We Need to Say Oops …
Okay, we are a new media firm – well relatively, and we are still navigating best and worse practices.
We publish stories surrounding public records. Over the last few months, we have requested many records from the City of Reno, Washoe County and the Attorney General and have been notified we would need to wait to be provided with the records. We have been given many different reasons, but it became apparent quickly we were being ‘put off’ until after the general election.
Picon had done one big ask from Washoe County regarding Robert Beadles and we requested all emails for a period of time that mentioned ‘Beadles’ – not only did we need to wait for well over six weeks for records, but we also needed to pay for them. Now mind you, public records are supposed to be provided within five ‘working days’ of the request per NRS code. When there is a plethora of records it might take ten to fifteen days, but not six weeks. Obviously, this appears to be a stall tactic by Washoe County.
In contrast, the City of Sparks is always responsive and gets us records within the guidelines of the law or lets us know why they are not. The Sparks example shows us governments can comply, they just choose not to do so, or they do not prioritize transparency.
While we have been stalled at the county – Washoe County appears to have been having an all-out relationship with Reno Gazette-Journal reporter Mark Robison. Once the records landed in our inbox, we started sifting through them, and found correspondence between Bethany Drysdale, Washoe County Media and Communications Manager, and Mark Robison and frankly we were a little hurt. While we get stalled and stymied, Ms. Drysdale is ‘pitching’ stories to Mr. Robison and providing numbers. We would have had to submit a records request, maybe re-ask two or three times, to get the numbers Ms. Drysdale offered to Mr. Robison, sans a request.
While we were in the trenches with 6,000 or so emails to wade through, and on the very day the Reno Gazette Journal broke a story “Who’s To Blame For 2022 Election Losses in Washoe County” about Robert Beadles, we happened upon the two emails between Mr. Robison and Ms. Drysdale. We were peevish, and we reached out to Robert Beadles for comment and attached the two emails.
To our surprise, Mr. Beadles threw the emails in an Operation Sunlight blast. It seems Robert Beadles out scooped us. So, we need to say oops. Yes, we were wrong, we should have just asked for comment and paraphrased what was in the emails, but we didn’t was its shoddy journalism on our part. It was simply a mistake, and we are admitting it here. Lesson learned.
However, we are fast learners and we got to thinking, while RGJ has a robust online presence, their home delivery is fading rapidly, as is most print throughout the country. At the last inquiry the RGJ home delivery was under 10,000 copies daily, down from a high of 92,000 years ago. While their viewership online might be robust, we have no idea how many of their stories are read and how long the reader stays engaged online. Meaning do they read the story, the headline, or look at the photo. The main question to be asked is the Reno Gazette Journal using Robert Beadles to get clicks? They seem to be writing about Herr Beadles frequently, almost as much as The Nevada Independent. Operation Sunlight has a newsletter subscriber base of over 500,000 people so at the very least many people, far more than ever read Picon Press Media (but we’re trying to catch-up) have now seen the correspondence between Ms. Drysdale and Mr. Robison.
Should our media ‘dream’ to be as fortunate as Mr. Robison and have a ‘relationship’ with Washoe County? That’s not going to happen because we are not mainstream media, we are new and unknown. Ours is one of continued hostility from the county questioning why we want records and what our motivation is. We are sand in the crotch of Washoe County, a constant irritant. Our motivation is the truth, full disclosure, transparency, and we are just getting started. We would never want Ms. Drysdale to ‘pitch’ us a ‘story’ about voter numbers, as she did Mr. Robison – we find no transparency in this – and furthermore we question why Ms. Drysdale was providing voter numbers and not the Registrar of Voters?
Our ‘oops’ has now led us a new direction and has caused us to ponder, if Ms. Drysdale has this flirty, fun correspondence with Mr. Robison – might she have this same type of repartee with other journalists? Our first inquiry will be correspondence between Ms. Drysdale and Mr. Ralston at The Nevada Independent – we’ll let you know when we get the public records, it might take Picon weeks for a response.