Columbia Journalism Review Daily has a list of five great stories you didn’t read, celebrating great journalism that either didn’t get national play or was overshadowed by other events.
The coverage includes:
- An in-depth examination of the chaos caused by Hurricane Rita.
- The Memphis Waltz sting
- The truth about global warming.
- The stories of wounded soldiers.
- A harrowing follow-up to a traffic accident in Florida.
Definitely worth checking out.
It’s that time of year again: The Society of Professional Journalists is taking entries through February 3rd for the 2005 awards. By my count, there’s approximately 15 categories in which I could theoretically enter one or more stories, and Peter has probably closer to 20 categories (given that he writes editorials and takes award-worthy photos).
If there’s any Hesperia Star stories from 2005 that you found particularly memorable, let me know, and I’ll make sure they’re among those we send in.
Thanks.
Once again, getting stories together at this time of the year is tricky. The last Hesperia City Council meeting clocked in at just under an hour, and very little happened that could be reported on for the next issue — the biggest story will require reaching people for comment who will be out of town for the holidays, possibly until January.
And so, naturally, next week’s issue of the Hesperia Star is a full 16 pages anyway. Without the ability to drop in stories from the Associated Press like other papers do this time of year, Peter and I are in the position of spinning straw into gold.
Check back Tuesday to see how we did.
The Internet scares the bejeesus out of the newspaper industry, as I’ve mentioned before. Although the industry’s current slump in circulation began before the birth of the World Wide Web, there’s certainly reason to be concerned: Even more than radio or TV, the Internet provides an immediacy that the daily newspaper, which once was the place where breaking news was reported, can’t compete with.
I’m a big advocate of newspapers competing by working smarter and harder. The Internet, at this point, does not cover all news equally, and some of it, it doesn’t cover at all. Newspapers, which have infrastructures and credibility, can and should push their ways even more aggressively into these areas. At the end of the day, a newspaper Web site is no different from a blog or a rumor site, except that the newspaper site can have a credibility and authority the others can’t match. (Obviously, if it doesn’t have that, fixing that is job one.) So pursuing, say, local news and politics — which regional media rarely does — is a key part of the picture.
But so is using the Internet to reimagine the news business. It removes a great deal of the overhead from taking on aspects of other media, and can potentially bring in more eyeballs and, more importantly, help develop more of a relationship with the eyeballs already there.
So what does this mean for the Hesperia Star? Well, the holidays will delay a formal announcement, but we will have what I think is a first of its kind for a weekly newspaper (maybe a first for local newspapers generally) announcement early in 2006.
The most important thing to notice about the 2005 Christmas card sent out by the Hesperia Star and its sister papers: Santa’s reading the Star. Oh, yeah.
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