As it’s not normally worth reading, I tend to play a game with my local paper. I call it ‘find the pointless story’. Snappy title, I’m sure you agree.
But we’ve all seen those ‘local news’ stories which make you go :dubious:, wondering why they made it into print. Stolen wheelbarrows, slightly damaged garden fences, that kind of thing. Normally they’re buried inside filling up a few lines.
Not today.
Front page splash, two-inch text:
BLAZE KILLS GUINEA PIGS
I’m impressed.
I kinda miss a feature our local weekly used to have:
[Bumfuck] News
“Bumfuck” being a local burg even smaller than the one the paper is based in. It was bits about whose daughter and son-in-law are visiting from Ohio, and how they had a nice afternoon and enjoyed lemonade and cookies. Total gossip and who the hell cares. It stopped several years ago and we can only figure that the nosy old biddy writing the column finally died or something.
Local newspaperman here. Started one last year. Largely because the established local daily was much like you described. One headline last week: “Warm weather means summer fun!” Urgh.
This week (I’m a weekly) we featured these headlines:
Economic Developments and the impact of local banks
Gold Wing Rally (I have something light)
The impact of leaks at a local chemical plant on long-term health
It CAN be done. It just takes work.
Good for you! The most annoying thing about my local one is that it’s not really a small paper - a daily readership of 100,000, and the evening edition (which the headline above came from) has 60,000. You’d have thought they could do better than always leading with (a) national news which happens to impact on this region or (b) whichever crank has phoned the newsdesk that day. Investigative journalism? Forget it. I mean, who wants to hear about corrupt local politicians, the reasons the local health authority is throwing money away, the entrenched pockets of poverty in a supposedly-well-off part of the country, or anything troublesome like that? Here, have a picture of a three-legged cat instead (seriously).