Readers (and AJC) still upset over mine-story confusion
Published on: 01/07/06
A few readers continue to take us to task this week for the erroneous front page story and headline that ran in some editions of Wednesday's newspaper proclaiming a miraculous rescue of 12 coal miners trapped underground in West Virginia.
Why didn't The Atlanta Journal-Constitution go to greater lengths to confirm reports from family members and politicians that the miners had been found alive? Why the rush to publish the news before the men had actually been removed from the mine?
My heart sank when I opened the AJC on Wednesday to find a bold headline and story that turned out to be so sorrowfully wrong. I knew that because I'd just seen ABC News' "Good Morning America" account of how in the space of three hours the story went from triumph to tragedy.
Bob Shomaker, a reader from Roswell, said his only source that morning was the AJC's account, so he believed for several hours that the men were safe and rejoiced as if he knew them. He was quite upset to learn from a radio report that they were not.
"The rush to print that headline, without seeing or talking to these miners, without bothering to verify it ... was terribly, terribly irresponsible," he said.
This newspaper and most others in the eastern United States got the news too late to correct morning editions. In a window of a few hours, those joyous declarations of a rescue were crushed by the reality that, in fact, only one miner had made it out alive. It was something no one wanted to believe.
Since news of the miners' deaths came at 3 a.m., the AJC's presses had already rolled and newspapers were out the door for distribution. As staffers put the latest news on ajc.com, senior managers decided to produce a special edition of the newspaper for morning commuters. About 23,500 papers made it out to newsstands with the update. Unfortunately, most readers got the editions that reported the miners were alive.
In response to my column Thursday explaining what happened, a reader from Suwanee e-mailed saying she didn't care what other newspapers did, she counted on the AJC to get it right and we let her down. Like Shomaker, she believes we should have waited for confirmation from a mining official before going with a report that turned out not to be true.
In this age of 24-hour news, however, waiting isn't an option. Readers expect the print edition to reflect the most recent information available at press time and rely on ajc.com for up-to-the-minute news.
What's clear now is that family members and West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin had been given bad information. They passed that information to newspaper and television reporters who had no reason to believe it was wrong.
In the rush to meet deadlines with an updated story and photograph, AJC editors failed to attribute the new information in the story to Manchin but did so in the photo caption. Original reports said the news was unconfirmed, but later reports credited the governor. Could we have couched the story and headline to say the miners had apparently been found alive, according to reports from family members and the governor? Perhaps that would have been the best approach. That's what The Boston Globe did.
When AJC editors learned around midnight from CNN and wire reports that 12 of the miners had been found alive, editors scrambled to update a story by Bob Dart, a Cox Washington correspondent, in time for the paper's main edition deadline. Dart and bureau photographer Rick McKay were dispatched to West Virginia before dawn Tuesday to cover the story for the AJC and other Cox newspapers. Their work was supplemented by wire reports.
"Among our reporters, [Dart is] one of the best at handling major stories with a human interest element," said Cox Washington bureau chief Andy Alexander. "He instinctively tells stories through the voices of people directly affected by it. Whether the miners emerged dead or alive, we knew that this story would have human drama and that much of the nation would be fixated on it."
Dart was still on the scene at around 11:45 p.m. Tuesday when the church bells began ringing and families of trapped miners began running out shouting, "They're alive."
"I interviewed about six family members of the trapped miners but was concerned about the lack of an official source," Dart said. "But then the governor of West Virginia came out shouting, 'I believe in miracles' and 'A miracle did happen.'"
The mining official who'd been briefing reporters wasn't at the church, so there was no way to ask him, said Dart, who waited at the scene until about 2 a.m. Wednesday, hoping to see the miners reunite with their families. In the meantime, he talked to several state patrol officers who also believed the miners had survived.
It's easy to second guess the actions of reporters at the scene now that more information is known. Anyone who's been in a situation where they had to deliver something in minutes knows there isn't time for deep analysis, just quick reaction based on experience and instincts. That's the nature of reporting in spot news situations.
• Contact Angela Tuck by e-mail at insideajc@ajc. com, by phone at 404-526-5819, by fax at 404-526-5610 or by writing P.O. Box 4689, Atlanta, Ga.30302.