Ask The Editors

Donald Munro, your Bee staffer, held a live blog experience on the Beehive, which I understand is owned by, um, The Bee. It was for the Tony Awards.

Of course, us being West Coasters, we had to wait until 8 p.m. to see the awards. It was kinda fun ... watch the show, read Donald's comments within minutes of the segment, guess who the winners will be. And, since there are commercials, surf the web a bit. Including, say, FresnoBee.com! Where I saw the breaking news - of all the TONY WINNERS!

What's up with letting right coast news creep in to West Coast feeds?
That's like exposing the "Survivor" winner on your home page. Or the "American Idol" winner. Or the Tony Award winners.

C'mon ... what happened here??

Stephen Mintz

Our home page wire news feeds are provided by McClatchy Interactive, the East Coast-based Web operation of our parent company, in real time for people who want to stay abreast of the news as it happens. Hence, anything that happens live on the East Coast but is delayed on the West Coast (such as season finales and award shows) will show up on FresnoBee.com in East Coast time, much as the wire feeds do for many news Web sites such as CNN.com.

However, we are looking at ways to allow FresnoBee.com readers to choose whether they want to know results that are being delayed on the West Coast. One way might be to add a story in front of these real-time feeds when the event is not live on the West Coast, which would force someone to choose whether they want to see the results. Another might be to put a disclaimer on the blog when we do a "watch along" to tell readers that real results can be found on the FresnoBee.com home page.

We want to have the information available for anyone who wants it, when they want it. But we also know how much fun it can be to see award shows and season finales without having the ending given away.

Posted by Jack Robinson at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In looking at the young people most likely to succeed, the question arose; why out of the whole City of Fresno, you could not find one African American most likely to succeed?

Patricia Davis

This question is not easy to answer. For a front-page story June 8 looking at area grads deemed "most likely to succeed" by their peers, we picked a sample of area high schools, looking for a mix of urban and rural from around our circulation area. None of them happened to have chosen students who are black.

There is considerable racial diversity in the group, but African Americans -- at less than 7% of the local population -- are, just as a matter of chance, less likely than some other ethnic groups to be included in such a small sample.

Should we have made a conscious effort to show racial diversity? The correct answer isn't obvious, but I would be uncomfortable with that. As a newspaper, our job is to reflect reality, not to dress it up.

Maybe a better answer would be to tally ALL the "likely to succeed" students in the area and choose example students in proportion to the ethnic mix of the whole group. If that effort is practical, we'll certainly consider it next year. Thanks for raising the point.

Posted by Jack Robinson at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)