Friday, November 19, 2010

I need to ask more questions

To me, I did nothing as bad or as controversial as some of the things I've talked about in my last two blogs on my own journalism experiences. This one just shows I need to be a little bit more careful when I report information. This past Monday, I covered the Columbia City Council meeting. I reported on the city thinking about raising parking garage rates in downtown because they've made a lot less money on this than they previously had thought they would. The situation has city officials wondering how they can transfer money over to the parking garage fund.

A couple of officials think they've come up with a plan. They want to transfer $400,000 from the city's parking meter fund, which makes a much greater amount of money for the city.They want to transfer that over to the city's general fund. After that, the city can then take that money and use it to help pay off the struggling four parking garages in downtown. The findings during the council meeting came during the 'reports' section of the agenda. In the web story I posted that night on komu.com, I reported the city had moved the money over. At the meeting, it sure sounded like they planned to do this. Unfortunately for me though, they never voted on anything. Good thing the morning producer called and asked me about it and asked if we should change it. I had already gotten back to my house and had started to prepare for bed.

What did I learn from this? You need to be much more careful with the way you word things. I'm not sure if the city officially transferred the parking meter funds over to the general fund or not. I'm not sure if mayor Bob McDavid has the authority to just do this, or if the city council has to vote. What did I need to do? I needed to ask the representatives after the meeting what became of this!!!! That would have cleared things up for me and allowed me to report the story the right way in the first place.

I say this issue did not impose as big of an ethical issue as my last two journalism experience blogs because nobody appears upset with me in how I reported the story for the 45 minutes it appeared online wrong. I'm very thankful the morning producer called and asked me about it because then we would have reported it wrong in the morning five or six times in a row. In a morning newscast, you run the same story six or seven times because the show goes on for at least two hours. Ours goes three. Then as more people could have heard it, they could have questioned whether or not I truly reported something that happened or not. Then I could have gotten in trouble!! Crisis averted.

 Mayor Bob McDavid has the task of figuring out where the city will get money to pay off the downtown parking garages.
Mayor Bob McDavid

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