Every town has at least one – a fireman who rescued an
old lady from a fire, a vet returning from war, a high school senior awarded a
full ride to an Ivy League or perhaps a local who made it on to a TV reality
show.
And just as every town has a hero of its own, the local
news rag is obliged to chronicle his or her story. It’s something readers
expect of their local newspaper. The story about the school board sending its
members to Disneyland on the taxpayers’ dime can wait another day.
While journalists see merit in these heroes’
accomplishments, they don’t quite understand the coverage and play these types
of stories receive. Journalists have never been fully able to wrap their heads
around the concept of writing what readers want. The concept of what readers
want has always been a second priority to journalists – to what journalists
want.
Journalists from time to time have resisted being
assigned the story of the woman who taught poor people in the Andes to sell
their blankets on E-Bay, but editors pull the “Wegotta cover it” card
and send the argumentative journalist to the assignment.
Inevitably these often inane stories, such as a local
woman whose name was called on the Price is Right, is read more than the
two-week in depth investigative piece on the impacts of soldiers blogging
during wartime on the morale of the country. Still, each journalist ends up
with a hometown hero story in his or her clip file to show prospective
editors that not all journalists are cold-blooded bastards and that they can
write uplifting stories.
For editors, stories of local heroes are a win-win;
easy stories to assign, usually comes with art that can make A1 and quenches
the readers’ demands. The only thing that can top a story of a hometown hero is
a kid with cancer. Editors and readers can’t get enough stories of kid with
cancer!
In the end, readers get what they want, a story of one
of their own, and journalists remain mostly unscathed from the incident
and move to cover more pressing news – like how to get his money back from the
paper’s vending machines.
More from @JournalistsLike
- Stuff Journalists Like – #63 Leaving Journalism
- Stuff Journalists Like – #48 Desk Dining
- Stuff Journalists Like – #73 Citizen Journalists | The List
@JournalistsLike Recommends
- Hidden Fears, A Love Story (High Road Artist)
- New Life on the Llano (High Road Artist)
Topics:
a story about a hometown hero
I was a sensitive reporter in Vietnam, not at all like your stereotypes in the blog, not at all. And I sometimes hung out with Joseph Fried, the highly sensitive and always PC reporter for the New York Daily News, then America’s biggest selling daily newspaper.
Joe had to do a hometowner a week for the Daily News, coverage of a GI (or Marine or flyboy or whatever) from the New York City area who had done something brave or good, or who otherwise exemplified the spirit of the American fighting man. Because most of them were combat heroes, and most of them involved killing the enemy, Joe called these hometowners “Local boy makes gook”.
Some of these are a little lame. The hometown heroes and nut graph sections are brilliant. Lots of truth.