Inside the Citizen’s coverage of the Karen Read case

A few years ago, a rumor about a sexual assault circulated at the high school where I teach. Conversations in the hallway moved online; an Instagram account was created where people anonymously posted their experiences as well as hearsay. The student newspaper, which I had been hired to advise one month before, wanted to report on the account — its spike in followers, combined with intense discussions in school-run groups about the experience of being a woman on campus, made it newsworthy.

Citizen Publisher Beth Erickson

The story was exceptionally difficult to cover. First, the student journalists were reporting on their own community during a time of deep stress and division. And second, they were trying to report the truth when the news consisted primarily of allegations, which the school denied.

Consider another situation. Blog posts spread like wildfire with theories about the death of a police officer. During the select board meetings, townspeople criticize elected officials and local police. A protest breaks out — and another, and another, and another.

What is newsworthy? What is the truth?

Journalists strive to uphold four principles, as outlined by the Society of Professional Journalists: Seek Truth and Report It, Minimize Harm, Act Independently, and Be Accountable and Transparent. I have this Code of Ethics taped to my desk at work; my students know that I’m obsessed with fact-checking, which I did for The Atlantic prior to teaching. But during a time when divisions dominate and facts seem up for debate, trust in the media remains at an all-time low. And for a local newspaper, the very things that make the publication so special — all-encompassing town coverage, a forum for opinions, close community ties — have posed the biggest challenges.

“[Running the Citizen has been] a struggle all along,” said publisher Beth Erickson, who owns the paper and serves as its editor-in-chief. For nearly four decades, Erickson, a Canton resident, has navigated controversial subjects in these pages from sexual abuse within the Catholic Church to gay marriage to the Iraq War. “But nothing like this year. This year has been a nightmare.”

When I approached the Citizen with my idea for this column, I expected to write a piece about how the newspaper is surviving in an era when local news appears to be an anachronism. But the story of the Citizen at this particular moment is unusual for another reason: As Canton makes national headlines for the Karen Read case, the Citizen is trying to report on the case and its fallout from within.

“Our role is to cover the entire community,” said managing editor Jay Turner, who oversees the newspaper’s coverage of schools, local government, sports, and everything in between alongside Erickson and general manager Connor Erickson. Turner explains that the Citizen has never tried to “compete” when it comes to investigating or breaking news surrounding the case, given the newspaper’s responsibility to other stories as well as its limited resources. (The Citizen has four regular reporters, two of whom are dedicated to news, including Turner.) “We agreed early on to cover this from an official standpoint and update people,” said Turner. The Citizen published a front-page story on Boston police officer John O’Keefe’s death in January 2022, then follow-up coverage of Read’s indictment. Though the Citizen did not cover pre-trial activities — as is typical, given staffing, according to Turner — the newspaper has published consistently on the topic since April 2023, the date of the pre-trial when the case gained broader media attention.

One of the earliest challenges in covering this story, according to Erickson and Turner, was deciding whether to identify people who might have been involved but weren’t charged with crimes. While some readers may have seen it as an abdication of responsibility to abstain from printing certain names, Erickson and Turner considered it journalistic due diligence not to do so, in an effort to minimize potential harm. “Even though there’s a place for speculation, there’s really no place for it in a community newspaper,” Turner said.

But what happens when unconfirmed facts are inherently part of a story centered around an unfolding murder investigation? For example, if the Citizen reports on what an attorney speculates during a court hearing, is the newspaper legitimizing that theory? Or, if the Citizen reports that at a public town meeting someone said they think the select board and police are doing a poor job, is the newspaper spotlighting that opinion? “It’s always a judgment call,” said Turner, who has spent hours discussing these kinds of questions with both Beth and Connor Erickson. Beth Erickson makes the final decision: “I want to be fair. I want the coverage to be balanced.”

The Citizen editors have also discussed how and when to cover protests in town. While it may be easy to make a case that the first or largest protest is newsworthy, coverage of subsequent protests is more challenging, given not only the newspaper’s small staff but also the fact that reporting on a protest could be considered as amplifying it. Then again, to not report could be considered lacking coverage. And when readers tend to desire “wall-to-wall coverage” of the case or “nothing at all,” as Turner puts it, it leaves little space for the very real gray area.

And then there are the opinion pages — columns such as this one, op-eds, and letters to the editor. The ideas in these pages remain independent of the Citizen’s editors (including this column, which was my own idea), though less than half of Americans can distinguish between news and opinion stories, according to the Pew Research Center. Turner noted that some readers have considered the newspaper’s publishing of opinions as its endorsement of the views. But part of a journalist’s responsibility is to “support the open and civil exchange of views, even views they find repugnant,” according to the Society of Professional Journalists. “Unless I feel that it’s absolutely a lie or something that is libelous, I’ve been giving them free reign. I’ve been giving them a forum to express their opinions,” Erickson said of those who write in. “The beauty of having a town newspaper with a letters section is that you can then write a rebuttal,” Turner said.

Erickson and Turner have often considered writing an editorial themselves that would include a look into their editorial decisions, some of which, for Erickson, have tested personal relationships. “The town is very divided, so is this editorial going to add fuel to that or help in any way to bring understanding or healing?” Turner said. “You’re writing to make the situation better, but the possibility it will make the situation worse can be paralyzing.” He does wonder if publishing a message to readers at the start of the case may have been useful. “I wish that we communicated more directly to the reader early on the challenges and obstacles that we face in covering a case like this.”

Would more transparency like this have helped? The opinions section embodies the divisions and dogmatism that extend well beyond Canton. In a column celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Citizen in 2012, George T. Comeau defined the Citizen as a way of “communicating over the back fence” with neighbors “in a way that opens doors, minds, and conversations.” Erickson no longer believes this to be true: “There’s so much hate.” She worries that even when the case closes, people will continue to believe only what they want. “It’s like you’re on one side or the other and you can’t see anything else,” Erickson said.

“The slow erosion of local newspapers is one of the reasons that American civic life has turned so sour,” Jerry Berger, a Boston University journalism professor and former reporter for the Marlboro Enterprise, wrote to me in an email. More than half of U.S. counties don’t have local news, according to a recent report out of Northwestern University; the Citizen’s engagement, while at times tense, is unique. “A newspaper used to be the lifeblood of a community, whether reporting on controversial issues — or school sports. That’s especially true in a case like Karen Read, where local reporters know the players involved better than outside journalists and can better gauge local opinion because they are dealing with neighbors, not just ‘sources.’”

The Citizen will cover Read’s case as it goes to trial next month. And with neither the courts nor the press necessarily trusted as arbiters of truth anymore, readers will inevitably decide for themselves what to believe — and how to judge the Citizen.

In my work, I talk frequently with media law lawyers and journalists about the ethics of the craft (a private school audience can be intense). What most of these conversations return to is intent. The first principle of journalism’s Code of Ethics is not to get the truth (for, is such a thing possible?), but to seek it responsibly. That distinction makes all the difference.

In Comeau’s column, Erickson spoke about her sleepless Wednesdays. On those nights before the paper is published, she wondered, “‘Did I offend anyone, make a mistake, or hurt someone with my coverage?’”

When a journalist stops asking those questions — when they begin to be on “one side or the other” and “can’t see anything else” — we’re in trouble. But more than a decade later, Erickson is still asking herself the same thing.

“I have to keep all those voices out of my head while I put the paper together. I do what I think is right every week,” Erickson told me. “Then, when I’ve tried to fall asleep, I roll from side to side with the voices.”

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Posted by Rachael Allen on Mar 1 2024. Filed under Featured Content, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.