THE LEAD: The Wyoming Tribune Eagle ended its publishing of the police blotter as news this month, noting that despite people’s interest in the material, the ethical and legal concerns were just too risky:

People love the police blotter, because it includes tiny nuggets of drama, intrigue and joy. For instance, in Gillette, Wyoming, cars get “cheesed,” meaning people will cover them with slices of American cheese. Who doesn’t love reading about a good cheesing?

But along with the weird and wacky things that show up in a police blotter are numerous inaccuracies that follow people for life.

“There’s a lot of problems with blotters in general,” Secrest told me. “An initial charge can change really easily. They can up the charge, they can lower it, they can dismiss it entirely. Things can get challenged pretty quickly. Also, people can be acquitted.”

COP TALK 101: For those uninitiated in crime news, the blotter is a list of all the incidents law enforcement officials within a department deal with in a day. It usually lists a mix of things, including the time of the incident, the name of the person involved, the place where the incident occurred, the date of birth of the person involved and any criminal charges associated with the situation.

The blotter only represents what the law enforcement officials are doing at the front end of a situation, not the resolution of the case or any changes made later that day (or week or month).

So, for example, let’s say I’m driving to the aluminum recycling place to turn in some beer cans when I hit an icy patch on the road and skid into the ditch. The cop sees beer cans all over my car, notices that I totaled my vehicle and wants to check me for drunk driving. However, I’m too woozy and messed up from the crash to do field sobriety and the ambulance takes me to the hospital, where instead of a breath test, they do a blood draw.

The officer might list Operating While Intoxicated as an expected charge, pending the results of the blood test. So, it goes into the the blotter as an OWI. However, it turns out I’m as sober as a judge, so the charges eventually get dismissed.

If all the paper is doing is publishing the blotter info and not really following up, that can lead to several problems, like one noted in Poynter’s story on the Wyoming situation:

Although the staff received some pushback when they announced the change, “now that it’s gone it doesn’t seem to be missed,” Secrest said. “Also, this week we had a man call us and tell us that his booking sheet incorrectly designated his charge as a felony and our publishing of that, prior to this policy, caused him to lose his job. We will be able to correct that once he provides the court document confirming the charge. But that was published about 10 days before this policy took place. It felt like a good reminder of why we did this.”

A CHECK OF THE INTEREST ELEMENTS: One of the things we always talk about is balancing people’s right to know something versus people’s right to be left alone. A key way we do this is looking at the FOCII elements (Fame, Oddity, Conflict, Immediacy and Impact) to figure out if we should be doing something or not.

The blanket publication of the blotter tends not to showcase any of these elements other than Immediacy, but as we note in the book, Immediacy always has to be tempered against accuracy. In short, fast and wrong is worse than slow and right.

That said, the Oddity element often shows up in the blotter, which means checking it for information still merits value. The Fame element can also come into play, as people who are well known often end up on the wrong side of the law.

Here are two examples I remember from working with the crime beat:

At UW Oshkosh, the Advance-Titan used to run blotter items under the heading of “Busted!” In looking at the revelations put forth by the Wyoming paper regarding accuracy, that probably wasn’t the best of titles.

In one case, Busted! featured a brief bit of news in which two students were caught having sex in the middle of the day behind the giant UW-OSHKOSH sign on the main drag of campus. When the officer began to write the students up for this tryst, the guy begged the cop not to do this, because he said he knew it would end up in Busted! and thus his girlfriend would find out about his “extra-curricular activities.”

At another place and time, we had a blotter item that really tickled our irony meter. A local radio personality who went by the moniker “The Altar Boy” got busted for OWI. He apparently also gave the cops a bit of a rough time in arguing with them over the bust, noting he was someone of great import.

The folks in Wyoming noted that in cases like these, obviously, the information would be covered, but done so in a more complete way. Meanwhile, minor incidents involving regular folks would not make the paper.

DISCUSSION TIME: Does your media outlet have a blotter section of some kind and how popular is it? What kinds of things do you think are fair game and what feels like a bridge too far? Also, how would you feel if the minor indiscretion you committed in college suddenly became something anyone could find on the first page of a Google search? A lot of student newsrooms have struggled with balancing this, so it’d make for an interesting classroom discussion.