After “Scouts’ Honor” was published in the Idaho Falls POST REGISTER, powerful sectors of the community launched a public relations campaign against the newspaper, questioning the reporting and focusing on the sexual orientation of the series reporter, Peter Zuckerman.

Zuckerman describes being publicly outed and verbally attacked in an essay for the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association.

Then managing editor (now executive editor) Dean Miller also describes the fallout in an article for The Nieman Reports:

The Post Register is a wee dory of a newspaper: With 26,000 daily circulation, it’s not buoyed by any corporate chain and has an opinion page often reviled in this livid corner of reddest Idaho for its reliable dissent.

Last year, by exposing Boy Scout pedophiles and those who failed to kick them out of the scouting program, we energized three of our community’s big forces against us, including those most able to punish our newspaper — the community’s majority religion, the richest guys in town, and the conservative machine that controls Idaho.

>> Read Dean Miller’s article.

>> Read Peter Zuckerman’s essay.

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Carrie Ching is an award-winning, independent multimedia journalist and producer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. For six years, she led digital storytelling projects at the Center for Investigative Reporting as senior multimedia producer. Her multimedia reports have been featured by NPR.org, The Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, Grist, Time.com, Fast Company, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, KQED, PBS NewsHour, Salon.com, Mother Jones, Public Radio International, Poynter, Columbia Journalism Review and many other publications. Her specialty is crafting digital narratives and exploring ways to use video, audio, photography, animation and interactive graphics to push the boundaries of storytelling on the Web, tablets and mobile. Her work has been honored with awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Best of the West, the Online News Association, Scripps Howard, The Gracies, and was part of the entry in a Pulitzer-finalist project. Prior to her time at CIR she was a magazine and book editor, video journalist, newspaper reporter and TV comedy scriptwriter. She was on the 2010 Eddie Adams Workshop faculty as a multimedia producer working with MediaStorm to teach digital storytelling techniques to photojournalists. She completed a master’s degree in journalism at UC Berkeley in 2005.