Newspaper reporters learn to condense the entire story into the first paragraph. The Oregonian’s James Mayer, whom I’ve occasionally run into, is a master of this art. Consider the first sentence of his story on SAIF’s president deleting e-mails from Uncle Neil, which ran on the front page August 6: “Kathy Keene, former president of Saif Corp., says she was a ‘clean desk’ kind of person who deleted e-mails between herself and $40,000-a-month political consultant Neil Goldschmidt because she didn’t think they were significant enough to keep — even when the documents became the subject of a public-records request.”
It has most of the elements of a good National Enquirer story: sex (the reference to Uncle Neil), politics (ditto), money ($40,000/month), and government wrongdoing (deleting public records). All that’s missing is a reference to Diana, the late Princess of Wales.
Yet Mr. Mayer was upstaged by the Oregonian’s headline writer, who assigned to this story the following subhead: “Kathy Keene, former president of Saif, tells a judge that she didn’t think correspondence with Neil Goldschmidt was worth keeping.”
That’s the end of Uncle Neil’s consulting career. People have survived scandal, even sexual scandal involving minors. But no self-respecting consultant can survive having the state’s major newspaper reporting that a $40,000/month client doesn’t think his words were worth keeping. It’s okay to be scorned, but not to be ignored.