by Jesse Fox Mayshark
"Oh, jeez," I said last Friday afternoon to my friend Joe Tarr. "I just remembered this is the week for the media column."
"Oh," said Joe, who ostensibly works for me and sometimes writes this thing.
"Do you have any ideas?" I prodded hopefully. I always know I'm in trouble when I have to ask that question.
"Well," he said, "you could write about how we're always struggling to come up with media column ideas and throwing them together at the last minute."
He was joking, I think (it's hard to tell). But it was also the only idea anyone offered, so I jumped on it. And here you are reading it.
That's how things happen around here, more often than we'd like to admit. And not just here. Hell, at Metro Pulse we've got a whole week to try to come up with things to put in the paper. At the dailies where I've worked (including the venerable News-Sentinel), the pressure to produce on the spot is exponentially higher. It's not that there's no planning or prioritizing; it's just that you can only plan and deliberate so much when you have the constant need to move things through the system and out the door, the constant holes in the page layouts to fill. The most principled editors I've ever met aren't above elevating a press release to a news story or a boring piece of fluff to a page one feature when circumstances dictate it.
And that's why I'm often amused by the various accusations of media conspiracies people toss around. Of course, if you read any publication long enough, you see patterns of coverage and broad agendas. (For example, Metro Pulse likes locally brewed beer and doesn't like suburban sprawl.) But the tendency of readers and viewers to assign great significance to the placement or headline or tenor of any particular article or broadcast report is—while understandable—often misguided. Most people who work at newspapers and magazines are happy simply to get the damn thing published every day or week or month. I've never worked in TV, but I've seen and heard enough to believe the same holds true there.
Under those circumstances, there is an inevitably random aspect to what gets reported and what doesn't. Or maybe random's not the right word; it's more like chaos theory. There are reasons, but they can be hard to trace. Somebody sees something they think is interesting while they're out driving around, and they mention it to a friend, and the friend knows somebody whose wife works at the newspaper, and they mention it to her at a Christmas party, and she mentions it to her editor, and the editor looks at the story schedule for the next day and says, "Yeah, we need something for page 4. Make a couple phone calls and see what you find out."
Or a call comes in to a reporter while he's sitting there with nothing to do because the story he was working on just fell through because a key source is out of the office until next Tuesday, and the phone call, which he might not even answer if he were busy with something else, is about something he's personally interested in (high school kids protesting vivisection, maybe, or somebody with a huge baseball card collection), so he says, "Sure, I've got a few hours this afternoon, I'll drive out there."
All of this comes out in the newspaper or on TV, and people—being the organizational creatures we are—look for patterns to explain why and how their news is the way it is.
But I think that's healthy, conspiracies or no conspiracies. When somebody writes or calls to complain that we're covering something too much or not enough or too negatively or too positively, it forces us to look more deliberately at how we're doing things and maybe to realize that—however haphazardly—we have indeed run six stories on one thing or no stories on something else. Or, to use a painfully true example, that only a handful of the people we interviewed for our "Future of Knoxville" story were women. When that happens, we go about the office flagellating ourselves with plastic Mardi Gras beads and swearing to each other not to do it again.
Until the next deadline, at least.
December 7, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 49
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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