The Ten Commandments
of Community Journalism

By Bill Sniffin
For WPA meeting in Casper, Jan. 18, 2002 at the Radisson Hotel

I first gave this talk at Newspaper Opportunity College in Maui and at a Publishers Boot Camp in Lincoln, Neb. for the National Newspaper Association.

Thanks to Jim Angel for finding time on the program for this talk - we had been trying to get it in -- thanks.

I am an "associate member" of this group and thanks to PPL for helping to host it. I am also a member of their state-wide community advisory board.

This short talk contains the main things I've learned in 39 years of writing for community newspapers and owning community newspapers in small towns in the Rocky Mountain Region.

I think it was Adlai Stevenson who always said an editor's job was to separate the wheat from the chaff. I always liked that. -

Yet, he also said they usually published the chaff! - I didn't like that.

I am reminded of the three rules of journalism - accuracy, accuracy, accuracy - Walter Hahn of KTWO radio referred to me as Bill Schilling earlier this week. I understand Bill wasn't too thrilled.

I GREW UP IN A SMALL TOWN, -- it was a lot smaller than most of the towns you folks work at. Many of you come from small towns or rural areas.
Well, I grew up in a small town. It was a tiny town in Iowa. It was so small, I was 16 years old before I found it wasn't called Resume Speed. The town was so small, the resume speed signs of the town of written on both sides of the same post.

When I told this story at the boot camp in Lincoln, the publisher of the newspaper in Ogallala came up and said he also grew up in a small town. He said his town was so small "we only had six commandments and four suggestions."

Well, let's talk about the Ten Commandments of Community Journalism.

1.Love your audience -

Dale Carnegie got me going on this one. Your readers really do know whether or not you care about them and your town . . . or not.

I helped more than 20 young men and women become publishers in small towns - I always said move there like you were going to spend the rest of your life there. Never act like you have your suitcase packed and it sits under your desk. The same rule applies to reporters and ad sales people.

2. Bless all these faces and names

Names are news

My favorite story about News Editor Tom Rush and my lecture to him about always including names of people, kids, parents, addressed in the cutlines.
The next week our front page photo was of a lightning strike (which is rare in the mountains of Wyoming) and the three cows killed by lighting, In the cutline, he had carefully written their names as (l-r): Daisy, Buttercup and Bossy.

(We count name and faces. We own a newspaper in South Dakota called the Winner Advocate which had photos of 167 people in last week's edition)

3. Dear God, Make Me See.

Mike Gartner said the best speech he ever heard occurred at the 1984 convention in Washington, D.C. It was by Gene Roberts, the executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

"My first editor in the newspaper business was blind. If you have been a member of ASNE for 25 years, you may have seen him a the conventions. His name was Henry Belk. He was the editor of the Goldsboro, N.C. News-Argus, which then had a circulation of 9,000. He was a tall man, six foot seven, I believe, and he walked with a stretch aluminum cane. He wore a battered fedora, which must have been bought at a time when he had his vision and saw movies like "The Front Page."
At the conventions, he was accompanied unfailingly by the woman he alternatively called 'my seeing-eye wife" and the 'general manager."
Back home, Lucille, his wife, and succession of high school students read to him every word of every issue of both the News-Argus and the Raleigh News and Observer. And many, many days -- I still wince at the thought of how many times -- he would summon me into his cubicle after having heard my stories word by word and say:
'You aren't making me see. Make me see.'

"It took me years to realize it, but no one ever handed down a prescription for good writing more succinctly or better than Henry Belk in those three words: Make me see.

So, that's the third commandment -- Make me see.

Anticipate the readers question and answer it! That is what reporting is all about.

4. Pray for integrity

Norman Isaacs's poem about lady from Kent.
From the same issue, reprint of article in August, 1960"
By Norman Isaacs, "Buying news; selling self-respect."

"There was a young lady of Kent
Who said that she knew what it meant
When men asked her to dine,
Gave her cocktails and wine:
"She knew what it meant -- but she went."

. . . and so do we know what this poem means.

And also refers to editorial leadership ... Quote Bruce Kennedy's line about this isn't no poster up at the Post Office. --

"An editorial or a poster"
Let's straighten out one apparent misconception.
You can write all the letters to the editor you want, cuss us out, disagree with us, give your side of any question. But don't tell us how to run our editorial page. Don't tell us that we can't tell you OUR opinion of a problem, or a theory, of a political candidate. Don't tell us what to write and what not to write.
We reserve this page in each issue of the Greybull Standard to express this one editor's opinion. Sometimes it has been the opinion of the majority; sometimes of the minority. It doesn't have to agree with anyone as far as we are concerned.
But each week there's some subject we'd like to comment on. Just as you do in your homes, to your neighbors, out on the street. Obviously this is freedom of speech and of the press. Do with yours what you like. We'll continue to print ours. And if we don't want to listen to yours, we don't have to . If you don't want to read ours, neither do you have to.
If you want an editor's published opinion of what he thinks about a political candidate, read his editorials. If you want to read information about getting out and voting, read those posters at the Post Office.

James J. Kilpatrick once asked in an essay " Why do editorial pages, so much of the time, read like the treasurer's report at the Elks' Convention?"
"Some years ago, Mobil Oil spokesman Herb Shmertz proposed doing away altogether with 'this turgid tide of intellectual pontification. In his syndicated column, he noted' Editorial writers themselves refer to most of their pointing-with-pride and viewing -with-alarm as 'THUMBSUCKERS'.
It is time to find honest work for those busy fingers."

5. Bless those ads -

Here is my system of imparting sales techniques that work to my ad staff:

SQIP - Service, Quality, Impact and Price

The price buyer is the worst customer you can have - need to sell him your service, quality and impact - and then price.

No such thing as hard sell and soft sell, just smart sell and dumb sell- Kennedy

Two buzzards that got impatient. One turned to the other and said: "Patience my ass, I'm going to kill something!!"

6. Respect the Power of Information

The power of the press versus the power of information - Local School Supt. Nominated me for citizen of year - 6 weeks later, I exposed an school test disaster

He railed at me at Rotary - four times, said "you can't win an argument with a man who buys ink by the barrel."

I wrote the column = won first in nation in the Herrick Editorial Award competition.

U.S. Senator Alan Simpson reflected on how news tends to repeat itself:
"We just keep on gnawing on it. It's like bear meat. The more you chew it, the bigger it gets."

7. Lord, grant me the ability to Listen.

Listen to everybody.
Even to those crackpots once in a while

Mildred Olson appeared to be a crackpot - no other word to describe her. Her husband Digger had died - she said his body had so much radioactivity that grass wouldn't grow on his grave. It was 14 times what was considered fatal dose. Had dug uranium mines some 15 years earlier -

We got Al Simpson involved - wrote 5 part series - got $100 million trust fund established through Congress - won top award in nation in investigative reporting and were nominated by Al for a Pulitzer prize.

8. Lord, grant me the ability to Manage --

Quote Mark McCormack on the three toughest things to say that a good manager says,
I don't know,
I was wrong, and
I need help.

Your insanity becomes your employee's reality.

9. Give thanks for our subscribers -

Quote Lake Wobegone publisher Harold Starr who owned the Herald-Star who loved to go through the sub renewals --
Talk about deadlines, quote Harvard guys on the truth about deadlines... and the effect it has on circulation. Doesn't matter how good it is if it doesn't get out on time.

10. Lord, help us remember our sense of History -
Remember you are only stewards temporarily of this paper -- much like a farmer or rancher who loves his land only to know that he is a temp. Steward of it too,

Recall that, like computer language, we deal "in hard copy" unlike radio or broadcast. Think about that for a moment.

Recall how fortunate we are that these people have allowed us to be their Chroniclers -- we are the historians of our time. Our "hard copy" is the day-to-day history of our town. Long after all of us in this room become dust, our words will live on.

Years from now-- hundreds years from now -- thousands of years from now -- ten thousands of years from now, when people want to find out what happened to these people in your community -- your words are what they will read about. Now that is an awesome responsibility, not one to be taken lightly.

I am honored that my community allowed me to be its eyes and ears all those years.

And thank you all for listening to me today.

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Authorized by William C. Sniffin
Contributions or gifts to Bill Sniffin for Governor 2002 are not tax-deductible.
Bill Sniffin for Governor - P.O. Box 900 ­ Lander, WY 82520 (307) 332-3111, ext. 17