One of the first things I learned when working for Lou Nell Clark at the Lamar Democrat in 1978 is that names are news.
She did not have to tell me twice.
Working as sports editor at the time, I made sure that my basketball articles were not limited to the person who scored the most points. I mentioned every player I could in the text of the article, and those who were not in the article were included in the game box score.
It was a bit more difficult in football, but I was still able to pack my articles with names, by listing any player who had an interception or a fumble recovery, including all offensive players who either passed, carried the ball, or caught passes, and then including others, including offensive linemen by describing particular plays.
Names are important. When people see their names on the pages of the local newspaper, they have an investment in that newspaper.
That is one reason why I was so disappointed with the Joplin Globe's coverage in Friday's edition of Missouri Southern State University's annual signing ceremony honoring students chosen to be a part of the college's honors program.
Dustin Shipman's article did an excellent job of describing the program, but only mentioned two of the 39 students who were selected for this program. As far as I can determine, neither the print nor internet editions featured the names of the other 37 students.
I was curious about who those students might be and I would guess other readers were, also. Did I know any of those people. What schools were they from? Some other background information would also have been useful. Who are these young people? The space that was given to MSSU President Bruce Speck to extoll the virtues of the program could well have been used to list the names. Or better yet, why not just make the story longer?
The Joplin Globe's sports section has always made a big deal of featuring the signings of area athletes who receive scholarships from colleges, junior colleges, and universities. Are students who achieve scholarships through academic accomplishments not as worthy of coverage?
At one time not too long ago, people flocked to the Joplin Globe and other newspapers to see who died, who got married or engaged, who was celebrating a wedding anniversary, etc. These milestones were quite rightly considered important news. Now they are just one more way of bringing in a few extra dollars in revenue, but at what cost?
Those few extra cents now will likely cost the newspapers many dollars later since more and more people no longer have any personal investment in their newspapers.
And then to add to the problem, the Globe fails to recognize opportunities to work names into the news. I suppose the decision might have been different had the scholarship recipients been willing to pay to get their names into the paper.
2 comments:
I, too, wondered who these new honors students were. After much digging, I found them listed on the MSSU web site. Here's the link: http://www.mssu.edu/news/2008/honorssigning08.html
But, the MSSU news release fails to provide the majors of the new students. It gives only names and hometowns.
When I was growing up in the 70's and 80's, my mother and sisters would fight over the Globe on Sunday to read all the weddings and engagements. It was not uncommon to have a page and a half of listings. Then in the 90's, the Globe started charging for these same announcements. In the Globe on Sunday, May 4, the wedding and engagement announcements filled only a corner of one page. And the Globe wonders why its circulation has dropped significantly over the past 20 years.
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