I think I may have hit a hot button in my conversation with the paper’s editor. He seems upset that I questioned his priorities. “We’re busting our butts trying to cover the news with half the staff we had 10 years ago, and I’m sorry if it’s not splashy or gory enough to suit your tastes.”
I wonder how many reporters they needed to cover the cat story.
As far as the argument that “it isn’t our story; it happened somewhere else,” this comes from a paper that runs major stories about someone’s relative who drives a tank in Iraq, and publishes letters to the editor complaining about Obama’s international policy.
another factor in small town news reporting is not wanting to make a bad situation worse, not wanting to make other family and friends suffer more by seeing it in the newspaper. That might explain the editor’s comment about “not splashy or gory enough for you.” Sounds personal.
I doubt if he is related, but he probably does know them (it’s hard not to be known in a small town). I think the “trying to spare them” is a factor. He even asked me (sarcastically) if he thought the paper should call up the surviving dad and ask him for comment. Not that it’s a great idea, but I’m pretty sure most news services would do exactly that without hesitation.
The secretary at the baking school I went to lost a brother-in-law in a major airline accident. Two TV stations in his city called wanting to interview the family, which emphatically said “NO!”
The one station backed away gracefully, but the other persisted and was pushy about it. The family had to threaten legal action. The secretary was pissed at the station because, as she said, “The only reason they cared is because he died with a bunch of other people. If he’d died in a car accident they wouldn’t have cared.”