N.H. newspaper makes its crime coverage 'more deliberate' after a reporter saw the obituary of a former story subject

Crime reporting at The Keene Sentinel in western New Hampshire involved quick-hits, police press releases and "not a lot of reporting, not a lot of context," Paul Cuno-Booth, a former police and courts reporter for the paper, said at last week's Radically Rural conference in Keene. That approach changed after Cuno-Booth spotted the obituary of a former story subject — a woman who had been arrested after leading police on a slow-motion car chase across an icy lake.

Keene in Cheshire County (Wikipedia map)

"Now, reading her obit, he learned more about the woman who’d been arrested on the ice that day," writes Dan Kennedy on his Media Nation site. "She’d had surgery for a brain tumor in 2016. She’d worked with mentally disabled people. She was a triathlete. Hers was a deep, well-rounded life, and the Sentinel’s story had reduced her to a caricature for the entertainment of its readers."

At Radically Rural, co-sponsored by the Sentinel, Cuno-Booth detailed how the paper sought to change its crime coverage. He left the paper, but it got help from Kelly McBride, an ethics specialist at the Poynter Institute, to be "more deliberate" in its coverage.

Individual crimes aren't being reported now unless the paper is "prepared to follow them all the way through the court system, which immediately ruled out minor offenses," Kennedy writes. Mug shots have become rare, people can have earlier reports of crimes scrubbed from online searches, and the paper is focusing on crime trends, not one-off small crimes.