Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Bill Dedman doesn’t like localizing, he tells the Poynter Institute’s Al Tompkins in an interview published on Tuesday.
“Localizing” is when reporters adapt trend stories to their home towns. Imagine that a thinktank publishes a study on teenage amphetamine use. You can expect stories that are distinguishable only by the name of the high school mentioned as a hotbed of drug abuse and tragedy.
On the positive side, it puts local color on a generic story. But Dedman sees it as a waste of time:
“The reader ends up getting stories that they’ve already heard elsewhere, or will soon hear elsewhere.” And more practically: “Localizing would be fine if we had unlimited staffs. But every time we do a local version of the latest national teen survey, we’ve kept the paper or station from breaking news with that reporter that day.”
What do you think? Is it a good idea to localize the news? Or does the Internet – with instant access to nearly every news outlet – show us reporters up for the lazy hacks that we are?
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2 comments so far
Preventing a reporter from breaking news for a whole day by localising a national story is clearly a bad idea.
- Posted by HackFlackHaving a sub spend 35 seconds localising a national story is a good thing.
The latter is far closer to reality on most newspapers (certainly UK).
Localising means the reader gets a story without having to get it elsewhere, in a way where the relevance to their lives is obvious.
Surely, by going after a local angle to a national story, the skill is to bring out a different and more personal ‘take’ - the personal story of the local teenage drug user must be more interesting than a set of national statistics?
If a local school is named as a “hotbed” of drug abuse, then there is a better story there for the community than tagging it on to a national report and just giving it a mention.
Speak to the parents, the staff and the pupils to find out why it is such a problem and what they are doing about it. Surely this is a sensible approach to bring the story to life and give readers a better understanding of what is happening “behind the headlines.”?
- Posted by Linda