Jim Memmott

I arrived as a reporter at the now defunct Rochester Times-Union in 1980 and quickly came to love the paper. But after I became a city desk editor, I realized that not every reader shared my affection for Rochester’s best (and only) afternoon paper.

Readers, often angry readers, would call with complaints about coverage or lack thereof. Disappointed souls would point out errors in grammar, in spelling, in logic.

One reader went so far as to send me an envelope full of our slipups each month. The gaffes were always crammed into an envelope that had once carried her RG&E bill.

After I moved up the editing food chain in the mid-1980s, Tom Ryan, the mayor of Rochester, was sometimes my first caller of the day, most always with a complaint, rarely with a compliment.

My phone would ring, there would be silence on the other end, and then there would be Ryan’s weary voice. “Jim,” he would say and there would be another pause before he said the name of a reporter who had rubbed him the wrong way.

Often there wouldn’t be much more than that, few supporting details, certainly no lecture, just the reporter’s name and a sigh. That done, I would ask the mayor how things were going. We would chat for a bit and then return to our jobs.

Ryan never took his complaints to the next level and picketed the newspaper. Roy Fries did.

Roy believed the city wasn’t doing enough to keep down the rat population. Beyond that, he didn’t believe the Times-Union or the Democrat and Chronicle, our morning counterpart, cared that much about rat control. He may have been right.

Roy would appear in front of our building on Exchange Boulevard wearing a hard hat, and sometimes sporting a sandwich board with a message condemning the newspapers. Slung over his shoulder was a transparent bag of what seemed to be dead rats. For sure, his message wasn’t subtle.

I would leave the office for lunch and there would be Roy. For my sake, he lifted his bullhorn and blared at the media. Then he would take off his sandwich board, put his bag of rats aside and become a different person. “How are you, Jim,” he might ask. I would reply and ask him how he was doing. We were suddenly two friends catching up, wishing each other well.

I moved over to the Democrat and Chronicle in 1989. The reader complaints were the same. But my memory is that a kind of civility prevailed. Sometimes the readers and I agreed. Sometimes we had to agree to disagree. In the end, we usually wished each other well.

Civility would seem to be in shorter supply these days. As has been reported, someone defaced some of the windows of the new Democrat and Chronicle building on East Main Street the other night, writing variants of the word “liar,” underscoring one “Liar” with “You brood of vipers.”

I work from home now, so I didn’t have to look at those hateful words. But my guess is that, for those staffers who did, being called a brood of vipers was not as hurtful as being called a liar.

All reporters make mistakes, but, in my experience, it would be a rare reporter who lied, who intentionally got something wrong. Indeed, most reporters go into deep gloom when they make an error.

An observer might ask why reporters care, why they fuss. I think it’s just that getting it right is a key part of their job, as a way of maintaining the reader’s trust.

Reporting is not a job that’s always understood, and there are certainly times when the media can seem distant. But perhaps we all need a quieter conversation.

At the end of the Democrat and Chronicle’s story on the graffiti, Karen Magnuson, the editor, was quoted as saying, “If someone has an issue with our coverage I’d love to talk to them about it.”

I hope people take her up on her offer. We’re living in a tense time. The least we can do is put down our bullhorns and talk.

On Remarkable Rochester

Retired Senior Editor Jim Memmott reflects on what makes Rochester distinctively Rochester, its history, its habits, its people. Since 2010, he has also been compiling a list of Remarkable Rochesterians. Contact him at: (585) 278-8012 or jmemmott@DemocratandChronicle.com or Remarkable Rochester, Box 274, Geneseo, NY 14454.

Remarkable Rochesterians

As staff writer Meaghan M. McDermott has reported, the Greece Historical Society has installed a historical marker at the summer home of this suffragist, someone whose name belongs on the list of Remarkable Rochesterians that can be found at rochester.nydatabases.com:

Jean Brooks Greenleaf (1831-1918): The president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association from 1890 to 1896, she was born in Massachusetts and settled in Rochester in 1867 along with her husband, Halbert S. Greenfield. She was a devoted worker on what was known as the Second New York Campaign for women’s suffrage, an effort led out of the home of her friend Susan B. Anthony. She also helped organize Rochester groups that provided services and activities for working women, and, in 1892, she joined other women property owners who paid their taxes under protests, arguing that as non-voters they had no say in how their money was spent.

Read more:

D&C building vandalized

An earlier column on Roy Fries

New historical marker honors Jean Brooks Greenleaf