From The Editor’s Desk: Weighing the requests

A story on our Business Page today does something that we normally don’t do: Reveal the winners of a raffle.
In this case, the raffle was a national Bud Lite promotion and one of Borderland’s own, Sean Bahr, was the winner of an all-expense paid Caribbean cruise.
The Journal’s policy calls for winners of raffles promoted by businesses or an organization to be published as an advertisement.
But newspaper staff regularly weigh requests for such stories and make decisions within the context of our policy. In this case, we felt that the prize and the promotion was big enough to warrant coverage by the newspaper. Tuesday’s story attempted to focus on the person who won the prize and not the prize itself.
That’s not to say that our readers may not have noticed that earlier last week we named the winner of a Twins promotion involved with a local business. That was a mistake and should have been published in an advertisement. The Twins and the business that promoted the contest could have purchased an ad to announce the winners.
But this photograph was used in an effort to convince us that the story about the cruise should be published. Again, we would have done the cruise story without the Twins promotion being noted. The cruise is a substantial value and Bahr is one of just 10 other Minnesotans who will join the 4,600 other cruise winners.
Journal staff regularly write stories that involve raffles. We have done stories about the creation of items such as quilts or other crafts to raise awareness of or money for an illness, a cause, a person or a program.
While the story may note that the item will be raffled, the real meat of the story is about the people involved in the effort, not about the winner of the raffle, or even that much about the item to be raffled.
We certainly don’t want to down play the importance of the local businesses that were involved in these promotions or any others. Each of these business are an integral part of Borderland’s business community and deserve our patronage.
And we know we’ve upset some people, most of whom were involved in a charitable effort to raise money for a deserving person or organization, when we’ve asked them to purchase an advertisement to announce the winner. But many times, these groups are already prepared to buy an ad to thank the people involved in the effort, and adding the name of the raffle has been an easy solution.
The many groups and organizations raising money through a raffles shouldn’t believe that we don’t think their efforts are of value. We do and we will continue to write stories about these efforts. They often are the backbone of this community and help when no other source of help is available.
But the value is in their efforts, not necessarily in who won the raffle.