Are bad words related to success of newspapers?

Today's challenge: To talk about language we don't use in the Daily Herald without using the language. This could be interesting.

I recently engaged in a polite but testy exchange with a reporter angry and frustrated because I'd removed a direct quote from the end of a story in which a downstate politician summed up the special legislative session with a mild vulgarity.

The word the politician used was not on George Carlin's list of seven words you don't hear on the radio, but it would be offensive to some readers and by the end of this particular story, the point had been well made that lawmakers were not happy to be back in Springfield when there was nothing they could do until their leadership got its act together. The line was telling. It certainly reflected the lawmaker's frustration, but ultimately using it came down to a question of whether it was so important as to justify making an exception to our paper's fairly strict prohibition against profanity and vulgarity in print.

I decided it wasn't.

The reporter fundamentally disagreed. He thought the phrase was a rare exhibition of a lawmaker in Springfield expressing his true feelings about the processes of government. He further added the belief that one reason newspaper readership in general is declining - a trend, I would note, that is not shared at the Daily Herald - is because the language we use seems more genteel than that of society in general. This, he said, makes us less interesting.

I don't deny he has a point. The Daily Herald's policy on profanity forbids - unless specific exceptions are granted by the managing editor or editor - the use of even mild profanity, including words that are common on prime-time television and don't make audiences flinch at high school plays and musicals. I suspect we are more discreet in our use of such language than is the public at large.

But I'm not ready to suggest that people don't buy a newspaper because it doesn't print a handful of rough words. Would that the industry's problems were so easily addressed.

Another, even more challenging editing decision involved a court case last week in which I removed from a story about the sex abuse of a 2-year-old a clinical, but vivid, description of acts that the suspect did - and didn't - commit with the child. The reporter's contention was that the description was necessary in order to show the degree of the crime and give insights into why the person received the sentence he did. Mine was that in order to explain what the defendant did not do, we needed to include details about what he did do, and that presented a picture of the crime that was simply more detailed than most people would want to see - or needed to see in order to understand the nature of what occurred.

Real life is not always clean. Politicians and public figures don't always use the most polite language and people sometimes do horrific things to each other. As a newspaper, we have the responsibility of writing about these things, yet in a way that respects even readers whose sensitivities may be more heightened than those of the society at large. That doesn't mean we should sanitize our language or descriptions. But it does compel us to be judicious in our use of them.

In cases like these two recent stories, the decision of what details to use or words to quote could easily go either way. But I do hope that we aren't at a point where the survival of the medium hinges on it.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.