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Anonymous (not verified) says:
Great post, Mr. Scocca. It's not only the pursuit of awards that causes this problem of rotten daily coverage.
I worked at a Gannett-owned daily. They had no interest in doing decent day-to-day coverage, and instead wanted only what you referred to as the "ambitious" pieces. Unfortunately, none of those were ever very nuanced or thorough. Similarly they were not dedicated to covering the daily news in their community. I'm not arguing against doing the ambitious packages - you need to do those too - but you also need to give more than 7 non-jumping inches to your daily coverage of local politics, cops, courts, local sports, local businesses, etc. They never encouraged that. And it wasn't a matter of putting that daily-type stuff up on the Web because this was before the current Web boom. As a reader on the outside and not an employee now, the trend seems to have continued.
Sure, the pursuit of awards also drove them, but it was this attitude of: if we do this big superficial piece on such-and-such community once a month or once a quarter then we've fulfilled our obligation to "cover" them.
Great post, Mr. Scocca. It's not only the pursuit of awards that causes this problem of rotten daily coverage.
I worked at a Gannett-owned daily. They had no interest in doing decent day-to-day coverage, and instead wanted only what you referred to as the "ambitious" pieces. Unfortunately, none of those were ever very nuanced or thorough. Similarly they were not dedicated to covering the daily news in their community. I'm not arguing against doing the ambitious packages - you need to do those too - but you also need to give more than 7 non-jumping inches to your daily coverage of local politics, cops, courts, local sports, local businesses, etc. They never encouraged that. And it wasn't a matter of putting that daily-type stuff up on the Web because this was before the current Web boom. As a reader on the outside and not an employee now, the trend seems to have continued.
Sure, the pursuit of awards also drove them, but it was this attitude of: if we do this big superficial piece on such-and-such community once a month or once a quarter then we've fulfilled our obligation to "cover" them.