How do you deal with an angry school board?

It was an interesting week for me with reporting. Perhaps the most interesting part of that being work I did on someone else's article:

Two of the K12 kids were working on a story about the school board releasing the results of a recent study that asked employees what could be trimmed from the budget to help alleviate this $10.3 million "shortfall."

What was interesting about the survey results was the comments section of the results. When you pulled them up on the site, however, all the names had been redacted. "A person outside this newsroom" was able to unredact (I don't think that's a word) the names and show us how. The thing is you didn't really have to do that because you could print out the results and read through the black bar. Not to mention there's no doubt who they were taking to task anyway.

So, I placed a call to Lynn Barnett. She was kind enough to call me back. The call didn't start so well. I asked simple numbers questions:
Q: How many responses were there?
A: It's on the summary.

So, it's a little tense, right.

I finally get to the question I wanted to ask. Why did you decide to redact the names?

I didn't get to ask it. I started the question and she ripped into me. She told me that she had found out that we had been able to unredact the names. ( We don't know how she found out.) And she just killed me. She said the names were redacted as to not hurt people's feelings. (I checked, the Sunshine Law does not have a feelings exemption.)

I had the kids write a simple report on what the survey said.

The next morning there was an email in Liz's box from Karla DeSpain. It kind of questioned the integrity of the reporters and the Missourian. I got a little lesson in how to manage my manager, Liz said.

It was a good chance to learn how to manage a source, a little Sunshine Law primer and other lessons.