Reader Steven Flagg is concerned over the fact that Joseph H. Zerbey IV, the president and general manager of The Blade, is also chairman of the University of Toledo’s Board of Trustees.
“I believe conflicts of interest should be avoided studiously. And to me that means not putting oneself in a position where it could be conceived as possible,” he said.
So how, he went on to demand, can the newspaper properly cover the university when its president is head of its board?
This is especially true, Mr. Flagg argued, now that the university is in the process of selecting a new president. “If the local newspaper is not going to take on its role as an independent observer … who will represent the interest of disclosure?” he asked.
Those are certainly fair questions. Your ombudsman agrees that this would be a clear conflict of interest if Mr. Zerbey supervised the news gathering process. But he doesn’t.
Kurt Franck, The Blade’s executive editor, does — as does John Robinson Block, whose titles include editor-in-chief. Mr. Block is also The Blade’s publisher.
“Joe represents the business side of The Blade, not the news side. In no way does he influence our news coverage,” Mr. Franck said, adding, “It is very common for presidents of newspapers to be leaders in the corporate community and wear several ‘hats.’
“Joe is a man of total integrity, and he understands the importance a newspaper’s credibility has to its readers.”
Indeed, it would be hard to imagine someone with a longer newspaper pedigree than Mr. Zerbey. His great-grandfather founded a newspaper in Pottsville, Pa., where Joe swept the floor of the pressroom as a small boy. Except for a stint in the Army, he has spent nearly half a century in the business, rising to serve as publisher and president of newspapers and newspaper companies in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Utah before coming to Toledo in 2004.
Successfully running the business side of any newspaper means being involved in the community — and Mr. Zerbey has been a board member of many charitable and nonprofit organizations from the Toledo Zoo Foundation to the Boy Scouts.
But what about when those institutions become newsworthy? “I have to wonder about how much Blade reporters have had to ‘back off’ their reporting” because of Mr. Zerbey, Mr. Flagg said.
The answer is they don’t — as far as this ombudsman can tell. In fact, at least one Blade reporter has sharply questioned Mr. Zerbey over the legality of closing some committee meetings. Nobody told him to back off. Nor, as far as I can tell, has Mr. Zerbey given his own paper any inside scoops on what’s been going on. (If he had, that itself would be an ethical violation of his responsibilities as trustee.)
Mr. Flagg thinks this is a violation of the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. Well, your ombudsman disagrees.
I have been a member of SPJ since 1978 and teach the code of ethics at Wayne State University. I may know something about it. Mr. Zerbey is not working as a journalist; he understands journalism but heads the newspaper’s business operations.
When I told some of this to Mr. Flagg, he was not satisfied. “Why would I believe the word of The Blade president … How in this situation can he prove to me or anyone that he is playing it straight?”
Well, maybe he can’t, at least to one reader’s satisfaction. But our law and society operates on a principle of innocent till proven guilty. And after almost five decades of a career without any known ethical blemish, Joe Zerbey doesn’t deserve any less.
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Speaking of the business side of the newspaper …
Ronda Matheny had an interesting concern stemming from Toledo’s August water crisis. “I was looking at different water filtering systems … below is a company I found and really I don’t know much about this company at all.” The company is one that advertised in The Blade, and essentially she was asking if she could trust the ads.
I asked Bill Southern, The Blade’s director of finance and information technology. “Great question!” he replied.
“Although our primary mission regarding the placement of advertising is to provide access for advertisers to potential customers, we are just as committed to delivering advertising content which is accurate, reliable, and useful for our readers.”
That doesn’t mean The Blade hasn’t occasionally been victimized by scam artists. But he added, “Our advertising sales team, based on their experience, has become adept at identifying such ads and will either reject them or contact the advertiser in order to substantiate [their] claims.”
However, nothing is foolproof, and when in doubt, it’s always a good idea to check things out for yourself: “When examining any business opportunity, personal research is generally the most effective approach,” Mr. Southern added. He also encouraged readers to ask the Better Business Bureau, or other reliable rating services, for advice.
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Mike MacGuffie of Toledo was suspicious about a photo that ran in The Blade on Sept. 17, with the caption “A Sunny Frolic.”
He thought the photo had been artificially altered through a technique known as Photoshop, something he said “is not appropriate in photojournalism.”
Well, he is certainly right about the ethical issue. News photographs need to represent reality and are not supposed to be altered in any way. “Photo illustrations” are allowable — if they are clearly marked to indicate that is what they are.
Seven years ago, The Blade discovered that an award-winning photographer had indeed altered some of his shots. That was the end of his newspaper career.
But the “Sunny Frolic” picture was not altered in the least. “It is not uncommon to have the background and foreground of a photo be blurred while the subject is in focus,” said Dave Zapotosky, The Blade’s chief photographer. “It’s generally referred to as having shallow depth of field,” something that in this case was produced by using a particular zoom lens with the appropriate aperture setting.
This technique, he added, is often deliberately used to make the subject stand out from both the foreground and the background.
Anyone who has a concern about fairness or accuracy in The Blade is invited to write me, c/o The Blade; 541 N. Superior St., Toledo, 43660, or at my Detroit office: 563 Manoogian Hall, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202; call me at 1-888-746-8610; or email me at OMBLADE@aol.com. I cannot promise to address every question in the newspaper, but I do promise that everyone who contacts me with a serious question will get a personal reply. Reminder, however: If you don’t leave me an email address or a phone number, I have no way to get in touch with you.
Jack Lessenberry is a member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit and a former national editor of The Blade.
Contact him at: omblade@aol.com
First Published October 5, 2014, 4:01 a.m.