by Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region
Back when I was a reporter for a daily newspaper in Virginia, people would often complain when my newspaper put a lurid story about a violent crime on its front page. A fair complaint, I would respond. But isn't it also bad when a newspaper hides a murder on its inside pages, or doesn't cover it all? What does that say about death and violence in our society?
I got a chance to ask this question more directly when a young man was killed outside my window in August. The murder - two gunmen shot down a man in the middle of the street on a sunny Friday the 13th at 11 am, within sight or earshot of dozens of people - did not make it into any of the local papers the next day, at least as a story.
This surprised me. I hadn't expected the New York Times to cover it, because it tends to focus on larger trends or feature stories. But I had expected one or more of the major local tabloids to write a story. These are the city's real local newspapers, and I respect their job. But only The New York Post made any mention of it, and it was inaccurate. Its "Crime Blotter" section said "police found a body on a Crown Heights street" - not quite right, since the man was still alive when the police arrived, and "found" makes a murder in the street sound oddly passive.
In an effort to find out why this murder wasn't covered, and to get some insight into the New York newsgathering process, I called various editors. Eventually I got a hold of a city editor at one of the tabloids who is in charge of daily coverage.
His explanation revealed something about how the news process works in general and on this particular day. There were basically three general factors, most having to do with the peculiar nature of the news business in August.
One, the newspaper's staff is down in the summer, due to vacations and such, so there are fewer troops to send out into the field. Two, the newspaper's advertising is down in August. This means a smaller "news hole," which is the space in a paper set aside for news, because on normal days the amount of advertising a newspaper has, not the amount of news, determines the number and length of stories in the paper. Three and relatedly, the Saturday paper, which is where news of a killing on Friday would go, is the smallest of the week and so there is even less space for news.
"If you could pick one of the slowest news days of the year, pick any Friday in August," the editor said.
Then there were the more specific reasons. On this particular Friday, he said, the newspaper's staff was strained because New Jersey Gov. McGreevey had announced his resignation a few days before. This was sucking up some of the newspaper's reportorial resources. Further, the newspaper's crime reporters did not hear about the shooting until alerted by police via a routine daily email message about four hours after the event. Reporters like to hear first about a crime through a tip or by monitoring the police scanner, so they can get to the crime scene quickly while the body and witnesses are still present. That makes for a better story.
All these factors were reasons, he said, that this particular murder did not make his newspaper. But not excuses. A crime like this should have been in his newspaper, he said.
"Ordinarily, when someone gets shot in broad daylight on a residential street, it's absolutely news," the editor said. "News is really anything that affects and impacts people. All news in its own way is local, and when someone is gunned down on your block, there is nothing more local than that. People want to know what are the circumstances of such a crime, and if there is any danger to themselves. Any good local newspaper, if they want to report news that resounds with their readers, they want to report on things that happen. It's never in any news organization's interest to ignore a big story, and murder is, by definition, a big story."
So that's one little insight into the news process. Although this was "just" one murder in Brooklyn, the question of what makes news is important, because the answer determines what events, trends or perspectives make it onto the public agenda. Crime news may seem more or less important, but similar processes and questions are asked about that city council meeting or speech by a politician.
Of course, only a tiny fraction of what happened yesterday makes it into even the best daily newspaper. The pages of a newspaper are the proverbial tip of an iceberg, with a huge body of events and trends remaining underwater, below the public sight. This is even truer in a region like New York, where a dozen or so daily newspapers represent some 20 million people. Of course television, which has only a tiny fraction of the space that newspapers do, shows just the tip of the tip of the iceberg.
In the end, there were a bunch of reasons why this particular murder did not make news, at least at the newspaper whose editor I talked with. One shouldn't make too much of one event on one day in Brooklyn. Leaving that event aside though, I would say that as far as having a vital civil and democratic society, more news is good news.
Back when I was a reporter for a daily newspaper in Virginia, people would often complain when my newspaper put a lurid story about a violent crime on its front page. A fair complaint, I would respond. But isn't it also bad when a newspaper hides a murder on its inside pages, or doesn't cover it all? What does that say about death and violence in our society?
I got a chance to ask this question more directly when a young man was killed outside my window in August. The murder - two gunmen shot down a man in the middle of the street on a sunny Friday the 13th at 11 am, within sight or earshot of dozens of people - did not make it into any of the local papers the next day, at least as a story.
This surprised me. I hadn't expected the New York Times to cover it, because it tends to focus on larger trends or feature stories. But I had expected one or more of the major local tabloids to write a story. These are the city's real local newspapers, and I respect their job. But only The New York Post made any mention of it, and it was inaccurate. Its "Crime Blotter" section said "police found a body on a Crown Heights street" - not quite right, since the man was still alive when the police arrived, and "found" makes a murder in the street sound oddly passive.
In an effort to find out why this murder wasn't covered, and to get some insight into the New York newsgathering process, I called various editors. Eventually I got a hold of a city editor at one of the tabloids who is in charge of daily coverage.
His explanation revealed something about how the news process works in general and on this particular day. There were basically three general factors, most having to do with the peculiar nature of the news business in August.
One, the newspaper's staff is down in the summer, due to vacations and such, so there are fewer troops to send out into the field. Two, the newspaper's advertising is down in August. This means a smaller "news hole," which is the space in a paper set aside for news, because on normal days the amount of advertising a newspaper has, not the amount of news, determines the number and length of stories in the paper. Three and relatedly, the Saturday paper, which is where news of a killing on Friday would go, is the smallest of the week and so there is even less space for news.
"If you could pick one of the slowest news days of the year, pick any Friday in August," the editor said.
Then there were the more specific reasons. On this particular Friday, he said, the newspaper's staff was strained because New Jersey Gov. McGreevey had announced his resignation a few days before. This was sucking up some of the newspaper's reportorial resources. Further, the newspaper's crime reporters did not hear about the shooting until alerted by police via a routine daily email message about four hours after the event. Reporters like to hear first about a crime through a tip or by monitoring the police scanner, so they can get to the crime scene quickly while the body and witnesses are still present. That makes for a better story.
All these factors were reasons, he said, that this particular murder did not make his newspaper. But not excuses. A crime like this should have been in his newspaper, he said.
"Ordinarily, when someone gets shot in broad daylight on a residential street, it's absolutely news," the editor said. "News is really anything that affects and impacts people. All news in its own way is local, and when someone is gunned down on your block, there is nothing more local than that. People want to know what are the circumstances of such a crime, and if there is any danger to themselves. Any good local newspaper, if they want to report news that resounds with their readers, they want to report on things that happen. It's never in any news organization's interest to ignore a big story, and murder is, by definition, a big story."
So that's one little insight into the news process. Although this was "just" one murder in Brooklyn, the question of what makes news is important, because the answer determines what events, trends or perspectives make it onto the public agenda. Crime news may seem more or less important, but similar processes and questions are asked about that city council meeting or speech by a politician.
Of course, only a tiny fraction of what happened yesterday makes it into even the best daily newspaper. The pages of a newspaper are the proverbial tip of an iceberg, with a huge body of events and trends remaining underwater, below the public sight. This is even truer in a region like New York, where a dozen or so daily newspapers represent some 20 million people. Of course television, which has only a tiny fraction of the space that newspapers do, shows just the tip of the tip of the iceberg.
In the end, there were a bunch of reasons why this particular murder did not make news, at least at the newspaper whose editor I talked with. One shouldn't make too much of one event on one day in Brooklyn. Leaving that event aside though, I would say that as far as having a vital civil and democratic society, more news is good news.
@RegionalPlan