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October 12, 2005
What's news?
One challenge of the news business is deciding what is news. Journalists learn to use their brains and all their senses to answer this question.
My eyes tell me there is brown grunge on the maple leaves on trees near the roads in my neighborhood. My guess is road salt could have something to do with this, but I’m hoping a Monitor reporter will look into it. Maybe it will be a story (if it is widespread and new), maybe not.
Anyone’s eyes can see that autumn isn’t up to snuff this year. That realization led to the centerpiece story and photos on tomorrow’s front page.
Our noses tell us how successfully the city is combating the odor at the Concord sewage treatment plant. Unfortunately, especially for those who live near it or downwind of it, this is one of the city’s longest running stories.
Thanks mainly to readers, our ears lead us to many stories. Ken Jordan called today to make sure we had seen the obituary of Joseph D. Shields III. I had read it and noted that in addition to a successful medical career, Shields once played in the Milwaukee Braves organization. What Ken added that I didn’t know was that Shields was “the Matt Bonner of his time,” meaning Concord’s most celebrated schoolboy athlete. Ken thought our sports department might want to follow up. I passed his idea on.
Our reporter Meg Heckman had her ears open at a recent conference on covering aging. The first result was last Sunday’s fun look from Meg and photographer Ken Williams at how people define “old.”
Some content comes from thinking and talking. We aspite to give Monitor readers as many stories as possible that they won’t find elsewhere. For the Opinion pages, we’ve begun brainstorming about how to expand our local reach. We hope our latest talks will lead to local commentary on what it’s like to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court, on a dispute over the flooding of local property and on the effects of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Many stories are in the paper because they’re important news events that anyone would recognize. The terrible flooding in southwestern New Hampshire is a current example. But journalists have some discretion in what we write about, too. In exercising this discretion, we rely on our senses, our thinking caps and our readers’ good advice.
Posted by Mike Pride at October 12, 2005 05:13 PM
Comments
I am glad I discovered this blog because it has a lot of interesting things in it about the immediate Concord area which I miss. Most importantly, I enjoy reading notes from a reporter which sometimes can actually have more color and clarity than wire stories in the paper.
Thank you for this blog> The newspaper site does and excellent job at giving me good glimpses into the city that I used to work and live in and where I met some of the nicest and caring people anywhere in New Hampshire.
Posted by: Bill at October 13, 2005 01:41 AM