More bad editing at the Arizona Republic

The paper’s good run of strong Sunday stories peters out this weekend with a numbingly long recounting of the mercury spill at an Avondale High School last February. It struck me that there’s some news in the story, but it’s buried so low in the piece, and surrounded by so much of the Republic’s legendary ability to raise more questions than it answers in its reporting, that it’s easy to miss.

There are the little things that are irritating—like waiting eight paragraphs to tell us that the school is in Avondale, and then only indirectly, or waiting fifty-five grafs to tell us how much mercury was actually involved. (Two tablespoons’ worth.) Even the date on which the spills occurred is divulged clumsily.

To me, the meat of the story is who was to blame. Here is where the major fumble comes. There’s a classic “he said/she said” conflict as to whether the school’s teachers had or had not complained to administrators about hazardous chemicals.

The thing is, we know who’s right:

Police discovered that since 2007 teachers had warned district administrators multiple times, verbally and through e-mails, about hazardous materials in the school.

The he said/she said thing is classic lame journalism in the best of circumstances; here it’s positively buffoonish. The information that the police have the actual emails should be related first. Then it’s fair to get comment from administrators.

This is what I think should have been the lede of the story. (It’s possible the Republic has reported this all out before, in which case the story should have said something like “The Republic reported back in August that police say teachers had complained in emails about hazardous materials at the school, but we never bothered to report the allegations out.”)

(The paper’s online archives are so stingy that there’s no way to follow how the paper has covered the story till now.)

In any case, the lede should have been: “A Republic investigation shows that teachers at an Avondale High School complained repeatedly in emails to school officials on campus in the months before a mercury spill endangered children, shut down the school, embarrassed the district and ran up nearly $1 million in cleanup costs.”

But, of course, after telling us the police have emails talking about this key issue, the paper doesn’t tell us who sent them or who received them. These are serious allegations, but they are never addressed, and logical lines of inquiry are left hanging, like this one:

Superintendent Dudley Butts resigned in July with little public notice, saying it was a family decision.

Why didn’t the reporter contact Butts and every other ranking school official at the time for comment? The reporter quotes an assistant superintendent saying she hadn’t heard complaints from teachers, but that’s before we learn about the emails.

Again, I’ve been enjoying the Republic on Sunday of late, but this story was a colossal waste of time and effort.