Permit us, for a moment, to demystify the media process. In this week’s IJN on page 1: BDS stories. Page 4: BDS column. Pages 16-17, 19: More BDS stories. Readers of the Intermountain Jewish News may imagine that the staff held a grand editorial board meeting and decided to focus on BDS this week. If only it were so simple!
In fact, IJN Assistant Editor Chris Leppek followed the BDS bill in the Colorado legislature without the input of the rest of the IJN staff who wrote about BDS. Ditto, IJN Senior Writer Andrea Jacobs, who independently tuned into the panel on BDS sponsored by the American Jewish Press Assn. On his own, Rabbi Hillel Goldberg had been reading the biography of Einstein for weeks before he got far enough in to devise an idea for a column about it. Coincidentally, it happened this week. No one in the office knew he was reading the book. All those other JTA BDS stories coming at once? That’s the news this week.
Sometime last Tuesday, it became clear to the staff that BDS would emerge as a major theme in this week’s edition. We were nimble enough not to plan this. When good story leads are pursued and newsworthy ideas are embraced, it becomes journalistically exciting to pull them together.
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