I’ve just read a story on the Hold The Front Page website which brilliantly highlights the effectiveness of local news reporting, but sadly also underlines the limitations of newspapers in this digital age.
From a reliable source editorial staff at The Bath Chronicle learned that the grim discovery of human remains found in a bin liner at the side of the M5 were those of 25-year-old Melanie Hall who went missing during a night out in the city more than a decade ago.
Ghoulish though it may be, this is the kind of stuff local news editors and journalists dream of: a missing person, a 13-year mystery, a grisly find at the side of the road and, crucially, a solid link back to your local news patch.
The journalists did what all good reporters should do in this situation: they quickly put together background pieces about Melanie’s disappearance, a timeline of her last known movements, revived old interviews with her family and wrote a hard-hitting front page splash.
Great work all round, but just one problem.
They didn’t get official confirmation that the remains were Melanie’s until after their editorial deadline had been and gone. So, rather than splash on undoubtedly one of Bath’s biggest stories of the year, they had to go with a far weaker story.
To their credit once the editorial team received the confirmation they needed they managed to secure a print slot for a 5,000-run, four page special…but you can’t help feeling the moment had passed.
Within seconds of the official announcement that the human remains were Melanie’s the story was leading all the rolling broadcast news networks as well as being all over cyberspace.
You could argue The Chronicle was just as much a part of that coverage as anyone else, having updated its website within minutes of the announcement, but, as we all know, that won’t help it to sell papers.
The Bath Chronicle is an excellent local paper, full of well-written news and views reflecting the area it covers. In the last year, however, it has had to go from being a daily paper to a weekly one, and if it misses many more scoops such as this, (and the laws of probability says it undoubtedly will) how much longer will Bath people continue paying for it?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment