Northwestern editors: bullies or just sloppy?

One of the enduring questions for all of us who are exposed to the Northwestern is whether the brain trust over at State and Waugoo consists of the small-minded or simply the sloppy.

The latest person to ask this question is the president of the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, Tim Lyke, who came down on the side of sloppy, as well as sensational and irresponsible.

Tim is also the head of one of the Northwestern's competitors, the Ripon Commonwealth Press, and he seems to think that the Northwestern may have been slanting its coverage to hurt his paper's parent firm, the company that was responsible for printing Social Security numbers on state tax returns that were to be distributed through the mail.

Here is Tim's letter to the editor, published in Monday's Northwestern:

Headline, editing failed to explain printer's error

I was disappointed to read the headline, "Printing company attempted cover up," in the Feb. 2 Northwestern.

As a co-owner of Ripon Printers and president of the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, I appreciate the story was local and so needed to be told. What I deplore, however, was the fact that one of your editors decided to cut the AP wire story before it explained the alleged "attempted cover up." Only nine of the story's 22 paragraphs were published.

Had you shared the rest of the story with your readers, they would have understood that my brother, president of Ripon Printers, did not ask anyone to bury the story. Instead, as the story reports beginning at the point your editor decided to excise: "Company President Andy Lyke said he only wanted the press to wait a few days before reporting it to reduce the risk of identity theft."

The press has every right and responsibility to print the news, and to do so expeditiously. But to use "cover up" in a headline and then fail to publish the accused's good intentions at minimizing harm to victims seems sloppy, sensational and irresponsible.

Thanks for your consideration.

Tim Lyke Ripon

You have to wonder which of the Northwestern's editors was responsible for this. This looks like real "old-time" newspapering, in the Wilbur Storey tradition. (One of Storey's more memorable tricks was to run an obituary of a political enemy just before an election in hopes of discouraging voters from casting their votes for the still very alive candidate that his paper opposed.)

I find it hard to believe that professional journalists would continue to engage in such antics, but the alternative explanation doesn't make me feel much better. Here is the Northwestern, with a profit margin fatter than that of Exxon Mobil, and yet it can't afford to hire a couple of extra copy editors?

(OK, I don't really know the Northwestern's profit margin. I'm just going by what its parent company reported, an operating margin of 25.25 percent. By contrast, poor Exxon had an operating margin of 18.48 percent.)