The Chronicle‘s features STAR section is just great, according to other features section editors:
The Houston Chronicle’s Features sections recently were named among the Top 10 features sections in the country by the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors.
At AASFE’s annual convention in Denver, the Chronicle was called “the most sophisticated and hard-news approach of the big-city feature sections; responsible, newsy, useful with a taste of Texas cowgirl thrown in.”
Responsible?
That’s really not the adjective that comes to mind when I think of a stunt like impersonating an evacuee followed by refusing to answer questions about the reporting.
UPDATE (10-12-2005): Reader representative James Campbell finally addressed questions about the reporting on his blog, as he promised he would do some time ago. It’s not clear why the features STAR folks wouldn’t address those questions via email. And it’s also not clear why the reporting that appeared in the Chronicle wasn’t more clear to readers about the approach to the reporting. While it’s good that volunteers were not misled, the lack of full disclosure about the reporting and the refusal to answer questions about the reporting were misleading to readers.
UPDATE 2 (10-12-2005): Upon further thought, it’s clear to me from Finan’s answer to Campbell that some volunteers didn’t know Finan was a reporter:
The mayor’s office told me to keep a relatively low profile, and there were hundreds of volunteers there that night, but those I interviewed knew I was a reporter, and at no point did I say I was an evacuee. In fact, after telling one volunteer about my article at 4 a.m. on the way to the restroom I found myself in a round of meetings with other volunteers who weren’t sure what to do with me.
Now I understand Kristin Finan’s refusal to answer followup emails (she answered one email and said “organizers” knew about the stunt) about whether volunteers knew she wasn’t an evacuee and Kyrie O’Connor’s refusal to answer any emails after her petulant comment on the forum in which she also said the “people in charge” knew. Clearly, volunteers were misled, and clearly the features STAR folks don’t want to talk about that.
That fact is that while some organizers might have known about Finan’s impersonation of an evacuee, Finan was NOT forthcoming that she was a reporter to the wonderful volunteers at the George R. Brown. The original criticism stands. The stunt was irresponsible, and potentially unethical (volunteers trying to make evacuees and Ms. Finan comfortable should have been informed, not just organizers).
