GEORGE ZIMMERMAN: JUST PLAIN NEWS OR JUST PLAIN NUTS?

A friend of mine, Matt Robertson -- who, among his numerous other duties is the web and, I assume, social media, editor for The Morning News in Florence, S.C. -- posted this on his Facebook page yesterday:

"I'm taking an informal poll here. George Zimmerman's marital status and woes -- news or drek. You tell me."

He didn't exactly get a slew of responses, but more than 60 percent of those he did get leaned toward "drek." One of the more interesting responses came from Bernie Elliott who wrote: "Drek, unless she shoots him, then its karma."

My response at the time (with the profanity deleted) was: "Considering that these are keys to what may have caused him to kill Trayvon Martin...I vote news (as well as drek)."

Twenty-four hours later, and with more of a swirl developing today over his latest defense for allegedly violent behavior -- in this case against his now estranged wife and her father -- which essentially is "I was in fear of my life; she pulled and iPad on me," I stand by that statement.

Following his controversial arrest and trial for the slaying of Trayvon Martin -- an African-American Florida teenager with no serious record of violent behavior -- Zimmerman has managed to stay in the public spotlight thanks to his part in the rescue of a motorist following a traffic accident and then a couple of traffic citations, his wife's decision to possibly seek a divorce and, now, his alleged threats of violence against his wife and her father.

One would think that after his acquittal in the Trayvon Martin trial, Zimmerman would be trying very hard to stay out of the public spotlight. If that, in fact, is the case, you must admit that he hasn't done a very good job of it.

Frankly, it appears to me that Zimmerman has a strong propensity for finding trouble, or maybe he's simply a natural-born screwup. Either way, he just keeps on attracting trouble and media attention.

Naturally, the argument can be made that he is showing up in the news more simply because he is getting more attention from the media than some other Average Joe Sixpack. Of course, as is often the case with "celebrities," Zimmerman's antics since the trial are getting far more prominent play on television and on the Internet than in the print media, where the latest stories about him are largely being relegated to inside pages except in some papers in Florida, where his latest alleged offense occurred.

But, is all of this, in the classic sense, news? Well, yes...and no.

I am not sure that the fact that he got a couple of traffic tickets is earth shattering. Any of us could get picked up for driving too fast and the police dash-cam video most likely won't show up on the network evening news programs, and I am not at all sure that Zimmerman's traffic stops should have unless he had led police on a high-speed chase or if significant road rage had been involved. That was not the case and, in my opinion, the news coverage those incidents got was not warranted.

However, I do believe this latest incident, in which he allegedly threatened violence against his estranged wife and her father, is news.

For the sake of transparency (excuse me for employing that buzzword), I will admit that I was among those who did not feel justice was in anyway served by Zimmerman's acquittal in the Trayvon Martin slaying. The way I see it, a kid is dead for no really good reason and the person who killed him got off Scot free based on Florida's ludicrous "stand your ground" law that is little more than a license to kill. I blame the law in this case and, to a degree, the prosecutors, not the jury.

Clearly, at least to me, Zimmerman armed himself and went out looking for trouble on the night of Feb. 26, 2012, in Stanford, Fla.  He found it when he accosted the 17-year-old Martin, who's only discernible offense before getting into the scuffle with Zimmerman was that he was a black kid walking through a largely white neighbor wearing a hoodie after dark. At the time, Martin was armed only with Skittles and a soda. If Zimmerman had minded his own business, Martin would be alive today and Zimmerman would not keep finding himself on television in the public eye.

And now, with this latest incident, he's done it again. The argument certainly can be made that Zimmerman was courting -- if not outright looking for -- trouble Monday when he showed up at the house in Lake Mary, Fla., where he and his wife, Shellie, lived during the trial. His estranged wife and her father -- who, together, own the house -- were there when Zimmerman and several friends arrived. Apparently, George, Shellie and her father had some sort of heated exchange that prompted her to call 911 and allege that he had threatened her and her father.

Apparently, at some point during the confrontation, Shellie Zimmerman started filming with her iPad, which ended up getting smashed, allegedly by Zimmerman, who apparently is contending that Shellie assaulted him with the device.

Police are trying to sort the whole mess out and could end up charging someone with domestic violence.

Granted, all this is still quite convoluted, but I, nonetheless, believe this incident IS newsworthy because it does show that Zimmerman apparently has a knack for placing himself in tense situations that have a potential for turning violent and then may let anger -- or fear -- get the better of him. These factors, which if better known about him before or during the trial, might have made a difference in the way the jurors viewed his behavior on the night of Feb. 29, 2012.

In her initial 911 call, Shellie Zimmerman alleged that George threatened her and her father with a gun. Police did not find a gun and Shellie later recanted the gun allegation. However, there apparently was a tussle of some sort between George and her father which may have resulted in the father getting punched in the nose -- more violent behavior on Zimmerman's part.

All things considered, Shellie Zimmerman and her father may have been quite fortunate that George did not have a weapon. After all, under Florida law, he could have contended that he was "standing his ground" against a woman armed with an iPad.

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IF IT'S IN BLACK AND WHITE, IT COULD TURN YOU RED ALL OVER

There is a very wise rule of thumb in the newspaper business that I suspect has an electronic media equivalent. It goes something like this: Never use dummy copy as a filler or write something inappropriate in copy that you expect someone else to catch and fix or remove before it ends up being published in the paper. Or, more simply put: If you don't want it to "accidently" get into the paper, don't do it.

Unfortunately, that rule is too often violated and the result is sometimes a major public embarrassment.

Currently, this screw up -- brought to us via http://www.newscastic.com -- is making the social media rounds among journalists:

 

This is just one of the rule-of-thumb-violation debacles featured. If you are interested in the full horror show, here is the link: http://www.newscastic.com/news/15-times-filler-text-become-a-journalists-worst-enemy-797964/

During my nearly 44 years in the newspaper business, I witnessed numerous such embarrassing occurrences in both my own and other newspapers.

The personally most embarrassing occurred came while I was managing editor of The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., in the late 1970s, destroying the impact of what was an otherwise incredible piece of investigative reporting.

At the time, U.S. Sen. John Stennis, D-Miss., was pressing hard to have Congress approve final funding and design for the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, a man-made waterway that would link the Tennessee River near Corinth, Miss., and the Tombigbee River in Alabama. A large portion of the waterway was to pass through eastern Mississippi, to create a water transportation link to the Gulf of Mexico.

Wikipedia succinctly describes the Tenn-Tom this way:

"The Tennessee–Tombigbee Waterway (popularly known as the Tenn-Tom) is a 234-mile (377-kilometer) man-made waterway that extends from the Tennessee River to the junction of the Black Warrior-Tombigbee River system near Demopolis, Alabama, United States. The Tennessee–Tombigbee Waterway links commercial navigation from the nation’s midsection to the Gulf of Mexico. The major features of the waterway are 10 locks and dams, a 175-foot (53 m) deep cut between the Tombigbee River watershed and the Tennessee River watershed, and 234 miles (377 km) of navigation channels.^[1] The ten locks are 9 feet (2.7 m) x 110 feet (34 m) x 300 feet (91 m) the same dimension as the locks on the Mississippi.^[2][3] Under construction for twelve years by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Tennessee–Tombigbee Waterway was completed in December 1984 at a total cost of nearly $2 billion."

Opponents of the project, primarily northern Democrat senators, decried it as a prime example of wasteful spending.

Nonetheless, Stennis -- a long tenured and powerful force in the Senate -- was undeterred in his support and kept pushing to have the project finished. As part of that push, he proposed a slight routing change, which he contended would shorten the construction mileage and, thereby, save money.

We received at tip that the rerouting would take the waterway through some rather large parcels of land that Stennis had been purchasing through "straw men" who were listed on land sales records as the buyers.

Our investigation of the tip took nearly two months to complete and involved the examination of hundreds of pages of land records, scores of interviews and weeks of fact checking. In the end, we had developed what we felt was ironclad proof of the allegation.

The reporter on the project managed to wangle an extensive interview with Stennis -- not a man given to freely talking under pressure to the press -- in which he finally acknowledged that some, but not all, of the land purchases had been made by others on his behalf. Stennis, however, contended that he didn't realize that the land purchased rather cheaply was along the path of the proposed route -- land the right of way though which would have to be bought at a considerably higher price by the government to complete the waterway and the balance of which could vastly increase in value because it would border the Tenn-Tom when completed.

Knowing that we would have to employ extreme caution in publishing this bombshell, I personally handled the first edit on the long and highly detailed story, then passed it along to the city editor for a second edit and took it back for a personal final edit. In the process, we exercised great care to make certain that a quick synopsis of Stennis' response appeared high in the story. After my final edit, I passed the story on to our best copy editor to read it, prepare it for publication and write a headline.

While doing his read, the copy editor inserted an inappropriate, sarcastic note in bold, highlighted italics and then passed it along to the news editor with the assumption that he would get a chuckle out of the insertion and then remove it before sending the story to typesetting. Well, you know what the say about the word "assume."

For whatever reason -- likely a brain burp brought on by deadline pressures -- the news editor failed to remove the note.

So, when the story was published, the high-up paragraph containing the synopsis of Stennis' response read like this:

"The senator acknowledged that some, but not all, of the more recent land purchases made along the proposed path of the waterway had been made by others on his behalf. However, he said he was 'totally unaware' that the land being bought was along the proposed route. (Can you believe this lying sack of shit.)"

OOPS!

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(Please note that I have made a correction in this post. Initially I identified Sen. John Stennis as "R-Miss." Actually he was one of the southern senators who never switched parties, I had forgotten that. He should have been and now is identified as D-Miss. My apologies.)

ROYAL BABY COVERAGE: HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH? HOW LITTLE IS NOT ENOUGH?

It's a pretty safe bet that newspaper, television and radio newsrooms across the nation -- and probably around the world -- are already getting calls today from readers, viewers and listeners carping about the amount of coverage being given to the birth of Great Britain's new royal baby.

Let's face it, there really are millions and millions of people around the world who truly and honestly don't care about the event, or have only a passing interest in the basic fact that it has, at last, happened.

However, there are just as many, if not more, millions who are breathlessly fascinated by it all and are anxiously awaiting the next tidbit of news regarding William and Kate's new male offspring and heir to the throne. Although you might refer to these people as "heirheads," that does not, necessarily make them airheads.

All of this raises the age old question for editors and news directors: "How much is way too much and how little is not nearly enough?"

I'm sure that if there had been newspapers in ancient Greece, editors would have been wrestling with questions regarding at what point readers would have had just about enough coverage of Agamemnon, Odysseus and that whole Trojan Horse thing.

Like it or not, the birth of a new potential heir to the British throne, is a big news story. However, every big news story has a life cycle. The real trick for newspaper editors and electronic media news directors is being able to sense when that life cycle is drawing to a close and further intense coverage runs the risk of turning off the vast majority of readers, viewers or listeners and transforming every Joe and Jane Sixpack into a media critic. Call it, if you will, reaching saturation point; and deciding when it has been reached requires the exercise of news judgment. The problem is that no two news executives have exactly the same news judgment and, frankly, I sometimes wonder if some have any news judgment at all.

However, I believe that when it comes to stories like the royal birth, newspaper editors in general (and this does not include the editors of grocery store tabloids) and local electronic-media news directors have a better sense than network news executives -- particularly those at "all news" networks like CNN, Fox and CNBC -- of when enough is enough and how much is too much for their readers or audience.

For instance, while this morning's TV talk shows were essentially wall-to-wall royal baby talk, my local paper -- The Monitor, in McAllen, Texas, of which I was the editor for nearly 12 years before my retirement at the end of April -- carried a single story about the birth stripped across the top of the front page. That Associated Press story, headlined "Fans go gaga over royal baby," coupled with a jump-page timeline sidebar headlined "Key moments for William and Kate," pretty much gave average readers all they might have wanted to know about the new, as yet unnamed, British prince. Of course, that may not have been enough for the avid heirheads in Monitor's Texas-Mexico-border circulation area, but, if it wasn't, they can easily tune in to any of the TV networks or go one of the social media websites for more incessant royal baby chatter.

If you are by this point thinking that I put little stock in the news value of the royal birth, you're wrong. Although I did make some jokes about it yesterday on Facebook and Twitter, I appreciate it as big news both as a newsman and a history buff. However, my personal interest in it will peak once they announce the name chosen for the kid. I could be wrong, but I think most non-heirheads feel about the same. The question is, how much more beyond that will the public be subjected to by the networks?

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As always, your thoughts and comments are more than welcome and will be most appreciated.