Journalese of the Day: The mayor and 55 City Hall big-shots meet “quietly.”

As I recently wrote, when a reporter says something was done “quietly”, it usually means he or she missed the story that happened a while back. A wonderful example is in this Boston Globe story, page 1 of the Metro section, Aug 15, 2016, under the headline: “City employees undergo ethics refresher course”. The story begins:

“City administrators were warned about the appearances of conflict, cautioned against the lure of abusing their positions, and urged not to disclose confidential information.

“The two-hour seminar, held quietly last month, was intended to serve as a refresher in ethical behavior for city employees, and it comes in response to a federal probe into City Hall.

“Mayor Martin J. Walsh had promised a top-down ethics review after the first of two high-ranking City Hall employees was arrested earlier this year and accused of forcing a popular music festival to hire unneeded union stagehands to work on a concert on City Hall Plaza.”

And then, after 18 paragraphs, two grafs from the end of the story at the bottom of a full column, readers discover that the mayor and 55 City Hall big-shots attended the seminar. Getting such a crowd together “quietly” without a reporter noticing it, tells you something about the Globe’s “coverage” of City Hall. Here are the last two grafs:

“He [Mayor Walsh] invited the Ethics Commission and the state’s supervisor of public records to conduct the seminar, which the mayor and 55 Cabinet members and department heads attended, [Laura, the mayor’s press secretary] Oggeri said.

“A second training session is set for next month for those who could not make the first one, and the city’s law department will be scheduling additional sessions for other city hall staffers, she added.”

And if Ms. Oggieri sends out a press release, maybe a Globe reporter will attend. Or at least, know about it

-Robert Skole