Language can be a tricky thing for a newspaper.

An incident involving a recent story published by a former employer of mine, the Albany-based Times-Union newspaper, reminded me of this reality.

Here are the facts of that case:

The newspaper published a story about a reported rape in a popular downtown area, and as part of the coverage, included reaction from people at the bars and restaurants there. That reaction included this quote: “That's the thing with Albany, there's always a ghetto nearby.”

That sentence apparently drew complaints from offended readers, and it prompted an apology from the paper's managing editor, Mary Fran Gleason. “The reporter exercised utterly poor judgment by including the quote. ... Ditto for the night city editor who failed to delete the quote and for the copy editors who also failed to red-line it,” she wrote in an editor's blog.

I was struck by the tone Gleason took in this apology; she certainly didn't hold back in expressing her view that people really screwed up on this one.

But I was also struck by many of the reader comments posted online below her apology.

“It's a quote. It expresses other people's opinions, not the opinion of the Times Union editorial board,” one reader wrote. “Ghetto doesn't automatically mean black people. Albany has a student ghetto. It means a bad neighborhood.

“And yeah, Albany has a lot of work cut out to clean up its neighborhoods.”

So the controversy really boils down to the word ghetto. Taken literally, the word does mean an area populated by members of a minority group. You can look it up.

But many people now use that word to refer to a bad neighborhood in terms of its crime rate and property conditions - they're not thinking about race.

My guess is that person in the quote was not trying to say Albany has a problem because it has minority-populated areas. But the bottom line is that is how some people would read into a quote like that.

Newspapers do need to be mindful of how certain words can convey different meanings to different people.

I'm curious to hear what readers of The Citizen think. If we had included a similar quote in a crime story, what would the reaction have been? And if we had issued a similar apology, would we be accused of being too politically correct?

With the luxury of hindsight, I can say that I would have paraphrased that patron's comments rather than quote directly. The person was making a point that Albany has too many high-crime areas, which makes the “safer” areas vulnerable, as well.

To be honest, though, I don't know if I would have been sharp enough to spot the inflammatory nature of that direct quote ahead of time.

Executive editor Jeremy Boyer's column appears Saturdays in The Citizen and he can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 231 or jeremy.boyer@lee.net