On Television News: Published in the NCJ March 6, 2008

On TV

by Marcy Burstiner

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Eureka's KIEM-TV, Channel 3, isn't in the smallest television market in the country, but it is near the bottom of a 200+ deck. Why should you care? The bigger the TV market size, the more money a station can command in advertising fees and the more it can spend on its evening and morning news. There shouldn't be a connection between money and quality, but of course there is. A big one.

That means that you can assume that the owners of this NBC affiliate, Pollack/Belz Broadcasting, LLC, which owns only one other TV station, don't pull in huge amounts of money from this station. So they won't likely devote a huge amount of money to improve it with better technology and staff training for the producers and reporters of its news operation. The quality of the broadcast screams low-cost operation.

Until now, I kept myself from criticizing the news team at Channel 3 in print. I try not to criticize what I can't improve, and I figured that if I couldn't suggest zero-cost improvements I might as well put my typing fingers to other uses.

But I'm now addicted to the 6 o'clock news. I find it tells me things I didn't know, such as the status of the closed Martins Ferry Bridge, which the Eureka Reporter and, until Monday, the Times-Standard have all but ignored. I can't help wanting to make the newscast better. Plus, since early December I've read The Little Train That Could at least a dozen times, and the story is insidious. I now think almost anyone can get over any hill with just the right amount of grit.

So here is my list of tips for the overworked, ridiculously underpaid team at Channel 3, who I know try the best they can with so very little.

1. Assume your viewers know nothing. When you tell me about Martins Ferry Bridge, tell me where the heck it is. I happen to know that the bridge is in Hoopa and affects a too-often ignored population of Native American people. But most of your viewers have no clue. So ...

2. Never forget the basics: Who, What, Where, When, How and Why for every story. If you can't find out that basic information you shouldn't run the story. That brings me to the Who ...

3. Identify people you interview on video. It frustrates viewers to no end when you show someone saying blah, blah, blah, blah, but there is no name or title or town of residency for that person.

4. Give me pertinent details. Roughly how many people live on the wrong side of Martins Ferry Bridge? From the multiple stories I saw on Channel 3, I have no idea whether we're talking five or 500 people stranded without access to schools or markets.

5. Don't show dull video. Want to send your viewers to Cold Case Files or Tucker Carlson? Show them video of a roomful of people's backs at a meeting of the Board of Supervisors, or a panel of city council people who you don't identify, or unnamed students walking down some path at HSU or College of the Redwoods. Take a minute while you are out on a shoot to be a bit more creative with the video camera.

6. Think multi-part series. Since you cover some stories over and over again, you might as well think about covering the story as a multi-part series. Let's get back to Martins Ferry. I've seen three broadcasts on this story. But the station reported the story the same way many newspapers handle ongoing police investigations. Newspapers slap two inches of new copy on top of what is basically the same story they've run over and over again. The TV station seems to give me the latest action or inaction of the Board of Supervisors over the same old video of an empty bridge, or of unidentified people crossing the bridge.

Instead, think about covering any story that you think might have legs as a five-part series. There are five days in the week, and each day you do a short piece on the subject focusing on a different part of the story.

Monday: The who. Tell us about some of the people the problem actually affects.

Tuesday: The What. Give us a rough summary of what's going on.

Wednesday: The Where. Tell us a little bit about the unique problems that are occurring because of where the problem is taking place. The problem with Martins Ferry Bridge is that it's located an hour from Eureka. If it were located 10 minutes from Eureka it would already be fixed.

Thursday: The When. Find some expert who can give us the skinny on when we can see some real action.

Friday: The How and Why. If the supervisors finally agree to fix the bridge once and for all, how will engineers go about doing that? Why fix it like that?

The beauty of a five-part series, based on five days of the week, is it gives you some economy of scale for news. Each interview makes each other interview easier, because you don't come in cold. Each person you interview can give you the name and contact number for the next person to interview. If you shoot a good amount of video the first day, you can use it throughout the week. You probably only have to do reporting for the first three days but you'll be able to fill up five days worth of airtime. And even as you actually save yourself time and labor you give your viewers deeper coverage. You can put the pieces all together on your Web site and give Web surfers the idea that you are a sophisticated news operation. And your viewers will appreciate it. Believe it or not, some of us actually do watch you.

Speaking of the Little Train That Could, I can't end this column without setting aside some space for my students at the Lumberjack newspaper. On March 1, Humboldt State's student-produced, student-run newspaper took four awards at the California College Media Association awards for weekly college papers: First Place for feature photograph, First Place for best back-to-school issue, Third Place for best editorial and Third Place for general excellence. You won't find a news team more overworked, underpaid and less appreciated in Humboldt County, or one that I criticize more severely week after week. Congratulations. You earned it.

On Clarity: Published in the NCJ Feb. 7, 2008

Be Clear

by Marcy Burstiner

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One day my not-quite-three-year-old daughter looked up at her father with big brown eyes, tugged at his shirt and said: "Daddy, what are you talking about?"

That's how I feel sometimes when I read newspapers, and not just the Times-Standard or Eureka Reporter. I often want to tug at the shirt of the San Francisco Chronicle or New York Times and ask the reporters: What are you talking about? Newspapers exist to inform their readers. But often they leave us more confused than before we picked up the page. A newspaper's survival depends on relevancy to readers, but you can't have relevancy without clarity, which is the ability to explain something without confusing the hell out of your reader.

When readers see big headlines and front page placement, they understand that a story is important. But when they read the story and don't understand it, they end up feeling ignorant or stupid. And I would bet that's not the reaction the reporters and editors hoped to get. Newspapers are more prone to this than radio. With radio, when listeners don't understand what they hear, the topic changes so fast they forget what it was they didn't understand. In print, when readers are interested but confused, they reread. So the newspaper confuses them over and over.

Mastering clarity takes time. It means giving the reader just enough but not too much information. It means pacing out information in chunks so that the reader can digest it. It often means sacrificing elegant wording for clunky copy. Imagine yourself trying to tell a great story, but you tell it to someone who keeps interrupting your story with questions that seem basic. Telling the story takes more time than you anticipated. The tale turns tedious.

It means spending more time on topics that are real for many people, but not very sexy from a storytelling perspective. There you are trying to tell a great story about something that happened at work the other day and the listener seems fixated on how you got your job in the first place, even though that's irrelevant to the story you want to tell.

Within stories, reporters tend to skim over and bury the information they don't find interesting to spend more space and time on what they consider more interesting. But folks who work on newspapers need to understand that readers have different rating systems for measuring the importance of different issues than do the reporters and editors. Readers get confused when newspaper stories seem to overrate issues they don't think are important or when they underrate issues the readers think are critical. And if readers think that an issue that a reporter skimmed over is important, they will want to tug at the reporter's sleeve and say: "Hold on now, what was that you said back there?"

Let's look at two recent stories in the Times-Standard about confusing issues: Schwarzenegger's proposed state budget and Proposition 93, which was on the Feb. 5 ballot.

A three-person team of Jessie Faulkner, Karen Wilkinson and Thaddeus Greenson put together the Jan. 11 state budget story. But first consider the challenge of reporting the California budget to local readers. It is so immense and contains so many pieces reporters must summarize an awful lot and then piece out parts relevant to different readers without boring the math-challenged. And they must do all that in about 1000 words.

The reporters start out well. All the elements of why local readers should care are in that story — 20,000 prisoners to be released, education to be slashed, parks to be closed. High up they tell us exactly which local parks will be closed. But then they take too much time space telling us about process — what it will take for the governor to get it passed — and too many paragraphs telling us how much worse it could have been.

It isn't until the jump (paragraph 18, to be exact) that we find out that Schwarzenegger plans to cut $4.5 billion out of K-12 schools. But it doesn't give us a per capita figure — in other words, how much Humboldt County schools must trim to make those cuts. And it isn't until paragraph 22 that you find out that free and reduced meals in the schools will be trimmed and that 47 percent of our school kids here are eligible for reduced price meals.

When I read that I just wanted to tug at the sleeve of all three reporters and say: "Hold on now. Does that mean kids will go hungry? Does that mean some kids won't get the meals or that all the kids will get 10 percent less food on their plastic trays?" But then the story ends and I'm left feeling ignorant.

Remember how the story began? Those early-release prisoners are all non-violent offenders. So from a get-real perspective, what's more of a concern? Early release for non-violent offenders (and without further explanation I might guess a bunch of those are drug users or small-time sellers) or hungry kids? What's more important to the reader, finding out what programs won't be cut or learning how badly our schools will be cut?

Now let's look at Greenson's Feb. 2 story on Proposition 93. Depending on how you read the information sent out with absentee ballots, the measure would lengthen state legislator terms in office or shorten them. Until I read the T-S story I didn't understand what the opponents were griping about. The way I saw it, it would result in more continuity with overall shorter terms. As a term limits proponent who understands the problems term limits have caused, this seemed to make sense.

In his story, Greenson explained the issue neatly and with nice local relevance. He showed how the measure would add years to the terms of our legislators. And he found an HSU professor to tell me what it means. After I read the story I said: "Now I get it! The fat cat lawmakers give themselves more years in office but screw future legislators."

This time I didn't feel ignorant. Whether I feel stupid for the way I cast my absentee vote is another story. But I do wish the article had come out before I mailed my ballot. Note to news editors for November: Assign election stories early and often.

– Marcy Burstiner

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University. If there's something about the media that confuses you, e-mail her at mib3@humboldt.edu.

On Top Ten Lists: Published in the NCJ Jan. 3, 2008

The Real Top Ten

By Marcy Burstiner

A friend once labeled me the ultimate optimist. That was after I confessed that I never threw out unmatched socks; I kept expecting to find their mates. But generally I’m a pessimist. I expect the worst to happen. To me, each New Year’s is the start of what will likely be a worse year than the one that just ended.

I face the same contradictions with the news media. In some ways I’m the ultimate optimist. While media blogs moan and groan over layoffs and cutbacks in the newspaper business, I believe the Internet will force the need for differentiation. A new system of rewarding quality reporting and writing will replace a system that tended to reward reliable mediocrity.

But in other ways I’m a pessimist. Publishers of old-fashioned newspapers, particularly ones with heavy newsstand sales, know little about their readers. So advertisers expect only one thing — big numbers. To get big numbers, newspapers must interest as wide a range of people as possible. When the formula works well, all kinds of readers learn all kinds of things about all kinds of people from the newspaper.

With Internet publishing, sophisticated algorithms allow publishers and advertisers to know an awful lot about their readers. Since advertisers only care about reaching the people who will buy what they advertise, publishers can all but abandon everyone else. We live in a new era of media selectivity. In it, the reader, not the publisher or journalist, defines what is important. This forces publishers to focus on stories that cater to the interests of those with money.

It was the North Coast Journal’s “Top Ten Stories of the Year,” published Dec. 20, that got me thinking about this. In brief, the 10 stories were: The Pacific Lumber bankruptcy, the trails v. rails battle, marijuana grow houses, the settlement over the Klamath River, the new Eureka police chief, timber protection zoning, the housing bubble, the dispute between Robin Arkley and Larry Glass, the collapse of Reggae on the River and the deaths of Bill the Chimp and Kinetic Sculpture Race founder Hobart Brown.

I made my own list: Palco, budget cuts at HSU, the financial crisis at College of the Redwoods, marijuana grow houses, the zoning battle over the Teen Challenge drug and alcohol recovery center, the state budget crisis, the eviction of the Arcata Endeavor, the Cherilyn Moore case, the immigration sting in Fortuna and homelessness, not in any order of importance. They were all important. I think the difference with the Journal’s list is the definition of a “top story.” Hank Sims seems to have included stories that people liked to read about along with some stories that were important for people to read about.

He left homelessness off his list even though the Journal devoted a terrific cover story by Jim Hight to the subject of homeless students in the Eureka school system last April. Karen Wilkinson of the Times-Standard did two stories — one on new state poverty figures that showed that some 700 students at the Eureka schools system are homeless. She followed it up Dec. 27 with a story similar to the one in the Journal. In 2006 the McKinleyville high student newspaper did a story on the 95 homeless students that attend that school. Combine those stories with those of the upcoming eviction of the Arcata Endeavor and the financial problems of the Multiple Assistance Center in Eureka, and homelessness is clearly a top story.

I couldn’t help pairing the stories about homeless kids with the marijuana stories — hundreds of grow houses in subdivisions taking up needed housing. I picture an awful lot of people with cash stuffed under their mattresses living next door to children who don’t know where they will be tomorrow. I’m all for the legalization of marijuana, but in my book that’s a social crime.

The mainstream press too often assumes that because people don’t want to read downer news, they won’t. If you ask people if they like reading bad news and they will say they don’t. (Would you date a guy that said “I love reading bad news”?) But when the Washington Post broke the story about appalling conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center last year and the terrible treatment of returning Iraqi vets, readers ate up those stories. It was the reaction from the general public that led to an overhaul of the U.S. Army top command. Though people don’t want to read downer stories, they will if those stories are important and if the stories help point the way towards achievable reforms.

The North Coast Journal recently launched a redesign and seems to have adopted a new direction, striving to be the intellectual center of Humboldt County. As a free weekly the Journal has a more difficult problem identifying its readers than even daily newspapers. Because the Journal’s readers pick up the paper at news racks, they can’t be tracked except by location. I hope that with the new direction they don’t forget that as many people read the paper in the Summer Street Laundromat as in Brio. And I hope that as part of a long history of alternative weeklies, it persistently prints stories that force the people at Brio to see the people at the ’mat.

With two daily newspapers, one regional weekly and an assortment of community weeklies we should have one of the most informed readerships around. But I fear that if papers focus on what people think they want to read about rather than what they should know about, we will have this: A blissfully ignorant readership in a very mediated region.

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University. She wishes everyone the best of news for the New Year.

On competition: Published in the NCJ Dec. 6, 2007

Pray for the Reporter!

by MARCY BURSTINER

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In my favorite movie, Three Days of the Condor, the assassin Joubert advises Robert Redford’s character, Joe Turner, to leave the United States. Turner says “I’d miss it if I were gone.”

Turner knows that people within the U.S. government hired Joubert to kill him, but he still doesn’t want to leave. He’d miss it. That’s how I feel about the Eureka Reporter.

For those who like to bash the Reporter, consider Humboldt County without it. When a newspaper goes from publishing seven days a week to five, that’s a sign of hard financial times. There are others. Its reporters are disappearing and more articles in the paper now carry no byline than stories that do carry a byline. (Generally that means that what you think is an article is just a printed press release.)

To many people, that’s reason to celebrate. A local boycott of the Reporter is a running joke — you can’t boycott something that’s free. Advertisers can, however, although I tend to think that the failure of the local business community to support the free paper has more to do with the problems of measuring the readership of a free paper than it has to do with dislike of its political slant.

I’d rather have a conservative paper than no paper. I’d rather have a paper owned by a conservative zillionaire than no paper. Consider that Dean Singleton owns the other paper. He lives in Colorado even as he owns just about every local paper in California.

There’s a rich history in the media business of newspapers founded on the egos of crazy rich men. In my short journalism history I worked for four crazy zillionaires — Charlie Munger, Bruce Wasserstein, Jim Cramer and Sy Newhouse. All four operated good publications. I avoided working for Singleton, not because of politics but because of his disregard for quality, his focus on newspapers as product and his tendency to pay reporters little, work them hard and bust their unions.

These days, with newspaper circulation falling across the board, you’d have to be crazy to get into the newspaper business. Consider the Bancrofts and the Wall Street Journal — a whole family of crazy rich people getting out of the newspaper business.

The Eureka Reporter recently attempted to survey its readers. Unfortunately, it was a case study in how not to do a media survey. First, it distributed the survey only in the Sunday newspaper, so it eliminated people who didn’t pick it up that day. You had to return the survey by hand delivery or mail.

In a note to readers Sunday about changes at the newspaper, publisher Judi Pollace said this: “The most fun a publisher can have is reading comments about how much you love us, and there were hundreds.” That’s backwards thinking. To grow newspaper readership you have to reach disgruntled readers and find out what they want and aren’t getting. Readers rarely love good newspapers. They read them, utilize them and act on what they read. Journalism is a masochistic profession. We’re the messengers people often want to kill. We strive to tell a truth people often don’t want to hear. Journalists understand that if too many people love what we’re doing, we probably aren’t doing the job right.

The survey’s multiple choice questions focused on what people did or did not read in the paper, rather than why they did or did not read it. For example, it asked you to check off whether you regularly, occasionally or never read the Humor Column by Nathan Rushton. But I didn’t know that Rushton’s column was supposed to be a humor column, so the question confused me. And it didn’t ask me whether I would regularly read his column if it were actually funny.

But don’t write off the paper yet. It eliminated paper publishing on Mondays and Tuesdays, but it recently added a fourth member to its editorial board: Peter Hannaford, a key adviser to Governor Ronald Reagan and a former partner to former Reagan adviser and lobbyist extraordinaire Micheal Deaver.

It makes for some interesting dynamics on the paper. The way editorials used to work involved a majority vote from the members of the three-person team. That led, at least once, to managing editor Glenn Franco Simmons writing a separate column opposing the paper’s stand. If they still use the voice vote, I’d like to see how they get out of a split.

I like having the Eureka Reporter around. It gives jobs to my current and former students. And it prints any opinion out there. For those who see it as a bullhorn for Arkley, they ignore how it prints columns by Amy Goodman, Dave Berman and others. It gives a forum for the 911 Truth folks — those pushing to reopen the investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Centers — who can’t get their voices into the North Coast Journal or Times-Standard. My stand isn’t whether I support the opinions or not. What I support is the forum for expression.

Until Heather Muller’s byline disappeared, it was the only paper that consistently covered our courthouse and kept an eye on what cases our district attorney prosecuted or pleaded out.

It also serves as a check on how the other paper treats its reporters. It is hard to tell your editor to screw himself when the other publications pay writers $25 a story or 10 cents a word. Feed your kids on that.

While you can’t boycott a free paper, there’s an effective way of opposing it. Support the other paper. Arkley subsidizes the Eureka Reporter. When someone will rather pay for the competition than get his paper free, that’s a quantifiable protest. Arkley loses money with every issue printed. You don’t like what the paper says? Write it a letter or column. He’s paying for the ink and newsprint and the energy and labor it costs to run his beautiful press. I’m betting the Reporter will print it. They’ll print just about anything.

– Marcy Burstiner

mib3@humboldt.edu

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism at Humboldt State University. You can contact her at mib3@humboldt.edu, but better yet, get your opinion publicly aired at the Eureka Reporter, the Times-Standard, the Journal or the Arcata Eye. Support your local press.

On Religion: Published by the NCJ Oct. 4, 2007

The Faithless Pages

by MARCY BURSTINER

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This was how the Times-Standard began a story about the Jewish New Year known as Rosh Hashanah: “The blast of the ram’s horn marks the end to the summer season. Jewish people around the world are roused by the piercing sound of this ancient instrument known as the shofar. The sound of the shofar announces the beginning of the Jewish New Year 5764.”

But we are now in the year 5768. The paper didn’t make a mistake. I’m quoting from last time the Times-Standard ran a story about Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, the single most important time of the year for Jews. That was in 2003.

It wouldn’t be so egregious an oversight, even though some 80 papers around California ran Rosh Hashanah stories this year, except that every week the Times-Standard devotes two whole pages to religion: Its “Faith” section. The U.S. Census doesn’t count religious affiliation, so it’s hard to know how many Jews there are in Humboldt County. But I counted seven Steins and six Goldbergs in the phone book, and those are just the ones listed.

But this column isn’t about slighting Jews. I haven’t been to a service in seven years, I spent Yom Kippur eating falafel at the North County Fair and I spent last Saturday at a Pig Pickin’ in Trinidad. It’s about how you measure the quality of a newspaper by the quality of its throwaway pages — the sections most people toss without reading. This is where they used to stick “women’s” news.

In 1989, I moved into a Midwestern town of 300 people. When I went to the town hall to get my water turned on the pleasant clerk handed me a list of the town’s 11 churches. When I moved my furniture into my rented duplex, the kindly man across the street invited me into his living room to play me an album his musician son had just recorded. It was gospel music, and he blasted out of speakers almost as tall as I was.

The world is now more religious than it was back then. The Humboldt County Yellow Pages has local church listings under 50 different categories. There’s a thriving Mormon population and a large number of Seventh Day Adventists. At a time when newspapers struggle to keep their circulation base and latch onto the new buzz word — “hyper-local” — I can’t fathom why our local papers do such a lousy job of covering the one thing most people care deeply about.

What’s on the Faith pages? Generally one photo profile of a church — a large photo or two over a a long caption that tells you where the church is located, who the pastor, priest, reverend or rabbi is, when services are held and whether it has bible study sessions and children’s programs. It also tends to give you a snippet of church history. And there’s one column each week written by a local religious leader. Then there are two much larger wire stories about some religious conflict from across the country and a bunch of briefs — some national, off the wires, and some local, off press releases.

In the 20 issues I scanned, there wasn’t a single story with original reporting. And that’s too bad, because the pages hinted at good stories. Did you know that Cindy Storrs replaced Kate O’Leary as reverend of the Arcata United Methodist Church? How’s that affecting the church? Or that the St. Innocent Orthodox church in Eureka has “acclaimed” gyros? Who makes them? Or that Easter and Christmas services are so popular at the Hydesville Community Church — some 800 people attend — that they have to have it in the River Lodge in Fortuna? I wonder about David Besanceney, the youth pastor there, and the challenges he has shepherding children and teenagers in such a rural outpost, where methamphetamines and marijuana are prevalent and immigration and the collapse of the lumber economy has transformed the community.

I’d like to know whether the churches are helping to integrate our increasingly ethnically diverse population here or whether they serve to segregate subsectors. These are the local issues the Faith pages should explore. I assume that’s why you have Faith pages in the first place. Instead, you can find out about the Hill Tribe Christians in Taiwan, the struggles of church bingo in Massachussetts and how, because of immigration, churches nationwide are recruiting clergy from Latin and South America. Are they doing that here in Humboldt? I don’t know, because when the paper rips off the wire story, it doesn’t bother to localize it.

Over at the Eureka Reporter, coverage of religion is left to reader submissions. That’s turned into an ongoing spitting match between a handful of people who each insist that the other writers are crazy and misinformed. It could be worse. Several years ago Channel 3 did a report on how local Jews celebrated Passover. Behind the newscaster was an icon of two palms held together in prayer, something you’ll never see a Jew doing.

Worldwide, there’s upheaval in the Episcopal Church and the Catholic Church. We can’t pull our soldiers out of Iraq because of conflicts between Muslim sects. There’s a Mormon running for president and a born-again Christian who is president. Fundamentalist Christians helped put George Bush in office. School boards across the country are dealing with parents who don’t want their children taught evolution. If relevance is the key to survival of a newspaper, there is nothing more relevant these days than religion. The media is quick to report negative news about religion — child molesting priests, corrupt preachers, Holocaust deniers.

But mostly good comes out of most churches and temples, and that’s rarely and poorly reported. Under each church steeple you’ll find happy stories and tragic stories. Churches are about births and weddings, communions and deaths. They are potlucks, raffles and rummage sales, food and clothing drives, soup kitchens and human rights campaigns. They are the heart of a community. We need thoughtful, substantive coverage.

That’s my prayer for the New Year.

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University. You can e-mail your comments to letters@northcoastjournal.com or e-mail her directly at mib3@humboldt.edu.

On California Coverage: Published by the NCJ Sept. 6, 2007

The Big Picture

by Marcy Burstiner

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Open any sports page in just about any newspaper and you get a great rundown on what's happening with teams from around the state and nation. But that's not the case for news.

The local papers here tend to give you a smattering of somewhat relevant local news, one or two of the biggest national stories off the wires and very little that happened elsewhere in the state. To stay informed, I read the Times-Standard, the Eureka Reporter, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Arcata Eye and I listen to National Public Radio. But I shouldn't have to. And I still don't feel very informed. Try this: Google the term Google News Map and you'll find a nifty site that ranks news stories in a visual presentation comparing news obsessions across the world. It gives you an idea of the stories you miss.

It is frustrating when a story not covered is one that is both important and relevant. That was the case with the state legislature's failure to pass a budget over the summer.

Considering that California is one of the world's largest economies, when legislators here leave for vacation without a budget in place it is a pretty big deal. For many people in Humboldt County, the state budget crisis equaled personal crisis, because payments from the state disappeared for almost two months. If you live paycheck to paycheck, that's a long time to be without one.

Between all the local papers there were just a handful of stories on the effects of the budget stalemate here in Humboldt County. I found that surprising. The state is the largest employer in the county and an awful lot of people here depend on state-funded social services. I have no idea how many small businesses supply goods to the state, but I'd bet the number is significant.

But then there's this: According to the San Francisco Chronicle on Aug. 14, a Harris Poll found that 51 percent of respondents said they paid no attention to the budget impasse and only 12 percent said they paid a lot of attention.

As a newspaper publisher, I might say that means that readers don't see the issue as important or relevant to them. The Chron said "The findings were not surprising given the often abstract nature of government finance ..."

Geographically, we are a long way from Sacramento. It seems like dollars take a long winding route getting from there to here. But I think we have a chicken and egg problem here. A story rarely becomes a story until a reporter does the story. If newspapers begin with the idea that government finances are abstract, that's how they will report them. And if stories are written that way, they will likely be dull and readers won't care about the issue.

It's the job of the press to not just report an issue but to get readers to care about news that's important. To do that it's the reporter's responsibility to spot the relevancy for the reader.

The combined handful of stories that the Times-Standard and Eureka Reporter did were good stories. They focused on real people hit hard by the budget crisis. T-S reporter Karen Wilkenson wrote about a child-care center operator in Briceland that had to borrow money to pay employees. Steve Spain from the Eureka Reporter noted that some state-funded children's centers were on such a thin thread they couldn't afford to make repairs or buy extra toilet paper. Carol Harrison at the ER reported how the stalemate cost Mad River Hospital $30,000 a month in interest payments on loans needed to cover lost Medi-Cal reimbursements, and how one nursing home in mid-August was waiting on $250,000 from the state that hadn't come.

But the impasse lasted almost two months. And it occurred during the summer when in Humboldt County, things couldn't get any slower. It warranted continuing coverage.

Here's some stories we missed:

On Aug. 10, the Sacramento Bee reported that a North Highlands computer company was waiting on $500,000 for hardware and software it sold to the state. An owner of a company that supplied water-softening salts to state prisons saw its cash flow evaporate. On Aug. 19, the Bee reported that some 266,000 college students in California might not get some $6 million in student aid in time for the start of the school year and 1,600 former foster kids wouldn't get some $6 million in aid owed them. The story reported that 70,000 community college students depended on state aid that was held up.

On Aug. 16, the Press Democrat reported that the stalemate was holding up some $10 million in Sonoma County roadwork projects, not counting Highway 101 projects. On Aug. 21, the paper reported that a women's health clinic in Santa Rosa was able to stay in business only because a small lender had advanced it an interest-free loan.

In the San Francisco Chronicle's Aug. 16 "Two Cents" feature, people expressed concerns that the budget impasse would disrupt chemotherapy treatment, Alzheimer's services, Cal State faculty raises, a small business' pending contract with the state and physical therapy at an adult day care.

The local papers should have seized the opportunity to explore how dependent we are on the state, and how many people and in how many ways politicians and policy makers in Sacramento can disrupt our lives. Instead of seizing on data that shows that people don't care about an issue that is really important, they should see it as a challenge: Here's an important issue that people don't understand. How can we, as the press, get people to care?

Here's what I'd like the local press to do next time a big story happens on the state level: Gather your reporters together from all your different beats -- schools, business, city governments, environment, crime, etc. -- and have them search out people on each beat affected by the state's action or inaction.

Or perhaps we have to take a completely different approach to state politics. After all, people are interested in the national sports stats not because they play sports, but more likely because they play fantasy sports. Perhaps we need to set up a fantasy league for lawmakers, with wins and losses measured by voting stats or the success or failure to pass bills and bring home pork. But wouldn't it be sad if the only way to generate more interest in state legislation was to give it a Second Life?

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University. She can be reached at mib3@humboldt.edu.

Complaining about long stories: Published by the NCJ Aug. 2, 2007

The long and long of it

by MARCY BURSTINER

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I reported any number of ridiculous stories over the course of my career -- all brilliant conceptions of bone-headed editors. There was the one on how corporate executives fit physical fitness into their busy work schedules, summer stories about desert heat, a feature about elevators in the TransAmerica Pyramid, interviews with mall shoppers about the invasion of Panama, a puffy profile of the potato chip king of Oakland who later turned out to be a fraud and the behind-the-scenes stories at the Bob Hope Golf Classic. There were worse, but to recall them I’d have to go into hypnosis to recover deeply repressed memories.

Here’s my nightmare. An editor says: “Marcy, give me 4,300 words on karaoke, 4,000 words on the thimbleberry plant, 3,900 words on folk musicians in Humboldt County and 4,300 words on the life of Bill the Chimp.”

Luckily someone else did all those stories. Each one was featured on the cover of the North Coast Journal over the last six weeks.

I can hear all 25 of you harmonica-playing, berry-eating, karaoke-crooning Bill fans groaning, but hear me out. I worship at the temple of Bob Dylan, I have nothing against karaoke or chimps and I wish I had the scientific aptitude to be a botanist. It’s not that a local paper shouldn’t write about any of the subjects. But 4,000 words on each story? For those of you who don’t measure the world in words or newsprint inches I’ll put it in perspective. A typical front page story on any daily newspaper might be 15 inches -- less for a Gannett paper, more for the New York Times. That’s roughly 500 words before the jump. Let’s say the jump triples the total length to 1,500 words.

That’s considered a very long newspaper story. A typical magazine story will run 2,500 words. When you get to 4,000, you better be writing for Vanity Fair or the New Yorker. Again I hear those groans, so let me state this: Until May, when my subscription ran out, I was an avid New Yorker reader for going on 20 years. Renewing it has been on my to-do list ever since. I particularly like those 30,000-word profiles about people I’d never heard of who do something I never thought I’d be interested in.

When you waste words you waste your reader’s time. It’s all about the reader, not the writer. Overly long stories say this about writers: They care more about writing the stories than they care about people reading them. They scream out that the writer thinks the reader has nothing better to do than read the story; that there is nothing more fascinating out there to read (let’s see, thimbleberry story or Harry Potter?), and there is nothing important or fun to do (let’s see, karaoke story or the Giants?).

Why is the New Yorker different? Because the reporting is so thorough and the writing is so good that every one of those 30,000 words matters. You get sucked into a New Yorker story. You start reading four paragraphs and before you know it you’ve been sitting on the toilet for half an hour. Now, the thimbleberry story was kind of interesting, but did the reader need to hear Heidi Walters call up restaurants to find out that no local bakers bake with the fruit or that Jerry Martien has never written poetry about it? Who cares? And the Bill the Chimp piece by Daniel Mintz. While the reporting is top-notch, it’s like Titanic, the movie. Engrossing until you’re two-thirds of the way through, then you just wait and wait for that damn ship to sink and Leo DiCaprio to die.

A story needs to deserve its length. A writer has to consider each word in it as if it were money -- it has to be well-spent. An overly long story says that the paper has nothing else to write about. It screams filler. If the NCJ had shortened each of those stories to a reasonable 2,000 words, it could have given us an extra story per issue for the same cost of the newsprint. When I went to grad school in New York we used to say there were eight million stories in the naked city. Here there are 130,000. Surely that’s enough potential stories to keep the paper filled each week. I’d like to read more stories like the June 14 cover story by Heidi Walters on Tyrone Kelley, the director of the Six Rivers National Forest. At 3,500 words I would have trimmed that one too, but as a story about someone important to the region, a decision maker over an area many people care deeply about, at least it deserved the length.

Another story this paper did recently that was worth its length was Hank Sims’ piece on the North Coast Railroad Authority v. hike-bike trail battle. Not only did every paragraph give you new, interesting and relevant information, but at the heart of the story was a compelling conflict -- the lost-cause fight to bring a rail line back versus the dream of biking and hiking along the bay from McKinleyville to Fortuna. Is there a similar conflict with thimbleberries or karaoke? Not quite. And forgive me, but when Bill died, so did the conflict.

There is a word for wasted words, and that’s “drivel.” Many of you will argue that’s just what I’ve written here. I teach my students that you can generally spot drivel in journalism if the article begins with the word “I.” But I just got you to read more than 900 words, and chances are you are still on the toilet.

– Marcy Burstiner

Marcy Burstiner is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Humboldt State University. If you want to comment on this story or let her know of some media coverage or issue you’d like her to look into, email her.