Truth be told, no matter what the others report | Our Corner

I used to have a comic in my cube at work in which a waitress at a diner asks a journalist what is going on and he says nothing.

“No news is good news,” the waitress says.

“Not if you’re in the news business,” the reporter replies.

Let’s just say that hasn’t been a problem here in Renton over the past few weeks.

Which means it’s been a busy couple of weeks for the journalists in the newsroom here at your local fishwrap.

Last week, we came as close to breaking the Internet as our non-Kardashian-based content can hope to get with a huge story from Dean A. Radford about a narcotics raid on a house that is the most-visited address by Renton police over the past three years.

This week, it’s the awful story of a Renton mother of three who went missing last weekend and was allegedly brutally murdered by a man she apparently met online.

We broke the former, but we got somewhat scooped on the latter. In fact, even after the story connecting the missing woman to the body parts found in a Seattle recycling bin broke on other media sources, we waited nearly a full day to release her name, which had already been out on other media.

I want to talk a little bit about this because it speaks to how we handle things in the newsroom here in Renton and the professionalism we try to maintain, because even if we are not working in a major metropolitan newsroom, you, our readers, deserve to have your city and your news treated with the same degree of ethics and professionalism as any other newspaper in the country and we hold ourselves to a high standard.

First, let me explain why we waited to release the victim’s name.

On Monday, we at the Reporter obviously saw the stories of Renton’s Ingrid Lyne being reported missing, but we did not have anything official from the Police Department. Our usual contact – the department’s public information officer – is out-of-state this week, so an email to him returned with a pair of phone numbers for two sergeants at the department.

I left message on the phones on both of those sergeants, asking them to please call me with any information they had on the missing woman so we could make sure to share that with the public. Neither of those calls was returned by end-of-day Monday.

So despite us knowing from other media sources that a Renton woman was missing – information it seems they got from worried friends and family who contacted them – we simply could not report it on our site as we did not have confirmation.

This is one of things that separate us from, say, a blogger or other non-professional “media” source. In order to publish anything, we need it confirmed. Sometimes this slows us down, but it ensures that we get to you the actual facts instead of what may be hearsay. In this business, all we have is our integrity and your trust that what we say is as accurate as we can give you, and we take that seriously enough not to risk it.

In this case, the info that was out there turned out to be accurate, but that is not really the point.

Now, it is not entirely unusual for a missing person report to go unconfirmed for a day or so, so I was not overly concerned. We would follow it up and certainly get the story for both our website and the print edition as soon as we could.

Then, at about 7:30 on Monday evening, after I had come home from the Committee of the Whole meeting and was enjoying “Jeopardy!” on the couch with my wife, she saw on her Facebook newsfeed a post from a friend who worked with Ms. Lyne at Swedish Hospital that linked the body parts in Seattle to her disappearance.

Everything stopped and I immediately was back in work mode.

I found the official statement from the Seattle Police Department, which did not contain a name but “tentatively identified” the remains as belonging to a missing Renton woman.

But again, even though other media sources were now reporting her name, we officially had no confirmation and therefore could not technically report it.

While I was working on getting the story posted to our website Monday night, my wife came into the office and set her phone down next to me saying “here’s some more information.”

While she was trying to be helpful – and I appreciate that – I had to explain that as a journalist, I could not report on another media’s reporting or use that as a source for my story. Had I been able to get some info on the missing persons report from the police, I could have connected the dots, but until I had that report, any ID I made would technically be an assumption.

Again, this is all part of the training professional journalists get in J-School. Obviously, the remains were Ms. Lyne’s, but because the medical examiner had not released her name and because I had not heard back from anyone in any official capacity, I was ethically bound to only say, “The woman has not yet been identified.”

On Tuesday, we immediately went to work trying to get official confirmation, either from the King County medical examiner or from Renton Police. And while the medical examiner had not yet officially released the name as of Wednesday, the Certification of Probable Cause for John Robert Charlton’s arrest included Ms. Lyne’s name, giving us the first official document we could use to link the stories.

We also on Tuesday received the missing persons report filed Saturday, which allowed us to further round-out the story for both the website and this week’s print edition.

Now, please do not read this as an indictment of any other news source you may have seen her name published in. Those reporters could have confirmed that information in myriad ways. As professionals, I give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they did. They have a lot more reporters and staffers than we do and were working it from two different angles with a head start.

But WE had not been able to confirm it and therefore we could only report what we had. It hurts to get beat sometimes, but I’d rather be a day late than a dollar short, if I can mix a metaphor in here.

The single most important thing we as journalists have is your trust that we are doing our jobs ethically and accurately. In this case, I can assure you, we did. It is something I take very seriously as both a professional journalist and the editor of this paper. If you see it in print, I want you to trust that we did our due diligence. (Conversely, if we get it wrong, we want to make sure we run a correction to get it right…)

My friends have learned this about me and actually come to expect it. In fact, for my wedding a few years back, my best friend got ordained online and actually performed the ceremony for us (I performed his a few years earlier). During the ceremony, he told the dearly beloved (and Dougherty) that I had told him I loved Emily and because I was a journalist, he assumed I confirmed it with at least two sources and therefore it must be true.