Opinion
Why do we print bad news?
It’s simple: To make a difference in the community
CULLMAN — There are a lot of great things about working in journalism. You get to meet fascinating people, tell the stories that matter to a community — both the little things and the big ones — and wake up every morning not knowing exactly what you’re going to do at work that day. No one can predict what the news day will bring.
Unfortunately, part of the job also involves seeing the dark underbelly of small-town life — the crime, the tragedy, the pain.
I’ll never forget my first job working for a tiny paper in rural East Texas. Part of my job involved listening to the police scanner and, if anything interesting was broadcast, to run out the door with a camera to snap a picture. This means I sometimes saw things that no one wants to experience — the moans of people after a violent wreck, the stomach-turning sights and smells of a crime scene — and would then go back to the office and pick a photo that was suitable to print. For a wreck, that usually meant we showed just a mangled car, not the injured bodies being tended by paramedics. I learned to take the volume knob of reality and turn it down enough for readers to tolerate it.
But why do newspapers cover these tragedies in the first place? Why don’t we just ignore all the arrests, the deaths and the scumbags?
There are really two answers.
One is that people are interested in those things. It’s human nature to want to see the violence and unpredictability of life around us, and people read about pain in the paper for the exact same reason they slow down to peer at an accident on the side of the road. That’s just what people do.
A bigger reason, though — and the real reason we cover the news the way we do — is that when the public knows about all these terrible things that are happening, they’re more likely to do something to stop them.
If you see methheads being arrested constantly, you might spur your friends and community leaders to do something about it. If you see someone arrested for a sexual crime in your neighborhood, you’ll probably want to keep your kids away from them, just to be safe. And if you see awful wrecks happening at the same place again and again, the government might be more likely to put up a traffic light or lower the speed limit to make that roadway safer in the future.
Even so, we try to print the good things that happen in town, too, and I think The Cullman Times does a pretty good job of that. If you look at last week’s front pages, you’ll see stories on the lady who won Ms. Senior Cullman County, the United Way giving awards to generous donors and volunteers, people raising money and collecting relief supplies for earthquake victims in Haiti, the boy who won the county spelling bee, and a talented athlete being recruited by Nick Saban. We’ll often give these kinds of stories bigger play — with a great big headline and photo — just because it’s good to show off the wonderful things that are happening here in Cullman County.
When we do print bad news in the paper, though, it’s not because we’re heartless people who like to see the pain in our neighbors’ lives.
Really, it’s just the opposite. We print the bad news because we want to see that pain go away.
Derek Price is editor of The Cullman Times. Contact him at editor@cullmantimes.com.
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