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By
Deanna Miller
Winter 2003
Queue
Press is a fledgling community publication in the Twin Cities. It
is a monthly magazine for the gay, lesbian bisexual and transgender
(GLBT) community. And we’re celebrating our first anniversary.
It is a milestone that marks the triumphs and challenges of community-service
journalism.
I
think the best example of our role in community journalism has been
our handling of the story of Melissa Schmidt, the Minneapolis police
officer killed on Aug. 1, 2002. As a monthly, Queue Press doesn’t
break many stories. The Star Tribune and Pioneer Press had the shooting
story on Aug. 2. On Aug. 6, the Southwest Journal was first to report
that Schmidt was gay. Three weeks later, Queue Press ran 1,800 words
on her life.
We
were the only Twin Cities publication that made a priority of telling
Schmidt’s story. Our reporter spoke at length with Schmidt’s
patrol partner. Did you know that Schmidt was a huge Packers fan?
That she was a terrible golfer? That she loved sushi? And that she
was active in the GLBT community?
If
your source of news is the Star Tribune, the Pioneer Press, local
TV news or Minnesota Public Radio, you had no sense of who Melissa
Schmidt was. As Ken Darling, a gay activist and former journalist,
wrote in an October column in Lavender, "Reporters covering
the story [for major media outlets] either did not pick up on this
angle of the story, or, if they knew Schmidt was gay, did not think
it was relevant."
Of
course her sexual orientation had nothing to do with her death.
But Darling insisted that her news obituary should have given readers
a complete picture of her life, including her well known activism
in the gay community, just as the obit of a man who had coached
Little League for 25 years would have acknowledged a major part
of his life.
We
also ran 700 words on survivor benefits—or rather, lack of
benefits—for domestic partners of police officers. No one else
in town examined the injustice that the state excludes domestic
partners from the public safety officer’s benefit fund.
The
Challenges
If
you work for an established newspaper, you don’t worry about
the separation of news and advertising. Either you provide content,
or you sell ads. Ideally, a firewall protects the news side from
pressure to please advertisers.
The
division of labor for a small start-up publication with no staff
is a bit more complicated.
Queue
Press has no news/ads firewall. I am the editor and the publisher.
Several times I’ve been on a sales call and had a potential
advertiser pitch a story to me. It’s difficult to figure out
if they are just brainstorming or indeed offering me a trade. Would
they think it rude if I said, "That’s a conversation we
need to have another time"? Or would I get a sale if I promised
to chase the story idea? Finally I invented Sam, as in "Let
me run that by Sam back at the office." No one ever asked who
Sam was.
In
order for Queue Press to continue to provide this level of community-service,
we need to grow. And to grow means raising our profile. One way
we do this is through sponsorships. We give an organization free
ad space, and they slap our logo all over their event. Rainbow Families,
an organization for GLBT parents, puts on the country’s largest
conference for GLBT parents every year. Last year more than 1,100
people took part.
This
year I made a sponsorship proposal — ad space for Rainbow,
in return for promotion of Queue at the conference. Rainbow made
a counter-offer, suggesting a higher level of sponsorship in return
for something more from Queue: "We wondered if you would be
willing to do an article on the conference, or possibly an editorial
piece on gay/lesbian parenting (mentioning Rainbow Families) in
your March issue as a sort of follow-up piece."
It
would have been so easy to say yes, or to offer them more ad space.
But when I took off my Publisher hat and put on my Editor hat, I
realized that if I offered Rainbow Families more ad space, it would
mean reducing the space I had already allotted to other stories.
That would be a disservice to our readers. And the Rainbow Families
Conference is a story we’d planned to cover anyway. I’d
be promising something that already existed.
"Besides,"
I thought, once I’d taken off both hats, "no one would
know." It’s fine not to blur the lines when people are
watching. But the only people who would know would be a few at Rainbow
Families. They weren’t trying to take advantage of me; in fact,
they probably didn’t even know that (ideally) publications
have a news/ad firewall. If I were to take this counter-offer in
the spirit in which it was intended, all I’d have to say was,
"We’re already planning on running a story," and
let Rainbow say, "Oh, great! Never mind. We’re all set."
But
I couldn’t do it.
I
tried to think about how I would feel about this decision 10 years
from now. What if I said yes? Would I regret having compromised
Queue’s integrity? Or would I point to this decision and say,
"I did the right thing when I took the trade, because small
publications need to leverage everything in order to survive."
Would I even remember this—in 10 years, will this even register
on my conscience?
I
thought back to what I started Queue Press with, and I found a hokey
metaphor that fit perfectly. Businesspeople and journalists alike
may set before themselves high-minded principles like pillars of
cloud to follow to the promised land. But the goal is always the
promised land. What if the goal is the pillar of cloud?
In
the end, I offered Rainbow Families more ad space. I decided that
it was more important to do this right than to do it painlessly.
And
it has been painful. Two time-sensitive stories developed the week
before we went to press, but space was tight because of the Rainbow
ads. Maddeningly, in this case, my principle interfered with the
execution—"doing things right" meant "not doing
things well."
The
truth is, I don’t need Queue Press. It doesn’t put food
on my table, and it doesn’t pay my health insurance. But I
do want Queue Press to exist as long as it can, to cover important
stories other news outlets ignore.
And
if I can’t "do it right," I don’t want to do
it at all.
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