Newsworthiness

In order for a subject to be worth of reporting, it must land in several of the following categories:

• unusual event
• extraordinary event
• involves notable people
• timeliness
• proximity
• scary/violent (IF IT BLEEDS, IT LEADS)

This podcast was really just a review for me. I learned all of this while in high school when I was copy editing for Hempfield's publication, The Royal. I think the most important category out of this list is probably proximity. Of course there can be some exceptions, but usually, it helps when we talk about stuff that's going on close to home. When I was a senior in high school, Jeannette was going nuts because Pryor was taking them to States, and blah blah blah. Anyway, my paper (remember that I went to Hempfield, not Jeannette) decided to cover a story about Pryor's success on the football field and basketball court. Needless to say, it was definately newsworthy. However, when the issue was distributed, our advisor recieved a ton of emails from coaches and teaching staff while some of the newspaper staff received complaints during classes. "Why would Hempfield write an article about Jeannette?" People were so mad! We explained to everyone that it was just something that was newsworthy, but in the end, people were still mad. It's not like it was The Royal's fault that Hempfield's sports teams suck beyond belief...

I guess part of the problem was that the Pryor article took up half of our sports section. Whoops. But anyway, this really shows how important proximity is. Would we still have printed the article knowing everyone's reaction? Probably.

So, at the end of the day, we kinda realized that sometimes it's more important to please your audience than to write an article that will most likely infuriate 2,500 students.

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