The Message

The Ranger concept, in which a reporter was allowed to roam the region in search of stories that might escape notice otherwise, has gone in and out of vogue at the Post over the years. But shortly after being named to the Post's top spot in 1999, editor Glenn Guzzo revived it. Mike Ritchey, Guzzo's first choice to fill the position, responded with copy so generally mediocre that few tears were shed when he departed in mid-2000 after only a few months on the job. Guzzo turned next to Franscell, whose resumé includes a stint as the editor and publisher of Wyoming's Gillette News-Record. "I was asked to sort of combine some of the style of fiction writing with the presence and the impact of journalism," Franscell says. "And that was a terrific challenge to me."

Franscell bowed at the Post in the spring of 2001, coming up with material that, if sometimes inconsistent or predictable, was infinitely more engrossing than anything that had appeared under Ritchey's byline. But when Guzzo was ousted in May 2002 in favor of former Boston Globe managing editor Greg Moore, Franscell lost the man most committed to keeping the Ranger in the saddle. Once Moore was ensconced behind the big desk, he wasted little time eliminating the feature entirely. According to Franscell, Moore initially said the former Ranger would be able to work on long-form pieces, but things didn't develop that way. "I don't know if his vision was translated down the line or not," Franscell says. "Maybe it just got lost in the shuffle. But in the end, I was moved to the newsroom as a general-assignment reporter. I worked on some good stories, just not many of them. By and large, they were less important to me than they had been, and since this book was very important to me, I decided that I should take the time to write it."

As a veteran journalist who's served in managerial capacities, Franscell doesn't resent Moore for trying to make the Post his own, and as evidence that he harbors no animosity, he points to an informal agreement for him to write book reviews in the paper on a sporadic basis. But the gutting of the Ranger does raise some concerns in his mind.

"The Post has the potential to be a very good newspaper, and Greg Moore seems to be pretty sharp and awfully energetic," he says. "By and large, the people he's bringing in are capable, too. But I do worry that he and the editorial leadership seems to be tilting more toward people who don't have a Western sensibility. And since Westerners have a mistrust of people from outside the region, that's a gap that will have to be closed by the newspaper eventually."

Flight plan: On February 12, smack-dab in the middle of the ratings period known as sweeps, Channel 7 ran the first chunk of a multi-part story by investigative reporter John Ferrugia about alleged rapes at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. By the standards of local TV news, where three-minute items are often portrayed as in-depth, the piece was extraordinarily hefty, taking up around twelve minutes of airtime in a broadcast that boasts about kicking off with ten consecutive minutes of news. The result was compelling television -- but viewers who glance at the occasional Westword may have experienced a sense of déjà vu. This paper published "The War Within," a cover article by staffer Julie Jargon about the same topic, back on January 30.

It's common practice for news outlets of every description to pretend a story is theirs, theirs, all theirs, even if it has previously turned up elsewhere. In this instance, Channel 7 used the word "exclusive" sparingly in talking about its story but employed near synonyms on several occasions. On night one, the intro stated that "a high-level Air Force investigation is under way after 7News uncovered information about sexual assaults at the Academy"; on night two, anchor Mike Landess referred to the story Ferrugia "broke."

Ferrugia believes this phrasing was appropriate, although stories about rapes had already shown up in Westword and the Colorado Springs Gazette, whose reporting was mentioned by Jargon. He stresses that Channel 7 worked independently of other media outlets, many of which received identical tips last October. And while Channel 7 focused upon two of the women who spoke to Westword (both of whom were referred to by pseudonyms sans any on-screen acknowledgement), Ferrugia says the station also dug up plenty of other sources and info not in earlier reports "and broadened the story to a national investigation."