Dateline Confusion Dominates Dailies

We don’t normally use datelines on stories in the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal since our reporters usually stay in Northwest Arkansas.

But we do use the city designation at the beginning of stories when our reporters leave the area. In our four-year existence, we have datelined three stories. They originated in London (England, not Pope County), Wiederkehr Village and Berlin (Page 1 of this issue).

Policies concerning datelines vary from newspaper to newspaper, but we think inconsistencies can be misleading to readers.

“The Associated Press Stylebook,” the bible for daily newspaper style, says a newspaper can use a dateline and reporter byline together at the beginning of a story “only if the reporter was in the datelined community to gather the information reported.”

The Morning News of Springdale tries to follow the AP policy, said Managing Editor Rusty Turner. The Morning News’ only exception is obituaries, in which, Turner said, “the dateline indicates where the person who died is from.”

He said there was a slip-up Nov. 5 when The Morning News used a “Beijing” dateline on a staffer’s story about Wal-Mart’s operations in China. The reporter apparently gathered the information and wrote the story in Springdale.

“There were a couple of times lately when [datelines] have gotten in that way,” Turner said, “and those were mistakes. We’ve got so many new people on staff now that a couple slipped through, but we’re trying to correct those as they happen.”

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette believes readers want to know where the story originated, not where the reporter was physically, said Managing Editor David Bailey.

So D-G reporters can dateline a story from Istanbul if they place a telephone call there, even though all of their work might have been done from the newspaper’s Northwest Arkansas office in Springdale.

“I think it probably minimizes confusion for readers,” Bailey said. “I just don’t think the reader makes that connection” to the physical whereabouts of the reporter.

One problem is that when the dailies actually send a reporter to another part of the country, it’s impossible for readers to tell from the dateline.

We noticed that the day after the relaunching of the Walmart.com Web page on Halloween, the D-G ran a story about it with a staffer’s byline and the dateline “Palo Alto, Calif.” From what we understand, the reporter was in Springdale that day, not California.

We thought we had pretty much figured out this dateline stuff until we saw this dateline in The Morning News on Nov. 1: “The World Wide Web.”

We’re not sure where cyberspace is, but we suspect it looks a lot like Springdale.