The Reporter’s editor and I were recently talking about how an opinion is not a fact, no matter how hard someone wants to believe otherwise.
Facts can be verified.
I enjoy the presence of cats. It is a fact that I wrote that.
If I were to say cats are good pets, that’s not a fact at all. It’s just an opinion. With apologies to Paul Poteet, there is no world in which it is objectively true that cats are good pets.
This is relevant because, like many newspapers, The Reporter publishes both opinion pieces and fact-based reporting.
This, for example, is a column. It is, by definition, an opinion piece. The opinion being expressed is mine, speaking solely in my capacity as a man who has been chasing wisdom for decades. (Editor’s note: the cat thing belies the wisdom chasing.)
News articles deal with facts. Thing X happened on a particular day and time at a particular location.
Many news articles will have quotes from someone who was interviewed, and in those quotes, there may be opinions expressed. When asked about thing X, person Y said they think or feel something.
It is still fact-based reporting because it is a fact that the person quoted said the thing inside the quotation marks.
An editorial is a piece of writing that expresses the viewpoint of the publication itself. Like a column, it is an opinion piece. It exists to give you the perspective of the owners or the editorial board rather than that of any individual writer. In this newspaper, our rare editorials are clearly labeled as such.
A column, like this one, expresses an individual writer’s perspective. This is not necessarily the perspective of the newspaper, but it is an opinion that The Reporter finds value in sharing with our readers.
Letters to the Editor are opinion pieces published because a reader has something to say that the newspaper thinks has value to other readers or to the community at large. The Reporter does not always agree with the content of letters published in these pages, but unless they border on libel or contain inappropriate language, we usually publish them.
We call this newspaper The Hamilton County Reporter for a reason. It is your newspaper, Hamilton County, and your voice has a place here.
Before things hit the page, those lines can get a little fuzzy. Our editor sometimes wears his U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart hat when explaining why a particular piece gets published as a column or a letter instead of a submitted piece of news content, saying of the difference. “I can’t always explain it, but I know it when I see it.”
By the time words are on pages for you, dear readers, we make the distinction as clear as we can.
The Reporter publishes letters on a background that looks like a yellow notepad. They begin with “Dear Editor,” and they end with the name and city of residence of the author.
Columns, like this one, have a headshot of the author, above which COLUMNIST or GUEST COLUMNIST, appears.
Columns by Janet Hart Leonard, Amy Shankland, Megan Rathz and Scott Saalman are rarely – if ever – mistaken for being fact-based news reporting.
Ray Adler and I sometime blur that line a bit. Especially when our columns, like this one, contain some facts.
This column also contains my personal opinions, which are not necessarily the perspective of this newspaper, but which The Reporter finds value in sharing with our readers. (Editor’s note: except the thing about cats being good pets.)
Just the cat facts, jack!