All-about-the-words journalism-blog Gangrey sparked a thread with its recent post, New Rules:
If you got to blow up your newspaper, effectively immediately, meaning even the potential elimination of the traditional, nuts-and-bolts beats – cops, city hall, school board – and if you then got to rethink completely how we harvest stories …
What would the “beats†be?
Great question. It got a bunch of responses too, here are my favorites from the contributions:
- Stories Where People Voluntarily Get Out Their Old Yearbooks
- Collision (cars, people, ideas, whatever)
- Pieces of furniture that cost under $500
- Contentment. Or, what people do when they don’t have to do anything
- Politicians who are (not) helping
- Businesses that are not chains
- Secrets
- Things we accept but shouldn’t
- The things we do, but do not talk about
And these are the ideas I contributed:
- Red: News and local ephemera that has to do with that color.
- Last Month, Last Year: What matters now about what happened around here 13 months ago?
- Oooops: Who out there is making the ‘best’ mistakes, and how do they do it?
- PGs and QBs: Point guards and quarterbacks in the news.
- Five Years: News and ephemera about five-year-olds.
- Running on Empty: “Running out of gas”-related news and stuff
What I like about the Gangrey post and the ideas it sparked is the idea of the world worth talking about that doesn’t fit within the usual definitions of what makes a news or feature article.
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