Reporting on a nighttime deadline is a lot different from crafting a story all day long — or all week, month or year, depending on the nature of the story — and The Star and many other metropolitan dailies are now doing a lot less true deadline reporting.
Yes, reporters are under deadline pressure to get stories on the Internet as soon as possible, but most of those can easily be edited, augmented or pared down after the first version has gone “up.”
Because of relatively early deadlines and much-diminished staffing, however, many papers don’t routinely cover nighttime developments, unless they are really big.
Such a story occurred last night, when, remarkably, the Kansas Legislature voted to roll back Gov. Sam Brownback’s 5-year-old tax cuts, which plunged the state into operational uncertainty and a long period of strangulation-level budgets.
The vote in Topeka was historic, partly because it took a two-thirds majority to override Brownback’s recent veto of the same tax-increase bill.
Unfortunately, The Star’s latter-day lack of experience in covering breaking, nighttime stories was on full display in last night’s Web version of the story as well as in today’s print edition.
The Star’s Topeka correspondent, Hunter Woodall, a young reporter who was assigned to the legislative “beat” early this year, got the key element of the story — the override — but failed to address the critical issue of the raw vote count in the context of the two-thirds majority.
In the third paragraph of his story, Woodall said: “The Senate vote was 27 to 13, and the House followed by agreeing 88 to 31 to supersede the Republican governor’s wishes on the tax plan…”
Not a word, though, there or later, about how many votes it took to hit the two-thirds level in either chamber.
In fact, 27 was the precise number of votes needed to override in the Senate, and 84 was the number needed in the House.
That is important information, and virtually every experienced reporter would recognize that and put it high in the story.
For example, John Hanna, a 30-year, Associated Press reporter in Kansas, expounded on the two-thirds issue in the fifth paragraph of his story — a version The Star did not run because it relies on its own reporter, Woodall, for firsthand legislative coverage.
Hanna wrote: “The Senate’s vote to override 27-13, exactly the two-thirds majority required. The vote in the House was 88-31, giving supporters of the bill four votes more than a two-thirds majority.”
If you’ll notice, the first sentence is missing a verb, but I’ll give Hanna a pass on that, attributing the oversight to fast writing. Woodall doesn’t get a pass, though; he simply ignored that important element of the story. Contributing to the damage, neither his front-line editor nor the copy editor who gave the story a final read and added the headline bailed him out.
**
I heard about the override about 11 p.m. while returning home from Kauffman Stadium with Patty and two friends. One of the friends was checking The Star’s site on her phone and announced the legislative development, to our collective shock.
My first question was what the vote count was. The friend said it was 27 to 13 in the Senate. I said, “How many votes did it take to get the two-thirds?” She scoured the story but couldn’t find the answer. We then did the math in our heads and calculated that 27 was precisely the number needed, assuming the total number of votes — 40 — represented the full complement of senators. But most readers don’t know that, either.
After getting home, I took a closer look at the story, thinking — surely, surely — Woodall had included the two-thirds information somewhere in the story. Alas, no, not there — nor in today’s print edition.
…A long time ago, one of my first editors said something I took to heart and never forgot:
“Don’t make the reader do the math.”
It’s a great rule, and Woodall is one of many reporters who have broken it. We can only hope this rebuke will cure him of future violations.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Woodall is a horrible writer and appears to have little sense of what to prioritize in his stories (your complaint being a perfect example). The Star would be far better served to can him and use Jonathon Shorman’s copy from The Eagle. He’s a much better writer and has a much better feel for key elements in a story.
John Hanna is clearly one of the best journalists in the state and certainly surpassed his mentor in terms of running an honest bureau. He and Shorman are my go-to journalists for info on Kansas government.
Interesting you should mention, Shorman…I’d never heard of him, but I checked the Eagle last night to see how it handled the override story and saw that Shorman and a reporter named Daniel Salazar shared the byline. I wasn’t impressed with the way they handled the two-thirds issue, either. In their online story, they didn’t address it until the 14th paragraph. That’s way too late.
To its credit, though, the Eagle’s online story now includes how each Wichita area senator and representative voted. The Star’s story has no breakdown. As big as this story is, The Star should have reported the complete Senate vote and how area House members voted.
Shorman came from the Cap-Journal.
A good editor would have caught this immediately. I don’t think there are any left at the Star. Surely, a managing editor would have been all over this despite the late deadline. Not sure there are any decent ME’s around 18th and Grand either. It undercuts any credibility the newspaper has been trying to rebuild with recent changes.
Let’s hope there’s a second-day story about the legislators who changed their votes from the first veto effort, and why. (Is there such a thing as a second-day story now that news unfolds hour by hour and even minute by minute?)
A couple of vets weigh in…
It is very doubtful a managing editor would be around that late, and I wonder how many sets of eyes saw that story after the reporter submitted it. I am fearful it was just one, which is at least one too few.
At this point, The Star has not updated its story from last night. Regrettable and disappointing.
The Star also misplayed the story in today’s print edition. It ran one column upper left under a pretzel-like headline — “Veto of Kansas tax bill fails to stand up.” The centerpiece story, which took up four columns, was a timeless feature about three 25-year-old murder cases out of Springfield, MO.”
The override story should have been where the centerpiece was, along with a photo that could have been taken earlier yesterday from the Legislature. The murder mystery could have held for another day — any day. Obviously, the top editors had not planned — before they left for the day — on the possibility of subbing the centerpiece in the event the Legislature overrode the veto. Poor planning, as well as execution. Bad day at 18th and Grand. Needs some tightenin’ up down there.
Key stories like this need to indicate how the lawmakers in The Star’s circulation area voted. That would obviously include Johnson, Wyandotte and Leavenworth counties and probably Douglas and Miami too.
The Star greatly underplayed this story, at least as it appeared on the web most of Wednesday. Looked for an article–expected to see it as the top displayed item, but some other story I’ve already forgotten was being featured. The override story was farther down the page with no special attention drawn to it. By Thursday morning, the print edition gave the story the play it deserved the day before. Shortstaffed and overworked? Or just lazy and inexperienced?
On the matter of breaking down the numbers, I don’t think it’s a big deal–it might be worth mentioning further down in the story, but the important thing is that the override was successful. The numbers themselves may or may not be significant, because party whips may have given some members a pass on how they voted once they knew they had the votes they needed to override. Another story I read (topeka maybe?) drew needless attention to the fact that the override passed “narrowly,” which was technically true, but in a 27-13 vote, the more significant fact is that this was an overwhelming repudiation of a Republican governor by a heavily Republican senate.
The advantages of having a 3am newsroom poker game…and a bottle in the bottom left desk drawer… those old editors stay late…