{"id":890,"date":"2013-11-25T17:34:48","date_gmt":"2013-11-25T04:34:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=890"},"modified":"2013-11-25T17:34:48","modified_gmt":"2013-11-25T04:34:48","slug":"sorry-people-but-here-is-the-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=890","title":{"rendered":"Sorry, people, but here is the news"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Man<\/a>My first serious girlfriend trained as a school teacher but earned her living as a journalist.\u00a0 Her successor was a journalist who worked in PR before going on to edit a weekly magazine.\u00a0 And her successor was a journalist who drifted into advertising.<\/p>\n

From these three bright (and feisty) women, I learned several important lessons.<\/p>\n

First, I learned that \u2018man bites dog\u2019 is news.\u00a0 But \u2018dog bites man\u2019 is not.<\/p>\n

Second, I learned that \u2018if it bleeds, it leads\u2019.\u00a0 Gore, conflict, and disasters pull in the readers.\u00a0 The gorier, the more conflicted, the more disastrous the better.<\/p>\n

Third, I learned that every positive story has a dark underside \u2013 even if it\u2019s only in the mind of some looney conspiracy theorist.\u00a0 And, if you want to hook the readers, you ignore the dark underside at your peril.\u00a0 \u2018Readers just do not want to read good news,\u2019 the second of my lady friends used to say.<\/p>\n

Each of these lessons was learned more than 30 years ago \u2013 long, long before the advent of 24\/7 news.\u00a0 Since then, everything has been multiplied by ten.\u00a0 Or maybe by 100.<\/p>\n

And yet, every morning and every evening, I have to remind myself that the newspaper editors and the radio and TV newsroom editors are just putting out what people want to read, listen to, or watch.\u00a0 Because if people don\u2019t read, listen to, or watch their news, they won\u2019t have any advertising; which means they won\u2019t have any revenue; which means they won\u2019t have anything.<\/p>\n

Personally, I would be happy to pay to read, listen to, or watch advertising-free news.\u00a0 But it would need to be very well researched, very well written, and very well presented.\u00a0 And that would be quite a step up from most of today\u2019s so-called news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My first serious girlfriend trained as a school teacher but earned her living as a journalist.\u00a0 Her successor was a journalist who worked in PR before going on to edit a weekly magazine.\u00a0 And her successor was a journalist who … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=890"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":891,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions\/891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}