More than once relatively early in my career at The Star I thought about leaving the news business and going into public relations. The main reason was that periodically I felt the urge to get back to Louisville, my hometown, but I was never able to get a reporting job at the Louisville Courier-Journal.
The closest I came to getting a job in Louisville — and this was before I met Patty in 1983 — was after interviewing for a p.r. job with Kentucky Fried Chicken, which is based there. I didn’t get the job, partly because I had no experience with convention and conference planning, which they wanted.
I can’t tell you how lucky I was I didn’t get that job. I would have been miserable — probably would have quit, and who knows where I would have ended up.
I remember an old friend saying to me later, disdainfully, “You don’t want to work for the Colonel and his greasy minions.”
…People in the newspaper business used to — and maybe still do — call it “going to the dark side” when reporters, editors or other editorial employees shift from newspapers to public relations.
It can look attractive from a distance — regular hours, a better salary and fewer deadlines — but it’s a total change of mission. From a mission of gathering facts, seeking the truth and exposing it, you go to promoting the business or institution you’re working for. Image burnishing is Job 1, while the truth may or may not take a place somewhere down the line.
The night-and-day difference between p.r. and working for a newspaper jumped at me once again today, when I read how UMKC pushed a phony story relating to the fatal shooting of a graduate student in July 2018.
Twenty-four-year-old Sharath Koppu, a native of India, was killed while working at a restaurant at 54th and Prospect. The Star initially reported, as police had said, that Koppu was working at the restaurant. But after internal discussions and emails among UMKC officials, Chancellor Mauli Agrawal issued a statement saying Koppu had not been working but instead had been “assisting family friends” at the restaurant.
Today, the skilled investigative reporting team of Mike Hendricks and Mara Rose Williams exposed the truth about Koppu — indeed, he was working at the restaurant — and why UMKC wanted to conceal his employment there. To quote Hendricks and Williams:
“Koppu’s off-campus job violated his F1 visa, which could have led to a federal investigation and put UMKC’s lucrative international student enrollment at risk. A precipitous drop in foreign students had already cost the university millions of dollars.”
Under U.S. Department of Homeland Security regulations, international students are prohibited from working off campus, seemingly because they could be filling jobs that U.S. citizens otherwise would have.
Hendricks and Williams obtained numerous emails that led up to Agrawal’s decision to attempt to hide the fact that Koppu was working at the restaurant. (An interesting fact that Hendricks and Williams did not report is that Agrawal had only been on the job about three weeks at the time Koppu was killed and the internal jousting over how to describe his role at the restaurant was taking place.)
One UMKC official who weighed in on the issue was media relations director John Martellaro, a former assignment editor at The Star. Martallero is a good guy and was a good journalist, and his instinct to tell the truth came through in an email he wrote to his supervisor, Anne Spenner, a UMKC vice chancellor who had previously had worked at The Star and had risen to the rank of assistant managing editor.
John Martellaro
Martellaro wrote: “I think saying he worked there is vital to establishing that he was an innocent victim and not someone who was engaged in violent activity. I doubt the legal formalities will come into play here.”
But Kevin Truman, vice provost for international initiatives, lobbied hard against quoting the police department account of what Koppu was doing at the restaurant.
“Let’s not emphasize where he worked,” Truman wrote. “I doubt that he had a work authorization.”
The emails do not show what position, if any, Spenner took or what she recommended to Agrawal. Ultimately, however, she issued the statement under Agrawal’s signature.
…You had, then, two former newspaper editors, groomed and accustomed to rooting out the truth, caught in a debate where it was in the university’s financial interest to misrepresent a key fact related to a case in which one of its student’s lost his life.
It’s easy to see that this incident probably left Martellaro frustrated and disgruntled. He’s on the record in a good way and can be proud of the position he took in the email. (I just hope he doesn’t pay a price for expressing an honest opinion and having it reported in the newspaper.)
Anne Spenner
We have no idea how Spenner reacted, but, knowing her, I would think the big lie that the international initiatives department advocated also rubbed her the wrong way and made her lose some sleep.
Whatever the case, when they go back to work in the morning, Martellaro and Spenner will still have impressive-sounding job titles, but they’ll also still be in jobs that too often make it very hard to feel good about what they’re doing.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Good article, Jimmy! Self-interest can make moral vagabonds of us all. That’s why it’s so important to report with indifference to the outcome…if you’ve got the courage.
The seminal point is whether and who in UMKC’s administration knew the student was violating the work restriction and yet turned a blind eye. Mike and Mara couldn’t irrefutably make the case for that, but left the reader with plenty of facts and enough evidence to figure it was likely. They laid out in detail what was at stake for UMKC. Follow the money. There are those who do what they’re told, and those who do the right thing. Don’t assume that communications specialists are in the former category and journalists only in the latter. I’ve been both, and you can be honest and straightforward, or dishonest and devious, in either role. Your choice.
Excellent comment. Newspaper employees can be just as deceptive and misleading as the rest of us.
One example: Back in 2010, for weeks The Star published a statement in its sports section that “Jason Whitlock is on vacation.” This was done to “explain” why his column wasn’t being published.
Of course, that turned out not to be the real story. The real reason for the column’s absence was that Whitlock was in a major labor-dispute with his bosses. But, The Star didn’t want to admit that, so they kept publishing a deceptive statement.
When I read this story it reminded me of the advice I’ve heard (and try to follow)….to never put anything in an email you wouldn’t want published on the front page of the paper.
One of the frustrating things to me about reporting and communication today is the over-reliance on email. Before email became so prevalent, you’d call somebody for a comment or track them down, somehow, some way.
Now most people who are being sought out for comment — especially if they’re on the defensive side of a story — dare not pick up the phone and will only comment by email — which seems a lot safer and reduces the chances of being misquoted or saying something they later regret. Reporters have gotten used to that, so, instead, they too deal mostly by email.
At the same time, to the benefit of reporters — as we see in this case — many officials within companies or institutions are also too reliant on email. Instead of picking up the phone or walking a few steps to an office down the hall, they resort to email, thereby leaving a nice electronic trail for reporters or others to follow through open records requests. As we go forward, I expect governmental bodies to do more to shield internal emails; the light of day often is not in the best interests of elected officials or people like those at UMKC who advocated lying about Koppu’s employment status.
The real issue is the lack of institutional control at UMKC. It has become a pariah of an academic institution in terms of ethics, and an embarrassment to the city. Before this latest episode we had the Bloch School fake ranking and the pharmacy school’s indentured servitude program. Is there any end in sight?
Some serious house cleaning is in order at UMKC.
Excellent point, Kelvin. I was thinking about the Bloch school debacle when I wrote this post, but the pharmacy school problem had slipped my mind…The team of Hendricks and Williams also produced both those stories. Thank God for their determination to hold UMKC accountable.
Jim, I left journalism when I was 22 for jobs that had pr components. For me it came down to wanting to make a difference rather than reporting on people who were getting things done and others who were doing things on their own behalf. But I always admired the reporters who stuck with it and remain friends with people who reported on me.