We occasionally post a Memorable Story we discover from the past or the present.
Today we salute a work that goes beyond Memorable Story and must fit into a category we might call a Memorable Project..
The story is about the this little baby boy who became the 2008 Baby of the Year in Summit County when he was born at 12:33 a.m. on January 1 and died 12
weeks later as the victim of Shaken Baby Syndrome. The baby’s father, Craig R. Wilson, 28, of Cuyahoga Falls, is scheduled for a pretrial hearing on murder and other charges August 20.Former Beacon Journal copy desk chief Jim Kavanagh, now at CNN, spent three months reporting and writing it. He originally proposed telling the story over two days with a main and a sidebar each day. The CNN editors were not ready to commit to that so it ended up a single, 1,600-word story.
But what a story: It stood as the main story on the main page for four hours , an extraordinarily long time for CNN”s site, because it was drawing such heavy traffic. Between 7 a.m. and 2 p.m., the story received 1,388,000 page views; 360,000 of those were people who read it because someone had emailed it to them.
“This was by far the biggest project of my career,” Jim writes. “I spent about three months reporting and writing it. It's a tough read, but I thought it was a story worth telling. I hope you think so too.”
The story is well displayed on the CNN site with links to the autopsy report, police investigator
ss’ report and the indictment plus a couple of info boxes and other lins to Shaken Baby Syndrome sites, You Tube and a tribute page. There also is a video with a doctor from Akron Children's Hospital.Jim, incidentally is one of the people honored on the Blog Wall of Honor on our website which contains the names of 16 who left the Beacon Journal during the big layoff announced on August 22, 2006 when one-forth of the staff was cut. The list honors 16 former employees with 291 years of experience who were not laid off but volunteered to leave--sometimes in the hope of saving the job of a friend.
Click on the headline to see the Memorable Project.
1 comment:
Thanks for your insight into the story.
Jim Kavanaugh did do a great story on the consequences of shaking a child.
I speak from bitter experience: my eleven month old son died when he was shaken by his child care provider - a 51 year old grandmother with four children of her own.
Unfortunately, it seems the editorial limitations on Mr. Kavanaugh's story prevented him from also telling a story that might prevent such tragedies in the future.
In 1998, a simple SBS prevention program was developed by Dr. Mark Dias at Children's Hospital of Buffalo. Using a simple video and a few minutes of a nurse's time, it has reduced the incidence of inflicted head injuries by 50%.
It will be introduced statewide in New York this year, and other statewide projects are being implemented in Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
Eleven states, including Ohio, have enacted legislation to require hospitals to offer education to all new parents.
However, it seems the remarkable success of this prevention programs rolls off the backs of editors like water of a duck.
In 2002, NPR declined to cover a prevention story about SBS because they had covered a SBS story [the English Nanny case] 5 years ago!
By that standard, I guess we wouldn't be hearing any hurricane coverage on NPR until 2010, since Katrina got considerable coverage in 2004.
Apparently editors don't realize that 10,000 children - and roughly twice that number of parents - are born every day.
Given that 15-20% of those babies will experience colic, about 2.7% will be shaken by a parent before age 22, and 5-10% of the mothers will experience some degree of post-partum depression, you'd think editors would find the back story about the challenges that follow birth a little more interesting.
So kudos to an excellent and touching report by Mr. Kavaaugh, and a large box of dismay and disapproval for CNN's editorial decisionmakers.
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