A letter from the editors

Last week, we posted an article online based on a news release from the Nodaway County Sheriff’s Office about an incident in which a deputy shot a man with a beanbag round who appeared to be ready to shoot himself. The article also appears in this week’s print edition.

On social media, we received several comments questioning the newsworthiness of the story, and we wanted to explain our reasoning along with what we could have done better.

You may have noticed that relative to many other news outlets, we don’t do a lot of crime reporting. That’s simply because we don’t believe every felony committed in our community is newsworthy. When we do report on crimes, we try to ensure that there is news value to the community in what we report, and attempt to be as sensitive as possible to everyone involved in the case, including any suspects. That’s why you will rarely see a mugshot with the crime stories we do run, because, generally, we don’t believe they add newsworthy elements.

We do recognize these stories are often very popular with readers, especially those on social media. But we try to stay out of the gossip business, which is often what much of the interest boils down to.

In this case, we ultimately decided the story was important because it involved a sheriff’s deputy shooting a member of our community. In many communities, that might not be newsworthy. In ours, we believe it is.

However, the context is obviously extremely important to understanding the circumstances of how the deputy came to shoot a man with a beanbag round. It also gives the community insight into how law enforcement resolves these types of situations.

In keeping with our best practices, we did not identify the man. But we do think the information we reported, which was sent out by the sheriff’s office, is valuable information for community members to have.

With that said, the initial headline did not reflect what we believed was the most important aspect of the story and was later changed.

We understand that our readers will not always agree with what we report or how we report it, but we always take that criticism seriously. We also don’t want our readers to think that we don’t put thought into what or how we report the news, because we do. We’re members of this community, too. We may not always meet the standards we set for ourselves, but we strive to do so with every story we publish.

Sharing how we gather and report news across our community is something we haven’t done as much as we should, and we’ll try to do that more going forward. We know it’s vitally important that a community is able to trust its newspaper, and we are dedicated to earning that trust from every Forum reader.

If you ever have any questions about our reporting, including our process, feel free to reach out to managing editor Skye Pournazari at [email protected].

Skye Pournazari,

Managing Editor

Geoffrey Woehlk,

News Editor