Frontiersman apologizes for public incident

Frontiersman editorial board

Where is the line between professional and private life? This question has come home to the Frontiersman this week, and we're left to struggle with what feel like personal ramifications from a public incident.

At this year's Iditarod Musher's Banquet, a Frontiersman reporter, who was not on official assignment, booed one of the mushers and was involved in a confrontation with several people. While it yet remains unclear exactly how the confrontation unfolded, it is clear that several people were offended, and that the event was marred, at least for some people. That is unfortunate, and for those of us in the newsroom, and everyone at the Frontiersman, it is particularly distressing.

The newspaper business is unique. In some ways it is like any other business. We come to work and produce something for public consumption, and we strive to make a profit from our labor. In many ways, though, a community newspaper is much more than a simple product for sale -- it's more than a commodity that can be simply quantified and priced by the ounce or by the inch. A newspaper is a living document and a living history of the community it serves. It belongs as much to its readers as it does to its owners, and those who work at a newspaper, though they are in private industry, are at least in some measure public figures.

Those of us in the newsroom feel a strong sense of responsibility to our readers, and we demonstrate that by adhering to a strong code of journalistic ethics. We take those ethics so seriously that we're willing to put our names on the articles we write. In that way we are certainly in the public eye, and that recognition means we are always representing the Frontiersman at least to some degree. We scrutinize other public figures and apply a strict level of expectations to them. It's an important part of our responsibility to our readers. We must measure ourselves by that same yardstick, and we must accept that public behavior that reflects poorly upon one of us, by association, also casts our newspaper in a bad light.

With that in mind, we all accept responsibility for the distress some of the attendees experienced, and we apologize to the Swingleys, Dick Mackey, the Iditarod Trail Committee, the mushers and anyone who was offended by the conduct of our reporter. We also apologize to our readers who have welcomed us into their homes and who trust us to be balanced and fair in our coverage of every event. The Frontiersman has always been committed to earning that trust and confidence, and it always will be.