Mail brings questions, and we have answers
I’m digging into the mailbag this week to share some thoughts from readers — and my thoughts about their thoughts.
Some Dispatch readers asked why we “buried” a story about criminal charges filed against five football players at Wheaton College. Among the five was Noah Spielman, son of former Ohio State Buckeyes linebacker Chris Spielman.
We picked up a wire story about 21-year-old Noah, an Upper Arlington graduate, being one of the Wheaton players charged with felonies in connection with a 2016 hazing incident in which a freshman teammate was restrained with duct tape, beaten and left halfnaked with two torn shoulder muscles on a baseball field.
The five were charged with aggravated battery, mob action and unlawful restraint.
Wheaton College is a Christian liberal-arts school of about 2,400 students near Chicago. We don’t cover it or its football team. We probably would have published a short wire story on the charges against the athletes even without a local connection, because it’s an unusual case. Because of the local connection, we gave the story a little more prominence inside the Sports section.
But that wasn’t enough for some readers.
“You seemingly ‘buried’ this news onto Page 2 of Sports so people such as myself perhaps wouldn’t see it, but I would like to believe that indeed is not the case,” one reader wrote.
She also wondered why we hadn’t written about it sooner. The simple answer: It happened at a small college in Illinois that we don’t cover, and we didn’t know about it until charges were filed and the Chicago Tribune wrote a story.
The placement in The Dispatch reflected the prominence of the local player involved, which is to say that he has no prominence other than that he is the son of a former Ohio State football star who had a 10-year NFL career. The son is not a star. He also has not been convicted.
Some people thought that we should have displayed the story more prominently as a “teaching moment” — an example of how a so-called “prank” or “initiation” hazing incident can go terribly wrong and cause injury or death.
Perhaps. Sadly, we have published stories about other such hazing incidents in recent years, some of them deadly. Anyone who read those stories and did not
immediately absorb the teaching moments inherent in them was not paying attention.
Obituary changes
Some readers have commented about changes on the obituary pages. I have heard some grumbling about the “tributes” label on the pages rather than the old “obituaries” label. And others have questioned why we now have two different formats for obituaries and why they are not all alphabetized across all of the pages.
First, please note that the tributes are handled not by the newsroom but by the advertising department. Obituaries are paid advertisements. As such, they are placed by the families of the deceased, and I think we can all agree that they are paying tribute by making a public statement about the passing
of their loved ones.
The different formats were developed by our advertising staff in response to requests from families who wanted something extra special to pay tribute. The standard, one-column obituaries remain available for those who prefer them, and they are alphabetized. The threecolumn format is available for those who want something different, and those also are alphabetized.
CbusNEXT response
After our most recent installment of CbusNEXT, our monthly series looking at what we likely can expect life to be like in Columbus 20 years from now, a reader wrote to say “thank you!” (You can find the series online at CbusNEXT.com.)
“The CbusNEXT feature in The Columbus Dispatch has been an insightful piece
to read each month,” she wrote. “I was particularly interested in the September edition on education. I want to commend the reporters for tackling the tough topics such as ‘Coming to classrooms,’ ‘The People Factor,’ ‘Schooling over the years,’ ‘Teaching with technology,’ ‘Considering college,’ and ‘Paying it back.’
“All are topics that we — as a community of parents, educators, and individuals who want to see our society compete within the 21st century — need to address. Every article left me asking, ‘What am I doing to help our students prepare for the future?’”
That’s exactly what we hoped would happen — that readers would consider their roles in our collective future and talk about it.
Not leaving anything to chance, we have gone
a step further to encourage and sponsor community forums around the topics. The Columbus Metropolitan Club, whose mission is “to connect people and ideas through community conversation,” has hosted a few of those forums so far and will do more. (See its forum schedule at columbusmetroclub.org.)
And Columbus State Community College is hosting one at 6 p.m. Oct. 16.
The event at the college’s Conference Center at 315 Cleveland Ave. will focus on ways to prepare the central Ohio workforce for jobs now and in the future. It is open to the public, and free tickets can be obtained at cscc.edu/ cbusforum.