Dateline Policy: One Last Comment (Outtakes Opinion)

Not to further afflict an already dead and well-beaten horse, but good work such as Dan Zehr’s economic series follow-up published on Oct. 21 is frequently undercut by the D-G news department’s unusual dateline policy.

As has been reported in detail, most publications and virtually every large nationally respected daily newspaper (along with the Associated Press) only dateline stories from cities where reporters actually visit and collect information.

The D-G news department maintains that it can dateline stories from anywhere that a portion of information was collected (even it was via telephone) or from where a story or its idea originated. We have maintained that this misleads readers because it implies that a reporter “was there,” when in fact the majority of the time the reporters never left their desks.

That’s reason enough for the newspaper to change its policy, but the D-G also hurts its own credibility when it does make the effort to send reporters on location. Without the bylined D-G staff photos included with Zehr’s reports from Jackson, Miss., and Oklahoma, City, we would have doubted that anyone from the D-G got any closer to those spots than Little Rock.

Now we’re just not completely sure.