Saturday, June 17, 2006

News-Leader story features Joplin skydiver who gave birth

The story of the pregnant Joplin skydiver who survived the failure of her chute to open has been a favorite of nearly all area media...except The Joplin Globe.
Let's see if I am remembering this right. The Globe didn't get the crash story, it didn't get the story about her wedding and it allowed other news outlets to beat it on the story of her giving birth to the baby she was carrying during her skydiving mishap.
There would appear to be only two reasons for this mishandling of the story:
1. Since the Globe missed out on the original story, it is following the old axiom that if we do not cover it, it is not news.
2. The editors don't realize they missed the story.
Obviously, Shayna Richardson's story is not that important in the grand scheme of things. It is a tabloid type story, something I have decried many times on this blog. But when the tabloid story is in your own backyard, you run with it, especially when it has already been determined that there is a public interest in it.
It's not as if the Globe is above running tabloid trash items on its pages. Lest we forget, this is the same newspaper than ran a page one photo and story about the FCC and Janet Jackson's Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction on the same day it relegated the death of longtime staff writer Gary Garton to page three.
If any of you are interested in following the exploits of Ms. Richardson, her story is featured today in the Springfield News-Leader.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gretchen Bolander of KODE had an interview with her on Friday and it aired on KODE on Friday night.

Anonymous said...

KFSM in Fayetteville had an interview on Wednesday. The day after she had the baby.

Anonymous said...

She still was messing around on the guy before, so no excitement or sympathy from me.