From the Minneapolis StarTribune

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/3922888.html

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From the editor: News staff will use judgment on team names
Anders Gyllenhaal

Published June 8, 2003

Every day, readers remind us how powerful and delicate the language that
delivers the news can be. They call in tears, in fury and once in a while in
sheer delight over the words in headlines, stories, summaries and captions.

The more emotional the subject, the more difficult the word choices. Over
the years, the newsroom's manual that suggests everything from even-handed
phrases for abortion coverage to clear identification of ethnic groups has
grown to include hundreds of entries.

So it should come as no surprise that when the Star Tribune took the
extraordinary step of banning American Indian team nicknames from the sports
pages nine years ago, the discussion on the topic never really stopped.

Of all the language policies at the paper over the years, this has been the
most complicated:

On the one hand, the stance was a strong and symbolic position that
recognized the derogatory nature of many of the nicknames, particularly in a
state that is home to tens of thousands of Native Americans as well as the
American Indian Movement.

On the other hand, it's unquestionably awkward for a newspaper to avoid
phrases that flow regularly from television and radio as well as daily
conversation. When is it appropriate for a paper to hold back information of
any kind? Has it had any impact? Does it amount to editorial comment in the
sports pages? Do policies like these actually take pressure off team owners,
the real source of the problem?

Those are among the questions the news staff has been wrestling with the
past couple of months. As mentioned previously in this space, the Star
Tribune is in the midst of a broad review of its content and approaches in
hopes of improving and strengthening the paper. After debating the nickname
topic this spring, most of the staff felt it was time to revisit the policy.

In the end, we settled on changes that go into effect today that try to
strike a balance between a commitment to accuracy and the need for
sensitivity.

The paper will no longer ban the team names. They will appear in the paper
as they come up in the news. But reporters and editors will remember that
these can be loaded phrases, and that how they're used is as important as
whether they are.

We'll avoid the slang and cartoonish clichés the names tend to attract and
pay close attention to headlines, subheads and captions, which often speak
the loudest. We'll use city, state or school names in box scores and daily
listings, the clearest way to serve up what are the most prevalent
references to most of these teams. We'll run alternate logos for teams that
have them.

But all of these choices will be guided by a different principle from in the
past: Instead of a ban, which newspapers rarely apply to any words, editors
and reporters will use judgment and care to produce respectful coverage.
That's the approach we take with other potentially offensive words,
including most profanity.

Some readers will be unhappy with this stance. In conversations over the
past week, some Indian leaders felt the change was disrespectful to the
Native American population. Others worried the policy would be a setback in
their campaign to stop the use of these nicknames.

It's not the paper's intention to do either. The fact is, the move has less
to do with nickname disputes than with the need to clarify the paper's
standards of journalism and respond to the changing society covered in these
pages.

In the nine years since the policy went into place, friction over language
has increased sharply, with religious conflicts around the world, bitter
divisions in the Mideast and cultural wars at home. If a newspaper bans the
common phrases that offend one group of readers, how does it respond when
others take issue with words in the news?

The answer we've come up with in staff discussions over recent months is
very much in line with where we plan to take the paper in general. The
priority should be on accuracy, clarity and straightforward reporting, and
that should extend from the most important stories on the front page to the
briefs in the sports section.
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Anders Gyllenhaal, the Star Tribune's editor, can be reached at 612-673-1734
or andersg@....