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An Interview With Carl Lavin of The Philadelphia Inquirer

Regular readers of this blog know that I was quite upset by the recent spill of cyanide into Philadelphia’s water system. My initial horror at the early reports of a “fish kill” turned to anger when I found out that the spill involved cyanide. That anger turned to indignation when I learned that Merck, the pharmaceutical company responsible for the spill, did not notify government officials of it until a week after the incident.

After reading one Daily News article that minimized the issue, I compiled a list of questions that remained unanswered. Susie agreed that the investigation should not be left in the hands of an agency, and a federal administration, that had spent the last five years weakening our nation’s environmental laws. This was a local story that cried out for some old-fashioned muckraking.

As the weeks passed without further coverage, I wondered why the Inquirer didn’t seem to be actively investigating the story. Although I was tempted to write angry posts condemning the paper, I decided to do the responsible thing — to contact the paper in an effort to figure out what was going on.

Dan Rubin, an Inquirer journalist who writes eloquently about the Philadelphia blogosphere on Blinq, put me in touch with Carl Lavin, Deputy Managing Editor of the Inquirer. Carl very graciously agreed to an interview.

He was not able to answer all of the questions I asked. I can’t say I blame him; here is one of the questions he skipped:

From my perspective, the spill brings up a number of controversial, and potentially explosive, issues. It’s a local story with national implications: it involves a real threat to the public health; it relates to national politics (the Bush administration’s weakening of environmental protection laws); and it deals with issues of corporate responsibility and governmental oversight at a time when the city is hoping to encourage corporate investment in the region. And, of course, the week-long delay in Merck’s announcement of the spill brings up a host of questions that have yet to be answered fully — foremost among them the possibility that other, unreported spills may have occurred. Do you agree with that assessment? Am I overstating the scope of this incident, or the implications of the larger story?

It’s hard to blame him for passing on that one.

At any rate, I’m extremely grateful for the dialogue that Carl and I did end up having during the interview process. His responses below remind me, as a blogger, of the human realities in which journalists operate. And his willingness to take part in a dialogue affirmed my sense that bloggers and journalists can and should make better efforts to communicate with one another.

Matt: How does the Inquirer decide which stories are worth investigative, rather than factual or topical, reporting?

Carl Lavin: There are more than 400 journalists at the Inquirer, and we share a certain discipline and an approach to our jobs. Accuracy, fairness, curiosity, skepticism, context, story telling, relevance, impact on the lives of our readers and immediacy are all values we cherish. Each of us might have a slightly different list, but I think there is a consensus around those core values. We each bring to our jobs a wealth of experience, as journalists, but also as people — with histories, families, connections, and a full range of personal interests. Any good journalist tries to chase a story with an investigative zeal, if by investigative you mean that we want to do more than serve as stenographers to press agents and officials.

We want to avoid cynicism, but we don’t want to be passive about the flow of information we each face every day. We sift, we challenge, we triple check, we look for discrepancies, for holes. We also are aware of the people in each story — the people who are the decision makers and the people who read our paper, the ones who don’t have the time or ability to sate their own curiosity but who want to know what really happened. We can find the answers, trace how their tax money is spent, uncover the broken promises made by the officials who represent them, and point out ways that their world — our world — can be made better. We also celebrate success, capture drama and emotion, listen to the music of the soul and the poetry of the heart.

We tell stories. We help readers make sense of the tumult of the world. We tell the truth. We are limited in what we can do each day, each week. We always have ambitions that overshadow our resources. We make mistakes. We try to be efficient and to pick the paths that will lead to stories that illuminate powerful forces. We hit brick walls. We sometimes find the path is easier than we expected. Luck works both ways. We try through conversation, planning, training and experience to make it work for us as often as possible.

Do you, as an editor at the paper, see this as a story that warrants more investigation?

As an editor at this paper, I do want to know more about chemical spills in our watershed, and I want to know more about this specific spill.

In fact, Carl has informed me that the Inquirer will publish a new article on the spill in tomorrow’s paper. When I asked him whether that article stemmed, in any way, from our conversation, he replied that it had not — the paper’s environmental reporter had been working on it beforehand. But he added that “hearing from readers always helps us as we make decisions about news coverage.”

Let us, as readers of the paper, make sure that neither we, nor our local journalists, forget that.

UPDATE: Here is the story: Merck faces fines for June fish kill. It is not the investigative piece I had hoped it would be (I’m thinking Woodward and Bernstein here), but it’s a start, and I’m happy to see continuing coverage of the offiicial investigation.