The San Antonio Express News has done two stories involving my school in the past year. Both were embarrassing to us for things that should have been embarrassing to them. The first had drastic factual errors, the second was merely snide (what annoyed me was that it covered three exchange students, but mentioned only the names of the other two schools. With my school, it included several snide comments.)
And then there are the Letters to the Editor, which appear to be written from Mars.
Frequently a "reader" from some faraway city (already suspicious as the Express News is rather patently lacking in national circulation) writes in to say something racist. San Antonio is, of course, mostly Hispanic, and letters from Tennessee or Wisconsin which are anti-Hispanic in tone are not welcome.
Free-speech does not mean that every nut-cases letters should be published. Especially when they are barely literate (most letters to the Express News are barely literate.)
Anyone with a Hearst-owned local paper can look at the difference in letters to their local paper and, say, the Economist, the Guardian or the New Yorker and despair.
Posts: 1332 | Registered: Apr 2005
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Two years ago, the Washington Post did a front page story that labled my school a "gang factory." The response was mostly outraged, because they had made the same mistakes you describe.
How big is the Express News, circulation-wise? The WP gets a lot of faraway readership but that's not surpising. Our local "town" paper, the Gazette, rarely recieved any readers outside of MoCo.
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I suppose it would be rude to hijack the thread.
By the way, EA (which devoured Westwood Studios) is about to unveil their decision as to the 3rd faction in the upcoming "Tiberium Wars" game. Look for it online...December 19, or in the December issue of "Games for Windows".
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At my university, we get free copies of the Indianapolis Star, which is Indiana's main newspaper. The paper's motto, written right under its name on the front page, is "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty" (II Cor 3;17). An okay motto, if you're a church, but depressing if you consider that this newspaper is the main written source of news for an entire state. The writting can be pretty bad at times, and most of the news is Indiana-centric. Happenings in the nation don't get much mention, and the newspaper seems to regard stories on Asia or South America in a similar vein to those of Neverland, Middle Earth, or the land of the Fae.
Doing the Star's crossword always makes me feel better about myself, though, 'cause I can complete it.
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I really don't understand why people get so upset about local newspapers carrying local news. That's their purpose! You can get national news from dozens of different venues, but it is really difficult to find local news. And that's a problem, because as a general rule local news effects our lives much more than national news does.
I constantly hear this complaint about local papers. I'm just wondering, what are those of us who actually want to participate in our community supposed to do to get news if the local papers don't cover it?
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Well, to be honest, it would be convenient if the newspapers here would run local news from my hometown two states away. But yeah, I get national news from the internet. By the time I read my school's newspaper, I've seen all the national stuff already.
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Our local Gannett rag, the Reno Gazette-Journal, makes a big thing about being a "local" paper. They format the news with local in the first section, and national and international in the second section. The promise rings hollow on Sundays, however, when they publish the national Gannett funnies section without change, and put Bryan Craine's "Pickels", usually in black and white, on some random back page. We're not fooled. We're not happy. Lake Tahoe and Bryan Craine are the two best things Northern Nevada has going.
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quote:Originally posted by blacwolve: I really don't understand why people get so upset about local newspapers carrying local news. That's their purpose! You can get national news from dozens of different venues, but it is really difficult to find local news. And that's a problem, because as a general rule local news effects our lives much more than national news does.
I constantly hear this complaint about local papers. I'm just wondering, what are those of us who actually want to participate in our community supposed to do to get news if the local papers don't cover it?
My problem isn't with newspapers that run local news. My problem is with newspapers that (a) run *only* local news, or run very little national/international news AND (b) are the main/only news source for a large percentage of the population of the area they're servicing.
I making a guess here, but I imagine that the Indy Star had the same proportions (or worse) of local to national/international news 15 years ago, before the internet cable news shows really took off. Where are people going to get their news in this case? The 5 o'clock news isn't going to give you the same depth of reporting that a short newspaper article will give you.
My problem here is that the newspaper is failing its duty to inform the public. Not only is it failing to inform them about important things happening in the world, but it's also cultivating an attitude that the things "out there" don't matter.
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My problem is when the run incorrect news, or misleading news. If an international paper does that, it is called on it, or people can at least look at different papers. Local papers are often the sole source of local news.
240,000 people deserve good news, hell, any town should have a good newspaper.
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I making a guess here, but I imagine that the Indy Star had the same proportions (or worse) of local to national/international news 15 years ago, before the internet cable news shows really took off. Where are people going to get their news in this case? The 5 o'clock news isn't going to give you the same depth of reporting that a short newspaper article will give you.
I don't know specifically about the Indy Star, because we never read it in my home growing up. I do know that the Herald Times (in Bloomington) switched to more local coverage, less national coverage about 5 years ago in response to the growing availability of national and international news from other outlets.
With the advent of internet news local newspapers are not doing well. There's no way the Herald Times is going to be able to compete with the big national newspapers in quality of writing or in comprehensiveness. As a business they decided they were going to compete in the area that they could compete in, local news.
Personally, I'm glad they did, our culture fosters a sense that local news isn't important, not that national news isn't important. We hear about national news every time we open a magazine, turn on the television, listen to the radio. I'm really glad there was a media outlet where I could find out the positions of the candidates for school board in our county. I'm glad there was a news outlet that told me a private hospital openned in Bloomington, and a newspaper that printed pro and con letters from the people who were going to be affected by it.
Because in the grand scheme of things, that's going to affect my life just as much as the national news does, and it doesn't even recieve half as much coverage.
EDIT: I just realized this might be one of the reasons I feel so strongly about this subject, so I thought I'd throw it out there. I'm a huge fan of state's rights. I think the federal government has way too much power. So I definately oppose anything that would give the federal government even more power.
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