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Israeli TV station says “feh!” to good news
“Why don’t you ever cover the good news?” is a common criticism of the media as a whole.
We hear it considerably less at a community newspaper like The Daily Sentinel, where our values include reflecting a wide swath of life in our community, not just the aberrant, which is the very definition of news.
But make no mistake, that value comes at a cost. For a medium that is immediately reactive to ratings, the cost of good news can sometimes be too high.
In a column titled “The news you want” by Israeli journalist Yair Lapid, he explains why he abandoned a weekly 2-minute “One Good Person” feature that was a ratings sinkhole.
(Thanks to Poynter columnist Alan Abbey for spotting this item.)
Comments
By Daniel
October 7, 2008 4:07 PM | Link to this
Half a million years ago, when I was barely 19 and the editor of a small-town weekly newspaper, I decided to do something like this. We called it “10 who make a difference” and encouraged the community to nominate the ten people who made the town what it was.
After taking nominations for weeks, we had names of exactly two people from the community and the staff ended up being forced to fill out the roster. I thought it would be a great way to counter the “only bad news” argument, but, in the end, readers didn’t seem to give a flip about seeing that their neighbors got their just due in print.
By Laurena
October 7, 2008 6:30 PM | Link to this
Sheesh. That’s a good example. Forced “good news” can be just that: forced.