The home of former Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss burned down last week in a place called Pahrump in the Nevada desert. No one was hurt. Is that something you needed or wanted to know?
I read it in the San Francisco Chronicle. It irritates me that I lack the memory to retain new pieces of info, like the names of my students or where I parked my car, but for some reason I still recognize Heidi Fleiss and know where in nowhere you can find Pahrump.
Knowing and caring are two different things. I know and don’t care. After I read it I felt the Chron cheated me out of valuable minutes of my time.
Publishers emphasize that a story should be worth the cost of the expensive paper it is printed on. But stories should also be worth the reader’s time. That’s the value of the things a reader might do instead: Maybe Facebook friends or play on the Wii. Don’t lowball that value.
So why does a non-local news story end up in front of your nose? An endless number of stories come to our local papers over the “wire.” Sometimes I think that the people who select wire stories are blind and lack screen readers. Otherwise why pick a story about a has-been madam in the Mojave for NorCal readers?
In beginning reporting we teach students that events become news when they fit one of a short list of categories: Proximity, prominence, importance, timeliness, novelty, conflict or emotional impact. Or: When everyone talks about it you can’t ignore it.
More broadly, news stories should do one of three things: Inform, entertain or connect a community together. The Fleiss story did none of that. It fit the prominence category barely. If it were Lady Gaga’s house, well that’s a different story. She could sneeze and make news. But Fleiss? To get my attention, she needs to sneeze in my face during a flu pandemic.
Meanwhile, all the talk where I was last week — Mendocino County — was of a tanker that rolled over south of Highway 20, turning the 101 into a clogged one-way lane that kept Willitsites from their turkey pickups and half of Humboldt County from their Bay Area destinations.
Back home, the Times-Standard to its credit skipped the Fleiss story and briefed the Willits tanker. But it ran a bylined AP story twice as long about how body scans caused few problems in airports across the state. Tell me, which story has more conflict? People trapped in their cars on Highway 101 as the time for turkey trussing ticks away or people in LAX smiling because the X-rays and pat-downs didn’t feel like the sexual assault the press had promo-ed.
In a recent blog post, online news guru Robert Niles suggested that newspapers should focus on five things: food, faith, education, labor and business. I think he should have added transportation, health and safety.
The problem with many local newspapers is that they place too much importance on the timeliness and novelty categories. It is called a newspaper isn’t it? But therein lies our current disconnect with newspapers. Because the stuff that affects our lives most isn’t new — the daily headaches of our jobs or lack of jobs, our commute to those jobs, our struggles to stay healthy and keep our families healthy and safe. Life tends to the tedious. To be relevant, stories need to touch on that tedium, but reporters and editors say: Booorring! So they focus on the new. During Thanksgiving, when most people are stuck in turkey traffic those news people have to stretch all the way to Pahrump for the new and novel.
Niles focused on what we call universals: The problems most readers have in common. He argues that most of us spend from 12-20 years in the educational system and then send our kids through it. Most people have jobs. Businesses affect our lives in terms of both our paycheck and in what we can buy and use. We all need and want to eat. For many people faith is our first language and the community within our community. I think in more simple terms: Money is the great universal. We all need to eat, to have a roof over our heads, and have some enjoyment in life.
A news story hits reader gold when it combines multiple categories. Consider a story that made headlines in papers across the state and nation: The U.S. Senate was set to vote on the Food Safety Modernization Act on Monday, which would make the biggest changes to our food inspection process in 70 years. It could be a big boost to small farmers, who were exempted from the onerous inspection requirements by a recent amendment to the bill after they argued that growers that supply to local areas don’t have the problems we’ve seen from large food processors. And it could help keep E. coli out of our escarole. The Times-Standard didn’t have this story even though: 1) It is about food; 2) It will affect our local farmers; and 3) is related to our health. And in a more traditionally journalistic sense, it is about the new, the important and is a story full of conflict: Big nasty corporate farms versus Farmer Eddie.
Newsworthiness is a tough call. In October I went with three students to New York and we sat through the morning meeting of the editorial board of the Associated Press. That’s where they compose their list of top headlines from among all the stories in the world. The stories they bandied about included riots in Europe over raising the retirement age, the continuing mortgage crisis (nothing new on that), Mexican police burning 140 tons of marijuana (nice video!) and the world’s longest cat, which garnered the most hits on Yahoo! News (the AP’s top customer).
You might have missed the cat story sitting in traffic somewhere, trying to get your kid to school and make it to work on time. Or maybe you were just Facebooking your friends about how well you did on your Wii. If you think the time you spent reading this column wasn’t worth it, calculate the opportunity cost and send me a bill. I’ll donate the amount to Food for People. We all need to eat.
Marcy Burstiner is an associate professor of journalism and mass technology at Humboldt State. You can donate directly to Food for People at: http://www.foodforpeople.org/Donate.html
This article appears in Empire Falters.
Newsworthyness is a tough call?
Half the eligible voters don’t participate, 8,000 U.S. families continue to be foreclosed every month since Jan.’09, we’re living amid the 6th largest extinction event on Earth, the average American must work a month for an hour of doctor/dentist care while corporations enjoy special INS status to import executives from India, but our doctors and lawyers retain their protected class and Americans are paying the price.
At least Sonoma State has the courage to publish an entire book EACH YEAR on “The 25 Top Censored Stories In The U.S.”.
Continued self-censorship is one reason our culture continues its decline.
John Osborn’s “Interested Parties” was a myth-smasher exposing a local legacy of political control.
FOLLOW UP!!!!
Correction:
8,000 new families face foreclosure EVERY DAY since Jan. ’09.
Regrettably, for many folks the news is just another form of entertainment. What’s “newsworthy” translates as “what’s most entertaining”, and nothing more.
Marcy, your problem here is the assumption that editors choose the wire content at the T-S. That is not the case. At the T-S their Copy Desk Chief Cheryl Karnes for the most part chooses their wire content. As everyone in the design industry here knows, Karnes’ reputation is mediocre at best in graphic design, she never worked at a newspaper ever, has only the training and experience that the T-S has offered.. Which of course is almost zero.
So put an unskilled, untrained, obviously biased pixel monkey in charge of the wire content and layout of a daily newspaper, and you end up with the “Sub-Standard.”
The criticism of the T-S should not be for running these stories– they have no clue what non-local content is going to run until they themselves pick up the paper the next day. The criticism should be of the editors for intentionally allowing this problem to continue. It proves what we all suspect: that the uncaring approach to the news at the T-S goes all the way to the top.
I don’t know who belongs to the group “everyone in the design industry” referenced by Jyrko in a previous comment, but I know Cheryl Karnes and her professional background. Jyrko just doesn’t have the facts right. Cheryl began working in the newspaper industry while still in college, starting at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. She began as a typesetter, became shift lead, eventually editing religion columns and contributing stringer copy to the entertainment department as well as creating type specification for leading advertisers, including the now-defunct major department stores May Company and Broadway. She worked at The Evening Outlook in Santa Monica and The Daily Breeze in Torrance, both in Southern California, both community newspapers similar to The Times-Standard. She worked as a writer, editor and production designer for The Palos Verdes Review and Long Beach Review magazines, monthly publications in Southern California. As in independent graphic designer, writer and editor she has created editorial copy, advertising, annual reports yearbooks and newsletters for a host of clients, including a leading software designer in San Pedro, California, and the University of Southern California. She designed and edited newsletters and promotional copy for Arcata-based Internews covering journalism and information technology endeavors in eastern Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia. I know this because I work in the technology side of the printing industry and for over 25 years Cheryl has been a frequent contact when I’m called in to troubleshoot equipment and network problems. Her skills in journalism, design and print technology are remarkable. The content and design quality at The Times-Standard has improved since she became copy chief. They are lucky to have her.
Jyrko should get his/her facts straight. As a reader of the Times-Standard, I have noticed a substantial improvement in copy-editing and an increase in local coverage (esp. in the business area) since Cheryl Karnes has been working there. I also worked with Ms Karnes at Internews, an international nonprofit based in Arcata, and was on the committee that hired her. She has worked at several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, as mentioned in the comment from tmaxster. At Internews, she was extremely compentent, organized, attentive to detail and dedicated in her role producing newsletters (including both design and writing) and other print materials. It’s ironic that Jyrko criticizes Karnes’ news skills while writing unsubstantiated inaccurate information her/hiself.
I also have personal knowledge of Cheryl Karnes’ news and graphics experience as the previous 2 posters have outlined. I’ve seen her resume and have worked with her. The NC Journal should take down posts that attack any non-public individual. In this instance, Jyrko’s post is not only a personal attack, it is deliberately false.
Admittedly, we don’t know “everyone in the graphic community” in our area, but we do feel that Jyrko’s comments are not factual. Government and business coverage and the design of the paper have all improved in the past few years with Cheryl Karnes as copy chief at the Times-Standard. As a local business owners, we have had contact with her when she has carefully fact-checked copy about our shop and about other businesses in Old Town. We are surprised that the North Coast Journal would allow its comments to be used in what is obviously a personal attack with no basis in fact.