Local angle: It's a great news town
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to yet another edition of our intermittent series, "You Can't Make This Stuff Up, and Why Would You Want To?"
This time we're focusing on the local angle. I learned the importance of the local angle years ago as a cub reporter at the Dayton Daily News, or at least I thought I did. Unless you were reporting a story of enormous national or international significance, and you could prove it at least 3 different ways, you absolutely had to have a local angle. That was best illustrated by the Harvard Lampoon's 1978 spoof, the Dacron Republican-Democrat, a quintessential local newspaper so focused on the local angle that under the headline "Earthquake Destroys Japan," the lede story began, "The vacation plans of two area women may have been affected by an ..."
We had an editor there who always insisted Dayton was "a great news town," explaining why he'd never moved on to bigger papers elsewhere. Maybe he just loved the local angle and didn't want to have to start over with a different one. He's no longer in this world, or I'd be sure to tell him about Hoboken, because this is a great news town, and fortunately we've got a newspaper to match. But we have more than that: a science-fiction future that, like all science-fiction futures, includes some interesting ideas but will probably never happen.
Two examples, both from this week's Hoboken Reporter, the best little local weekly I've ever read:
Example A: "Our pool Has floated to Brooklyn"
Example B: Story here; illustration here.
And here's another, this from the City of Hoboken web site.
Meanwhile, I have my own theory as to why the floating-barge-as-swimming pool didn't work out for Hoboken. Click here to see it.
Most of my day went into my other blog, Second-Day Lede. Thankee, Buddy Don, for the kind words about it.
posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @6:14 PM
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