Why there’s less ‘good’ news at my old paper

Today is the third anniversary of my departure from the Los Angeles Times. I quit, after 26 years, because the paper offered me a year’s pay and because. . . well, because I had never taken many chances in life, and this seemed like a good time to change that.

What’s it been like to watch my former paper lose hundreds of thousands of readers and many talented staffers? Painful. What’s it’s been like to watch the Tribune Co. muscle out two editor-in-chiefs and two publishers who fought against cutbacks? Laughable. Very much like a Vietnam-War-era episode in which commanders destroyed a village “in order to save it” from falling into the hands of the North Vietnamese.

Unhappy anniversary

I was reminded of Vietnam when a Times reporter duped me a memo written by the Times’ current publisher, Tribune Co. functionary David Hiller, who sent an e-mail to all Times employees in June. Hiller wrote about attending a Rotary Club meeting where a minister said during the invocation: “Help us to reinvigorate the world by having good news people, people that produce and publish glad tidings.” You know this criticism; we get pelted this way all the time: “Why don’t you publish any ‘good’ news?”

Hiller told the staff he had been thinking a lot about that moment, and that if the paper wanted to keep its readership, it would have to do more “good” news stories, stories that give readers “hope that we are staying with them…”

At which point I hope someone reminded the publisher of this harsh reality: It is much harder, and more costly, to find and publish “good” news. The very cuts that Hiller and the Tribune Co. have made at the L.A. Times are responsible for making the Times look more “negative.” The cuts are the reason the local news section too often contains little but bloodshed and criminal trials.

As those of us who do the actual work of putting out the paper know, bad news takes care of itself. It grabs your attention more quickly. It unfolds as news of a higher magnitude than good news. It is harder to ignore (priest molestation settlement, riots, philandering mayor, fires, floods. . .).

So-called “good” news stories rarely scream to be written. You may get a phone call from a source who pitches “good” news, but you have to believe in the story to assign it–and you may have to put a “bad” news story on the back burner to get a “good” news story done, especially when you’re working with less people.

Like most newspapers, the L.A. Times today has far, far fewer “general assignment” reporters who are kept ready (as in a fire department) for unpredictable kinds of stories. Almost all the bodies left after the buyouts have been assigned to “beats”–necessary if predictable areas of inquiry for bread-and-butter stories.

What don’t you see? Check out four stories from the mid-to-late 1990s that you would rarely see in the L.A. Times today because nothing about them demanded to be written. I was the editor who assigned each of them. I was able to do it because I had access to enough reporters–and because I didn’t have to sacrifice any “bad” news stories to get these “good” news stories done.

Only one of these four was about something warm and syrupy. There’s a whole other kind of “good” news stories: stories about the way people struggle to make it through the world, stories about how big events trickle down to ordinary life, stories about how people from other cultures intersect.

The first two stories were done by John Mitchell (still with the paper, still looking for stories like these, bless his heart).

Story 1: On the day in 1996 that Shaquille O’Neal signed a huge contract that brought him to the L.A. Lakers, Mitchell and I talked about trying to write about the way this event trickled down. The story, which made A-1, started like this:

Every time an NBA star signed another impossibly huge contract this week, Dave Koch’s job got tougher.

Koch directs 400 teenage athletes at USC’s National Youth Sports Program, trying to instill not only athletic skill but also an appreciation of discipline, long-term planning and the need for education. You can’t rely on the slim chance of a big pro contract, he tells them.

Then came the wave of unprecedented pro basketball contracts, so fast that it was hard for the boys to keep the names straight, hard for them to conceptualize the dollars: seven years, $56 million; five years, $50 million; seven years, $98 million. By the time Shaquille O’Neal signed with the Lakers for $120 million for seven years Thursday, almost a billion dollars in free-agent money had been thrown around the NBA.

And Dave Koch’s athletes, youngsters whose bodies have yet to catch up with the size of their feet, fantasized yet more about getting their share, getting it fast, getting it all in one shot.

“I’m a baller,” insisted David Santana, 13, stretching to show his full 5-foot, 11 1/2-inch frame and size 13 shoes. “I want to be a professional ballplayer too. I can do it.”

O’Neal will make about 500 times as much as a Los Angeles public school teacher. What coaches like Koch tell kids like David is that the odds of emulating the lowest-paid pro, let alone Shaq, are overwhelmingly long. First, David will have to make his high school team. That will cut the chances of making the NBA down to about 10,000 to 1.

“Kids read about these one-in-a-million athletes getting mega-million-dollar salaries, and it’s hard to convince them that it’s all right to be one of the other 999,999 individuals working hard to make a decent living,” Koch said.

Word of O’Neal’s deal zipped through the USC camp as the teenagers moved through their organized schedule, from basketball and swimming to discussions about first aid and AIDS. They tried to imagine the sheer size of the contract.

“Los Angeles is going to have the best basketball team,” said Shangameir Sutton, 15. Yes, he admitted, he too has a secret desire to be a pro. “They wouldn’t have to pay that much for me.” . . . .

Story 2: Mitchell told me he had stumbled into a donut shop with a fascinating cultural mix:

The owners of the Daily Donut, Lynn and Now Lay, are talking in their Los Feliz shop one bustling morning about how they escaped Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, fled to America, went to school, learned English, bought their first shop in South Gate, and bought and sold enough other shops to acquire a mini-mall and an apartment building. Suddenly an old man perched in a corner seat interrupts.

“When you came to this country, you’d never seen a toilet,” Lennie Bluett proclaims for the rest of the shop to hear, “and now you have 14! It’s the American dream.”

Bluett is the best customer and best friend of the Daily Donut. He’s an 83-year-old piano player who’s been holding court for most of the 16 years the Lays have owned the shop, beguiling customers with wit and charm honed in piano bars around the world. “Mister Lennie,” the Lays call him.

Mister Lennie’s picture is on the Daily Donut’s wall, and his corner seat is reserved. When the Lays go on vacation, they leave him the key to the shop. When the couple, who live in the San Fernando Valley, were seeking to put their daughter into a better school, Mister Lennie became the girl’s guardian so the Lays could use his Los Feliz address.

Theirs is an L.A. story: the tall old black piano player, raised in segregation, sharing laughs with two rugged immigrants raised amid genocide.

Bluett arrives one recent morning at the crack of dawn, entertaining customers with stories of his travels and show-biz experience, peppering them with greetings: Buenos dias … bonjour … ciao.

Just back from playing at a hotel bar in Casablanca, he’s sporting a hand-knit Moroccan skullcap over his cleanly shaven head. He boasts that he sported the bald look before Michael Jordan–why, even before Telly Savalas.

“I was traveling in Switzerland, and all these little children came up to me shouting and pointing: ‘Kojak!’ ‘Kojak!’ ‘Kojak,’” he says. “I wanted to say, ‘No! No, not Kojak! It’s Blackjack! Now shut up and go away!’”

Bluett spots a Los Feliz neighbor.

“He’s a judge,” he warns the customers. “He could have you arrested.”

“He’s divorce court,” jokes an employee, Rosana Aleman, handing a Styrofoam cup of coffee-to-go to U.S. District Judge Matt Byrne.

The judge pauses and tells a story about a preacher’s response when asked if he had ever contemplated divorce.

“He said, ‘Divorce, never. Murder, yes,’” Byrne laughs, pushing the door to leave. . . . .

Story 3: This second pair of stories was written by Matea Gold (still with the paper, covers television from New York City). She had written a story in which a brief reference was made to an immigrant child who translated for a non-English-speaking parent. It was easy to envision an entire story on that subject, and Matea’s made A-1:

Jessica Ramirez already has a pretty busy schedule, what with 5th grade and ballet class and tutoring after school.

But the bright, affectionate girl with lively brown eyes also juggles another set of duties: After school, she sorts through the mail at her Boyle Heights home and goes over the bills with her parents. She marks down appointments and deadlines on the calendar hanging on the kitchen wall. If the phone rings, she jumps to get it. She sits down in the evenings with her younger brother and helps him with his homework. She accompanies her mother everywhere–to the grocery store, doctor’s office, teacher’s conferences–and stays at her elbow, ready to help explain a product or a medical prescription or her progress in school.

Jessica, 11, is her family’s gatekeeper, the main conduit between her Spanish-speaking parents and the English-speaking world. As the eldest child and the most bilingual speaker in the house, she shoulders the responsibility of translating.

“I feel like an adult already,” she says matter-of-factly. “Just a small adult.” Translating at a young age is a common experience in immigrant families, one that helps children gain increased confidence, greater fluency in both languages and a broader knowledge of society. But the cumulative burden of what researchers call “language brokering” also puts children like Jessica in the awkward position of trying to decipher for their parents a world they have barely learned to navigate.

“These kids don’t simply interpret, they act as surrogate parents for themselves and their younger siblings,” said Lucy Tse, an assistant professor of education at Loyola Marymount University who has studied language brokering. “They make adult decisions, sometimes without the benefit of adult sophistication and knowledge.”

Thrust into this grown-up world, many children feel overwhelmed and ill-equipped. The role reversal sometimes causes friction between them and the frustrated parents who rely on them to communicate. Some children resent being drafted into service–called away from their friends and playtime–every time their parents need a translator.

Although the experience of language brokers transcends America’s many waves of immigration, experts are just starting to recognize these pressures. Confronted with a mounting number of non-English speakers, institutions that once relied heavily on children to interpret are altering their policies.

For example, in the Alhambra school district, where about 40% of the 20,000 students translate for their families at home, officials now discourage children from taking on that role at school. Says professor Tse: “We need to better understand how these kids survive.”

Jessica’s family immigrated from Guanajuato, Mexico, when she was 8 months old. Her father, Martin, works as a handyman. Her mother, Dolores, is a cook. Like many working-class immigrants, neither has ever found the time to study English, although Martin bought an English course called Ingles Sin Barreras–”English Without Barriers”–that lines the living room wall of their small Boyle Heights home.

“I understand a little, but I can’t express myself,” Dolores said. “So wherever I go, I take Jessica . . . and I feel secure in what I’m doing.”

Jessica takes it in stride when she has to write a note for her mother to sign, or speak to adults who call for her parents. She admits, though, to often feeling a little lost.

“Like a live dictionary,” she says. “Sometimes I feel nervous because I don’t really understand what something means. I just go, ‘Uh, I’m not really sure.’ I just guess.”

She frets about her family’s finances. Sometimes she gives her parents back her $1.50 allowance to help pay for utilities. Once she felt bad because the water bill was high and she thought it was her fault. Another time she dreamed there was a huge bill and she didn’t know how to pay for it. . . .

Story 4: This story came to me from a woman I’d written about who insisted the paper do a story about a sweet relationship: an 81-year-old florist and his wife. Matea started it this way:

Maybe Bill Williams is right. Maybe he hasn’t done anything all that extraordinary in the last 81 years.

Not his marriage. Nothing special about a 56-year love affair with a woman he still calls “honey” and eyes flirtatiously as she walks across the room.

Or the flower shop he runs out of a dim garage behind his Compton house, where he has spent four decades arranging carnations and roses for celebrations and funerals, creating corsages for proms and graduations.

Or the dozens of kids he’s employed at the shop during the last 40 years, giving them their first job and a friendly ear.

You tell Bill Williams he deserves some praise, and he ducks his head with a vigorous, disapproving shake. You ask him to sum up his life, and he puts it this way: “I’ve made an honest living. I can sleep well at night.”

Longtime residents of Compton tell a different story.

To them, Williams is a rare, living link to a time when neighbors visited each other through gates in their backyard fences and parents kept a watchful eye on each other’s children playing in the street. Williams and his wife, Myrtle, moved to a gray stucco house on 137th Street in Compton in 1951, among the first group of African American families to settle in the area as segregation broke down.

In the 1950s, Bill was working as a janitor at the Bel-Air Country Club when he saw a man arranging ferns for a table centerpiece.

“That’s for me,” he said to himself. No boss to tell you what to do. Good steady work.

He took some flower arranging classes in the evenings at Manual Arts High School and started working for a floral delivery service. Every time he picked up a bouquet or arrangement, he would spend a couple minutes chatting with the florist, learning tricks and techniques.

He opened up a flower shop in his garage in 1958, putting in an old refrigerator to keep the blossoms fresh. Soon the word spread that Bill Williams was in the flower business. In his first week, he did three weddings.

As the business grew, he hired young neighborhood kids to sweep the floor, eventually teaching them how to make flower arrangements and take orders.

What they didn’t realize at the time, they say now, was that in the process Williams was teaching them how to get ahead . . .

Nothing about this story demanded it be published–except for the fact that it allowed the paper to connect with its citizens. The fact that the newspaper devoted the space and time to these stories (none of them were done in a single day) made them effective.

Once you begin strangulating your reporting ranks, you jettison these kinds of stories. You forget about them, and so does much of your audience, who slowly find fewer and fewer compelling reasons to subscribe. Until a clergyman raises the subject indirectly, and catches the attention of your publisher, whose grasp of the dynamics and mechanics of “good” and “bad” news is so unsophisticated that he does not know the very problem he rails against is of his own making.

COMMENT: This comes from a reader who prefers the cloak of anonymity

Of all the rebuttals to cost cutting in the news biz, I think the best I’ve ever heard is your idea here: That cutting back on the staff virtually guarantees cutting back on precisely the type of stories that might attract a broader readership and save the day. I never thought of it like that — and neither, clearly, did the guys in charge. Well, they thought about it to this extent: dollars and cents are black and white, easy to grasp and deceptively easy to work with, while appealing to the hearts and minds of readers is anything but black and white and difficult. The fact that the intersection point between those two is the nexus of the business they’re in is, apparently, little more than an annoyance.

Everywhere I’ve worked, the reality never changes: Whenever a business or a business leader reduces what he faces to just numbers, he fails. Now, if he accepts the fact that his work is about both numbers AND people, he still might fail. But only then do you have even a chance to succeed.

Remember, those four stories you cited in your piece are not only great pieces of journalism, they are great PRODUCTS — products that happen to sit on a shelf that’s made of newsprint.

But it’s not business that’s at fault. You can do it right, you know — and you can do it by simultaneously addressing private and public responsibilities.

Your newspaper execs should take a close look at my hero, Theodore Vail, twice president of AT&T in its formative years and, in the words of uber-business theorist Peter Drucker, “the greatest decision-maker in the history of American business.”

Vail’s ability to play the numbers like a card sharp shuffling a deck while simultaneously communicating a shining vision to the hearts of his employees and the American people is nothing short of genius. When AT&T begged him to come back and save the company in 1907, he looked the board straight in the eyes and told them: “I’m not here to produce an immediate rise in our profits. I’m here to put a telephone into every home in America. And when we do that, the profits will come.” THAT, my friend, is Babe Ruth calling his shot. This was Vail’s great idea: Take this huge business and run it like a government agency — the speed and urgency of a business combined with the sense of public duty of government. The board thought they were electing a new president of the company; Vail saw his job as being president of the entire INDUSTRY. He saw the future.

I’ll bet almost everyone thinks government imposed regulation on the telephone industry? Nope. Vail INVENTED telephone regulation and imposed IT on government and the rest of the industry to protect AT&T! His great sponsor, J. P. Morgan, despised government, as did all the other business leaders of the day, but Vail had come from government — he was the boy genius of the federal government in the early 1870s, single-handedly revolutionizing mail delivery in the U. S. — and refused to give in to robber baron conventional wisdom.

For example: Every one of his VPs told them it was insane to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on his pet project beginning in 1910. I think Vail may have been right in building the world’s first LONG DISTANCE NETWORK, don’t you? And AT&T Long Lines was probably the most profitable business in the world for 75 years after Vail built it.

Anyway, this is what I thought about when I read your piece: Isn’t a newspaper a little like those early telephone companies — both a private company and a public trust?

And if the people running newspapers today don’t think they can balance those two — that seems to be their message, and their alibi — I would point them to Theodore Vail. He faced a challenge a jillion times bigger than they do — and he fundamentally changed his industry, his country and the world. How can you even gauge the social and economic impact of America connecting its citizens by phone DECADES before other countries? Staggering.

The thing is, throughout his career, Vail never surrendered to easy solutions, like the newspaper execs you cite, or averted his eyes from the horizon. If I had to summarize his genius, it was this: Vail always figured it out. No matter what he faced, he sat down, thought about it, and figured it out. He was the greatest figurer outer anybody ever saw. And if he was running a newspaper company today, he would figure it out.

And I guarantee you, the kind of stories you included on your site would be front and center of a newspaper led by the great Theodore Vail.

Uh, I believe I’ve gotten a little worked up here, so I apologize — but doesn’t it seem like this private/public trust issue is the crux of all this? And wouldn’t Vail come in handy?

NYT puts itself in front of the battering ram with abortion story

Byron Calame, whose tenure as the New York Times’ Public Editor has seemed largely lukewarm to me, finally hit a home run. He caught the Times Magazine in what appears to be an embarrassing and simply wrong reportorial posture. Prepare to be hit with this example the next time you’re accused of being an apologist for the liberal media.

This unfolded in three parts, the first on New Year’s Eve, the second two parts on the day I’m posting this, Jan. 7.

Taking the easy way out

You can read what follows and draw your own conclusion. For my money, there’s not a soul in journalism who hasn’t fallen prey, for honest or dishonest reasons, to the kind of conduct described herein. (Pay close attention to a letter to the Public Editor that appears lower down from a former Austin American-Statesman reporter, Bill Bishop.)

PART I: THE PUBLIC EDITOR STRIKES

Truth, Justice, Abortion and The Times Magazine
By Byron Calame
Dec. 31, 2006

The cover story on abortion in El Salvador in The New York Times Magazine on April 9 contained prominent references to an attention-grabbing fact. ”A few” women, the first paragraph indicated, were serving 30-year jail terms for having had abortions. That reference included a young woman named Carmen Climaco. The article concluded with a dramatic account of how Ms. Climaco received the sentence after her pregnancy had been aborted after 18 weeks.

It turns out, however, that trial testimony convinced a court in 2002 that Ms. Climaco’s pregnancy had resulted in a full-term live birth, and that she had strangled the ”recently born.” A three-judge panel found her guilty of ”aggravated homicide,” a fact the article noted. But without bothering to check the court document containing the panel’s findings and ruling, the article’s author, Jack

Hitt, a freelancer, suggested that the ”truth” was different. The issues surrounding the article raise two points worth noting, both beyond another reminder to double-check information that seems especially striking. Articles on topics as sensitive as abortion need an extra level of diligence and scrutiny — ”bulletproofing,” in newsroom jargon. And this case illustrates how important it is for top editors to carefully assess the complaints they receive. A response drafted by top editors for the use of the office of the publisher in replying to complaints about the Hitt story asserted that there was ”no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported.”

Apart from the flawed example of Ms. Climaco, Mr. Hitt’s 7,800-word cover article provided a broad and intriguing look at a nation where the penal code allows prison sentences for a woman who has an abortion, the provider of the procedure or anyone who assisted. His interviews with doctors, nurses, police officers, prosecutors, judges and both opponents and advocates of abortion offered revealing personal perspectives on the effects of the criminalization of the procedure.

Complaints about the article began arriving at the paper after an anti-abortion Web site, LifeSiteNews.com, reported on Nov. 27 that the court had found that Ms. Climaco’s pregnancy ended with a full-term live birth. The headline: ”New York Times Caught in Abortion-Promoting Whopper — Infanticide Portrayed as Abortion.” Seizing on the misleading presentation of the article’s only example of a 30-year jail sentence for an abortion, the site urged viewers to complain to the publisher and the president of The Times. A few came to me.

The care taken in the reporting and editing of this example didn’t meet the magazine’s normal standards. Although Sarah H. Smith, the magazine’s editorial manager, told me that relevant court documents are ”normally” reviewed, Mr. Hitt never checked the 7,600-word ruling in the Climaco case while preparing his story. And Mr. Hitt told me that no editor or fact checker ever asked him if he had checked the court document containing the panel’s decision.

Mr. Hitt said Ms. Climaco had been brought to his attention by the magistrate who decided four years ago that the case warranted a trial, so he had asked the magistrate for the court record. ”When she told me that the case had been archived, I accepted that to mean that I would have to rely upon the judge who had been directly involved in the case and who heard the evidence” in the trial stage of the judicial process, Mr. Hitt wrote in an e-mail to me. So he didn’t pursue the document.

But obtaining the public document isn’t difficult. At my request, a stringer for The Times in El Salvador walked into the court building without making any prior arrangements a few days ago, and minutes later had an official copy of the court ruling. It proved to be the same document as the one disseminated by LifeSiteNews.com, which had been translated into English in early December by a translator retained by The Times Magazine’s editors. I’ve since had the stringer review the translation of key paragraphs for me.

The magistrate, Mr. Hitt noted, ”had been helpful in other areas of the story and quite open.” So when she recalled one doctor’s estimate that Ms. Climaco’s pregnancy had been aborted at 18 weeks, he used that in the article. (The only 18-week estimate mentioned in the court ruling came from a doctor who hadn’t seen any fetus and whose deductions from the size of the uterus 17 hours after the birth were found by the three judges to be flawed.)

Mr. Hitt concluded the article with this summation of the Climaco case: ”The truth was certainly — well, not in the ‘middle’ so much as somewhere else entirely. Somewhere like this: She’d had a clandestine abortion at 18 weeks, not all that different from D.C.’s [another woman cited earlier in the story], something defined as absolutely legal in the United States. It’s just that she’d had an abortion in El Salvador.”

The caption under Ms. Climaco’s picture was notably specific. It stated flatly that she ”was given 30 years for an abortion that was ruled a homicide.”

When Times Magazine editors provided me with an English-language version of the court findings on Dec. 8, just after the translation had been completed, there was little ambiguity in the court’s findings. ”We have an already-formed and independent life here,” the court said. ”Therefore we are not dealing with an abortion here, as the defense has attempted to claim in the present case.”

The physician who had performed the autopsy on the ”recently born” testified that it represented a ”full-term” birth, which he defined as a pregnancy with a duration of ”between 38 and 42 weeks,” the ruling noted. In adopting those conclusions, the court said of another autopsy finding: ”Given that the lungs floated when submerged in water, also indicating that the recently-born was breathing at birth, this confirms that we are dealing with an independent life.”

Exceptional care must be taken in the reporting process on sensitive articles such as this one to avoid the slightest perception of bias. Paul Tough, the editor on the article, acknowledged in an e-mail to me that in reporting this story, Mr. Hitt used an unpaid translator who has done consulting work for Ipas, an abortion rights advocacy group, for his interviews with Ms. Climaco and D.C. This wasn’t ideal, he said, but the risk posed for sources in this situation required the use of intermediaries ”to some degree.”

Ipas used The Times’s account of Ms. Climaco’s sentence to seek donations on its Web site for ”identifying lawyers who could appeal her case” and to help the organization ”continue critical advocacy work” across Central America. ”A gift from you toward our goal of $30,000 will help Carmen and other Central American women who are suffering under extreme abortion laws,” states the Web appeal, which Ipas said it took down after I first contacted the organization on Dec. 14. An Ipas spokeswoman called the appeal ”moderately successful.”

The magazine’s failure to check the court ruling was then compounded for me by the handling of reader complaints about the issue. The initial complaints triggered a public defense of the article by two assistant managing editors before the court ruling had even been translated into English or Mr. Hitt had finished checking various sources in El Salvador. After being queried by the office of the publisher about a possible error, Craig Whitney, who is also the paper’s standards editor, drafted a response that was approved by Gerald Marzorati, who is also the editor of the magazine. It was forwarded on Dec. 1 to the office of the publisher, which began sending it to complaining readers.

The response said that while the ”fair and dispassionate” story noted Ms. Climaco’s conviction of aggravated homicide, the article ”concluded that it was more likely that she had had an illegal abortion.” The response ended by stating, ”We have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported in our article, which was not part of any campaign to promote abortion.” After the English translation of the court ruling became available on Dec. 8, I asked Mr. Marzorati if he continued to have ”no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts” in the article. His e-mail response seemed to ignore the ready availability of the court document containing the findings from the trial before the three-judge panel and its sentencing decision. He referred to it as the ”third ruling,” since the trial is the third step in the judicial process.

The article was ”as accurate as it could have been at the time it was written,” Mr. Marzorati wrote to me. ”I also think that if the author and we editors knew of the contents of that third ruling, we would have qualified what we said about Ms. Climaco. Which is NOT to say that I simply accept the third ruling as ‘true’; El Salvador’s judicial system is terribly politicized.”

I asked Mr. Whitney if he intended to suggest that the office of the publisher bring the court’s findings to the attention of those readers who received the ”no reason to doubt” response, or that a correction be published. The latest word from the standards editor:

”No, I’m not ready to do that, nor to order up a correction or Editors’ Note at this point.”

One thing is clear to me, at this point, about the key example of Carmen Climaco. Accuracy and fairness were not pursued with the vigor Times readers have a right to expect.

PART II: TIMES READERS RESPOND

Other Voices: When the Facts Need More Checking
Jan, 7, 2007

I see the problems with the April 9 Jack Hitt article as part of a larger problem facing reporters. Editors want the killer example. It’s not enough to write an article that provides, as you describe Mr. Hitt’s article, ”a broad and intriguing look” at a subject. For a reporter to get on the front page, or for a freelancer to get in the magazine, he or she needs the fist-slamming anecdote.

The question is, would Mr. Hitt’s piece have gotten in The New York Times without the drama of the 30-year jail sentence? Would The Times have purchased ”a broad and intriguing look” on any subject, for that matter, that didn’t have either celebrity, outrage or some kind of goodness-gracious hook?

Every reporter knows this drill. You find an interesting story that is, like all things interesting, also complicated. You describe this complex story to editors, who inevitably ask, often blankly, ”Where are the real people?” So reporters hit the phones looking for just the right example and the stories roll out with the strained anecdotal leads that push any fact or explanation on past the jump. Editors say this kind of narrative diversion is what readers want. It’s interesting (to me, at least) that most of the journalistic scandals come down to reporters creating ”real people.”
BILL BISHOP
Austin, Tex., Jan. 1, 2007
The writer is a former reporter for The Austin American-Statesman.

I was startled to read that The Times Magazine’s editor distrusted a legal opinion from El Salvador because he, personally, believes that ”El Salvador’s judicial system is terribly politicized.”

Has it ever occurred to him, or to any of the other editors involved in this embarrassment, that it is because The Times’s reportorial and editing system is itself ”terribly politicized,” that is, terribly one-sided, that this misreporting occurred?
FRED DANZIG
Eastchester, N.Y., Dec. 31, 2006

There is a relatively simple way to cut down on the type of attribution — or lack of attribution — errors you mention.

Most journalists today write on word-processing programs that have the capability to insert comments, footnotes or endnotes anywhere in a story.

Editors should require that reporters provide one of these insertions after every paragraph, stating how they know what they just wrote.

Such notes could include U.R.L.’s, references to specific pages in a reporter’s notebook, reference documents (for example, the court transcript you referred to) — anything that would allow the reporter and editors to backtrack from the manuscript and judge the veracity of the content or conclusions.

I would encourage making as much of this type of sourcing as possible available to online readers so they can judge for themselves, especially when public sites and documents are referenced.
TOM JOHNSON
Santa Fe, N.M., Jan. 2, 2007
The writer is a co-founder of the Institute for Analytic Journalism.

The April 9 Times Magazine article about the criminalization of abortion in El Salvador is a very important document. What does the maternal mortality and morbidity rate mean? It is one way of measuring the health of a society in that dimension so that it can be compared with others.

It also implies that every time there is a pregnancy, wanted or not, a woman’s health and her very life are at risk. There is no comparable paternal mortality or morbidity rate. Therefore it should be only a woman’s choice to carry or not carry a child each and every time.

If Carmen Climaco performed infanticide, the lesson should be that abortion should be legal, which would have allowed her to abort the fetus earlier. It also seems possible that the so-called autopsy findings were manipulated or fudged for political, social or other reasons. Without photos and verified pathology findings, it’s hard to know.

I agree that ”bulletproof” journalism is ideal. But it is also important to expose the effects of draconian laws on individuals.
ENID KLAUBER, M.D.
Tampa, Fla., Dec. 31, 2006

You identify Jack Hitt, the author of the magazine article you discuss, as a ”freelancer.” While this may be technically correct (he isn’t a full-time staff member of The Times), it at the very least might mislead the reader about his place as one of the most admired and scrupulous magazine writers in America today.

Before Mr. Hitt became a contributing writer at The Times Magazine, he spent over a decade writing lengthy, award-winning articles for commercial and literary magazines. He is a producer of the radio program ”This American Life,” and was for many years an editor at Harper’s Magazine. He is the author of one book, and the editor of several others.

I do not claim to know the details of the dispute you wrote about. What I do know is that it should be considered in the context of Mr. Hitt’s entire career.
ROBERT S. BOYNTON
New York, Jan. 2, 2007
The writer is an associate professor and the director of the magazine writing program, New York University Department of Journalism.

In the interests of full disclosure, I am passionately anti-abortion, for the simple reason that it’s a morally indefensible act. I suspect that The Times’s defense of abortion on demand is based on its belief that morality is ”personal,” which, in essence, means that there is no morality.

I want to congratulate you on your expose of shoddy, inaccurate and biased journalism (The Times does have the right to be illogical and biased on its editorial page). I anxiously await from the standards editor something more than the ”not ready to . . . order up a correction” cited in your column. Otherwise, I’ll assume that shoddiness, inaccuracy and bias are the standards.
LAWRENCE LONGUA
Rockville Centre, N.Y., Dec. 31, 2006

[Note from the public editor: An editors' note about the article appears in today's paper.]

Part III: THE TIMES’ EDITOR’S NOTE
Jan. 7, 2007

An article in The Times Magazine on April 9 reported on the effects of laws that make all abortions illegal in El Salvador. One case the article described was that of Carmen Climaco, who is serving a 30-year prison sentence in El Salvador.

The article said she was convicted in 2002 of aggravated homicide, and it presented the recollections of the judge who adjudicated Ms. Climaco’s case during the pretrial stage. The judge, Margarita Sanabria, told The Times that she believed that Ms. Climaco had an abortion when she was 18 weeks pregnant, and that she regretted allowing the case to be tried as a homicide. The judge based her legal decision on two reports by doctors.

The first, by a doctor who examined Ms. Climaco after the incident, concluded that she had been 18 weeks pregnant and had an abortion. A second medical report, based on an examination of the body that was found under Ms. Climaco’s bed, concluded that her child was carried to term, was born alive and died in its first minutes of life.

The three-judge panel that received the case from Judge Sanabria concluded that the second report was more credible than the first, and the panel convicted Ms. Climaco of aggravated homicide.

The Times should have obtained the text of the ruling of the three-judge panel before the article was published, but did not vigorously pursue the document until details of the ruling were brought to the attention of editors in late November.

A picture caption with the article also misstated the facts of the ruling. Ms. Climaco was sentenced to 30 years in prison for a case that was initially thought to be an abortion but was later ruled to be a homicide; she was not given 30 years in prison for an abortion that was ruled a homicide.

Ms. Climaco is now preparing to appeal her conviction. The Times is continuing to investigate the case.

‘…But I grit my teeth because I know that things are changing’

Two perspectives–the macro and the micro–about where our business is headed. Try to restrain your sighs of anguish. These are two painfully accurate assessments.

First, a piece in today’s New York Times’ business section:

'It makes me crazy...'

THE LONELY NEEWSPAPER READER
By DAVID CARR

In the house where I grew up, everybody ate breakfast at the same time. The younger ones would sit at the table elbowing one another for toast while my dad stood, drinking coffee and reading The Minneapolis Star Tribune.

He would mumble and curse at the headlines, check the sports and then tell us it was time to go. When my brother John became a teenager, he left the table and would eat his toast, leaning against the washing machine and reading the paper as well. This, I thought, is what it means to be a grown-up. You eat your food standing up, and you read the newspaper. So I did the same thing when I turned 13. I still do.

Last Wednesday morning at my house, one of my daughters back from college was staying at a friend’s house in the city, no doubt getting alerts on her cellphone for new postings to her Facebook page. Her sister got up, skipped breakfast and checked the mail for her NetFlix movies. My wife left early before the papers even arrived to commute to her job in the city while listening to the iPod she got for Christmas.

True enough, my 10-year-old gave me five minutes over a bowl of Cheerios, but then she went into the dining room and opened the laptop to surf the Disney Channel on broadband, leaving me standing in the kitchen with my four newspapers. A few of those included news about the sale of The Star Tribune, a newspaper that found itself in reduced circumstances and sold at a reduced price to a private equity group.

I looked around me and realized I didn’t really need to read the papers to know why.

Sure, the consolidation of department stores and the flight of classified ads to the Web hurt big metropolitan dailies like The Star Tribune. This summer’s downturn in overall newspaper advertising landed hard on the paper, with ads off 6.1 percent in the last year from the year before.

The McClatchy Company, which bought the paper’s parent company with a great deal of fanfare in 1998 for $1.2 billion, looked at those numbers — and the fact that it had lost 26,000 or so daily readers since it bought the paper — and decided to sell the paper for $530 million. The chain was equally bullish when it bought Knight Ridder for $4.5 billion last summer and then turned around and sold 12 of the papers, including another newspaper in the Twin Cities, The Pioneer Press in St. Paul.

But the sale of The Star Tribune came completely out of the blue, in part because, as the chain’s biggest paper, it was viewed as a marquee property. The parties were able to keep it quiet in part because they all knew each other. The principals for the buyers, Avista Capital Partners, were once a part of a private equity arm of Credit Suisse, which represented McClatchy in the sale.

McClatchy’s chief executive, Gary B. Pruitt, said that tax advantages of $160 million made it a good time to sell, partly to offset capital gains from the sale of the Knight Ridder papers. When the stealth auction for the paper ended and word of the sale came out the day after Christmas, Mr. Pruitt said, ”I don’t feel good about the paper being sold.”

Me either. The paper, around in one version or another since 1867, may not have knocked down a lot of Pulitzers, but with its vigorous political reporting and thoughtful cultural coverage, it has served as a center for civic life in Minneapolis and beyond. The Star Tribune was not a great paper, but then my first car, a very used ’64 Ford Falcon, wasn’t great either. I still have a great deal of affection for both.

There are two ways to look at the sale: the second-biggest newspaper operator in the country, with its stock dropping in the wake of the Knight Ridder deal, dumped a paper with near 20 percent profit margins in what looked like a fire sale because big papers are doomed. Or, more brightly, a private equity firm saw an opportunity for a savvy investor who could operate the property without the quarter-to-quarter franticness that comes with making Wall Street happy.

It is a cliche of the media business that the assets go up and down the elevator every day. In Minneapolis, many of those assets are pals from my days of working as a reporter and editor at a weekly there, so I wondered: Who would be controlling their professional destinies, bottom feeders or benefactors?

Private equity owners are often viewed with suspicion, in part because they have limited investment horizons and tend to milk properties for cash flow, clean up the balance sheet and then flip the property to what is technically known as a ”greater fool.” The sale of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News by McClatchy to a local group of investors has resulted, after a sharp downturn this summer, in a great deal of strife and talks of significant layoffs.

I talked to OhSang Kwon, one of the partners in Avista Capital Partners. ”We don’t want to rule out anything, but the idea that we bought this paper with a quick exit in mind or that we were going to cut our way to profitability is not correct,” he said. ”I don’t have the hubris to say that we have the answers — we are new to the newspaper business — but the old way was not working. Maybe it is time for a different approach.”

Maybe it is. Tomorrow, The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Dow Jones & Company, will hit my doorstep in a smaller size and with a different approach, pushing much of the so-called commoditized news — the daily reports and incremental articles that everyone has — to the Web and filling the physical paper with more analysis and deeper reporting. Google, which has been dining to some degree on ads diverted from newspapers, announced last week that it is expanding a program to sell newspaper advertising using its own auction approach.

As I sat at the kitchen table, I marveled at the low price of a newspaper that had once preoccupied the conversation around my dinner table. Then I looked at the four papers on the table and the empty chairs that surrounded them. Before my second cup of coffee, the rest of my household had already started the day in a way that had nothing to do with the paper artifacts in front of me. Maybe I was the greater fool.

–30–

Now the Micro, published last month in the Washington Post.

A NEWSPAPER CHAIN SEES ITS FUTURE,
AND IT’S ONLINE AND HYPER-LOCAL

BY FRANK AHRENS

FORT MYERS, Fla.–Could this be the future of newspapering?

Darkness falls on a chilly Winn-Dixie parking lot in a dodgy part of North Fort Myers just before Thanksgiving. Chuck Myron sits in his little gray Nissan and types on an IBM ThinkPad laptop plugged into the car’s cigarette lighter. The glow of the screen illuminates his face.

Myron, 27, is a reporter for the Fort Myers News-Press and one of its fleet of mobile journalists, or “mojos.” The mojos have high-tech tools — ThinkPads, digital audio recorders, digital still and video cameras — but no desk, no chair, no nameplate, no land line, no office. They spend their time on the road looking for stories, filing several a day for the newspaper’s Web site, and often for the print edition, too. Their guiding principle: A constantly updated stream of intensely local, fresh Web content — regardless of its traditional news value — is key to building online and newspaper readership.

Myron and his colleagues are part of a great experiment being conducted by their corporate parent, McLean-based newspaper giant Gannett, which is trying to remake the very definition of a newspaper. Losing readers and revenue to the Internet and other media, newspapers are struggling to stay relevant and even afloat. Gannett’s answer is radical.

The chain’s papers are redirecting their newsrooms to focus on the Web first, paper second. Papers are slashing national and foreign coverage and beefing up “hyper-local,” street-by-street news. They are creating reader-searchable databases on traffic flows and school class sizes. Web sites are fed with reader-generated content, such as pictures of their kids with Santa. In short, Gannett — at its 90 papers, including USA Today — is trying everything it can think of to create Web sites that will attract more readers.

“Whatever you spend your time and money doing,” said News-Press managing editor Mackenzie Warren, “is news.”

So Myron sits in the parking lot, hunched over, keeping one eye out for threatening vagrants, and peers through his steering wheel to file a story on his laptop, perched on his knees. The workplace is, at best, ergonomically challenging.

The event he just covered? The signing of a fundraising calendar for the local chamber of commerce featuring the Hunks of North Fort Myers. The event was held inside a gym beside a Winn-Dixie in a strip shopping center.

It had been looking dim — just three hunks and half a dozen seemingly uninterested middle-aged ladies working out nearby — when Myron arrived at the gym with his ThinkPad under one arm and a digital camera peeking out of a pocket of his khakis.

Twenty minutes passed before one senior citizen and her husband walked in with two calendars to be signed by the hunks. She agreed to be interviewed and have her picture taken by Myron. He took notes on the screen of his ThinkPad, using an electronic stylus.

Thirty minutes later, sitting in his car with a sense of relief, he has written a short story, cropped one digital picture, written a caption, uploaded it all to the Web and linked to a previous story he’d written on the calendar fundraiser. Traditionally, such a story would barely rise to the level of a newspaper’s weekly community insert. Yet this is the third story Myron has written on the calendar. In the dark, Myron refreshed his browser and pulled up his fresh dispatch on the News-Press’s Cape Coral “micro-site,” one of several sites-within-a-site focusing on individual communities.

“There it is,” he said. “That’s what I do.”

Fort Myers is a growing city constantly replenished by hard-core newspaper readers — retirees. As such, the News-Press, circulation 89,283, has been spared some of the tumult in the rest of the newspaper industry, where circulation and advertising revenue have been in steady slide for a decade. Gannett’s stock price is down 25 percent over the past two years. Hence the overhaul.

“We’re trying a lot of things. Some will work; others won’t,” said Kate Marymont, 53, the energetic News-Press executive editor for the past six years and a Gannett lifer. “It’s like play.”

Among her innovations are some ideas that challenge journalistic orthodoxy. For instance:

* The creation of 14 full- and part-time mojos. By the end of next year, the paper’s 30 other news reporters also will be mojos to one extent or another. The News-Press is nonunion.

* Enlisting the help of dozens of reader experts — retired engineers, accountants, government insiders — to review documents and data to determine why it costs so much to hook up water and sewer service to new homes in the area. The result: an investigative report that resulted in fees lowered by 30 percent and an official ousted. Gannett calls the practice “crowdsourcing.” The News-Press and other Gannett papers also are building searchable online databases on as many topics as they can think of, in part to “enable people to do digging themselves and maybe find conclusions we won’t,” said Michael Maness, Gannett’s vice president of strategic planning. “It’s having thousands of investigative reporters instead of three.”

* The appointment of a managing editor in charge of “audience building” who reports only to Marymont. The editor monitors Web traffic to make sure popular stories stay high on the page. The editor meets weekly and shares data with the paper’s marketing and sales staffers. * Online message boards that allow readers to post anything from lost-pet notices to profanity. “Bring it on,” Warren said.

* Next spring, the paper plans to run a large story on a topic it would not identify. It did, however, say that the reporter on the article will accompany News-Press ad salespeople on trips to advertisers as the paper seeks a sponsor for the article. The logic: The reporter understands the project and can explain it best to potential advertisers. Though the reporter will be in sales meetings, he or she will not be part of the sales pitch. Nevertheless, the practice violates one of journalism’s fundamentals — maintaining a leakproof wall between the news and business sides of a newspaper.

As part of their training, mojos get a three-hour session with the paper’s vice president of marketing. If someone out in the community complains that ad rates are too high in the daily News-Press, mojos can and should tell them that rates are lower in the paper’s community weeklies.

It would be “morally wrong” for a reporter not to pass along such information, said Warren, the managing editor for information distribution, a new position. The paper also has a managing editor for information collection. “It’s like rolling down your window and giving someone directions,” Warren said. Keeping reporters away from the business side is “old-school snobbery,” he said.

The newsroom has mixed opinions of the new ways. Many are enthusiastic. “There is so much more creative energy than we can harness into actual journalism so far,” said managing editor Cindy McCurry-Ross. Others are irked by such practices as mojos posting stories directly to the Web without editing — a breach of newspaper editing protocol.

“It makes me crazy,” said Gale Baldwin, a News-Press assistant managing editor and newspaper veteran. “But I grit my teeth because I know that things are changing.”

Some staffers, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, worry that the zeal to feed the Web with fresh material has led to publishing “fluff” in addition to news. They recalled one recent incident in which Marymont walked through the newsroom and strongly noted that the Web site had not posted any fresh material in three hours, and urged them to publish something quickly.

Though the News-Press has largely been insulated from the industry’s travails, it has not been immune. The paper showed a circulation decline this year, and Marymont must eliminate three staff positions by the end of the year to meet the budget set by Gannett headquarters in McLean. The paper has offered buyouts to older staffers.

Are readers buying the changes?

On the one hand, the News-Press Web site had grown from an average of 58,000 unique visitors per week in 2002 to 140,000 per week so far this year. Traffic to the paper’s community micro-sites in August-October of this year is up 106 percent over the corresponding period last year. Carol Hudler, the paper’s publisher, said it’s too early to tell if the changes have made a material impact on the paper’s revenue.

On the other hand, none of the sources Myron dealt with in two assignments on consecutive days seemed to grasp that what he was reporting and writing about them would go to the News-Press Web site.

“They ask me, ‘When’s what you wrote about me going to be in the paper?’ ” Myron said. “I have no good answer.”

–30–

Is this the future journalists are consigned to living? I have no good answer. Say a prayer for Chuck Myron. A database search shows that between the day this story was published, Dec. 4, and Dec. 21, Myron wrote 25 more stories, averaging between 200 and 450 words.

Two more weeks of the priest abuse scandal means even more pressure to explain inside baseball

Two weeks ago we examined the previous six weeks of my newspaper’s coverage of the priest abuse scandal.

And then the shit really hit the fan.

Editor's Journal: A test of perspective

The pope called the church’s cardinals to Rome. The cardinals spent two days talking (the adjective “extraordinary” was used more within these two days by journalists than at any other time in recorded human history) and essentially punted to the church’s bishops, who control 195 separate, independent dioceses. The bishops will meet in June. Until then you’ll be reading lotsa “interpretive” pieces, but not much action.

What follows is an analysis of our coverage during the past two weeks. As in the case of the April 15 posting, I’m not trying to show perfection–far from it–but rather the instantaneous choices that get made when a big whopping story drags you around like you were a big whopping fish.

In many of these stories, the most important–and hardest–choice was perspective. On the face of it, many of these developments had the nuanced feel of inside baseball. Only with careful attention to the events that had gone before, and that might grow out of new ones, could we give anybody but the most attentive Catholic incentive to read this stuff. In editing many of these stories I found myself screaming inside (not out of anger but out of panic): What does this mean? What did it stem from? Where might it lead? How does it contradict the past?

The April 15 Editor’s Journal posting ended with the April 13 story in which reporters Beth Shuster and Richard Winton developed enough specifics from police to force the Cardinal of Los Angeles, Roger Mahony, to admit the specific number of priests he had dismissed in February and March for past sexual misconduct. That ended a month and a half of silence by the cardinal–at least partially.

Then:

April 14: Larry Stammer weighed in with a news analysis that grew from my frustration with everybody blaming the sexual abuse scandal on one issue, when it was obviously far more complicated.

The sexual-abuse scandal rocking the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. has prompted calls for reforms that often blame the crisis on a single issue: Celibacy. Or homosexuality. Or secrecy. Or imperious bishops.

But what has made this scandal more intense and prolonged than its predecessors is the complex way each of these issues interlock.

The complexity explains why the scandal has outraged and energized such a wide range of church constituencies: Liberal Catholics believe the church can be healed by permitting married priests and the ordination of women. Ardent traditionalists who link homosexuality to sexual abuse see the scandal as a sign that the church must return to a holiness grounded in fealty to traditional teachings. Still others call for a democratization of the church so that bishops, who answer only to Pope John Paul II, will be held accountable by their dioceses.

“We’ve had so much institutional culture shock that the deeper [question] is where to go from here,” said Dennis Doyle, a church historian and professor at the University of Dayton in Ohio, founded by the Marianist teacher order.

The current scandal has struck with unprecedented breadth and fury. In the last three months scores of priests from coast to coast and three bishops around the world have resigned, been fired or asked to retire.

So volatile is the debate that rational discussion is impaired. “We are in a dangerous period. . . . Everyone inside and outside the church, wants to find simplistic solutions,” wrote Father Stephen J. Rossetti, president of the St. Luke Institute, which treats sexually abusing priests, in the upcoming issue of the Jesuit magazine America.

The church’s dilemma lies at the intersection of celibacy, homosexual and secrecy.

Larry then went through each of the three:

Celibacy
What one often hears is that if an offending priest had a healthy sexual outlet–in other words, a wife–he wouldn’t turn to minors for sexual gratification.

But to suggest a direct correlation between celibacy and the sexual abuse of minors is both facile and specious. Study after study demonstrate that pedophilia, an attraction to pre-pubescent children, and ephebophilia, an attraction to post-pubescent youths, more often involves heterosexual men who are friends or relatives of their victims.

In such cases, the abusers suffer from what psychologists call arrested psychosexual development. They are sexually immature. Often they have difficulty relating to and negotiating with adults. In other cases, they may have experienced feelings of abandonment and low self-esteem.

In other cases, heterosexual men have been known to molest boys, not necessarily because of…

April 17: Beth, Richard and Glen Bunting develop our first story on a particularly troublesome case that calls into question the Archdiocese’s judgment:

A 34-year-old West Hollywood man reported Tuesday to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department that he had been molested from 1976 to 1986 by a priest who Cardinal Roger M. Mahony said failed to comply with a church-ordered therapy program.

The man, whose name is being withheld by The Times, claimed he was abused repeatedly by Father Michael Baker, beginning when he was 9 at St. Paul of the Cross Church in La Mirada. “Father Mike did this to me, and he did it to others and needs to answer for his crimes,” the man said.

Baker, 54, is one of several former priests whose names were recently turned over by church officials to Los Angeles Police Department investigators.

Baker left the priesthood two years ago and agreed to pay a portion of a $1.3-million settlement to the family of one victim, according to sources familiar with the deal.

Mahony, who refused to discuss the specifics of Baker’s case, said in an interview the former priest is among a small group that “troubles me the most,” men who have left the archdiocese and are living without any supervision.

In a telephone interview Tuesday, Baker said he could not comment on the allegations or Mahony’s characterization of him. “I have some feelings of response and clarification … but I don’t think I can really comment on them right now. I have been advised not to,” he said.

Baker began years of counseling in the mid-1980s after the archdiocese learned of alleged child abuse, according to sources knowledgeable about Baker’s treatment.

“All of our evidence showed that he was never really complying with any therapy program and therefore there was never any cooperation of any kind,” Mahony said.

“The experience of many in dealing with him was they questioned the truthfulness of what he said.”

Mahony is under increasing pressure to reveal the names of priests who have been fired over child abuse allegations.

L.A. County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley sent the cardinal a letter warning of a grand jury investigation unless law enforcement agencies receive assurances that the archdiocese is disclosing everything it knows about the abuse allegations.

That same day, Teresa Watanabe examined the loyalty of devout Catholics despite the scandal. (The full text appears on the April 22 posting.)

Even after the Roman Catholic Church’s clergy sex scandal hit home, even when her own parish priest was accused of molestation last month, Maria Lopez never doubted her faith.

How could she? Her entire life, she says, has been one long answered prayer.

Lopez, a 35-year-old electronics company supervisor in Azusa, says God has calmed her troubled marriage, miraculously provided every time her cash ran short, even sent an angel disguised as a woman to talk her out of suicide.

Her church friends, as dear to her as her own mother, have prayed with her through her illnesses, fed her family and cared for her children. On Saturday, she marched with them and 3,000 others through downtown Los Angeles in support of their faith. After Mass on Sunday, she gathered with a dozen others, clasping hands and offering fervent prayers for her church, the priests and all abuse victims.

The priests in her life have baptized her four children, blessed her home and counseled her through depression. Her own pastor, Father David Granadino of St. Frances of Rome in Azusa, is under investigation on allegations that he molested boys, but Lopez and her children say they know only his goodness.

Lopez’s life offers a glimpse into why the Catholic Church’s spiraling crisis is not likely to drive many devout Catholics away from their spiritual touchstone. Her faith, she says, is not rooted in a hierarchy of men, but in the redeeming and nourishing power of Jesus’ love. In the rhythms of weekly Mass, in the deep friendships forged, her faith is her life and her church is her family.

“Our faith is based on God and the resurrection of Jesus Christ and not on a priest,” Lopez says. “Everybody is human; everybody falls at one time or another. As Christians, we should forgive. I am not someone to judge others.”

(You may have noticed the absence of our prolific and insightful columnist Steve Lopez, whose perspective contribued mightily to the coverage of the previous six weeks. He was on vacation–in Italy. We asked him to suspend his vacation, buy a tux, come to the Rome airport and welcome Cardinal Mahony as a limo driver, but he sensibly refused.)

April 19: By now we’ve been told the pope has called the cardinals to the Vatican. Our own cardinal, for so long determined to avoid the press, is suddenly giving news conferences at a heated pace. Larry Stammer tries to put it in perspective:

On a day when an alternative newspaper pictured him on its cover with a zipper locking his lips, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony settled in for a series of media interviews Thursday to get the word out that he is committed to taking direct action against sexual abuse.

It wasn’t unusual for Mahony to grant interviews. He’s viewed as one of the most media-savvy bishops in the Roman Catholic Church and sits on a pontifical council on social communications. Pope John Paul II once called him “Hollywood” for short.

But like other bishops buffeted by a sexual-abuse scandal that has shaken the church in America, Mahony initially faltered in responding. When The Times first disclosed that Mahony had fired or retired six to 12 priests who had been accused of sexual abuse in the past, the cardinal refused to comment.

Several weeks later, he conceded that “a few” priests had been let go. But he told The Times during an April 3 interview that the newspaper’s source was so off the mark “that I’m embarrassed for him and for you.”

Then Mahony’s private e-mails were leaked to the media, revealing that he had fired eight priests, forcing him to respond specifically. That was followed by a series of revelations involving priests in his own archdiocese and several missteps with law enforcement over the extent to which the church had cooperated in disclosing the names of accused priests.

And so on Thursday, in an attempt to address the issue on his own terms, Mahony invited nine television stations and two all-news radio stations to the new Cathedral Conference Center. Reporters lined up for 10 minutes apiece to hear the cardinal unveil what he described as a proactive plan to cut priestly abuse.

…Mahony’s decision to go to the media has been a defining characteristic of his priesthood, whether marching with the late farm labor organizer Cesar Chavez or dealing with child abuse. In the series of private e-mails he wrote and received that were leaked to the media, Mahony again showed himself to be keenly aware of public perceptions.

His approach sharply contrasted with that of Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, who not only avoided public appearances in his archdiocese, but secretly flew to Rome to determine whether he still had a job. He later said the Vatican asked him to remain.

April 20:The bishop of neighboring Orange County had been more candid than Mahony, and offered some interesting points in an interview with Orange County Edition religion writer William Lobdell as the Vatican meeting approached:

Fresh from a two-day meeting with 20 Roman Catholic leaders in Los Angeles, Tod D. Brown, bishop of Orange, said Friday it’s clear that bishops and priests will have to yield some authority to church members as a result of the church’s unfolding sex scandal.

“I think the Catholic Church in our country has been too clerical,” said Brown, a member of the Vatican’s Curia, an elite group of cardinals and bishops whose members perform duties in the pope’s name and with his authority.

“We need to take seriously” the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, a modernizing effort of the 1960s, and get the laity involved at all levels–”as much as we can do that theologically,” he added.

Placing lay Catholics in roles of influence can produce watchdogs within the church and also bring in different perspectives, loosening the powerful grip that each bishop has on his diocese. Each of the church’s 195 U.S. dioceses operates independently, with its bishop reporting to the pope.

Some prelates already have proposed such reforms. On Thursday, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony announced an expanded role of laity in the Los Angeles Archdiocese, including using victims of molestation to review sexual abuse allegations.

Brown’s comments came after a conference of California and Nevada prelates who were preparing for the highly anticipated national bishops’ conference in June. It will be the first time the bishops have gathered since news media revelations in Boston early this year unveiled case after case in which church officials had allowed priests accused of molestation to remain on the job.

April 22: Larry and Beth develop a scoop about the April 23 sex abuse talks in Rome:

ROME — Several senior American cardinals will urge the Vatican today to ask Cardinal Bernard Law to resign as archbishop of Boston in the face of an escalating sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church.

Two American clerics–a bishop and a cardinal–said that America’s Catholic bishops are all but unanimous in believing that Law must leave Boston for the good of the church.

The cardinal, who asked to remain anonymous, said Sunday that he had been “commissioned” by other senior prelates to take their case against Law directly to Pope John Paul II’s inner circle. He said that he, as well as others, would do so today during private meetings at the Vatican. Today’s meetings come a day before two days of talks between America’s cardinals and Vatican leaders on the abuse scandal.

“If the Holy See wants to send a strong signal of quality and standards of leadership,” the cardinal told The Times, Law “will have to be replaced. This cannot be a phaseout.” The cardinal said he did not want to undermine his efforts by publicly disclosing his name before speaking to the Vatican.

The bishop, also speaking on a confidential basis, told The Times, “Many bishops are of the mind that the healing process really can’t begin until there’s a change of leadership in Boston.”

The rare move against a fellow cardinal underscored Law’s increasingly precarious position in the wake of his handling of the scandal in his archdiocese, and the growing determination by the U.S. hierarchy to call for dramatic steps to extricate the American church from one of its worst crises in modern times.

A week ago Law flew to Rome to confer privately with the pope and other Vatican officials about his future. He returned to Boston and announced that he would continue as archbishop as long, he said, as God would permit him to serve. On Sunday, Law received a standing ovation when he told churchgoers at Holy Cross Cathedral that he wished that he could “undo the harm” caused by his handling of cases involving the sexual abuse of minors by priests.

On the same day that story is written, a nasty scene plays out when anti-abuse crusaders picket a church where the Times has reported the priest is under investigation for molesting boys:

Carrying picket signs that read “House of Rape” and “Stop Crucifying the Children,” a group of protesters marched outside a Roman Catholic church in Azusa on Sunday, prompting an emotional response from parishioners who yelled obscenities and blocked outsiders from entering the church.

“Go home,” shouted one parishioner at St. Frances of Rome church. “This is a place of worship. You have no place here.”

Other parishioners yelled out obscenities and insults.

One man who stood outside the church to keep out activists and the media told protest organizer Mary Grant, who said she was molested by a priest as a child, “I bet you enjoyed it, didn’t you?”

A female parishioner charged a man holding a picket sign and hit him in the chest. Police, who had been nearby monitoring the confrontation, were summoned by a protester.

Norma Arista, 42, of Azusa, was arrested for allegedly assaulting protester Jim Falls of Los Angeles.

“Sadly, this has been the posture of the church,” said Grant, who leads the Southern California Chapter of SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests). “To treat us as the enemy. If they blame the victim, then they don’t have to take responsibility.”

The standoff continued for several hours as parishioners walked in and out of the church. Some cursed at protesters before entering, while others stood outside holding hands to block the front steps to the church. Others, however, ignored the protesters.

Grant’s group took their campaign to raise awareness of sexual abuse by priests to St. Frances because of an investigation involving the church’s pastor, Father David F. Granadino.

April 23: A couple weeks before I had heard a stat that fascinated me: Americans account for only 6% of the Catholics in the world. Perhaps, as the Vatican talks neared, we could use that as a starting point to explain the dissonance between the way American Catholics looked at the abuse scandal and the way the Vatican had dismissed its importance.

Larry Stammer and our Rome correspondent, Richard Boudreaux, expanded the idea in a story that was published the morning the talks were to start:

VATICAN CITY — A month ago, long after clerical sex scandals had mushroomed in the United States, the Colombian cardinal overseeing the worldwide Roman Catholic priesthood fielded a barrage of questions from reporters here over how the Vatican would respond.

Defensive and irritated, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos portrayed the scandals as the product of an American “culture of pansexuality and sexual licentiousness” and noted sourly that most of the questions were in English. “This by itself is an X-ray of the problem,” he said.

Today, when 12 American cardinals lay the sex abuse crisis before Pope John Paul II and his top aides, what the Vatican had long viewed as an “American problem” will become its own.

The Americans’ immediate goal is to persuade the Vatican to authorize the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to impose unprecedented binding procedures on all 195 U.S. diocesan bishops for addressing clerical sex abuse.

But more fundamentally, the extraordinary two-day meeting here is an opportunity to bridge a cultural gap between the Curia–the central Vatican bureaucracy that is dominated by Italians and, to a lesser extent, by other Europeans and Latin Americans–and Catholics in the United States, whose church is one of the world’s largest and richest.

The divide reflects conflicting values: New World openness versus Old World secrecy, American home rule versus Vatican centralization, Anglo-Saxon CEO-style management versus a Mediterranean forgive-and-forget attitude toward sinners.

The chasm helps one understand a range of conflicts between the Vatican and American Catholics during John Paul’s long reign, including disputes over academic freedom at Catholic universities and inclusive language in the liturgy. And it helps explain why the pope and his aides failed at first to grasp the scale of the current crisis, the American church’s worst in modern times.

…The two sides have a history of misunderstanding.

Since the 19th century, when Pope Leo XIII cracked down on what he called “Americanism,” the Curia has viewed American culture as deeply rooted in Calvinist individualism, lacking a strong concept of community or the church.

More recently, in 1989, John Paul became concerned that the American church was spinning beyond his control. He summoned all American archbishops, including cardinals, to Rome. The discussion ranged widely–from the high rate of remarriage for divorced American Catholics to the American hierarchy’s tolerance for dissent within the church.

John May, then archbishop of St. Louis, crystallized the clashing perspectives in his opening remarks.

“Authoritarianism is suspect in any area of learning or culture,” he said. “To assert that there is a church teaching with authority binding for eternity is truly a sign of contradiction to many Americans who consider the divine right of bishops as outmoded as the divine right of kings.”

April 24: On the first of the two days of talks, Larry and Beth (both of whom we’ve sent to Rome) and Richard struggle with the pope’s remarks on priestly abuse. It is a classic example of a story where what a subject doesn’t say, and has said in the past, is as important as what he does say:

ROME — Pope John Paul II, in a ringing denunciation of sexual abuse, declared Tuesday that there is no place in the Roman Catholic priesthood for those who molest the young.

Speaking to an extraordinary meeting of cardinals summoned from the United States in the wake of the clerical sex scandal rocking the American church, John Paul called the abuse of minors both a civil crime and “an appalling sin.”

The pope’s emphatic statement, several cardinals said later, was an unmistakable signal that he expects bishops to cooperate fully with law enforcement authorities in ferreting out offending priests.

But he offered no explicit guidance on whether the church should enforce a “one-strike” rule to defrock any priest found to have molested a minor. Some cardinals, meeting at the Vatican to set guidelines to handle sex offenses, said the pope’s nuanced statement was open to interpretation.

Shifting from the defensive tone of his recent remarks, which had agonized over the scandal’s demoralizing blow to the church and its clergy, John Paul sounded a note of compassion for the victims of sexual abuse. Since January, dozens of American priests have been accused of sex crimes, and bishops have been faulted for covering up some of the incidents.

“To the victims and their families, wherever they may be, I express my profound sense of solidarity and concern,” John Paul said in remarks to the cardinals that were later released by the Vatican. The actions of abusive priests, he said, have caused “suffering and scandal to the young” and undermined trust in the church.

“People need to know that there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young,” the pope told the 12 U.S. cardinals, two U.S. bishops and leading Vatican cardinals. “They must know that bishops and priests are totally committed to the fullness of Catholic truth on matters of sexual morality.”

But John Paul, who believes in the transformative power of religious experiences, also raised the possibility of a changed life for a repentant fallen priest.

“We cannot forget the power of Christian conversion, that radical decision to turn away from sin and back to God,” he said.

Whether a priest undergoing such a “conversion” would be allowed to remain a priest remained open to question.

“This isn’t clear to me either,” Cardinal Francis George of Chicago told reporters. “So I’m not sure where that [papal] discourse leads us on that question of ‘zero tolerance.’ ” Even the U.S. delegation, George said, was not in agreement on that issue.

“There is a difference between a moral monster who preys upon little children, who does so in serial fashion, and someone who perhaps under the influence of alcohol engages in an action with a 17- or 16-year-old young woman who returns his affections,” George told reporters.

…Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the reassignment of abusive priests remained “a thorny issue.”

One thing was clear: Cardinals and bishops who weeks ago avoided public discussion of the growing scandal are now eager to pose as articulate reformers. Public relations representatives for the U.S. bishops conference were flown here from Washington to arrange daily media briefings, and several cardinals spoke to reporters on their own.

April 25: On the second day of the Vatican talks, the American cardinals emerged with a statement that fell short of the tough stance most Americans would have anticipated of any other organization up to its knees in scandal. Watch how Larry and Richard Boudreaux employed measured phrasing to capture (1) the weasel language the communiqué used and (2) the attempt to look ahead to explain how this dilemma might be resolved:

VATICAN CITY — Emboldened by Pope John Paul II and stung by an unprecedented sexual abuse scandal at home, U.S. Roman Catholic cardinals called Wednesday for steps making it easier to defrock priests guilty of sexual abuse. But they stopped short of a “zero-tolerance” dismissal policy.

Wrapping up two days of extraordinary sessions with the pope and senior Vatican cardinals, the U.S. delegation said it had set the stage for a comprehensive plan to wrest the American church from its most serious moral and legal crisis in modern times.

Their final communique was short on specifics. It called for new procedures to speed the dismissal of any priest “who has become notorious and is guilty of the serial, predatory sexual abuse of minors,” as well as first-time offenders deemed to be incorrigible. It recommended safeguards to screen out problem candidates from seminaries.

But it made no mention of other steps many of the cardinals had said they wanted: a “one-strike” rule for all future sex offenders, mandatory reporting of all abuse cases to law enforcement agencies, and greater involvement of lay Catholics in overseeing the church’s treatment of offenders. Nor did it spell out how church canon law should be changed to make it easier to defrock priests while protecting their right to appeal.

Even so, the high-powered meetings are likely to be remembered as a defining moment, when an issue that the Vatican once viewed as an “American problem” irreversibly became its own. The meetings also increased pressure on American bishops to formally adopt a plan that will convince Catholics that they can entrust the church with their children.

Even with tougher standards of accountability and openness on sexual abuse, the cardinals said, it might take years for the church to regain its credibility. The scandal, they conceded, has not only damaged victims and cost millions of dollars in settlements, but it has also weakened the church’s moral voice.

Critics of the church were disappointed by the communique but not surprised.

“Historically, there has been, and there remains, a huge gap between what bishops say and what bishops do,” said Barbara Blaine of Chicago, founder of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. “Their promises sound good, but their performance is lacking.”

Fundamental decisions lie ahead for the church. Chief among them is how to deal with priests who abused minors many years ago but have since appeared to be leading successful and healthy ministries. There is likely to be tension between bishops who believe in the Christian virtue of repentance and forgiveness, and an outraged public that seems in no mood to forgive and forget.

Before leaving Rome, the Vatican and U.S. cardinals dispatched a letter to the priests of America voicing “regret that episcopal oversight has not been able to preserve the church from this scandal.”

They called on bishops to set aside a day of prayer and penance throughout the United States “to implore reconciliation” between sinners and abused members of their flock.

That same day, we published a story by Gene Maddaus, who obtained a jailhouse interview, that reminded us how Los Angeles’ diversity sets up unusual dynamics–and unusual legal pleas:

A Pomona priest in jail on suspicion of molesting two girls said Wednesday that the allegations stem from a cultural misunderstanding.

Honesto Bismonte, 72, of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, was arrested Tuesday for allegedly molesting the girls about 50 times since 1997, when they were 8 and 12.

Speaking from the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga, Bismonte said that hugging and physical contact with children is far more accepted in his Filipino culture. “I’m sorry this has come this far,” he said, blaming the wave of current allegations against priests for his plight.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives also are investigating Father Patrick Cotter, 70, a retired priest who once worked at St. Joseph’s. He allegedly was involved with a girl there several years ago, sources said, an accusation referred from the Los Angeles Police Department. Cotter, of South Pasadena, did not return telephone calls for comment. An archdiocese spokesman said Cotter is retired and not attached to any parish.

The probe of Cotter is one of several investigations of clergy being conducted by the sheriff’s family crimes unit.

Detectives said they have expanded their probe of Father David Granadino, 46, from the time he has worked at St. Frances of Rome in Azusa, where he now is pastor, to his former church, St. John of God in Norwalk.

“There are several adult males who have reported being molested by Granadino at the Norwalk church when they were kids more than 15 years ago,” said Sheriff’s Sgt. Dan Scott.

Detectives have interviewed more than 100 children and parents since a March 22 call to the Los Angeles archdiocese hotline, which was created to report sexual abuse allegations. Scott said detectives know of as many as five allegations of “inappropriate touching” by Granadino during church activities at the Azusa parish. Granadino, a Sheriff’s Department chaplain, has denied any misconduct, according to an exchange of e-mails by top archdiocese officials.

Meanwhile, in Rancho Cucamonga, Bismonte remains in jail in lieu of $200,000 bail as the San Bernardino County district attorney decides whether to press charges.

Bismonte acknowledged taking the girls to the park to play on the swings and said, “we used to wrestle.” Fontana Police Sgt. Robert Beltran said the girls told detectives the priest touched them over and under their clothing. Bismonte shared an apartment in Fontana with the girls’ aunt, who would frequently baby-sit the children, Beltran said. The girls said the touching stopped in 2001, according to Beltran, when Bismonte moved out of the apartment.

April 27: With Larry flying back from Italy, Teresa Watanabe is asked to do a follow piece. We give her very little direction. She finds her own angle:

After this week’s Vatican sessions on clergy sex abuse, Southern California’s Roman Catholic priests are urging their leaders to seize the historic moment. They want American bishops to debate not only abuse prevention but far-reaching reform measures, from healthier teachings on sexuality to more lay oversight of clergy personnel decisions.

America’s cardinals, meeting with Vatican officials in Italy, called Wednesday for steps making it easier to defrock priests guilty of sexual abuse. But they disappointed many critics by stopping short of a “zero-tolerance” dismissal policy. That reluctance increased pressure on American bishops to formally adopt a more specific plan when they meet in Dallas in June.

Interviews with area priests, however, made it clear that far more was on their minds.

“This is the worst scandal since the Reformation,” said Father John McAndrews, parochial vicar for St. Angela Merici Church in Brea. “This is the moment for reform.”

Greater lay involvement in church affairs as a way to increase accountability seemed to top the list of their hopes for reform.

McAndrews said Diocese of Orange priests are discussing a proposal to place lay members for the first time on boards that hire and assign priests. Some Los Angeles clergy back that idea as well.

“If there had been more parents involved in the personnel process, nobody would have allowed priests accused of sex abuse to be reassigned,” said Father David O’Connell of St. Frances X. Cabrini Church in Los Angeles.

Rome, however, has indicated less enthusiasm for empowering the laity than the American church. In 1997, for instance, Pope John Paul II approved measures to bar the laity from governing the church, preaching homilies, using the title “chaplain” and other duties. That occurred the same year that 500 Southern California priests unanimously decreed at a Palm Springs conference that the priest’s most important role was to empower the laity.

In Dallas, the bishops are expected to discuss ways to beef up seminary admission requirements. O’Connell said he saw a need for wholesale changes in the way men are trained for the priesthood to counter “arrested psychosexual development,” which has been cited as a contributing factor in numerous sex abuse cases. After this week’s Vatican sessions on clergy sex abuse, Southern California’s Roman Catholic priests are urging their leaders to seize the historic moment. They want American bishops to debate not only abuse prevention but far-reaching reform measures, from healthier teachings on sexuality to more lay oversight of clergy personnel decisions.

April 28: Beth Shuster flew back from Rome with Cardinal Mahony and was able to use some of her time to develop a Sunday profile of the way Mahony gracefully navigated the spiritual and secular worlds. We played that next to a sidebar by William Lobdell that pointed out a contradiction in Mahony’s rhetoric.

Beth’s mainbar:

“I regret terribly what happened–but maybe without that or something like that we wouldn’t be here.”

“I wish I could undo some of the things in the past myself, [but] now it’s really a chance to look to the future–from today forward.”

Vivendi Universal chief executive Jean-Marie Messier on the dismal performance of the company’s stock? Disney Chairman Michael Eisner on his poor ABC television ratings?

Neither. These are the words of Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles, head of the largest Roman Catholic diocese in the country.

He is church leader and CEO, pastor and politician. And just as leaders of private corporations sometimes find themselves, he is involved in a crisis of damage control that tests his ability to simultaneously navigate the worlds of church doctrine and secular society.

The proliferating cases of sexual abuse by priests that were ignored or covered up by bishops and cardinals in past decades have put every American leader of the church on the defensive. Last week’s meeting of American cardinals and Vatican officials on the issue gave Mahony, 66, his greatest media exposure and a welcome change from a posture of defensiveness.

Several weeks ago, about 50 of Mahony’s private e-mails to his inner circle were leaked to the media, providing fuel for stories that questioned his sense of urgency about dealing with cases of priestly abuse.

The trip to Vatican City gave Mahony the opportunity to present himself as a reformer, and even his critics were impressed, if not convinced. Before he left for Rome, a week ago, he met with the media to outline his agenda for the extraordinary meetings with Pope John Paul II and other Vatican officials. He talked about the need to discuss such controversial issues as celibacy, the ordination of women and homosexuality in the church–carefully avoiding taking a stand in favor of any particular policy.

In Rome, he appeared on national news programs, morning and evening shows, conducted interviews with the national press and held a media briefing for the hometown press. His statements in favor of stronger procedures to fire errant priests were made in the tone of someone who recognized his organization had a problem and was determined to fix it. Unspoken was the fact that some of the reforms in Mahony’s own archdiocese were the result not of his doing, but rather of compliance with a 2001 court-approved settlement of a molestation lawsuit.

David Clohessy, national director of the Chicago-based Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, contends Mahony has “escaped the scrutiny that many of his colleagues have been under because he is very, very media savvy.”

Clohessy said the cardinals who went to Rome avoided scrutiny only temporarily. “The sad truth is, they have to not only come back home but come back to Earth and deal with this enormous backlog of pain and denial and cover-up and unresolved issues around abusive priests.”

Indeed, upon his return to Los Angeles, Mahony was confronted with the arrest of a Pomona priest. Other sex-abuse cases against his clerics still are under investigation.

Several of the cardinals left Rome for a Mass and dinner for Catholic University of America in Philadelphia on Friday. But Mahony said he needed to return swiftly to Los Angeles, where he conducted a whirlwind series of interviews with the print and broadcast media and sent out letters about his trip to all the parishes in his three-county diocese–with copies of the pope’s statement attached….

Bill’s sidebar:

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony can brag that his archdiocese has implemented the toughest rules in the nation against priests who molest children. But that boast was made possible only because one of the church’s stubborn accusers insisted last December that the new policy be part of his record $5.2-million settlement.

Last week in Rome, America’s cardinals and Vatican officials grappled with exactly how unforgiving a sexual abuse policy should be: Should they adopt a “zero-tolerance” stance for priests with a decades-old molestation incident? They ended their two-day conference by issuing only a generally worded statement on sexual abuse, leaving the most difficult decisions to the nation’s bishops when they meet in June.

The Los Angeles archdiocese settled those matters months ago. Mahony, along with Bishop of Orange Tod D. Brown, enacted a new set of rules, including a “one-strike” provision that has triggered the recent dismissal of at least a dozen priests in both dioceses. Some of those priests had a single incident of misbehavior in their distant past. The new rules also include an independent advocate who is not a priest or diocesan employee for alleged victims, an 800 number for anonymous complaints and a mandatory program on abuse prevention at parochial schools.

In all, 11 changes were made to the dioceses’ policies in December as part of a settlement with abuse victim Ryan DiMaria. The settlement imposed a state-of-the-art sexual-abuse policy on Mahony and Brown a full month before the church’s sex scandal broke in Boston.

The beefed-up rules, whose implementation was overseen by Orange County Superior Court Judge James P. Gray, gave the prelates the look of prophets.

Mahony and Brown rarely refer to the legal settlement that brought about the new rules, though they frequently have highlighted the policy with pride in media reports, letters to parishioners and on Web sites.

For instance, in March, the Los Angeles archdiocese distributed to parishioners a brochure called “Respecting the Boundaries: Keeping Ministerial Relationships Healthy and Holy.” Archdiocese spokesman Tod Tamberg said at the time that the cardinal decided to hand out the information because of the surge of attention to priest sex scandals that erupted in January with the criminal trial of a Boston cleric accused of molesting 130 children.

“Cardinal Mahony thought … it was important for him to reiterate to the Catholic faithful that we have comprehensive policies on sex abuse, that we follow them carefully and review them regularly,” Tamberg said.

The informational campaign was one of the measures imposed by the settlement.

“Cardinal Mahony is giving this perception that he did this on his own,” said Katherine K. Freberg, one of DiMaria’s attorneys.

Mahony flatly denied Friday that he may have been forced into the new policies by lawsuits, saying that he had been developing and implementing the procedures well before the Dec. 4 settlement.

Which brings us up to today, Monday, April 29. Tomorrow is the first anniversary of the first posting on www.newsthinking.com. I’d like to express my gratitude to the scores of supportive e-mails that readers have sent. One of my favorites came last week:

“…I have often wished I could tail a great reporter around for a couple of weeks, watching them report and write their stories. Newsthinking is the next best thing. Thanks!”

If somebody had told me I would be posting every week for 52 weeks, I would have laughed. But it’s been exhilarating to have a dialogue with so many reporters. You remind me why this is the greatest way in the world to make a living, if also the most absurd and maddening. I can’t promise to keep up the same posting schedule for the next 52 weeks, but you’ve inspired me to keep trying. For that, I owe you big-time.

A newspaper takes on a stonewalling cardinal and nobody wins

I’d like to get the last six weeks off my chest.

That’s how long it took my newspaper to drag out of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles the simple confirmation that a specific number of priests had been fired recently for long-ago sexual abuses.

Editor's Journal: The church abuse scandal

The odds are, the L.A. Times would still be banging its head against the church doors if some still-unknown soul hadn’t leaked scores of internal e-mails between L.A.’s Cardinal Roger Mahony and his inner circle. (More on that later.)

Our experience parallels that of many newspapers as they try to cover the ongoing scandal of church sexual abuse, in which the real story is not that molestation occurred–that’s old hat– but that so many bishops were willing to move errant priests to other parishes rather than fire them.

I’ve compiled a chronology of Times coverage, some of which I oversaw. (I work with seven reporters, two of whom, Larry Stammer and Teresa Watanabe, cover religion full-time.) Our deployment, enterprise and frustrations may help you make some decisions on your own the next time you tackle a multi-faceted story in which there are more directions to pursue than available reporters.

Here’s the backdrop: For decades, newspapers have run isolated stories of priest abuse. But earlier this year the Boston Globe broke a story that told how the Boston diocese knew but kept silent about many abusive priests. Boston’s cardinal, Bernard Law, eventually turned over to law enforcement the names of 80 priests accused over the last 40 years of molesting children. The one who’s received the most recent attention, John Geoghan, was sentenced in February to between nine and 10 years in prison for molesting a 10-year-old boy at a community swimming pool in 1991. The Globe revealed that more than 130 people had accused Geoghan of molesting them during his 30 years as a priest. That led to demands that Cardinal Law resign–something no American cardinal has ever done.

We had our own mini-scandal in 2001 when Bill Lobdell, a religion writer in our Orange County edition, reported a million-dollar abuse settlement. Our Metro columnist, Steve Lopez, followed that up with several columns, including many frank personal revelations from another priest whose misdeeds were part of the lawsuit. Steve referred to the priest only as “Father X,” but the church figured out who he was and removed him from his parish.

As the Boston story broke, other U.S. dioceses began their own belated house-cleaning. We heard about ours in early March. Let’s take it day by day:

March 2: Bill Lobdell learns of a lone priest dismissal in the Diocese of Orange. His sources tell him there’s been more firings in the L.A. Archdiocese. Larry Stammer, who has our best Catholic church sources, cuts short a book leave and starts making calls.

March 4: We publish a story that the Los Angeles archdiocese has fired between six and 12 priests, accounting to church sources during the last two weeks. Unlike some other dioceses, the Archdiocese has chosen not to inform churchgoers or the public, and will not confirm our report. As the story notes, there’s more we don’t know than do know:

…None of the priests in the Los Angeles Archdiocese are believed to be involved in any recent cases of sexually abusing minors. Their cases occurred as long as a decade ago, and all had undergone psychological counseling, according to one of the sources.

…It was unclear Sunday whether the names of any of the priests in the Los Angeles Archdiocese–which includes Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties–would be given to law enforcement authorities, or whether any of the priests planned to appeal their dismissals.

March 13: No progress. We’re stonewalled. Part of this is my fault. I let Larry return to his book leave (he’ll return today), and I told Teresa to finish a project on a local mosque that grew out of her prolonged post-Sept. 11 coverage of Islam. Steve Lopez offers in today’s column:

Across the land, the Catholic Church is being forced to come clean about the sins of the fathers, and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles appears to be falling into line. But the million-dollar word there is “appears.”

As reported in The Times, Cardinal Roger Mahony dismissed as many as a dozen priests for allegations of sexual abuse. But local authorities said they hadn’t gotten any calls from church officials regarding those allegations.

A reasonable person might ask, What gives? Does the church consider itself to be above the law?

On Sunday, the archdiocese sent priests into pulpits to read a statement from Mahony. My hat is off to the author, whether it was Mahony himself, a team of lawyers or a high-priced flack, because it was a beautiful piece of work.

March 15: Teresa Watanabe, her project finished, gets a tip that Cardinal Mahony has ordered all priests to attend a mandatory workshop on sex abuse. It turns out to have been planned for months but it allows us to express in the next day’s paper the resentment many priests feel:

…Several priests [who Teresa interviewed after the session] lamented that the furor has caused them to shrink back from normal gestures of affection, such as hugging children.

Father Roger Labonte of Holy Family Church in South Pasadena said he has found himself hesitating over whether to place his hands on a parishioner’s head during absolution rituals, straighten an altar server’s collar or even take some neighborhood children to a movie. After Mass last Sunday, he said, several children ran to him, hugging his legs, but he kept his arms straight at his side.

Labonte, a Canadian native who said that touch is important in his culture, said the self-imposed restrictions are “just not me.”

March 14: The LAPD, in response to our March 4 story, has begun “general inquiries” of whether any priests committed crimes.

March 15: Lopez columnizes about fed-up Catholics.

March 17: Lopez, who writes three times a week, responds to allegations that his columns are guilty of Catholic bashing:

I don’t really care whether it’s a church, a temple, the White House or the next-door neighbor. I write about users and abusers wherever I find them. But yes, I was Catholic once, and I suppose I still am.

…I probably never was a hall of fame Catholic. But nothing drove me away. I was never abused, nor did I ever hear of anyone who was. As an adult, when I did consciously drift away, it was because I found the church’s attitudes about contraception out of touch and its anti-gay preaching repugnant. But to tell you the truth, I later regretted walking away from what was good about the church just because of the things that bothered me.

…Dozens of people have told me, over the years, about abuse by clergy. Almost all of them, when they can rise up from their torment and self-hatred, talk about two shattering betrayals.

The first is when a priest uses church authority to have his way with a child. The second is when the church calls the victim a liar.

For decades, the church has merely transferred known molesters to other parishes, or sent them to drive-thru therapy, and then recycled them back into the care of future victims.

I don’t have words adequate to the task of describing that violation of trust and failure of basic human consideration. And the failure goes to the very top ranks of an institution that every Sunday preaches Christian morality.

So in the end, yes, I’m completely biased against, and intolerant of, hypocrisy. And without apology, I fully intend to keep banging on the door.

Blame it on the nuns. They said you should always ask yourself: What would Jesus do?

March 18: Teresa Watanabe, on another tip, visits a Sunday sermon by a prominent priest, allowing us to report:

In a searingly blunt sermon that led to a standing ovation, one of the Southland’s most prominent priests exhorted the Roman Catholic Church on Sunday to summon the “raw courage” to openly address the problem of clergy sex abuse.

That painful process would lead to the church’s purification, said Msgr. Clement J. Connolly, who served as secretary to Cardinals Francis McIntyre and Timothy Manning before taking the reins at Holy Family Church in South Pasadena.

Connolly, a priest for 38 years, told his congregations at all six Masses that church leaders had failed the people in neglecting the problem, which he said had caused irreparable wounds to victims, damage to the priesthood and feelings of betrayal, anger and shame among many Catholics. He said once-unquestioned church leaders must now be accountable to the people, and he asked parishioners to accept his remarks Sunday as “part of me being accountable as a pastor.”

“We have let this malignancy grow and allowed it to reach the awesome proportions it has today,” Connolly said of the sex-abuse problems. “Not to speak about it now would be to compound and continue the malfeasance.”

Roman Catholic leaders in Southern California have yet to give a public accounting of their handling of priestly abuse cases. Church sources maintain that Cardinal Roger M. Mahony in recent weeks dismissed or forced the resignations of a number of priests who were involved in molestation incidents but continued to work for the archdiocese. However, the archdiocese has declined to confirm those actions. It has issued two general statements on the problem of abuse, apologizing to victims and explaining church policies.

March 21: Bill Lobdell reports on the unlikely triumph of the victims movement:

After years of being disdained, dismissed or simply ignored, longtime crusaders against sexual abuse by priests suddenly have entered a kind of promised land. It’s an unfamiliar place where Catholic bishops apologize, prosecutors and politicians listen, and a friendly media army helps fight their battles.

And, perhaps most soothing to the victims’ scarred souls, people finally believe them.

“I’d never thought I’d see this day,” said David Clohessy, national director of the St. Louis-based Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, one of the nation’s two largest such groups, with 3,500 members. “We’ve been crying from the rooftops for someone to notice what’s going on for so long.”

Clohessy is among the 10 or so original activists who found each other a decade ago and became bound by phone calls, e-mails and anger.

They quickly got used to losing: Catholic dioceses avoided many potential court fights and messy publicity by writing settlement checks on the condition that the victims remained silent. Some priests implicated in abuse cases were quietly transferred to other churches. Other victims were told their complaint was an isolated incident and that the priest was now rehabilitated.

…Since the Boston case broke, the victims have watched the dominoes fall in ways they scarcely imagined: Dioceses are combing through personnel files to rid their ranks of any priest with a molestation in his background. Politicians are introducing legislation to eliminate the statue of limitations for sexual abuse of minors. Priests are attending mandatory classes on sexual abuse of minors.

Says Peter Isely, a 41-year-old victim of priest abuse from Milwaukee who entered the battle 10 years ago: “The dioceses spent tens of millions of dollars on the highest-priced lawyers from across the country and hired the best public relations firm to fight us. And what did we have? All we had was the truth.”

Other reporters on our staff are trying simultaneously to confirm through the LAPD the names of the suspected priests, but Cardinal Mahony had yet to turn over the details. We continued to pursue explanatory stories to put the crisis into perspective, always nagged by our inability to find out just who had been dismissed so we could track their movements and see whether the L.A. Archdiocese had been guilty of protecting them.

March 21: The pope offers a tepid comment from Rome. Our Rome bureau chief is occupied, so Larry writes the story. Managing Editor Dean Baquet prods us to get high and clear the pope’s semantic decision to blame the power of “evil,” rather than to simply hold errant priests accountable.

March 22: We learn about a fresh case. In response to last year’s abuse settlement, the archdiocese installed a sexual abuse hot line, and someone has reported that the head of a prestigious Catholic high school in the San Fernando Valley molested two students in the ’70s. It’s a different world now–the allegation has led to his firing.

March 25: Watanabe provides perspective on how other faiths deal with clergy abuse:

The wave of clergy sex scandals now engulfing the Roman Catholic Church has battered other denominations as well, producing an uneven record of response that ranges from the Episcopal Church’s aggressive and detailed policies to the Southern Baptist Convention’s widespread lack of written standards.

In the last decade, clergy sexual misconduct has been exposed in virtually every faith tradition. National studies have shown no differences in its frequency by denomination, region, theology or institutional structure.

Mainline Protestant denominations have generally taken the earliest and most aggressive measures against clergy abuse and fundamentalist churches the least, according to Gary Schoener, a Minneapolis psychotherapist who has handled more than 2,000 cases of clergy sexual abuse over the past 10 years. Rabbis began working on their policies more recently.

The Roman Catholic response has varied dramatically, in part because each of the 195 American dioceses operates independently. One of the first to take action was the Seattle Archdiocese, which in the early 1980s began exposing the problems and commissioning training materials. By contrast, as recently as January, church officials in Boston were accused of having routinely assigned as many as 80 priests suspected of molesting minors to different churches. It was the Boston cases that sparked the current national furor over priestly sexual abuse.

In faith after faith, the problem of clergy misconduct was exposed during the past 10 to 15 years because victims began stepping forward, plaintiffs began winning large awards and insurers began demanding policies to prevent abuse.

March 25: We run a story comparing Mahony’s secretiveness to the more open policies of the bishop of Orange. This day, Mahony holds an extraordinary “Mass of reparations,” telling about 300 Catholic priests that he would support victims of long-ago sexual abuse who want to break confidentiality agreements and talk, but would not release the names of their abusers. Mahony also says he is willing to consider changing the church’s celibacy policy to allow priests to marry.

March 27: Stammer does a quick takeout on Mahony’s comments on celibacy:

Celibacy, a cornerstone of the Roman Catholic priesthood for a thousand years and a symbol of ordained holiness, is being questioned with a new urgency as the church’s sexual abuse scandal sweeps across the nation.

In a sharp departure from Pope John Paul II’s insistence that the celibacy issue is closed, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony on Monday became the first American cardinal to declare that discussion of a married priesthood remains open.

Lopez writes his column on the premise that the church’s abuse problem begins with celibacy. We report separately on a demand by the D.A. that the church comply with state abuse-reporting law requirements.

March 29: The LAPD chief, irritated by the archdiocese’s slowness, demands the names of priests suspected of abuse. Cardinal Mahony insists the LAPD already has the names. Bill Lobdell reports that “Father X,” John Lenihan–the priest who told Steve Lopez how his lack of a mature sexual identity led him to molest girls–has agreed to leave the clergy. We’re aware a settlement with a Lenihan victim is days away.

April 2: Lobdell reports the settlement:

The Roman Catholic dioceses of Orange and Los Angeles paid $1.2 million Monday to a 37-year-old woman who alleged in a lawsuit that a popular priest molested her as a teenager, got her pregnant and paid for her abortion.

The church’s settlement with Lori Haigh was the second high-profile settlement the two dioceses have paid in eight months to a victim of priestly abuse. It was the latest in a mounting string of cases throughout the nation that have focused attention on the church’s tolerance of abusive clergy.

Haigh, of San Francisco, held a morning news conference Monday at her attorney’s office in Irvine, and then filed a criminal complaint against Father John Lenihan with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. A spokesman for the department said it would launch an investigation.

Haigh’s lawsuit also claimed that two other priests–now high-ranking officials with the Diocese of Orange–ignored her pleas for help 20 years ago. She said she was abused from age 14 to 17.

Lenihan’s attorney, Ron Talmo, declined to comment. But in a written statement, Bishop of Orange Tod D. Brown said, “I am deeply sorry for the hurt caused by the actions of Father Lenihan, and extend my apology to Ms. Haigh and all victims of sexual clergy abuse.”

According to church officials, the two other priests deny ever meeting Haigh. One of them, Msgr. Lawrence J. Baird, held his own press conference later in the day and threatened to file a defamation suit against Haigh.

At her press conference, Haigh said she got to know Lenihan because she played the guitar in a youth group that performed at Sunday evening Mass at St. Norbert Church in Orange, where he was a priest.

On the same day, Richard Winton reports that sheriff’s detectives are questioning altar boys at a church in Azusa, a distant suburb of Los Angeles County about recent abuse by an unnamed adult who we suspect to be the priest but can’t confirm.

April 3: Cardinal Mahony has told Larry Stammer he wants to be interviewed. We expect little and are not surprised:

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, in his first interview since the priest-abuse scandal broke, said Tuesday his refusal to give details about priests dismissed from the Los Angeles Archdiocese was based on requests from police and victims.

The cardinal, the archbishop of Los Angeles, requested an interview with a Times reporter to clear the air about the archdiocese’s role in the sex abuse cases. He compared the church’s sexual abuse crisis to a cancer, saying that until the “last injurious cell” is removed, the church will not be able to move on.

(You know you’re being stonewalled when you have to say what your subject won’t say as high as the third graf.)

However, Mahony did little to clarify the types of abuses committed by the six to 12 archdiocese priests sources said he removed earlier this year. Nor would he say exactly how many priests were dismissed. He said two victims in “heart-wrenching pleas” urged him not to reveal the priests’ identities.

…While refusing to say how many priests were dismissed, Mahony said that none were currently involved in any ministry involving children or youths.

…Boston Cardinal Bernard Law has come under pressure to resign. Mahony declined to take a stand on Law’s future Tuesday, but said, “I don’t know how I could face people. I don’t know how I could walk down the main aisle of the church myself comfortably, interiorly, if I had been [guilty] of grave neglect.” He said later in an e-mail that his use of the term “grave neglect” was not a personal judgment, but a frequently used characterization by Catholics in Boston.

On the same day, Lopez writes the first of what will turn out to be four columns in five days about this topic. This one suggests that priestly silence is crushing the victims of abuse.

April 4: The fun starts.

The producer for two psuedo-populist radio talk-show hosts, Ken & John, calls Lopez and tells him about a big scoop: Somebody anonymously has given the radio station scores of Mahony e-mails. Ken & John will broadcast their show from outside the archdiocese’s office this afternoon and will read the e-mails. Lopez asks to see them. The producer sends over a half-dozen. They show a piqued Mahony obsessed with spin control. They also appear to refer indirectly to a couple of the cases we’ve been unable to convince the archdiocese to describe.

The question is: Are they real? E-mails can be altered invisibly during the forwarding process. Stammer and Lopez, both of whom have received real Mahony e-mails, say these look authentic. One of the e-mails from Mahony to a colleague describes a conversation Mahony had with Stammer. No way to make that up. But the archdiocese, not surprisingly, will not confirm these are real-instead, it sends out a cease-and-desist demand letter, maintaining these are confidential communications and illegal to reproduce. None of the church staffers who received copies will comment.

By 7 p.m. we have reluctantly decided not to use the e-mails. We’ll seek further confirmation tomorrow.

Instead, the archdiocese lays it in our lap. One of its lawyers obtains a highly unusual 10:30 p.m. court hearing to seek a restraining order prohibiting us from publishing. (If you were anybody else in L.A., you’d have to warn the clerks in the writs courts earlier in the day that you might seek an after-hours hearing. In this case, the archdiocese’s lawyer talked to the retired presiding judge of the Superior Court a little before 9 p.m. and set the wheels in motion.)

Our lawyer, Karlene Goller, rushes over to court to fight the motion. During the hearing, she is able to ask the church’s lawyer: Are these e-mails real? Yes, the lawyer says. Thank you, Karlene says.

Shortly before midnight the judge rules against the church’s request, saying the constitution does not permit prior restraint. We manage to get a short story about the e-mails on B-5 and hit 400,000 of our 1 million readers.

In that morning’s paper, Lopez columnizes about the recent settlement of the Orange County abuse case and his relationship with “Father X”:

Well, there goes another round of Sunday offerings. Your Easter tithes won’t pay for hymnbooks or boost the salaries of underpaid Catholic schoolteachers, but will go straight into the scandal management fund.

You read about these sex abuse cases each day and wonder if the national spectacle of hypocrisy and betrayal can get any more outrageous, and now we know the answer is yes. The latest case involves an Orange County priest who allegedly got a teenager pregnant roughly 20 years ago and then quietly paid for her abortion, breaking perhaps a half-dozen commandments in this one relationship alone.

But I can’t say I’m surprised. The priest happens to be an acquaintance of mine.

We return to work on Friday, April 5, planning on either doing a broader story about the content of those half-dozen e-mails or, hopefully, convincing the producer of the “John & Ken” show to share his entire collection. Lopez lobbies the producer, who finally sends all the e-mails over to us at about 3 p.m.

Larry Stammer will write the story, and he has about three hours to distill everything and present a coherent story for the National Edition. We get it mostly right, then expand and polish it for the home edition. The best e-mails will be compressed into two-graf bullets, but there’s a judgment call: One of the e-mails alludes to an abuse allegation against Mahony himself in Fresno. That had only been a rumor to us. Now we’re able to call Fresno PD, which confirms it has a recent claim from a woman who says Mahony molested her 32 years ago.

We get the woman on the phone. Her coherency is suspect. We won’t put this allegation in the lead, even though we know the local TV stations will lead their broadcasts with it at 11 p.m. We make the abuse allegation the first bullet, six or seven grafs down. Our superiors ask that it be higher, in the fourth graf, but with more detail about the marginal quality of the allegation.

The home-edition story on April 6 reads:

A series of confidential e-mails written by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony show how pervasively the nationwide child-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church has affected the Los Angeles Archdiocese.

The e-mails, leaked to radio station KFI, which provided copies to The Times, paint a picture of a sometimes-agitated archbishop alarmed that he is losing public relations ground.

The memos, written during the past three weeks, capture an archdiocese confronting political, legal and moral challenges: where to place a priest newly accused of molesting children; whether the church should start a victims support group; how to anticipate and counteract media accusations; how to give “instruction” in child-abuse law to Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, and how to measure the number of weeks or months before a “healing” process begins in the church.

The e-mail also reveals that a Fresno woman made a 32-year-old unspecified “claim” against Mahony. Questions by reporters prompted the cardinal Friday night to issue a denial.

Fresno police Lt. Keith Foster confirmed Friday that an investigation is underway. The Fresno Diocese turned over a recent two-hour taped interview with the woman to police, an e-mail says.

The woman told The Times on Friday that Mahony molested her in 1970 when he visited the San Joaquin Memorial Catholic High School, where she was a student. She provided few other details, saying police asked her not to talk.

Mahony, who was then a priest in Fresno and rose to the position of auxiliary bishop, “categorically” denied “ever having molested anyone.”

In a March 28 e-mail, Mahony expressed willingness to be interviewed by Fresno detectives and wrote his advisors that he did not need an attorney because he had no recollection of the woman making the complaint and informed the LAPD the same day he was told of the accusation.

Other e-mails focus on the growing demands that Mahony fully disclose the names of the eight priests he had fired in February for molesting minors. The archdiocese subsequently turned the information over to police but has yet to disclose it to the public.

In one e-mail, a top Mahony advisor recommends that the cardinal remain deliberately vague about where the eight priests served before Mahony fired them. While Mahony told The Times in a separate interview that none of the priests were in parish ministries, the e-mail from Msgr. Craig Cox, vicar for clergy, says that some did serve on a part-time basis in parishes–a fact that implies they had were around children.

At times, Mahony and his inner circle are shown attempting to promptly cooperate with police on new allegations of sexual abuse. In other e-mails, there is a clear determination to protect the institution.

(The bullets began here:)

The communications also reveal that:

* Mahony was so upset by the archdiocese’s failure to turn over some names of several dismissed priests to police that he warned his general counsel he might be subpoenaed by a grand jury.

“If we don’t, today, “consult” with the [detective] about those three names, I can guarantee you that I will get hauled into a Grand Jury proceeding and I will be forced to give all the names, etc.,” Mahony wrote to his top lawyer, Sister Judith Murphy.

At that point, March 27, the archdiocese had not turned over to police the names of three of eight priests he dismissed in February. The names were subsequently turned over to authorities.

* Mahony wrote Murphy in that same e-mail that the archdiocese had made a “huge mistake” by withholding the names of the three priests…

Lopez decides to write an extra column so he can appear in the same day’s paper. He begins:

There is talk of telling police as little as possible about priests who were known sex offenders.

There is the crafting of statements to avoid being caught in a lie down the road.

The truth is framed, needled and massaged in the name of protecting the church.

All this from those who hold themselves up as paragons of morality and virtue, with God as their guide.

April 7: We run a front-page story that examines in far more detail the troubled mental history of Mahony’s accuser. It runs on A-1.

On B-1, Stammer writes a news analysis comparing Mahony’s case with a famous abuse allegation lodged against a Chicago cardinal a decade earlier–one that proved false, and sucked credibility out of the national crusade against abusive priests.

Next to Stammer’s story on the page is another Lopez column. He has researched depositions that Mahony gave a few years earlier in a child abuse lawsuit in Stockton, in central California, dealing with Mahony’s oversight of an abuse case when he was bishop of Stockton in the 1970s:

In 1998, Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony was a central figure in one of the most notorious sex-abuse trials in Catholic church history.

The case involved two Stockton-area brothers who had been abused by a priest from the time they were toddlers until they were in their late teens, both before and after the Stockton diocese had received complaints against the priest.

A jury was so disturbed by the drama that unfolded in San Joaquin County Superior Court, it awarded $30 million in damages to the brothers, an amount later negotiated to $7 million.

Mahony was not a defendant in the case, but he was the bishop of Stockton during a critical period addressed in the lawsuit. He had ordered an evaluation after the priest himself admitted he was a molester, then reassigned him to another parish, where he abused victims for years to come.

“Mahony is the Teflon cardinal,” says Jeff Anderson, who represented the victims and was amazed that Mahony’s reputation in Los Angeles was scarcely tainted by the Stockton verdict, which at the time was the largest-ever per-person settlement in such a case.

April 9: We struggle to use the e-mails to assemble a list of which priests Mahony has gotten rid of. It’s imprecise. One of the e-mails allows us to publish a story today about a priest accused of molesting boys while wrestling more than a decade ago.

Also running today is a piece by Elizabeth Mehren, our Boston staffer, that Cardinal Law had approved the transfer of a pedophile priest from Boston to California. Give the Globe credit for breaking that story weeks earlier; today’s story was sexier because it detailed hundreds of pages of court documents about the misconduct of that priest, released by lawyers of his alleged victims:

BOSTON–Although well aware of sexual abuse complaints against Father Paul Shanley, Catholic Church officials here failed to disclose his history when they approved his 1990 transfer to a Southern California parish, documents released Monday show.

On the contrary, a recommendation to the diocese of San Bernardino described Shanley as “a priest in good standing.”

At an extraordinary 2 1/2-hour news conference, lawyers for a family that has filed a civil lawsuit against Shanley displayed material from his personnel file on a giant video screen. The papers showed that church officials have known of sexual misconduct charges against the priest since at least 1967. Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law also is named in the suit. “They gave [Shanley] their seal of approval and shipped him out,” said Roderick MacLeish Jr., a lawyer representing 24-year-old Gregory Ford. Ford has alleged that Shanley abused him over several years, starting when he was 5 or 6.

“He was taking children on youth retreats in San Bernardino, and the archdiocese of Boston knew about it,” MacLeish said.

In a statement that failed to mention Shanley, Boston archdiocese spokeswoman Donna M. Morrissey said Monday that “whatever may have occurred in the past, there were no deliberate decisions to put children at risk.”

Shanley, 71, now lives in San Diego. He was fired last week from his post as a police department volunteer and, MacLeish said, “many people are looking for him.”

The allegations against Shanley, first reported in the Boston Globe, were the latest bombshell in a sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church since early this year. Prosecutors here would not say Monday whether Shanley’s name was on a list of more than 80 priests suspected of molesting children that Boston church officials provided after the January conviction of former priest John J. Geoghan. Geoghan, who has been accused of molesting more than 130 young people, is in prison for groping a boy at a community swimming pool

Also running today is an A-1 feature by Bill Lobdell about Lori Haigh, the woman who last week settled her suit against Father Lenihan:

Lori Haigh couldn’t stand the voice of Father John Lenihan any longer. So she sat among the congregants in the parish hall and stabbed a pencil into her left thigh again and again, until blood began to flow.

The 16-year-old was hoping someone at St. Norbert Church in Orange would ask her what was wrong. That’s when she would blurt it all out:

Father John was molesting me. Three, four, five times a week for the past two years. He got me pregnant and then paid for the abortion. He set me up with another priest.

But no one asked.

It took Haigh 20 years and a million-dollar lawsuit to be noticed.

The dioceses of Los Angeles and Orange last week agreed to pay her $1.2 million to settle her accusations against Lenihan and the church. Though Lenihan neither admitted nor denied the allegations involving Haigh, he previously admitted to molesting another teenage girl and having several sexual relationships with adult women. He agreed last month to be removed from the priesthood.

Bishop Tod D. Brown of Orange County last week acknowledged that Haigh had been molested, saying, “I am deeply sorry for the hurt caused by the actions of Father Lenihan, and extend my apology to Ms. Haigh and all victims of sexual abuse by clergy.”

The sexual abuse scandal now racking the U.S. Roman Catholic Church has many victims. But Lori Haigh stands apart on several grounds. The allegations that led to the settlement are among the most serious yet leveled against a priest. And while many victims contend that molestations haunted them for years, Haigh is among the few willing to detail how her life spiraled downward after repeated sexual abuse, while the church ignored her complaints.

She is now a San Francisco mother who appears to lead an enviable life as a video entrepreneur and songwriter.

But she says that she hates to wear dresses because they make her feel vulnerable–the same way she felt when Lenihan allegedly would take her in his silver Mercury Monarch and park on deserted roads. She picks at the skin around her fingernails, leaving them bloody, saying it distracts her from bad thoughts. She says she has tried to commit suicide more than 10 times, beginning at 16, when Lenihan allegedly got her pregnant…

In the next few days, the Fresno PD ends its investigation of Cardinal Mahony, saying there is no evidence wrongdoing occurred. (It runs on A-1.) Thanks to the archdiocese e-mail and more chatting up of police sources, we’re able to advance on a couple of fronts: We confirm that the priest is the suspect at that Azusa church where detectives questioned altar boys. And we learn that the archdiocese transferred a priest suspected of molestation to a hospital that had a pediatrics ward, despite concerns the priest should not be allowed to work around children.

Nailing down that second case allows police reporter Beth Shuster to seek confirmation from Mahony with the leverage we need. Only now, during the discussion of this case, does the cardinal give us the breakdown of who he dismissed–the breakdown we initially requested on March 3.

The information is published in the eighth graf of this April 13 story by Beth and Richard Winton:

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony said Friday he erred when he transferred a priest accused of molesting children to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center about 14 years ago without telling hospital officials about the allegations.

In his first public comments on a sex abuse case involving the Los Angeles Archdiocese, Mahony said he never should have assigned Father Michael Wempe to Cedars-Sinai without informing hospital officials that he had removed Wempe from his parish and ordered him to a New Mexico treatment facility for evaluation and counseling.

After the treatment, Mahony said, he was told Wempe could be trusted to work as a priest if he were in a supervised job without access to children. Mahony said he was told Wempe could serve in a prison or a hospital. When he assigned Wempe to Cedars-Sinai, Mahony said, he did not know it had a pediatric unit.

“I think that was a mistake on our part then to not simply tell them of his background,” Mahony told The Times. “That should have been done. I take responsibility for that.”

In retrospect, Mahony said, he should have forced Wempe to immediately resign after hearing of the abuse allegations. “Fourteen years [later] is so different,” said Mahony, who has headed the L.A. Archdiocese since 1985. “If that had been today, he would have been out of the priesthood.”

…The Times reported in March that six to 12 priests had been dismissed by Mahony in February for past sexual abuse of minors. Mahony, under growing pressure to reveal details about the cases, would say only that “a few” priests, almost all of them retired, were involved.

On Friday, Mahony continued to refuse to name priests accused of sexual abuse, repeating earlier statements that he has been asked by two victims not to divulge the priests’ names.

For the first time, however, Mahony clarified the number of known sex abuse cases. He said seven cases allegedly occurred before 1997, four in the last five years and another four were connected to priests who have since left the ministry and cannot be found. There were also a smaller group of allegedly abusive priests who are now dead, Mahony said.

Conclusion: There is no conclusion. I have to wake up tomorrow morning and dive back into this. Don’t ask me to grade what we’ve done so far. There hasn’t been enough time to contemplate. Thanks, though, for indulging my catharsis. And if you’re interested in seeing the Boston Globe’s fine work that drove this national scandal, go to: http://www.boston.com/globe/spotlight/

Four writers offer four techniques about how to conceptualize more creatively

What we write about is usually more important than the techniques we use to make the story pretty. Newspapers continue to suffer from too many stories that feel obligatory or flat or formatted, and from too few that brim with a sense of discovery–a natural enthusiasm that comes from looking at the world in a fresh way. It isn’t merely language that hooks the reader and carries him along. It’s the ideas–your ability to make him think about something in a way he never thought about it before.

Where good ideas come from

Here are four essays from reporters, published in “Nuts & Bolts” in 1999, that provide insight into attitudinal technique–the intellectual stances that can make you more sensitive to good ideas.

#1: “Imagine the broadest context possible…”

Many of us have written the story of a parent fighting back for social change after losing a child to homicide or disease. And many of us slapped ourselves in the head when we read Mark Fritz’s piece about how common this syndrome has become, and how it can lead to poorly thought-out social policy. It was so obvious! So, how come the rest of us didn’t think of it? (Confession: I once wrote about a Riverside father’s successful crusade to ban lawn darts after one of them accidentally struck and killed his daughter, and until I read Mark’s article it never dawned on me that what I’d chronicled was part of something grander.)

When I asked Mark (who subsequently left the L.A. Times for the Boston Globe) how he connected the dots, he responded:

I live in the wilds of western New Jersey, where the biggest fear isn’t crime, cow pies or drive-bys, but a tick the size of a decimal point that might be carrying Lyme Disease, a rarely fatal but potentially debilitating yet easily treatable illness caused by a spiral-shaped bacteria borne by a bug that can burrow into your eyebrow and suck your blood for two days before it drops, now looking like a fat asterisk, onto the copy of “Nuts & Bolts” you happen to be reading. Last year, under pressure from Northeast politicians, the FDA rushed the approval of a vaccine that seemed to work for some people. Sometimes.

I like stories about things that change collective human behavior, so I thought this news peg might warrant a quick trip to the Connecticut city where the affliction was discovered to see how Lyme the disease had changed Lyme the town, a woodsy epitome of upscale exurbia.

The most interesting thing I found was the Lyme Disease Foundation, a nonprofit group founded by a couple whose child had died of mysterious ailments that the family had become convinced were caused by a Lyme-carrying tick that must have bit the mom while she was pregnant, though the link was never proven. Their belief that Lyme disease was much worse and more prevalent than the evidence indicated was taken at face value by so many newspapers, that a couple of scientists tried to point out that these folks were letting their personal agenda distort the empirical facts. Cooler heads claimed the foundation was panicking people into thinking they had the disease when they didn’t, and had opened the door to countless Lyme-curing quacks.

I tucked this example of obsessive parental advocacy away for a bit, looking for parallels elsewhere. If something is happening somewhere, something similar is usually happening somewhere else for somewhat the same reason, which sometimes means, voila, a trend (which sometimes unravel so slowly they aren’t noticed for decades).

Some months later, President Clinton signed a new law called the ”Jeanne Cleary Act” that compelled colleges to compile new sets of campus crime statistics for the Department of Education. This law required them to begin collecting and collating crimes that occurred in places adjacent to campus or were merely frequented by students. Having dropped out of one school nestled in the peaceful countryside of western Michigan, and attended another that mingled colorfully with the crack alleys and hooker promenades of midtown Detroit, I wondered about how this one-size-fits-all law would work. I noticed an item in a higher education trade journal about the legislation, and it quoted some school officials as saying the new law, which toughened an already confusing older law, was so contradictory and difficult to decipher that schools needed to pull cops off the streets to manage compliance.

It turned out that Jeanne Cleary, a freshman from a well-to-do family, was the victim of a tortuous campus rape and murder that had compelled her parents to go on a mission to change the way schools catalogued and chronicled crimes on campus. They had succeeded in getting two sweeping federal laws and 13 state statutes enacted in little more than a decade. Lobbyists, lawmakers and even tough-on-crime prosecutors admitted they often were too intimidated to point out the flaws of these laws when confronted with the mind-bending manifestation of every parent’s worst nightmare.

Their comments, campaigns, convictions and even their web site were so strikingly similar to the Lyme folks’ that it took only minutes to find other analogies in crime, product liability and disease policy. I passed a note on to my editor, Bret Israel, who talked with colleagues Scott Kraft and Tom Furlong, and more analogies poured forth: MADD, Megan’s law, missing kids on milk cartons, Three Strikes prison sentencing, the Superfund’s origins as an outgrowth of a mother’s complaint about the Love Canal. Parents whose kids suffered brain damage because of an infinitesimally possible yet unproven link to the whooping cough vaccine had morphed into a movement opposed to childhood vaccines–the lack of which probably kills more kids in the world than anything else. All relied on media stories that–whether the killer was a paroled child molester or disposable cigarette lighter–sounded eerily similar, and sometimes tritely formulaic.

This wasn’t an easy story to write. Many parents had accomplished incalculable good after suffering incomprehensible loss. Yet their missions were so uniform in the arc they followed that it cried out to be covered as a collective phenomenon that increasingly produced what some rarely covered critics said was bad law.

A psychologist specializing in parental grief told me that embarking on a mission, in fact, is a common reaction to the loss of a child. But there were other things at play that became apparent by imagining the broadest context possible and talking to people from other, seemingly unrelated fields: The growth of the Internet and its ability to instantly link like-minded people; this decade’s unparalleled demand for tough anti-crime laws; the increasingly imitated success that AIDS and breast cancer advocates have had on influencing the priorities of federal disease policy; the two political parties’ war to one-up each other on people-pleasing legislation; and this generation’s rise in consumer protection and product liability lawsuits—all have combined to give enormous public policy power to pitiable parents just trying to cope.

Sure, far too many news stories are twisted into symbols of the Zeitgeist, but today’s Zeitgeist (I know, you German speakers, it’s a redundant term) compared to yesterday’s is a terrific source for stories and a good way to broaden the context enough to find angles that challenge the surface assumptions that lead to formulaic approaches. I firmly believe that every story we cover is a tiny part of a larger one that sometimes eludes our grasp. Too often, we forget that what we mostly cover are aberrations from the norm, and we have a tendency to treat a statistical cluster of aberrations themselves as trends while missing the larger picture, which is sometimes as interesting as the aberration itself.

EXCERPT:

…The Clearys remain undeterred. Theirs is a classic American story of contemporary activism, a wounded family’s odyssey endlessly replayed, from Megan’s Law to missing children on milk cartons. Thanks to the unlimited power of parental grief to attract media and sway lawmakers, lawn darts in toy stores and drawstrings on children’s clothing are banned. A vaccine comes to market earlier than originally intended. A child’s sickness is linked to Love Canal, spawning the Superfund.

And at the center of them all so often stands a tragic tale, a family calamity transformed into arresting allegory, a freak occurrence offered up as a terrifying trend.

Parental grief, in fact, has become one of the most powerful political forces in the country. Already, the massacre at a high school in Littleton, Colo., has inspired a parents’ group modeled after Mothers Against Drunk Driving that aims to toughen gun laws and, if history is any guide, will inevitably broaden its agenda.

“You see this on hundreds of different things,” says Burdett Loomis, a University of Kansas expert on interest groups. “What is fascinating to me is that a lot of times the power is in the story itself, the narrative. The power it has over legislatures. Anecdotes become the evidence.”

Though it can be politically dangerous to oppose teary-eyed parents from middle-class America clutching photos of children killed by what they are certain is some institutional defect, there are signs of an emerging backlash.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist recently ripped Congress for churning out laws “to appear responsive to every highly publicized societal ill or sensational crime.”

In February, an American Bar Assn. task force said 40% of the federal criminal laws passed since the Civil War had come in just the last three decades–often “in patchwork response to newsworthy events” rather than “an identifiable federal need.”

The bar says the last Congress alone slogged through 1,000 new crime proposals, with some of the voguish laws passed in recent years–including those against drive-by shootings, interstate spouse abuse and murder committed by escaped convicts–so superfluous they were never used.

Even MADD founder Candy Lightner says the politics of grief have seized control of the political system. “How are you going to say ‘no’ to a crying mother?” she says. “The legislature winds up acting emotionally, and you have all these ridiculous laws passed that don’t do a hill of beans. I can relate to it, because I used to do it too.”

#2: “Look for the nexus where several fields intersect…”

Our business’ emphasis on geographical and topical beats, as well as increased formatting, conspires against the kind of eclectic thinking in which a reporter finds a story in that rich soil where two or more seemingly unrelated fields intersect. One of my colleagues, Sharon Bernstein, excells at breaking down these barriers. Here she describes how she got jazzed by news that Eli Lilly & Co., the pharmaceutical company that makes Prozac, was about to air a 30-minute television info-merical promoting the anti-depressant:

When I first heard the news, the old-line business reporter in me wasn’t all that impressed. But the former media writer in me was floored.

They’re going to do what? And they’re going to run these things when? In the middle of the night so depressed people can see them?

I knew this was a hell of a story. But it wasn’t obvious to a lot of people until it was all done. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal had passed the information on to their marketing writers, who devoted all of one paragraph to the topic in columns on new advertising campaigns. Although my editor, Annette Haddad, immediately saw the value of the story, some people on our Business desk didn’t think it was that important.

But from my perspective–having covered entertainment, business and health care, and having often thought about how marketing and media affect people–the story was a natural. To pull it off, though, I had to rely on skills honed in very different fields.

To gather the elements necessary for a good financial story, I relied on techniques learned by covering business during two stints in my career: I found out why the company felt it needed to market Prozac, what the goals of the campaign were, and what it cost. But to cover the program properly as media, I also relied on skills from my days of covering TV and entertainment.

I watched the show and took notes. I interviewed the producer to find out what she had been trying to accomplish. In the story, I made sure to describe the program itself, quoting from the narration and describing the mood and the program’s progress.

Putting those two fields together, I was then able to make the most important leap–understanding the program’s importance as it related to health care. I found sources who were experts in health care and mass communications, and talked to them about the program, its positioning in the market and the financial goals of Eli Lilly in making the show.

The resulting story ran on A-1 and was picked up by many other media outlets. At a symposium on the health care business a few weeks later, the it was quoted by the keynote speaker.

The Prozac story brought home to me something I had been trying to articulate for years: that the best stories come not from narrow specialization, but from the nexus of several fields. In my case, this happened entirely by accident. I bounced around to so many beats that I wound up, for example, covering business (the first time around) like a political reporter; then, when I switched to media writing, I covered entertainment with the understanding of a business reporter. And so on when I went back to metro news and then came back to business. (Editor’s note: She’s now back in metro as our public-health reporter.)

The resulting stories are kind of weird–maybe because they’re written from something of an outsider’s perspective–but they’re full-bodied in a way that I think is important. They’re more fun to write, too.

In a way, writing from several points of view is like learning several foreign languages. You reach for Italian and it comes out French. But the resulting patois can be the basis of a whole new language.

EXCERPT (beginning with lead):

Borrowing a technique used to sell everything from exercise equipment to food dehydrators, the makers of the antidepressant Prozac have produced a 30-minute television infomercial to directly market to consumers the prescription-only drug.

The commercial, which is aimed mostly at women, will air in the middle of the night and on weekends, when company marketers believe more depressed people will be watching.

By producing the ads, Prozac manufacturer Eli Lilly & Co. is aggressively stepping up to the plate in a controversial new area of marketing that many pharmaceutical companies see as their best hope for new sales in the era of managed care.

More and more, since rules on advertising drugs on television were eased in late 1997, drug makers are turning to consumers, rather than doctors and hospitals, to create demand for their products.

The question of marketing a psychiatric drug directly to consumers, however, goes to the heart of the controversy over whether pharmaceuticals should be advertised on television. Prozac, unlike drugs for allergies and hair loss, can have psychological side effects and is aimed at a condition that is often not easily treated.

“It’s a trap,” said George Gerbner, a telecommunications professor at Temple University in Philadelphia and author of the book ”Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs in the Mass Media.” ”They’re trying to appeal to and exploit the most vulnerable people.”

The Prozac commercial, which appears to be the first half-hour advertisement for a psychiatric drug, is part of Lilly’s bold campaign to shore up the $2.8-billion drug’s lead among antidepressants.

…”You’ve got to have mixed feelings on this,” said Lawrence Wallack, who specializes in mass media and public health issues at UC Berkeley and Portland State University in Oregon. ”Depression is a big issue, and the more public discussion of it the better. But you can’t get around the fact that it’s an infomercial. It’s a sales pitch.”

Introduced in the United States in 1988, Prozac was the first of a new breed of antidepressant medications called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which….

#3: ”Weigh reality against society’s expectations.”

Greg Braxton’s front-page piece in May, 1999, about the virtual whiteness of the coming network television season stood out as a strong moral statement by the newspaper. Rather than writing about a questionable societal trend after interest groups or lawyers intervened, Greg’s piece was a simple but important statement of a fundamental shift in programming: The networks, which had been creeping toward diversity, seemed to have retrenched in unison. (The then-hipper-than-it-is-now Entertainment Weekly didn’t pick up this until July 30, using as an angle the NAACP’s plans to protest, which came in a reaction to Greg’s piece.)

The story was–like Mark Fritz’s parent-protest story–obvious in retrospect, and so is the lesson that it teaches: Keep measuring reality against society’s expectations. The story also reinforces Sharon Bernstein’s point about finding stories where two fields collide–in this case, entertainment and race.

Greg’s explains:

Since coming on the TV beat in 1994, I have spent much of my time exploring minority images on dramas and comedies, and how race relations are handled on different shows. Pursuing this angle has resulted in a steady stream of stories-how comedies are more segregated than dramas, the unhappiness with black and Latino images, and how some popular series have been popular with white viewers but not minority viewers, and vice versa.

Just before the new fall schedules were announced, I got a sense that there would probably be little ethnic diversity in the new shows. But it didn’t start to dawn on me, my colleague Brian Lowry or my editor Betsy Sharkey that there would be virtually no minorities in a leading role, very few blacks in supporting roles and virtually no Latinos or Asian Americans that were visible.

In New York in May, all of the television networks unveil their new programming before advertisers, showing them clips of all the new shows. I attended closed-circuit broadcasts of those presentations here. By the second day of watching pilots, it was obvious that there was a certain sameness to the looks of the shows. That was a sharp contrast to our anticipation of more integration, especially since there had been diversity in some of the hit shows, like ”The Practice.” We assumed the pendulum was going to keep swinging in a direction of inclusion. I remember sitting in an ABC board room and being so shocked that the casts of the new shows–even ensemble casts of the new dramas–seemed to be all white.

Heightening the contrast further was the fact that I had heard several network executives say in previous years that diversity was very important to them. But from the clips and cast photos, it was clear that wasn’t the case this time. Something had gone wrong. It was never anticipated that all of the major networks–Fox, CBS, NBC and ABC– would all look the same.

I contacted the network executives and confronted them about the trend and their past promises. For the most part, they were responsive in explaining their rationale, and how they were still trying. When the story wound up on the front page, many of them clamed up.

It was only the beginning of what would turn out to be an ongoing series of stories examining diversity in television, which has turned out to be the hot-button issue clouding the new season.

EXCERPT (beginning with lead):

The new prime-time television season has been unveiled, and guess who’s not coming to dinner this fall.

Of the 26 new comedies and dramas premiering on the major broadcast networks–CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox–not one features a minority in a leading role. Even secondary minority characters on these sitcoms and dramas are sparse, turning the TV lineup into a nearly all-white landscape.

There are few blacks in supporting roles on the shows, and Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans and other ethnic groups are virtually invisible. And even Fox, a network that grew to prominence on the strength of shows targeted for and featuring blacks, may have only one regular black character on its entire schedule this fall.

The lack of minority characters has sent a shudder through an industry that has prided itself on being politically enlightened and progressive. Further, it is in direct contravention of network executives’ repeated pledges to increase diversity in their shows.

Tom Nunan, entertainment president of sixth-ranked UPN, whose edgier programming strategy includes several shows featuring minorities in leading and supporting roles, said the lack of diversity on the major networks has been obvious for some time but is particularly evident in the new crop of prime-time series.

“It was really glaring at the upfronts,” said Nunan, referring to the networks’ announcement of the fall prime-time series lineup to advertisers last week in New York. Advertisers, in turn, will now decide how and where to spend roughly $6.5 billion to buy advertising time in advance of the season, which begins in mid-September. “It was a shortsighted approach that they took. When you realize how valuable the African American audience can be, and also any minority audience, [inclusion] shows respect to all Americans, not just one demographic group.”

Among several high-profile shows with all-white casts are ABC’s “Wasteland,” about six “twentysomethings” living in New York City and dealing with life after college; NBC’s “Freaks and Geeks,” which features a group of teens attending a suburban high school in 1980; CBS’ “Love or Money,” a comedy about romance in an upscale New York City apartment building; Fox’s “Manchester Prep,” set at a prestigious New York prep school; and NBC’s “Cold Feet,” about three couples in various and differing stages of relationships.

#4: “Keep an open mind…”

Evelyn Larrubia heard about what sounded like a slam-dunk story: Some toy manufacturer was producing a set of figurines called “Homies” that clearly resembled Latino gang members. An outrage story, clear and simple. But by being willing to let the story take on additional complexities–rolling with the punches and keeping an open mind to a changing set of facts–Evelyn produced a far richer tale about two ways of looking at the world.

“Cultural toys.” That’s what the guy on the other end of the phone was calling them. Sure, some people have complained that they look like gang members, he conceded, but they’re just ignorant.

This was not quite what I’d expected to hear when I finally tracked down David Gonzales, creator of those 1 3/4 inch Homies figurines that had cops and prosecutors up in arms.

I had gone out and bought myself a purseful of Homies figurines and stickers as soon as I heard about them. I saw the knit caps, the bulging muscles, the baggy pants and white tee-shirts, the bandana hanging out of one guy’s back pocket, the teardrop that looked like a prison tattoo–I was sure this was going to be an easy quick story. I mean, who wouldn’t condemn toys dressed like gang members?

All I had to do was track down the company that made the toys, call few Hispanic activists, add police and prosecutor quotes and file it.

But now I had Gonzales talking, with a straight face, about low-rider Chicano kids as a cultural phenomenon. He told me his art was inspired by neighborhood people from the barrio. They weren’t supposed to be bad, just authentic, he said. He was intelligent, well-spoken and sounded like a decent human being.

I didn’t know if anyone would agree that these tiny, cartoonish Chicano toys were art, but it was worth a shot. Which meant my original idea of just calling people up and describing the little guys was not going to work. I mean, baggy clothes and bandanas? Nobody was going to defend that description on its face.

Nope, I had to take the Homies on the road. I showed them to kids, parents, community leaders. Those I couldn’t get to personally I asked to look at pictures of the little guys on the manufacturer’s web page.

Even then, plenty of people still hated them. They thought the toys were demeaning and demoralizing. They said Homies glamorized gang life and perpetuated negative stereotypes about Hispanics. But I didn’t have to go very far to find others who actually saw these little Homies as a genre of art. At the very least, they said the toys and stickers were an honest portrayal of some people that lived in Chicano neighborhoods.

EXCERPT:

…The Homies draw mixed reactions from Los Angeles area Latino community leaders, raising issues of dignity, stereotyping and the right to artistic expression.

Some in the community agree that many of the images are nothing more than silly, harmless or nostalgic portrayals of characters that have existed for decades.

”It’s a form of art and I respect it as such,” said Xavier Flores, head of both the local area Mexican American Political Assn. (MAPA) and the San Fernando-based social service agency Pueblo y Salud.

He said he has seen similar caricatures over the years and considers them a legitimate portrayal of disaffected Mexican American youth who feel neglected and rejected by the dominant culture. ”It’s art imitating life.”

But other activists said they found the toys to be offensive.

”They are negative images. They perpetuate stereotypes,” said Helen Hernandez, president and founder of the Imagen Foundation, which honors groups that portray Latinos in a positive light in film, television and advertising. ”Who is he kidding?”

”I believe in creative freedom, but I also believe in social responsibility,” Hernandez said disgust washing over her face in disgust as she examined the toys.

”They’re cool! They’re gangsters,” said 9-year-old Gino Johnson, a sweet-faced third-grader at Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, who was interviewed at the Pacoima Boys and Girls Club on Thursday night. ”Can I have this one?”

RECOMMENDED READING: Owen Glieberman’s 325-word review of the new John Singleton movie, “Baby Boy,” in the July 13 issue of Entertainment Weekly. It’s short enough to present below. I offer it to you as an example of two complimentary virtues, purposefulness and compression. This could have easily been twice as long without telling you any more. Just imagine how tough the writer was on himself in cutting it; it’s easy to see the extra sentences that were there in draft form. Read:

Jody (Tyrese Gibson), the strapping, sloe eyed, 20 year old protagonist of John Singleton’s ambling yet impassioned “Baby Boy,” is, by any definition, a bum. Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, he’s the father of two young children by two different women, but he still lives with his mother. Jobless and pleasure seeking, with no focus on anything but the next moment, he cruises around the neighborhood in his girlfriend’s car and considers it his divine right to cheat on her whenever he wants. (He refers to his conquests as ”tricks.”) His one brainstorm of employment is to steal a bunch of dresses off the back of a truck and barter them, with his ladies man swagger, at the local hair salon. Even when he’s ”working,” he’s really playing tricks.

”Baby Boy” is structured dramatically to echo the lackadaisical, easy-does-it chaos of Jody’s existence, and while that lends the picture a certain lurching and repetitive quality, Singleton’s achievement is that he stages each moment with such an intricate and painful sense of what’s going on inside Jody that his haphazard days have more fullness, more life, than most movie characters’ tidy arcs. Far from indifferent, Jody is boxed in by his anger, his need to inflate the most casual living room conversation into a turbulent contest of power and pride.

He is, to put it in the film’s terms, the neurotically infantalized African American urban male, yet Singleton, nearly a decade after ”Boyz N the Hood,” now puts the ripeness and conflict of adult experience right up there on screen. Ving Rhames, as the violently contained, wised up ex-con boyfriend of Jody’s mother, continues to be amazing, and Snoop Dogg, with his skinny coyote’s snarl, makes a mesmerizing petty sociopath. What holds the movie together, however, is Gibson’s broodingly responsive performance as a young man who refuses to grow up because it would mean that he’d have to stop fighting himself.

Notice how, in the first graph, each sentence takes you slightly deeper in describing the protagonist; how, in the second graf, that initial monster sentence, despite its 64-word length, clearly connects our understanding of the protagonist to the success of the movie, and finally, how, in the third graf, the supporting roles get their due with the briefest but functional descriptions, allowing enough room for the last sentence to resonate back to the review’s first.

This is not great writing, but it is great efficiency, one of the building blocks of great writing. You should steal from any writer who exibits this sensibility as well as Mr. Glieberman does. On your next draft, and on your next self-edit, be as tough on yourself as he is.