Friday, June 01, 2007

Real journalism alert

"The Tragedy of Trustin Blue" showed up on the Enquirer's web site this morning, a tale of how seven children died of abuse while their cases were being monitored by Hamilton County Department of Job and Family Services, written by Sharon Coolidge. This was not published in today's paper, and it seems too big for Saturday, so we might see it on Sunday.

This is a major effort for the Enquirer, with four stories, video and a library of documents linked to the case, and it smells like a mea culpa for the over-coverage of the death of Marcus Feisel. Trustin's death originally was a brief of on the front page of the Local section on January 24, 2006, followed by a longer story inside Local on February 2, 2006. Coolidge previously wrote about this case in a Sunday story on August 22, "Moms' choices put kids in peril," about four kids who died due to abuse by their mothers' boyfriends.

I give it a B. This is a very good review of documents. It names the names of police and social workers linked to this case. It reads clinically at times, though, and it fails to point to any big systematic problem at Jobs and Family Services. The department has too many cases and too few workers for a city with so many low-income single moms.

It's probably just my dirty mind at work, but a video for this story, where a child died after being horribly sexually abused, is on the same page as a link to "The making of 'Cornhole'." Somebody should fix that.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Cincinnati's insistence on calling its favorite parochial pastime "Cornhole" is just another reason for the rest of the country to laugh at this homophobic burg. "Beanbag toss" just doesn't have that Queen City cachet.

1:10 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You have to be a sick, twisted individual to see what you perceive to be disgusting irony in that juxtaposition. Perhaps you should turn your hypercritical eye upon yourself to see what lies beneath.

12:11 AM  
Blogger Newsache said...

If you've ever worked for a publication and have laid out news pages, you just know you have to look for those "sick" connections. What might seem like a good headline, next to the wrong story, can be embarrassing. Yeah, it's sick, but anybody who's ever worked for a newspaper thinks this way, because you're trained to.

5:13 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's said that you have to have a dirty mind to put out a clean paper, anon @ 12:11.

9:53 AM  

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