Excerpts: Local reporters, you’re a national treasure. You’ve got one of the tougher jobs going—coming up with story ideas, tracking down sources, writing on unforgiving deadlines, working nights. With all that pressure, it’s no wonder stories about people on the sex offender registry make a tempting target.
Registries are in the public domain. Registrants’ photo, address, place of work, school, and make and model of car are usually there for the taking. It’s easy to write a story that looks investigative without doing much work—with everything in the open, you just ask a good question. Public hysteria seems like good copy.
Good reporting means better governance. An issue as important as sexual violence badly requires your objectivity and independent judgment to move our leaders away from policies that waste money or cause needless pain, and toward those that actually work. So here are a few questions to ask when you’re assigned or are considering a story about someone on a sex offender registry. ..Continued..
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