Publisher's Notebook

On Oct. 31, Ian Graham got dressed for work. Although he is a photographer and more likely to wear jeans on the job, he put on a coat and tie.

Later that evening he was wearing handcuffs.

Graham works for RVA Magazine, an alternative entertainment and arts publication in Richmond. That night, he had a free-lance gig to photograph a Halloween party at a trendy Richmond nightclub.

Around 1 a.m., when the typical Halloween bash is at its scariest, he got a phone call from Preston Duncan, the publisher of RVA Magazine. The police were moving on the Occupy Richmond site. Let’s get over there and cover it, Duncan said.

The two men went to Kanawha Plaza in downtown Richmond, a public square that was full of hand-lettered protest signs and a scruffy crowd of people who had been camping there for weeks. Like so many protesters in different cities who sought to follow the example of the “Occupy Wall Street” organizers, they railed, somewhat indiscriminately, against “greed” or corporate anything.

In an account published at rvamag.com, Duncan wrote that while he and Graham were standing on the public sidewalk on the perimeter of the plaza, they were threatened with arrest by the police. They moved to the area designated for journalists. But the view from that corner was obscured.

Graham walked to the middle of a crosswalk to get a better angle. He was arrested for trespassing and handcuffed. There were other people on both sides of the crosswalk, Graham wrote in the same account.

“But none of them had cameras,” he added.

Graham was charged under Virginia Code § 18.2-119, a section called “Trespass after having been forbidden to do so.” It is a Class 1 misdemeanor punishable by up to 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine.

Graham told me that he was supposed to have a hearing on Nov. 18; he and his lawyer, Patrick Anderson, expected the charges to be dropped. But the Richmond commonwealth’s attorney’s office for some reason is playing hardball, so Anderson got a continuance.

Anderson, who has been retained by the American Civil Liberties Union to represent Graham, said he couldn’t comment except to confirm that the matter is set for trial on Jan. 24. The Richmond commonwealth’s attorney’s office wasn’t talking either; they didn’t return my call by press time.

Graham’s case is one of eight instances across the country in which journalists have been arrested while seeking to cover police activity relating to Occupy protests. That’s a distinction the City of Richmond, and the Commonwealth of Virginia, should not be proud of.

Journalist groups in the commonwealth have lodged protests with police and prosecutors over Graham’s arrest; there is even a Facebook group called “Free Ian Graham.”

The Virginia Code provides a strong statement of public policy about how journalists should be treated when covering news events. It’s about police lines, but you will get the idea. Code § 15.2-1714 allows “personnel from information services such as press, radio and television” to cross a police line “when gathering news,” so long as they don’t obstruct the police in their work. In other words, as a question of policy, journalists with cameras get to go where others can’t, when they are covering news events.

According to Mickey H. Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, very few other states provide such statutory protection to the news media. Virginia’s statute is strong and could serve as a model for other states, he said.

What exactly is Graham accused of? Here is the pertinent language of Code § 18.2-119: “If any person without authority of law goes upon or remains upon the lands, buildings or premises of another … after having been forbidden to do so … by the owner, lessee, custodian, or the agent of any such person, or other person lawfully in charge thereof … he shall be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.”

This statute is used by landlords to get rid of deadbeat tenants, by merchants to prevent suspected shoplifters from coming into a store and by public housing projects to keep away undesirables.

Ian Graham, armed with his camera and doing his job as a photojournalist, doesn’t fit that list.

There are so many ifs to a prosecution under this statute: If Graham was there “without authority of law.” If the officers issued a proper warning, “forbidding” Graham from any locale. If the cops were the custodians or “lawfully in charge” of the street. If this statute even applies.

The Supreme Court of Virginia has interpreted Code § 18.2-119 and predecessor statutes in a number of cases. In 1929, the court held that the trespass law does not apply to “thoroughfares,” a position it has reiterated repeatedly. A 1990 Virginia Court of Appeals opinion defined thoroughfares: “those ways or passages designated for public access.” Sounds like a crosswalk to me.

Why hasn’t this case been dropped? Why has Graham been forced to lawyer up and sweat out a possible jail term?

There’s hardball, and then there is the pursuit of unwarranted criminal charges that aren’t supported by the facts or the law. Call that what it is: governmental intimidation and an abuse of an individual’s basic rights.

Free Ian Graham?

Hell, yes. Free us all.

In honor of National Newspaper Week, I want to share a story from the backrooms of the newspaper business.

There are reporters with byline fever. There are editors who crusade. There are photographers who freeze moments of history. And then there are people who make sure the newspaper goes out every day or every week. This one’s for them.

My grandfather, Paul Edwin Fletcher (he went by Edwin), spent his entire working life at the Middlesboro Daily News in Middlesboro, Ky. He started there as a boy of 15 in 1929, and he retired 53 years later, in 1982.

Granddad was “a make-up man” – that’s a job title you don’t hear any more, except maybe on a movie set. He worked with lead type, making up the pages of the paper and preparing them for the press.

I got my first view of the newspaper world when I was about five. On a family trip into Middlesboro, my dad (Paul Edwin Fletcher Jr. – he went by Paul) took me to see Granddad at work.

Mostly I remember a lot of noise. The presses were loud and clanging. And I recall Granddad working at a table, putting in type that looked funny – the little letters were backward. He put them into a big metal frame as they became words, sentences, paragraphs, then a page. Granddad’s hands were covered in black, gloppy ink; it stayed under his fingernails no matter how much Lava soap he used.

Granddad was on the small side – I don’t think he ever topped 5’9” – but he had muscular shoulders and thick brawny forearms, the result of a daily workout of lifting those heavy frames of type and carrying them to pre-press.

He wasn’t a man who talked a lot. He didn’t discuss work at home, although my dad told me how once Granddad had to work late, then rushed home excited with the special edition carrying a one-word headline: “WAR!”
But from five, I remember his quiet kindness. He gave my sister, my brother and me each a special gift that trip – our names, spelled out in backwards lead-type. It showed us what he did, and who he was. I still have mine, a small lump of metal that says Paul in 48-point type.

When I was a kid, my family kept moving farther away from Middlesboro – from North Carolina to Atlanta to South Florida. Visits to Kentucky became less frequent. But with each trip I was getting older and better able to understand Granddad’s world.

Middlesboro is just past the Cumberland Gap, where Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky met and dipped their mountains to provide passage for pioneers headed west. Some people kept going, seeking a better life in Indiana, Missouri and other western states. Some made it just past the gap and decided to stay. The city proudly supports the nearby coal mines, and many miners live in the area.

The east end of Middlesboro, where my grandfather lived, was not tony; many of the frame houses were small. Here or there, you might find a rusted car gradually disappearing into weeds. At most of the homes, though, people tried.

The second time I visited Granddad at work, in 1974, I was a high school senior getting ready for a year as editor of the student paper. By then the make-up process had changed. Granddad still laid out the pages, but he would run printed columns of type with the day’s stories through a waxer, then position them on the pages. The pre-press team then burned a plate that went on the press.

I spent an entire day at the Daily News, helping him lay out the paper. With sure hands and a practiced eye, Granddad methodically measured and sized the columns of type and laid them on the page so straight that you wouldn’t need a level to tell you how true they were. He positioned the headlines, photos and ads. And with his typical quiet kindness, he patiently showed me where my pages were crooked and how to fix them.

Granddad became the first Daily News employee to log 50 years with the paper in 1979; he retired a few years later. He had seen newspaper production go through generations of changes. He missed the next innovation: Computerized layout, just around the corner, put all that valuable make-up work inside a box and on a screen.

Years of working near the noisy presses did some damage. Granddad was nearly deaf, and he refused to get a hearing aid. In later visits, this sometimes made conversation difficult. Usually we would sit on the high porch of his house overlooking the town, communing in a warm silence. I know he was happy when I joined Virginia Lawyers Weekly. He liked the idea of another newspaperman in the family.

I last saw him in 2000, in a grim nursing home – he had fallen and shattered a knee, putting him in a wheelchair. At 86, his body was failing, his mind was mostly gone and his speech was slurred. My sister and I tried to connect with the man we knew. I reached into the darkness, if just for a moment, when I showed him a picture of my son. His face brightened and he said clearly, “I’ve got one of those at home.” He died three months later.

Granddad was a lifelong newspaperman who liked what he did. He knew his role and he played it well for 53 years. Thanks to him, the Daily News went out every day. The people in and around Middlesboro got their paper and the news they needed. He never got a lot of glory, but he served his paper and his community well. He never got a byline.

Actually, that’s not true. He gets one every time I sign my name to an article I’ve written.

— Paul Fletcher

The Fairfax County Police Department has earned a dubious honor: the department was a runner-up for the “Black Hole Award,” a distinction started this year by the Society of Professional Journalists for the “most heinous violations of the public’s right to know.”

The state of Utah was the winner of the Black Hole Award for its passage of a bill that the SPJ award committee called “the most regressive piece of freedom of information legislation in recent history.”

House Bill 477, signed into law earlier this month by Gov. Gary Herbert, makes major changes to the Utah Government Records Access and Management Act.

Starting July 1, anyone seeking information will pay heavy fees for search time, redaction, administrative overhead and legal review that will price citizens out of their government, the committee said.

Additionally, there is a requirement that someone seeking information must prove beyond a preponderance of the evidence that a public record should be public; every other state requires the government to prove it should be secret.

And there will be exemptions keeping a wide swath of electronic records secret, including text messages and other correspondence of officials, allowing government leaders to communicate in secret, according to the committee.

The Fairfax police department was one of five runners-up for the award.

The department was cited for its refusal to provide information on its handling of the shooting of a motorist by a police officer. In November 2009, an officer shot and killed an unarmed motorist on Richmond Highway. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information about the incident, Fairfax officials declined to release video footage of the shooting from police cruisers or copies of reports written in the wake of the shooting. Even the name of the officer remains shrouded in secrecy, said the committee.

After a 14-month internal investigation, the commonwealth’s attorney announced in January that he would not file criminal charges against the officer. In a press release, authorities suggested the driver, a carpenter and former Army Green Beret with bipolar disease, had ignored police lights and sirens before the officer fatally shot him. But the police department denied a request for public inspection of the actual reports, the committee concluded.

The other runners up were the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, for refusing to disclose information about the death of a toddler; the University of Maryland, for charging high copy fees to a student journalist investigating sexual assaults on campus; the CIA and Attorney General Eric Holder, for destruction of interrogation videos protected by the Federal Records Act; and the Broward County (Florida) School Board for keeping inadequate records.

Today is National FOI Day. March 16 is James Madison’s birthday, and that’s the reason this date was chosen, in a nod to the Father of the Constitution, as the day to observe the importance of freedom of information. The First Amendment Center has more information at its website, including the scoop on yesterday’s FOI Day Conference held at the Newseum in D.C.

Closer to home, Megan Rhyne, the executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, has an op-ed piece in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, in which she reports a welcome development: She said in her job she hears from a lot of people. But recently, she said, she’s been hearing from government workers and officials who want their offices open and information fully accessible to the public.

This week (March 13-19) is Sunshine Week, an initiative to promote open government and freedom of information. March 16, this Wednesday, is National FOI Day – and that day was chosen because it is James Madison’s birthday.

The week is spearheaded by the National Society of News Editors and underwritten by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Sunshine Week got started in 2002 in the Sunshine State, when the Florida news editors society banded together to fight efforts to create scores of exemptions to that state’s public records laws. Several other states followed suit in 2003; the ASNE went national with a sunshine celebration two years later.

Here in the Old Dominion, the Virginia Press Association and the Virginia Coalition for Open Government fight the good fight, and they were busy as usual during the 2011 General Assembly session.

According to the VPA website, there were at least 33 different bills relating to public access to government that were introduced during the session.

The VPA noted one of the bills it supported, House Bill 1457, will double the civil penalties for a willful violation of the Freedom of Information Act by government employees. The bill made it through both houses and awaits the governor’s signature.

And a number of bills that would have exempted various state agencies’ work from the purview of FOIA were killed in committee.

As part of Sunshine Week, the ASNE honors “Local Heroes” who fight for access and little-guy rights. The overall national winner was a woman in Miramar Beach, Fla., who filed a lawsuit against local officials and forced them to handle public records differently.

But Virginia can lay claim to the third-place finishers. A Waynesboro couple, Phil and Ellen Winter, took the bronze for their effort to straighten out practices in the city treasurer’s office. According to Sunshine Week officials, they noticed their property tax check had not been deposited promptly.

They then gathered reams of government documents that showed the treasurer had allegedly mishandled city and state money. They went to the local newspaper and shared their research. The treasurer lost his bid for reelection last fall.

Sunshine Week is a newspaper industry effort to insure that information remains free. The Society for Professional Journalists, for example, is a big promoter of the week and of FOIA education in general.

But this isn’t just inside baseball and an example of how journalists pat each other on the back so they can feel good. Far from it. The week highlights how the fourth estate can keep government honest and the citizens informed.

It was Thomas Jefferson who once famously said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Go to these two sites for a lot of information and resources: www.sunshineweek.org, maintained by the ASNE, and www.spj.org, the home site of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Let the sun shine.

Work product from someone who didn’t proofread his work. Don’t let this happen to you!

Before you can say you have finished writing something, you have to proofread your work. Before you file anything, you have to proofread your work. Make sure you say what you mean.

The other day I got an e-mail message from a colleague who knows I like to tinker with headlines – it was one of those viral collections of “Oh no, did they really publish that?” headlines. The papers that printed the headlines below shall remain nameless. I can say on good authority that none of these appeared in Virginia Lawyers Weekly.

Man Kills Self Before Shooting Wife and Daughter

Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says

Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers

Panda Mating Fails, Veterinarian Takes Over

Miners Refuse to Work After Death

Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant

War Dims Hope for Peace

If Strike Isn’t Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile

Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures

Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges

Man Struck By Lightning, Faces Battery Charge

New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group

Kids Make Nutritious Snacks

Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half

Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors

Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery, Hundreds Dead

The question was pretty stark and pretty direct, but there it was on the Daily Press website:

Was Your Wife a Criminal?

Gee, I didn’t run a background check before we got married.

The provocative query sounds like the title of a 1950s film noir. Or maybe it brings to mind the plot from a bad TV show, in which the hero gets a really big surprise. The line comes from an ad for one of those online criminal records sites.

I have to wonder how many people are going to use this service to look up a spouse…is non-disclosed past criminal activity really a problem in this country?

Here’s some comfort for anyone who meets their mate in law school: The character and fitness people at the bar examiners’ office will out anyone with a shady past, so you can rest easy.

The NFL season opened this past weekend, and hope is everywhere. From Miami to Seattle to Houston to … Washington?

In honor of Week 1, here’s a Lawyer Could-Have-Been – Cris Collinsworth, the one-time Cincinnati Bengal who took over John Madden’s seat on NBC’s Sunday Night Football this season.

Collinsworth went to the University of Florida, where he played football and earned a degree in accounting in 1981. Tall (6’5”) and fast, he was drafted by the Bengals in the second round and played eight seasons, appearing in Cincy’s two Super Bowls, both of which ended in San Francisco victories. The 1989 SB, Collinsworth’s last game, was one of the more interesting title games, featuring a last-minute touchdown drive led by 49ers quarterback Joe Montana.

Collinsworth moved into broadcasting, taking a reporter’s job at HBO. But he was hedging his bets. He started law school part-time at the University of Cincinnati law school in his next-to-last season with the Bengals and earned his law degree from UC in 1991. But his TV career went well and he has yet to take a bar exam anywhere.

By the way, one of Collinsworth’s sons plays football for Notre Dame, where he is a teammate of Nate Montana, son of Joe.

(Photo by Mitchell Haaseth / © NBC Universal, Inc.)

Newspapers base their success on hustling news and selling ads. (And on selling subscriptions, but this item is about the other two).

News and advertising in a paper don’t always jibe. Take this morning’s Richmond Times-Dispatch as an example.

The Metro section has a story about a U.Va. student charged with murdering his father. The alleged weapon was unusual – a 4-pound bowling pin, a memento of a birthday party.

(If you take a bunch of kids to a bowling alley for a birthday party, the honoree gets a free actual bowling pin. All the kids who attended sign it. We have one somewhere in the garage or the attic).

The bowling-pin murder story jumps to page B-8, where you’ll find the end of the obits and the crime log.

Then turn the page. On B-10, there’s the jump of a story and a big, half-page, four-color ad for … Bowl America. “You can be a star at Bowl America,” the ad says. Get info at www.bowlingparty.com.

Boy, that was close. The T-D’s production team was either very alert or very lucky. You be the judge.