Opinion on Top of Opinion

By Denise Tessier

A former Albuquerque Journal colleague and I recently compared notes on something we’d noticed about the paper’s handling of the power struggle at the Socorro Electric Cooperative.  What we’ve noticed is that the introduction of the UpFront column – that hybridization of news and opinion that appears daily on the front page – has created a sea-change in terms of standard practice on the editorial page.

To be clear, my former colleague and I concur that the coverage about the co-op and its board members in columns by Thomas J. Cole (on March 28 , June 13 , and Oct. 21, subscription required) appear to capture well what is happening at the co-op in Socorro.

What’s interesting is that officially, there have been no news stories about it. Instead, there have been these three pieces by Cole, clearly marked at each column’s end with the disclaimer that “UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column”.

Twice the Journal has followed these columns with editorials weighing in further on the subject (March 31 and Oct. 24).

Technically, that’s piling opinion on top of opinion.

And that is the departure from editorial-page standard operating procedure that raises our eyebrows.

In the past, the unsigned, institutional editorials that appeared on the Journal’s editorial page were based on news stories, either generated by staff or run from wire services. The only rule regarding editorial topics was that the subject of the editorial had to be based on news that had appeared in some form in the Journal.

And technically, the information about the Socorro co-op did appear in the Journal, just not in what an old-school journalist might consider a traditional news format.

Part of this dynamic is the fact that Cole, not surprisingly, approaches columns from his background as investigative reporter, throwing in language to fit the UpFront format. The editorial writers obviously still regard him as part of the Journal’s investigative team — in fact, the editorial that ran in March alluded to “calculations by Journal investigative reporter Thom Cole” — and no doubt this factored in their decisions to write editorials based on his columns.

What’s interesting, however, is that Cole is no longer billed as part of the investigative team in his columns. The Journal still gives other investigative reporters that distinction as part of their byline. A recent example: Mike Gallagher’s front-page news reportage Oct. 24 on troubles at the State Investment Council (in the print version of the Journal anyway; online Gallagher is a “Journal Staff Writer“).

So, what we have here is an interesting progression. Just as the Journal – like many businesses – has workers do double duty in terms of beats rather than hire more reporters, UpFront does double duty by letting opinion columns serve up news.

And this isn’t the only example. On Aug. 12, a full six weeks after the rest of us heard the breaking news on television or via the Internet, the Journal finally got around to mentioning what had been a significant news story: a police chief’s tasering of a 14-year-old girl in Santa Rosa. The Journal’s mention, coincidentally, also was via a Cole UpFront , and also was followed by an editorial on Aug. 19.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with having a column do double duty by serving up news. But I miss those early, reportage-from-the-meeting news stories that provide a bedrock on which a reader can base reactions to the columns and editorials that follow.

And it’s the piling of an editorial on top of a column that gets slippery – at least from the perspective of the old-school journalist.

From that perspective, the UpFront column offers an example not only of how opinion has infiltrated news, but in some cases comes perilously close to replacing it.