The story, by sports reporter Mike Cooper, gave readers insight into what the girl’s life had been like in the foster system before her adoption. It wrote about the new adjustments the couple who adopted the girl — Jodi Curnutte and Becky Hall — have had to make.
The adjustments reminded me a lot of the kinds of things my wife and I had to do when we brought our first son home 20 years ago.
It is a non-traditional structure these folks are forming — two moms and an adopted daughter — which was part of the reason we wrote about it.
By Monday, there were some strong responses to the story.
One woman visited our newsroom to state that she thought the story was inappropriate to run on Mother’s Day.
One caller who reached editorial page Editor Tom Hawkins’ voicemail left a message stating that the editors who put the story in the paper should have a fairly violent medical procedure performed upon them.
Throughout the week, too, Cooper and others here have received calls and emails thanking us for running the story.
Mike Cooper and the other reporters at the News-Sun have been challenged by myself, our publisher Steve Sidlo — and by you readers, through your own choices about whether or not to read us.
The challenge is this: find the most interesting stories you can possibly find in Clark or Champaign County. Tell those stories with originality and attention to detail. Find the stories that no one else in our community is capable of telling, and bring them to our readers.
Make it worth their time and money to pick up the Springfield News-Sun, every day.
Then, once you’ve done that, go home tired, wake up the next day and do it again.
That is our challenge to our reporters, and we are lucky to be blessed with a talented staff who can do this far more often than not.
And that is what Mike Cooper did with his story about Jodi Curnutte, Becky Hall and Donyale Hall-Curnutte.
The caller who wanted us editors to receive the medical procedure said he didn’t object to the fact that a girl like Donyale was getting a loving home; he didn’t want to read her story on Mother’s Day.
Now, Mother’s Day is a good way of showering moms with some additional attention, chocolate and flowers — even if my wife is the one who actually ordered the flowers this year for my mom.
But there is nothing about any other families’ relationships to one another that affects my relationship with my mother. How could there be? Our bond is our own, independent of any outsider.
So, too, are the relationships that our callers and emailers have with their own mothers. So, too, is the family relationship that Jodi Curnutte and Becky Hall are forming with their daughter.
So, as journalists, we brought our readers an interesting story about a local family whose dynamics are different than those of many of us.
That’s what we try to do all the time in this newspaper — introduce our readers to important or new or interesting information about people and lives in Clark and Champaign County.
I can’t wait to see what we come up with next.
Jim Bebbington is managing editor of the Springfield News-Sun.
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