Check it Out!: Great Reporters on What It Takes to Tell the Story

5. So What’s News

“On Extra tonight, stars remember where they were when they heard about Princess Diana. ” tease for story on her death, one year later So What’s News hdon't ask!h T he crusty old city editor relit his well-chomped cigar and forcefully blew a blue-gray cloud of acrid smoke over his cluttered desk. He was pissed. He had sent his cub reporter to the stadium to cover the big game, which should have been over for some time now. Deadline was approaching, and he hadn’t heard a word from the budding young scribe. The now furious editor had left messages all over town. Finally the phone rang. “Where the hell have you been?” steamed the editor. “For chrissake, we’ve only got a few minutes to get that story in the paper!” “Don’t worry about it chief,” the young journalist reassured his boss. “There’s no story, so there’s no problem.” “What the #&*%#@*&!!! do you mean, there’s no story?” the editor sputtered. “It was the championship game! What the hell do you mean, there’s no story?” “It’s very simple, chief,” the reporter calmly replied. “There was no game. They cancelled it when the stadium burned down.” So what’s news? According to my antique, three-thousand-page Webster’s New International Dictionary (1927), the word “news” has French origins, coming from the word nouvelles, as in novelty. “Something strange or newly happened; novelties,” says Webster, which 5 50 g check it out! continues: “a report of a recent event; information about something before unknown; fresh tidings; recent intelligence.” The reference to intelligence certainly comes into question in some stories we’ve seen or heard lately. My much newer Webster’s New World Dictionary (1991) defines “news” as “new information about anything” (my emphasis), and it seems that in today’s world of news, anything, indeed, goes. I write all this here just to make a point. Is anything really news? And who decides? It seems we each have our own definition. I always say that to be a news story, it must pass the “Who cares?” test. If nobody cares, it ain’t worth tellin’. Linda Ellerbee has her own theory. “Who cares?” is a good question to ask, but I think we run a risk today of the news lineup [choice of stories] of the program being controlled by the notion of what the people want. Or what somebody thinks the people want, or thinks the people at least won’t want to miss. And so the basic core of the arrogance goes like this. Most of the people who work in broadcast news really think they’re a lot smarter than most of the people who watch or listen to broadcast news. So instead of giving their very best, they are content to give the viewer or listener what they think he or she would want, or needs, or doesn’t want to miss. I don’t think our mission is just the “Who cares.” I do believe many studies say that most people don’t care much about foreign news. So if it’s only “Who cares,” we would never be telling about the rest of the world. I think the rest of the world is as important as how to grow your own Christmas tree for next year. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You can have Martha Stewart over here, you can have Foreign Affairs over there, and broadcast news is somewhere in the middle. It’s not original, and it has probably hung, in one form or another, on the walls of most newsrooms in America. It’s called a “Newsworthy Proportionality Chart,” and it’s a tongue-in-cheek guide to determining the importance of a news story. My CBS News colleague Paul Jeffers drew up this one. so what’s news g 51 200 thousand Pakistanis dead in a typhoon equals 4,000 Peruvian peasants killed in a landslide equals 540 Japanese lost as a ferryboat overturns equals 102 Yugoslavians trapped in a coal mine explosion equals 41 Portuguese senior citizens dead in an old-age home blaze equals 4 California tuna fishermen lost in storm equals One three-year-old girl trapped in a well in Teaneck, New Jersey You get the idea. What’s of great interest to one is of little interest to another. The fire in...