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Vol. 22, No. 3/Spring 2000

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News Librarians Getting the Story
By Jalyn Kelley

News Librarians can contribute to the newsroom in ways both big and small and to stories both big and small.

No story has been bigger at the Los Angeles Times recently than the controversy that ensued after the Times devoted its entire Sunday magazine to coverage of the Staples Center, a sports arena and entertainment venue. After publication, it was revealed that the Times had agreed to split the advertising profits from that issue with the Staples Center.

Times editors and reporters complained they had not known of the profit-sharing arrangement. More than 300 Times journalists signed a petition demanding an apology from their publisher.

In the midst of the newsroom uproar over the issue, David Shaw was investigating and writing while Senior Research Librarian Jacci Cenacveira was researching. In December, a 14-page special section ran presenting the results of the six-week investigation into the controversy, the circumstances surrounding it and the impact it had on the newsroom.

Jacci had this to say about the experience: "We (David and I) have always been a good team and David is always generous with research credit. Although I would not have wished for the circumstances under which it occurred, never have I been more pleased and proud of a research project than I am of this finished product."

At The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal, Assistant Library Director Greg Paraham has been compiling a database of incident reports since 1996 from the Memphis Police and Shelby County Sheriff’s departments. As the following custody story illustrates, the database is an invaluable reporting tool.

In May, the Commercial Appeal published a wire story about a custody case involving a Memphis woman who gave her newborn daughter to a friend to raise almost 9 years earlier. The state Supreme Court ruled that the child should be returned to her birth mother.

Reporter Tom Bailey followed up on the story and interviewed the woman who had been raising the 8 year old. After the story ran, Greg noticed that there wasn't a lot of background on the birth mother. She didn't want to talk to the media. He ran her name in the police database and found three instances in the past 13 months when she had called police to report domestic assaults and a death threat from her husband.

Tom contacted attorneys for both sides for a response. Armed with the new information, the attorney for the woman who had been raising the child filed motions asking for a hold on the order to return the child to the birth mother and asking for a rehearing of the case.

Tom quoted the attorney, "As clearly shown by the police incident reports . . . there is continued violence in the home of the natural mother and without a full hearing before the trial court, there is a strong likelihood of substantial harm to the child."

Eventually the Tennessee Supreme Court again ruled that the child should be returned to her birth mother. In an A1 story, Tom reported a moving account of the custody transfer, but in the background lingered the shadow of domestic violence which The Commercial Appeal was the first to discover.

The library has made this police database available on its intranet, searchable by name, address, type of incident or date.

The following personal example illustrates how sometimes providing simple research for small stories can make a big impact and increase a researcher’s visibility in the newsroom.

Last fall, a body was found in a tree in a crowded area of northwest San Antonio. What made the story more than a brief on the crime page was the fact that the body had been there for two months without anyone noticing. The police were not releasing the identity of the body and without that information there wasn’t much of a story.

The police reporter assigned to the story went through missing persons reports and found one from an apartment complex next to the field where the body was found. There wasn’t any ID or names on the report, but there were two crucial pieces of information: an address and a license plate. A simple Lexis-Nexis public records search provided two names. One was the missing man’s sister and the other his girlfriend.

The girlfriend provided the reporter a long rundown on how her boyfriend came to be reported missing. Within an hour after giving us the missing person’s report, the reporter knew as much as the cops about the man whose body was found. With that information as leverage, he got the Medical Examiner to confirm that the missing boyfriend was almost certainly the victim found in the tree next to the apartments.

As the reporter mentioned in an email the following day this "little story is a good example of how a reporter and a good researcher can work together." This search was one of the more simple research requests that I answered in recent months, but I got more feedback and kudos for this than anything else I did in that time period. And not just because of the impact it made, but also because many people in the newsroom remember what it was like four years ago before there was a news research department.

Jalyn Kelley is the Assistant Editor of Information Service at the San Antonio Express-News. Send her email at jkelley@express-news.net.


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