Enquirer editor speaks

This is interesting: I've noted before that the Enquirer doesn't do two things that many major papers do. First, they don't employ an ombudsman. Second, the editor -- in this case Tom Callinan -- doesn't write any sort of column to shed light on how the Enquirer makes decisions about what gets into the newspaper. He had a blog a while back, but he shut it down because he was getting flamed so terribly.

But for some reason, Callinan decided to jump into Andrew Warner's blog, responding to Warner's disgust at the way the Enquirer played up Blackwell's attack on Strickland on the front page. While I encourage you to read the blog on this topic here, I'll include Callinan's remarks. First:

I am Callinan and, yes Andrew you are correct that I don't have the time or inclination to blog these days. But I respect your respectful challenges of mainstream media and I will respond. We make hundreds of decisions each day and while the blogosphere may want to pick each to shreds and dig for hidden agendas....sometimes we just have to publish the news and hold our noses and wish for the good old days when public discourse was more dignified. This story disgusted many...including me. But the facts are the facts, distasteful as they may be. Several editors agonized over the play of this story...and I imagine they come from all spectrums of "agendas." In the end, news is news. End of story.

Obviously, this wasn't the end of the story, because Callinan came back with this:

I don't mean this as a defense of our decision. Perhaps it's just a commentary on our culture, for better or worse. But I checked the online traffic this morning and the governor's race turns ugly story led with 33,071 page views. Next was the gatorade bottle story with 12,278. The nude prosecuter got 7,708. Way down was a traditional high interest story....the Ohio AP football poll with 2,711.

As much as we may cringe at seeing these smarmy political stories unfold, it'd be pretty difficult for us to downplay them.

Thought you'd be interested in those numbers.

This says two things to me. First, Enquirer editors are either too stupid or too lazy or too gutless to make tough decisions. As Al Franken says, intellectual sloth is not a virtue. "Sometimes we just have to publish the news and hold our noses," he says. No, you never have to do this; you can always do something different, something better, something courageous, something smart. Callinan never says why the Enquirer put the Blackwell news in the most prime position on the front page three days in a row, when you can look at other newspapers and see the other choices that were available to him.

Second, his second entry reveals something I've suspected, that web traffic drives decisions about what goes on the front page. I don't think anyone argues that the Enquirer should not have reported what Blackwell said about Strickland. It's the prominence of the story in the Enquirer that was so troublesome, and Callinan seems to try to justify this by pointing out the web traffic. Hell, by that reasoning, the Enquirer should publish pictures of a naked Lindsay Lohan -- no doubt that would be the most popular thing on the Enquirer's web site, and thus justify the lead position on the front page. Right now on Yahoo News, the most emailed story is about a man accused of having sex with a dog. Will we see that on the Enquirer's front page Tuesday?

This is very discouraging, and I can't see it getting any better.