News is a very subjective medium. It consists of items the whole world cares about. It also consists of items that only people in my own neighborhood would care about. I know that whatever the subject, not only will the stories themselves be edited, but also the list of subjects that will be reported on today will be edited.

In some cases, I will complain that a news item should have received more attention than it did receive. In other cases, I will wonder who cares about a particular bit of news. In every case, though, I would hope that the article’s author can tell us why an event happened or why it was important.

Yesterday I saw an example of an article that clearly left me asking “Why”, and in the process, made me feel that someone was trying to lead me to an improper conclusion. From yesterday’s Everett Herald:

Local briefly: Ferry worker taken off run, put on paid leave
MUKILTEO — A Washington State Ferries employee was taken off the Mukilteo-Clinton run Friday.
The employee was placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation, said Marta Coursey, a ferry spokeswoman.
Coursey declined to provide additional details about the personnel matter.
Washington State Patrol Sgt. Trent Cain said no one was arrested.

Now I do understand that articles listed under the heading “briefly” are going to be less than a complete story. But this story really left me with a bad case of “why.”

I would hope that in the future, if the Everett Herald wants to say that “someone at WSF did something” that they at least give us a hint as to what that something might have been. We don’t even know if this “something” was work related or personal in nature. The story has a much different significance depending upon one of several scenarios:

  1. A WSF employee did something bad as part of their job, perhaps causing potential to passengers of fellow employees. OR,
  2. A WSF employee was wanted for a crime that happened in their personal life and was arrested at work. OR,
  3. Police found a person (who happened to be a WSF employee) and took them away from work to tell them that a family member had passed away. OR,
  4. Something else.

It just seems that we are possibly implicating a lot of people in a matter that could have been very mundane in nature. Who in the public reading this will presume that WSF has done something wrong? We don’t know that from this article. Who in the public reading this will presume that this employee has done something wrong?

Even if details of a story are thin at publication time, it would still be helpful to find out why we are reading something. We don’t want to be misled about its significance.

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