Dog bites man.

Yeah, BillyT, in retrospect, the words were harsh. The guy probably did exactly what his editor told him to do. He didn't deserve my personal crack.

But if this is the best Marty Biron and the gang at the Globe can come up with -- another example of provincialism emanating from the capital of paranoia and provincialism -- then there even are more problems on Morrissey than anyone thought previously.

 

Considering that an innocent citizen got shot stone dead by police at a Red Sox victory celebration, I can think of a few newsworthy stories on the celebrations here. News side of the Globe has been running extremely stupid stories on page one all during the Series. Like the day before game one, we Bostonians were told the amazing news that World Series tickets are expensive, hard to get, and usually wind up going to wealthy and influential people. Stop the bleep presses! Get the Pulitzer Committee out of bed!
There are a lot of talented people at the Globe. Top management would not appear to be among them. So the quarterly reports of the Times Corporation tell me.

 

Most of NY responded with a huge yawn

 

Spnited, I would wonder how you would know most of NY yawned, but that would be counterproductive to the conversation.

Frank, a 1,000 folks don't seem like much. But it kinda is. That's not the number of web hits. That's the number of people who went thru the trouble of emailing the story to someone else. I would bet that's a pretty significant number for a web story. Come to think of it, I've never emailed a story to anyone in my life.

I never said this was the greatest story ever written. Nor the best idea. ... My point is simply that what we consider good stories and what the public considers good stories are often times very, very different things. And sometimes we let down our readers because we feel we couldn't possibly sink to such levels of reporting. To put it another way, we've become journalism snobs.

Go back and read these posts. We've thrown out terms like "news hook" and pointed out the root of "newspaper" and talked about "integrity" and "ethics" and "real journalism." And it all sounds real good. But those terms don't apply to every story, every situation. They certainly didn't in this case.

 

I'm pretty sure, bob, if you checked FOX's World Series ratings in NY, you'd find most of New York yawned.
Despite what some idiot editor in Boston thinks, there are thousands of people walking the streets of NYC every day with Red Sox caps, shirts, etc. on and nobody pays attention to them.

 

Among them, Rudy Giuliani.

 

Exactly. Nothing wrong with sending the reporter to New York, but the execution kinda sucked. He really could have had fun with this. You have the Red Sox celebrating another championship and the Yankees falling apart, but there was no humor in that story. Also, am I the only one bothered by the idea of a reporter wearing team garb and doing it while on the clock?

 

Well, considering that the reporter is paid by the same entity that owns 17 percent of the Red Sox, you shouldn't be shocked.

 

But if your newspaper isn't "popular", who's reading your work? If people generally don't read your paper because they think the product as a whole is dull, then your great hard-hitting enterprise story is completely wasted. Besides, journalism is supposed to serve the community -- not the journalists' own egos -- so why is it wrong to put out a product that appeals to readers' tastes? It's not a popularity contest, but journalists should also get off their high horse and see that producing a few fluff stories that readers enjoy every now and then isn't selling out your journalistic integrity, but rather furthering the mission of serving your readers.

Also, your point that newspapers should be entertaining AND informative is valid, and yes, there are times when you can do both in one story. But not every single story in the paper has to be both (look at it from the other side: how many city hall stories are both informative AND entertaining?). What is important is that the paper as a whole accomplishes both goals, which means having a good mix of stories that are both, and stories that are one or the other.

Let's put aside the quality of this particular story for a moment and just talk about the basic principle of it. A fluff piece that gets people to read and helps make people think that the paper is worth reading would help bring in resources journalists need to do other, hard-hitting pieces or to just cover stuff like city hall, which aren't the most appealing things to read but still need to be covered. Besides, consider this: Like it or not, part of the resources that pay for great investigative work come from subscriptions by people who just want the paper for the Sunday inserts. But would you argue that the newspaper would be better off without that revenue since those people don't read the paper for the stories that they "should" read or stories that are up to our personal level of journalistic integrity? And what do you think about a news reporter who laments that the sports section is more popular with readers than the much more important and hard-hitting news section? Hell, you can make the argument that much of the sports section is pure entertainment and not really any news of substance when compared to stories on Iraq. But the point is: Readers care about it. If putting some purely entertaining stories in the paper can help corral more readers and more resources, I don't see any problem with it.

 

We already run the comics, advice columns, all kinds of fun shit, and always have.

That doesn't mean we can't, in our professional opinion, decide a story has no value whatsoever, as news or as entertainment. We've seen it before. And we don't have to read past the headline to have the gist of it. Lest you think I'm an old fart, I'll give you some pandering right here. I'll appeal to SportsJournalists.com's younger readers by quoting Kurt ... ahhh ... Cobain, yes, that's it, Cobain, that flannel-wearing dead fella. "I wish I was like you, easily amused."

 

Your point is well taken, and I agree that fluff pieces are part of the status quo. But this piece, I feel, is worse than fluff. But that really is beside the point.

As far a paper's responsibility to serve the community, I agree. But I don't think the paper serves anything or anyone by pandering to stunts like this. The papers that I enjoy most, and I've found those that still read them enjoy, are those that raise the level of discussion, not lower itself to what people will find "cool" or "popular". This may be me on the journalists' high-horse, but I'm really not trying to sound elitist here. I'm just saying what I think.

I don't think we, as journalists, need to settle for stupid stories like this to get people to read our paper. I think we should step our game up, to take an athlete's cliche, and be more creative and work harder to put out stuff that no one has seen or read before. That way, people will want to read our papers/web sites and we will have added to the public discourse.

I work at a paper in Georgia and I guarantee you we could almost double our rack sales if we wrote primarily about why UGA rules and why Georgia Tech sucks. And at some level, that is what the piece in question did with the Red Sox and Yankees. Instead, we try to go beyond the surface, talk to players no one knows about, investigate trends, do stuff that hasn't been done. If I can make someone say "Wow, I did not know that" once every week or so, then I am doing my job well. Do you think anybody that read this piece said, "Wow, I didn't know Yankees fans hate the Red Sox."