David Higgerson, Digital Publishing director for the regional websites of UK’s Trinity Mirror, on the slippery definition of “news”:
“There’s a serious point I want to make here: that the difference between what a trained journalist sees as news and what the local newspaper reader sees as news has the potential to render us irrelevant to our audience. My parents read the Chorley Guardian every week and have been known to snigger at what some might consider trivial nibs. But the trivial nibs aren’t so trivial when it explains why the police, ambulance, fire crews, etc., were down their way. Likewise, I’ve been known to smile at some of the smaller stories which appear in the Bourne Local, a weekly newspaper serving the small Lincolnshire town. But, as I’ve blogged before, seeing the paper being picked up by more people than not as soon as it arrives in the local Sainsbury’s tells me that it’s a paper which knows its audience.
Had I been a reader of the Westmorland Gazette who had seen fire crews putting out the office chair fire in the local park, there’s a safe bet I’d not know for sure what they were doing. If I picked up the Westmorland Gazette and couldn’t find anything about the fire, what would I do? Maybe nothing at all. But make the paper useful – by telling me something I knew I wanted to know – and I like to think it makes it more likely I’ll pick the newspaper up again. And that’s what local newspapers need to be: relevant and useful. Applying journalistic snobbery doesn’t help. …
“Small news, for local newspapers at least, should be big news. If we’re to maintain a relevance to a local audience, they need to know we’re covering things that matter to them. And making sure we cover the ‘I wonder what that was all about’ stories is as good a place to start as any?
