Beukey on Pop Culture

This blog will focus on pop culture, with an emphasis on views outside, overlooked, or ignored by the mainstream. I may veer off-topic. We are all grown-ups, so don't act shocked at occasional bad language. This blog is not the place for those of you who stood in line to see "The Lake House".

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Media Hits Another Low Point

About 20 years ago, when I was a senior in college, in between the daytime when I was kicking Bluey's ass in Fireball and the nights I was spending at the bar, I had an intership in the newsroom of the only television station in a small city. We were in a mostly rural area that didn't have a lot of real news, and whatever real news happened was usually covered by the paid reporters. I spent a lot of time monitoring wire stories and transmissions of network news packages.

We had a police radio in the station. If something that sounded like it was news was happening, we would jump in a car and drive to the scene. One time a fire report came over, and it sounded promising so a cameraman and I drove to the scene.

When we got there, nothing was happening, but all the local yokels came out because we were in a car with the station's logo on it. The cameraman and I got separated, and one of the yokels asked me if I wanted to shoot video of a big pumpkin growing in his back yard.

I was a rookie, and I didn't want to go back to the station with nothing, so I found the cameraman and asked him if he wanted to shoot the footage.

He gave me an extremely pained look, one that immediately made me realize what a stupid question I was asking. What was the news value of a huge pumpkin? What was the compelling story, "Pumpkin grows, is ready to be harvested"? How was I going to shoot and edit 30 seconds of footage on that, let alone write the accompanying story that anybody would care about? In retrospect, this was probably the best lesson I learned during the internship; think about the news value of what you are doing, rather than do a story on anything that comes your way.

Today, I noticed that MSNBC.com (not some local one station town) posted a story (with video!) about a 330 pound pumpkin. (You can click on the title if you want to see the story, but you will have to sit through a PDA about ADHD (which no one with ADHD would sit through) and the story is every bit as exciting as I made it sound.)

So I guess the lesson was this. I wasn't wrong to question my judgment 20 years ago. Rather, I was a visionary who was ahead of his time, and the small minds around me couldn't see the superior skills I had in picking stories. I guess NBC will be calling me any day now. There's a really cool puddle near my house, maybe we can do an hour special on it.

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