You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
News Options.
After a hundred text messages to contacts. After 2 dozen calls to cops, friends and anyone who might have a clue.
I find a story today that I think is a home run.
Halloween day, a 74 year old man is attacked in his gun shop. A man wielding a military style hatchet smacks the senior citizen in the head drawing blood. The thief reportedly takes 2 semi automatic guns and leaves.
The old man who has owned the store for 33 years, calls for help and is able to identify his attacker and the get a way car. The cops nab him in a nearby county.
It’s not yet 9:30 am but I all ready have a picture of both suspect and victim and I have a request in to talk to the badly injured shop keeper’s family.
911 tape is possible. The man is 74, certainly he has a family, a long history that might be worth telling.
I go to the news meeting. there is a tidal wave of discussion about the Country Music Awards. There is talk about twitter and photographs of country music images and Carrie Underwood’s costumes.
I pitch my story.
Suddenly I am met with crickets.
“What’s the viewer benefit?” I am asked.
Viewer benefit?
What’s the viewer benefit of anything country music related, I wonder.
“Well, the would be killer won’t be able to hurt anymore old dudes with hatchets,” I retort. “That’s viewer benefit.”
The group looks at me as if my suggestion is idiotic.
Someone tells me to make some more calls like I can go to the exclusive news bush and pluck another dynamic story off the vine.
More calls? I’ve been working the phone for 2 hours. All I hear around this table is Country Music Awards nonsense.
Really?
The story I’m pitching is a potential home run if I get the man’s wife or kids. But on this particular morning, a senior citizen being attacked in a senseless act of violence is not considered very important. It’s considered “crime du jour”
I shake my head. The only consistency is the non consistent reaction to stories we might cover.
So I go back in and make a slew more calls.
What else you got? I hear repeatedly from law enforcement agents and public officials.
“Well, I got this story about an old man attacked maliciously by a crazy man with a hatchet.”
“A hatchet attack on Halloween?”
“Yup.”
“Damn, that’s better than anything we got here. They don’t like that?”
“nope.”
“damn”
“Exactly”
And there it is. A day of trying to figure out what is a news story? 24 years in the business and I guess I still don’t know.
What will viewers watch? I guess I don’t know.
What is the viewer benefit? Who knows.
Should I care about women 18-34? I don’t, but maybe I should.
Someone told me a long time ago, NEWS is a four letter word. I know it when I see it. The problem is, what I see is different than what the decision makers I work for see.
So the purity of what is news and the economics of what is news and the managerial sanitizing of what is news collide yet again.
It is not your grandpa’s newscast anymore.
We are an organ grinder’s monkey working for shiny objects. We are driven by ratings and like a fortune teller we try and guess what people might watch.
Remember the days of Walter Cronkite smoking a cigarette and staring into the camera and talking about the day’s events, man landing on the moon or Vietnam? Those days are gone.
We are a watered down version of our journalistic ancestry. We are governed by cell phone apps and Internet banality.
I think my days are numbered much like the news dinosaur I am.
Or maybe I just shrug it off and move on like the news professional I have always been.
Perhaps it’s time to grab a cold one, turn off the country music awards show and watch the ball game.
Some late breaking gratification on this story.
The NBC affiliate led with the attempted ax murder story at 10pm. They learned of it quite probably from our internet post early in the day.
And that is crazy.™