JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

Perhaps you saw in The Star on Wednesday an item about a 16-year-old youth being charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of Zach Myers, who died from injuries he suffered in a Dec. 1, head-on collision in Olathe.

That’s the case where I stirred a batch of hot coals after I called Zach’s parents to try to find out what happened that Wednesday morning on North Iowa Street.

Zach

What happened, I discovered through some straightforward reporting, was that the driver of the car was going at least twice the posted 25 mph speed limit when the car he was driving crossed the center line and collided with a car being driven by a 20-year-old woman.

The woman, Ashley Poage of Olathe, apparently edged across the center line about the same time as she maneuvered around a truck that was parked on the street. Poage told police she was traveling about 20 mph.

Poage was out on an errand; the boys were traveling from a vocational school in downtown Olathe to their home school, Olathe Northwest.

Neither Poage nor the two front-seat occupants of the car in which 16-year-old Zach was riding was seriously injured. But Zach, seated behind the driver, suffered a massive head injury and died a day later.

A witness who got to the scene a minute or two after the crash told me that Zach did not have his seat belt on when she got to the car and opened the back door. She said it appeared, from blood stains on the lap portion of the belt, that he might have been wearing the lap portion of the belt but not the shoulder harness, which bore no blood stains. The police report was ambiguous on the seat-belt issue.

Joshua Pena, the driver of the car in which the boys were riding — a borrowed car — told police he was going 50 to 60 mph. The other boy in the front seat told police that shortly before the crash “he looked at the speedometer and noticed that they were traveling 70 mph.”

So, now, Pena is charged not only with involuntary manslaughter but also two counts of reckless battery in the injuries of Poage and the third boy.

The formal “complaint” — the charge sheet — that the Johnson County District Attorney’s office filed on Monday does not reveal any details of the case. It does not mention speed, and it does not reveal the results of blood tests conducted on samples taken from Pena and Poage. The police report on the crash says there was no indication that drugs or alcohol were involved.

This is an incredibly tragic and upsetting case all the way around.

One boy is dead. Another is charged with manslaughter and has to live with the death of his companion. The third boy is either kicking himself for not doing anything to try to slow Pena down, or, if he did try to slow him down, is asking himself if he could have done more. And Poage has to be thinking about how things would have been different if that damn truck hadn’t been in her path or if she had arrived a few seconds earlier or later.

And Zach’s parents, Kimberly and John Myers, and Zach’s brother, John Myers Jr. — as well as grandparents, other relatives and friends — are left with a void that will never be filled or a memory that will never be erased.

My deepest sympathy goes out to all parties involved in the case.

I’m sure the Myerses told Zach about the inherent danger of speeding, how to wear his seat belt and to wear it at all times. (John Myers Sr. is a captain on the Olathe Fire Department.)

But it’s a warning to the rest of us — parents, relatives, friends of young people — to remind youngsters, over and over, to obey the speed limit and to tell them, even demonstrate, how to wear their seat belts properly.

If they try to wave us off, we need to tell them about Zach Myers.

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Last Sunday, The Star’s reader representative, Derek Donovan, wrote a column about the number of corrections in the paper having dropped between 2009 and 2010.

He wasn’t bragging, just laying out the raw numbers. Deep in the column, he also put forward a weird idea: To create two tiers of errors — significant and insignificant.

Maybe they could be presented under the headings “mortal” and “venial.” (That’s my idea, mind you, not his.)

Seriously, I have a couple of thoughts on this. (Are you surprised?)

First, if Donovan is looking, in his low-key way, for a gold star for the decline in corrections, he’s not going to get it from this here blogger. In fact, in my book, The Star’s treatment of corrections has earned them a big, scarlet “C” that the paper should be forced to put on Page 2 every day for the next year.

Page 2 is where The Star used to run all the news-related corrections. Every day, you could go to Page 2 and see how the paper had screwed up. A few years ago, they changed it, though. Now, the corrections run somewhere, but the editors often make the reader guess which shell the pea is under.

There are two main reasons that the number of corrections is down at The Star.

:: The news hole has gotten smaller, and circulation continues to dwindle.

Donovan reported that the paper published an even 300 corrections in the print edition, out of about 41,000 separate stories. That compared with 383 corrections in 2009, when the paper ran about 46,000 stories.

So, that’s an 11 percent drop in stories and a 22 percent drop in corrections. Donovan rushed over the story-count dip like it was a beaten-down speed bump, but, frankly, that should be a much greater source of concern to the paper and the readers than the correction rate.

How often do you hear people say, “There’s nothing to The Star anymore?” It’s not an illusion; it’s simply not offering the readers as much for their money as it used to.

As the story count has dropped, so has the number of subscribers and readers. And when fewer people are seeing the paper, not as many corrections are caught. It’s the readers who report most of the corrections. The reporters tend not to self-report their own errors for fear of getting dinged in their annual performance evaluations — and maybe even their paychecks.

:: The Star has made corrections a lower priority.

By depriving the corrections of a permanent home (as Page 2 was), The Star has signaled that it does not place as high a value on the corrections as it once did. Believe me, the reporters get that message, and most of them probably aren’t complaining.

During my many years at The Star, I lived in constant fear of winding up on Page 2. And, unfortunately, I made it there quite a bit. Once, in fact, I made a reporting error that, naturally, required a correction. But then I made an error in the correction. And so we published a correction to a correction.

Talk about mortification!

As tough as the policy was, though — and as conspicuous as the corrections were — we knew that our feet were being held firmly to the fire. It was good for the paper and good for the readers: full disclosure; no slip-sliding around.

I’m not saying The Star wouldn’t run a correction to a correction now. I’m sure it would. But now that it’s under siege, financially and otherwise (like many other metropolitan dailies), I think the handling of corrections has been allowed to drift a couple of rungs down on the priority ladder.

And now Donovan is tossing out the possibility of dropping corrections to an even lower level. In his column, he proposed two tiers of corrections — one for “significant factual errors” and one for “mundane, often mechanical mistakes.” As examples of insignificant mistakes, he cited the misspelling of celebrities’ names and erroneous TV listings.

Now, Donovan is certainly right that some errors are more significant than others, but establish separate tiers? No way. The first and perhaps biggest problem would be who decided which category the errors fell into.

Well, I guess that would be our helpful readers’ rep. But that’s an awful lot of discretion to give to one person, or even a committee, and I could foresee constant battles with readers and “error victims” over whether a certain error qualified as significant or insignificant.

Can you envision a correction that said: “Yesterday’s correction on the misspelling of Harry Truman’s name was improperly placed in the insignificant error category. We regret both errors.”

So, what’s the answer: Treat all corrections the same. And, please, go back to putting them in the same place every day.

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