against the family court, divorce and child custody system.
Of the 160 comments that have been posted, only two or three were censored, Miller said. The majority are thoughtful and eloquent, he said.
“It’s a healthy, robust back and forth … It’s about the system, and it’s about despair. It’s really actually kind of fascinating … It’s about government, of course, bureaucracy, responsibility, and it’s been fascinating.”
Those comments will shape future coverage by a team of two reporters who are being moved at least partially off of other stories, he said.
“Now that I’ve seen this play out, I think (the comment forum) is the best part of this whole story,” he said. “I think we’re obligated now, with the conversation that’s been going in our readership area, to take a look at this issue.”
But many visitors to the Sentinel’s site won’t see those comments. The vast amount of them, and the length of many, has repeatedly disabled the page.
But paying for Web space to accommodate reactions to a once-in-a-lifetime story is an investment not every paper will make.
Instead, the Sentinel is focused now on planning for how best to deploy staff resources in the face of a breaking news event.
Miller, the paper’s local news editor and two reporters met this week to shelve previous assignments and plan coverage of the many claims Ball makes against the judicial system.
That future coverage will be shaped equally by the Web’s weighty presence in this story, and old-fashioned shoe leather reporting, Miller said.
The event helped reignite conversations between the newsroom and the new media department about how they can integrate Web content into everyday stories, not just breaking news events, Garcia said.
“We live in Keene. There’s not a whole lot of up-to-the-minute news that’s going to happen,” she said. “They’ve taken an initiative in the newsroom to really try to think about publishing for the Web, too, and not taking it as a one-time deadline each day. It’s not 100 percent, but we’re definitely getting there.”
Sarah Palermo worked as a reporter at The Keene Sentinel for three and a half years, until leaving in March to work for a non-competing newspaper in Concord, N.H.
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