Albert Yuravich named director of New Haven Register design center

Albert Yuravich has joined Digital First Media’s newsroom staff in Connecticut as director of a new regional page design center based at the New Haven Register.

Albie Yuravich

Yuravich led the newsroom of the Greenwich Time over the past few years as managing editor, and also assisted with a redesign of all of Hearst’s daily newspapers in Connecticut in 2012.

He follows Ben Doody and Tom Cleary in making the jump from Hearst Connecticut to Digital First. Doody was Hearst’s digital news editor and is now managing editor of DFM’s Connecticut group. Cleary was a breaking news reporter at the Connecticut Post and is now co-managing editor of DFM’s Register Citizen in Torrington.

But it’s also a homecoming for Yuravich, who was city editor of The Register Citizen from 2004 to 2008, where he won first place national awards for front page design and breaking news coverage from Suburban Newspapers of America.

Yuravich started his career in 2002 as a sports reporter and copy editor for the Waterbury Republican-American.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Boston College.

In his new job, Yuravich is overseeing a design center that will handle page design for Digital First Media’s newspapers in the region. One of his first tasks will be to help lead the New Haven Register through an upcoming print redesign and conversion to a new content management system.

Email Yuravich at ayuravich@nhregister.com. Follow him on Twitter @albertyuravich.

Esteban Hernandez, Evan Lips, Tom Renner join DFM Connecticut newsroom

Esteban Hernandez, Evan Lips and Tom Renner have joined the newsroom staff of Digital First Media in Connecticut.

Evan Lips

Hernandez and Lips have been hired as staff reporters at The Register Citizen in Torrington and the New Haven Register, respectively. Renner has been hired as a deputy sports editor in New Haven.

Lips, a Connecticut native, previously worked as a reporter at a DFM sister paper, the Lowell Sun in Massachusetts. He got to know the New Haven newsroom in December when he was part of a team of DFM journalists who came to help the Register cover the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Within hours on his first day as a Register reporter on April 15, he was sent in the other direction as part of a DFM team headed to Massachusetts to cover the bombing of the Boston Marathon. His first week was spent working with his former Lowell colleagues and a team from New Haven that fed news of the bombing’s aftermath to Digital First Media’s 75 daily newspapers across the country.

Lips holds a bachelor’s degree from Kenyon University and a master’s degree in journalism from Boston University. He will cover East Haven for the Register. Email him at elips@nhregister.com. Follow him on Twitter @evanmlips.

Esteban Hernandez

Hernandez also worked for a DFM sister paper, as an intern at the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado, before relocating to Connecticut to work at The Register Citizen.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he worked as an editor on the staff of the CU Independent. Email him at ehernandez@registercitizen.com. Follow him on Twitter @estebanHRZ.

Renner starts work today as deputy sports editor at the New Haven Register.

He has worked the past three years as Fairfield County sports editor for the online local news site The Daily Voice, formerly known as Main Street Connect.

Previously, he worked for 22 years at the Stamford Advocate, leaving in 2009 as sports editor.

Tom Renner

Renner holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Temple University and has won numerous awards for sports writing, page design and overall sports section leadership from the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists, New England Press Association and Associated Press Sports Editors.

Email him at trenner@nhregister.com. Follow him on Twitter @tomrenner.

Blaming rape victims’ parents is blaming the victim

“Unfortunately, it’s considered bad form in today’s social climate to ‘blame the victim’ or even acknowledge the degree to which her actions put her in harm’s way.” – Waterbury Republican-American Editorial, April 13, 2013

These are the “unfortunate” words of a Connecticut newspaper that on the same day in a front page headline referred to the rape of two 13-year-old girls as a “tryst.”

The editorial dismisses criticism of the Torrington High School football players accused of raping the girls and the students who bullied the victims as “an exercise in stating the obvious.”

It goes on to blame victims’ parents for failing to “exert discipline.”

It says girls are responding to a popular culture that says  it’s “OK to be sexually provocative,” and that “boys and young men … respond predictably.” (Emphasis is mine.)

The Republican-American editorial board completes the victim-blaming cycle with a reference to girls’ use of alcohol and drugs stepping in to “do the rest.”

The newspaper could have saved some space. One of the students who bullied the victims following their alleged rapists’ arrest in February summed up the point they are trying to make in the editorial with this tweet: “Young girls acting like whores there’s no punishment for that men acting like boys is a sentence.”

I’ll offer my own paraphrase of the Republican-American’s editorial: Stop talking about those poor young men who couldn’t help but “respond predictably” and blame parents for allowing their girls to act like whores.

The “tryst” headline could perhaps be excused as a really poor choice made in the rush to get out a newspaper. Editors actually changed the web version of the headline after being criticized on Saturday, and acknowledged that it was the wrong word. But the editorial was purposeful.

So what happens when the next Torrington girl is raped? Will she report it knowing that classmates called the last person who did so a “snitch” and a “whore” and rallied to defend her alleged rapists? Will she talk to police knowing how they described the football player case?

What will she think when she sees the last person’s rape described as a “tryst” on the front page and opens the paper to find the blame placed on her parents?

No, Republican-American, rape is not a ‘tryst’

I’m extremely hesitant to publicly criticize our direct competition and do it rarely. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones, etc. I respect what they do, how many difficult decisions are made around the clock, how much margin for error there is.

But Torrington and communities like it all over the country are dealing with harmful misconceptions about rape, consent and how we treat women and girls. The media has a huge role in helping change the way we talk about it.

This morning’s front-page headline in the Waterbury Republican-American perpetuates those misconceptions. Rape is not “a tryst.” The word “tryst” should not be used to describe an encounter where an 18-year-old young man is alleged to have raped a 13-year-old girl after she repeatedly said “No” and after he pressured her to use drugs and alcohol.

The Republican-American is all in on the “tryst” description, in print, on the web and on social media.

It’s easy to use the wrong word on a topic that is so difficult, especially when you’re in a rush to get a newspaper out. But this comes after the Waterbury paper and our Register Citizen were (rightfully) criticized in a Poynter article for referring to the Torrington rape case as a “scandal.” I guess I’m mainly weighing in here to urge all of us to be more careful, more accurate, in how we write about rape, and not to give credence to the “blame the victim” mentality.

Seeing the case called a “tryst” this morning was particularly upsetting on Twitter, where the bullying of the 13-year-old victims played out in such a nasty way after two of the football players charged in the case were arrested in February.

We wrote this morning about how harmful language used by police has been in this case. And previously, I talked about how the media has to change the language it uses.

Why “tryst” is a wrong, harmful word to use in describing rape shouldn’t need much explanation. But consider the common definition, “an arranged meeting of two lovers.” Other than nasty innuendo from bullying teenagers, we’ve seen no evidence in this case that this was an “arranged meeting of lovers.” Using the word buys into the “rape culture” mindset that if a girl comes over to your house, or drinks with you, or shows any kind of interest, you are going to get/are entitled to sex. And it’s really inappropriate to use after the fact to describe a case in which one of the girls said she told her alleged rapist “no” repeatedly. Step back from all of that, and consider that these were 13-year-old children, regardless of other circumstances, and “tryst” should not be part of the vocabulary.

UPDATE: The Republican-American changed the headline on the web version of its story sometime around mid-day following heavy criticism on social media. Republican-American Litchfield County Editor Ann Karolyi responded to the criticism in the online comments section under the story by saying, “the headline was not the best choice, and it has been removed from the online version because of the implications that word carries.”

Robert Michelin, Michael Lyle join JRC Connecticut newsroom staff

Two Quinnipiac University graduates have joined Journal Register Co.’s newsroom staff in Connecticut.

Robert Michelin

Robert Michelin has been hired as a member of the Breaking News Team at the New Haven Register, responsible for editing and producing local, state and national news coverage for JRC’s three daily newspaper websites and mobile platforms in Connecticut and managing social media accounts.

He was previously a high school sports reporter for the Star-Ledger and NJ.Com in New Jersey, and before that covered local news for The Daily Voice in Westchester County, N.Y.

Michelin graduated from Quinnipiac in May 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in print journalism.

At Quinnipiac, he was sports section editor for the Quad News. He also worked as an intern for the Torrington Titans Atlantic Collegiate Baseball League team in 2010, and as an election night correspondent for the Associated Press.

Michael Lyle Jr. has been hired as a staff reporter for The Middletown Press.

Michael Lyle Jr.

He was previously a reporter for WQUN radio in Hamden, a production assistant for ESPN Radio in Bristol and an overnight news anchor at WTIC radio in Farmington.

Lyle is a four-time winner with of Associated Press Broadcasters Awards for his work with WQUN.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and a master’s degree in journalism from Quinnipiac.

Michelin can be reached at rmichelin@nhregister.com.

Lyle can be reached at mlyle@middletownpress.com. Follow him on Twitter @Lyle308.

Torrington shows that media needs better language for statutory rape

How will Steubenville and Torrington affect a future victim’s decision to come forward?

That question, above everything else, weighs heavily on us as The Register Citizen continues to write about the rape victim bullying case that has sparked national outrage. Because without big changes in how police, school districts, parents and the media talk about rape, consent, relationships and sex, we’ve only made it worse.

Would you tell your parents or school guidance counselor or police that you’d been raped after reading on the front page of The Register Citizen that the last Torrington girl who did was called “whore” and “snitch” and blamed for ruining the lives of two popular football players?

Would you come forward if you flipped on CNN and heard about the tragedy of two young Steubenville men’s promising careers devastated by rape allegations against them and all about how much the victim had been drinking that night and what she’d been wearing?

Let’s hope that Steubenville was a wake-up call for media about buying into a “blame the victim” culture. That includes giving “equal time” or otherwise legitimizing “blame the victim” arguments. If a bystander, or a friend of the accused, or a friend of the victim, or a defense attorney, or God help us, a police chief, or school official, questions or minimizes rape based on what the victim was wearing, who she was hanging out with, what she’d had to drink or how many people she’d previously had sex with, the media has a duty to put it in proper perspective. Which is right up there with the Torrington High School students’ “whore” and “snitch” Tweets we published.

The only question before us in establishing guilt or innocence in a rape case is, “Did the accuser consent?” And consent has nothing to do with past behavior, wardrobe, the company you keep, or how much you had to drink. The media continues to legitimize the latter by treating the discussion as though it relates to mitigating factors in the crime instead of a glaring cultural attitude that helped contribute to and minimize it.

The Torrington case presents additional issues for the media.

A big part of the “blame the victim” dynamic in Torrington relates to statutory rape, and we need better language to refer to it.

A large number of Torrington High School students believe that statutory rape (in this case, two 13-year-old girls having sex with two 18-year-old high school seniors) is not “real rape.”

Local police have referred to the case as “consensual,” and “just a matter of age difference,” and “not forcible.”

Many Torrington young people have minimized the seriousness of statutory rape.

We see this language as inappropriate, and harmful, and are struggling with a better way to refer to the details of the case.

The statutory rape law exists because a 13-year-old is a child, and an 18-year-old is a man. A 13-year-old can’t “consent,” period. There is an inherent power imbalance that kids fail to recognize.

In fact, if the allegations against Torrington football players are true (and only two questions really need to be answered – was there sexual contact, and how old are you?), it, in fact, was not “consensual.” It was not “just a matter of age difference.” It was “forcible.” Not consensual because they are children and don’t know what they are doing. Not “just a matter of age difference” because “just” and “rape” should not appear in the same sentence – it is so much more damaging than those words would imply. And “forcible” because of the power, status and manipulation that an adult holds over a child.

So much is at stake in how our communities respond to Steubenville and Torrington. And the very language the media uses to talk about it is crucial to that response.

Why The Register Citizen exposed the identity of student bullies

Due to some excellent journalism by Register Citizen reporter Jessica Glenza, Torrington, Connecticut, has become notorious across the country over the past 24 hours for a scandal involving its high school football team and widespread bullying of 13-year-old girls two 18-year-old players are accused of raping.

While most of the outrage has been focused on the players, their bullying friends and a school district that has been slow to react to bad behavior by athletes and harassment of victims, the newspaper has been criticized by some for identifying underage students who bullied and subjecting them to national ridicule.

On its website and on the front page of its print edition, The Register Citizen printed screen shots from Twitter on Wednesday morning of Torrington athletes and other students calling a 13-year-old rape victim a “whore” and “snitch” and blaming her for “ruining the lives” of the two players.

We did not blur out the Twitter handles or profile photos of the students doing the bullying, which effectively identified them.

The result, undoubtedly, was intense embarrassment to the teens involved and their families. They said some really disgusting things, and thousands of people from all over the country and world expressed outrage as the story was published prominently in news outlets including the New York Times, New York Daily News, Washington Post, Daily Mail of London and on national blogs such as Jezebel, The Daily Dot and Think Progress, among many others.

Every Connecticut TV station and even a camera crew from CNN was in Torrington Wednesday to cover the story as parallels were drawn to the horrible case in Steubenville, Ohio, where a girl was raped by multiple football players at a party, followed by social media taunting of the victim and a significant number of students and townspeople engaging in a “blame the victim” reaction to their arrest.

Faced with a barrage of criticism (and hopefully, embarrassment and regret over what they’d said, although messages calling Register Citizen staff “snitches” and many unprintable names yesterday would indicate otherwise),  most of the students responsible for the bullying Tweets disabled their accounts quickly after the story broke Wednesday or had shifted them to “private” status.

Some accused us of subjecting these students to bullying themselves, while even those outraged at their actions sympathized over the issue of young people not understanding the ramifications of publicly posting stupid things online and the permanence of those mistakes.

We could have easily told the story, they suggested, by just “summarizing” the extent of the bullying, and quoting some of the awful things that what were said without identifying who said it.

Yes, we could have done it that way, and I’ll tell you right now, we wouldn’t be having this big local (and national) conversation about the problem.

By publishing the actual messages, we made this real in a way that writing a story about unnamed kids would not.

We gave the city, the state and the country a taste of how horrifying and uncomfortable it has been for two 13-year-old girls over the past month who can’t escape the bullying and the nasty comments whether they’re at school or online.

Vaguely summarizing this kind of bullying, identities protected, would have allowed the school district to continue to ignore the problem and the community to assume that it was “someone else’s kid.”

But the fact is that “good kids,” from “good homes,” honor roll students, athletes, male, female, participated in this stuff, and showed a fundamental and staggeringly dangerous misunderstanding about rape, consent and how to treat other people.

If we hadn’t identified the bullies, this would have been dismissed by the school district and the community as “just a few bad apples.” In fact, that’s exactly how Torrington High School Athletic Director Mike McKenna and School Superintendent Cheryl Kloczko tried to dismiss it right up until the night before Jessica’s story showed everyone that it was more than that.

And in an outrageous failure to understand the need for an urgent community conversation around this problem, Kloczko and Torrington Board of Education Chairman Ken Traub used “student confidentiality” as an excuse to remain silent on the topic yesterday.

We don’t have to be another Steubenville, in part because there are local journalists like Jessica Glenza and her editors at The Register Citizen who are drawing attention to the problem and refusing to be complicit in the school district’s attempts to withhold information as a shield for their own failure to act.