TURNING OVER A NEW LEAF - PD's Regina Brett

If any one incident so far this year has given the Plain Dealer a story to sink its teeth into, that incident has to be the Damon Wells-Arthur Buford shooting. The episode has all the elements of a morality play: Damon Wells was a law-abiding citizen accosted by two young toughs who threatened to rob him. He pulled out a gun and shot, killing Arthur Buford, who was unarmed. Then vandalism forced Wells from the Mt. Pleasant home where he lived with his girlfriend and her mother.

The newspaper played the story on the front of its Metro section. If they'd known what would happen next, they probably would have stripped it across the top of page 1.

"We've never seen anything like the Damon Wells case," Metro editor Chris Quinn wrote in an e-mail, titled "thugs and more," that was distributed to most of the reporting and editing staff last week.

"That shooting crystalized (sic) for many much that is wrong with the city. It captured the attention of people throughout Northeast Ohio, and it sparked all sorts of imaginative thinking in the newsroom. Over the past few weeks, columnists and reporters have launched on stories to examine issues raised by the case, and many others proposed wide-ranging projects for the paper to undertake."

"Thugs and more" touts the editors' "ambitious plan to get at what is going on in Cleveland these days," Quinn explained. "Our aim is to produce a series of stories and packages, to run through late fall, that ties together the many themes suggested by the Damon Wells shooting. The plan requires a big investment of time, but the result promises to be unlike anything ever offered to readers of The Plain Dealer."

The coverage includes nine stories that will start this month and run through the fall. Plain Dealer reporters will infiltrate and examine every aspect of life in the neighborhood around 134th and Kinsman, where the shooting took place. But Quinn's challenging project overlooks one important issue: How can a newspaper where blacks make up only 10.4 percent of the newsroom speak to and for a community that is 75 percent black?

If the furor over the newspaper's coverage to date is any indication, the Plain Dealer's major obstacle isn't just going to be getting at the stories; it's going to be establishing credibility and trust with people whom the newspaper has overlooked for years.

Regina Brett, the paper's senior Metro columnist, admits she hasn't done well in covering Cleveland's African-American community. That's about to change, she promises.

"I've never heard from as many black readers as I have in the last few weeks," she wrote in her May 20 column on the fallout from the Wells-Buford shooting. "That tells me I haven't done my job very well. I plan to do it better."

Brett wasn't the only opinionator writing about the Wells-Buford shooting. By the Sunday after the story broke, she and Phillip Morris, one of the paper's black journalists whose column recently moved to Metro from the editorial page, had written about the incident. So did editorial columnists Dick Feagler and Kevin O'Brien, who, like Brett, are white. All four painted the shooting in broad strokes, using the incident to rail against the so-called "thug culture" that they claim reigns in America's inner cities.

But Brett went further than the others, using the shooting to campaign against urban violence - a crusade she's dubbed the "new civil rights movement." Her language has been strong, her imagery stark.

"It's time for anyone on the fence to choose a side," she wrote on May 11. "There are only two choices, and there isn't a black side or a white side. The options are right or wrong. Law and order or lawlessness and chaos."

She writes, she says in an interview, what she believes.

"On the streets I don't think there's a middle ground," she explains. "People I talked to in those neighborhoods say there's no middle ground."

That notion of "mean streets" is commonly used to frame coverage of urban communities, says Keith Woods, an expert on coverage of race relations, ethics and diversity. He ticks off a list of other narrative archetypes he calls "inner-city frames."

"There's the "struggling to overcome' frame, the "against all odds' frame, the "rising above it all' frame," says Woods, who is dean of faculty at Poynter Institute, a training school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla. "All flow from some sense of pre-existing pathology, some of which is visited upon the community by itself, some of which might flow from racism."

The danger comes when outsiders overlook the mundane aspects of life that can produce the richest types of stories.

"The inner-city frame doesn't talk about ordinary parts of life. In all communities, teens rebel and parents struggle," Woods says. "[Journalists] don't find those stories because we don't live in those communities. The imbalance has to be fixed by a conscious decision to get into the neighborhood."

The folks who knew Arthur Buford complain that the Plain Dealer has cropped the portrait of his life so tightly, the full picture has been lost.

"I say he was convicted in the womb," says Khalid Samad, whose organization Peace in the 'Hood works with teenagers in the neighborhood where the shooting occurred.

Buford lived in the basement of an abandoned building and fended for himself. The teenager's parents reportedly are drug addicted. When Samad's group tried to get Buford a job, they couldn't find a parent or guardian who could sign the necessary papers.

These facts might have explained why the teen, who was on probation for one robbery, tried to commit another only a year later. But that information didn't emerge until a week after he'd died. By then, coverage - particularly columns - had labeled him a "thug."

The friends who knew him from school and the neighborhood are enraged about it. Buford may have had a robbery conviction, they say, but he wasn't a thug.

"A thug is somebody who don't care about life, who don't care about where they end up," explains Joshua, a participant in the Peace in the 'Hood program. Joshua, who did not want to use his last name, dismissed the idea of a "thug culture."

"It's not really a culture, it's more an attitude," he says. "It's like, "I don't give a fuck.' I see [folks like that] on the corners."

Street thugs don't care - and that's why they are so dangerous, agrees Red Cloud, a Los Angeles-based rapper who gives motivational speeches to high-school students.

But he notes that a thug is much more than someone with a police record, or even a couple of convictions. A thug is a hardcore criminal who has dropped out of school, a person to avoid at all costs. Yet a standard of behavior governs those folks, too, says Cloud, whose newest CD is Hawthorne's Most Wanted.

"All over the streets, from LA to the East Coast, there's a code of ethics: Don't hurt innocent bystanders; don't use gang propaganda to enlist people who are still in school," he says.

He notes that songs about "thug life" - a consistent theme in music by the late Tupac Shakur and Cleveland's own Bone Thugs-N-Harmony - talk about gangsterism to relieve the frustrations of living in a violent and stressful environment. But thug life is really an in-your-face exultation of success despite overwhelming obstacles.

"Thug life doesn't mean rob or steal," Cloud said. "It can be a person on the streets saying "I came from nothing and I made it.'"

People who knew Buford say he loved basketball and worked hard in school. He didn't shy away from a fight, but he didn't start any. He was a friend and a confidant. And that is why his friends and family erected a street shrine where he died, to ensure he would be more than a number in the growing tally of Cleveland homicides.

"A shrine doesn't make somebody a hero," explains Tyrah, a participant in Peace in the 'Hood and a friend of Buford's. "It shows that he wasn't just one person who got shot, that he was special."

That memorial inspired some of Brett's strongest language.

"First, get a coalition to come to Kinsman and take down that shrine to an aggravated robber. Pop the balloons. Give the stuffed animals away. Rip down the tributes," she wrote on April 29.

Her opinion hasn't changed.

"The shrine there on that street was for a 15-year-old who had a gun and [who was] killed in the process of robbing an innocent man. I don't believe somebody who is robbing somebody deserves a shrine," she says (although Buford was unarmed).

When some of Buford's friends read Brett's columns, they began their own campaign. They passed the paper around in school and fired off e-mails and voice mails to Brett, complaining about her opinion of their friend and her assessment of their neighborhood.

"They don't know," says Ashley, who had known Buford since middle school. "They live in nice houses, we don't. They don't know what goes on in neighborhood. They're trying to say we're thugs and we're not.

"They trying to say we're not smart when we're very intellectual people."

The journalists and youngsters seem to be speaking different languages, and in a way they are. Brett clearly believes she is upholding normal, middle-class values that the youngsters lack, and she wants to change that.

"There is a disconnect between their world view and most people in and out of their community," she explains.

But the paper's critics claim the folks who aren't getting the message are the ones working in the modern building at 18th and Superior. They say Brett's stance is typical of journalists who haven't bothered to comprehend the diverse points of view running through the black community.

"The [Plain Dealer], instead of doing interviews and talking to kids, they came in here like God and formed an opinion of a community that they know nothing about," says the Rev. Dale Bruce Snyder, Sr., pastor at Quinn Chapel AME Church on 130th St., near Kinsman.

According to the Plain Dealer's records, minorities make up 14.5 percent of newsroom employees: Asians comprise 1.5 percent, African-Americans are 10.4 percent, and Hispanics are 2.6 percent. The percentage of minority employees has hovered around 14 to 15 percent for the last eight years. In fact, the percent of minorities in the newsroom peaked in 1995, when the number reached almost 18 percent.

On the editing desk - where stories are conceived, assigned and shaped - the situation is more stark. The newspaper only has two blacks on its metro desk: Karl Turner is a deputy Metro editor for online and obituaries. Clara Roberts, also a deputy Metro editor, oversees a cluster of general-assignment reporters. Susan Ruiz Patton, the one Hispanic on the Metro desk, helps with election coverage, contest entries and the source list.

The paper's new editor, Susan Goldberg, acknowledges the paltry representation of minorities and women.

"You really should reflect your community your readers whoever it is you're trying to reach out to. I think that you need enough diversity so that you're understanding where those people are coming from," she said in a podcast on cleveland.com.

But the Rev. Marvin McMickle of Antioch Baptist Church wants more than a few black and brown bodies sitting in front of computers.

"Let the Plain Dealer hire black reporters, editors and other managers in proportion to the black population of the region they serve," he wrote, after his name appeared on a list of prominent black leaders whom Brett challenged to come up with a "10-point action plan" to fight urban violence. "Then listen to those people when they tell you that it is not the people who were "called out' that control most of the things that need to be addressed."

But Ashley, a friend of Buford's, doubts that the newspaper will really pay attention to people in her neighborhood.

"They have the power to write whatever they want and then everybody's going to think we're thugs," she says. "They stereotype us already. They are adding to the stereotype and making it worse."

Afi Scruggs is writer, journalist and digital storyteller who lives in South Euclid. She is also a former Plain Dealer metro columnist.