Monday, October 29, 2012

Small town papers vs large dailies

While working with the Portage Daily Graphic in the summer, I had to unfortunately cover two deaths - both car accidents on the Trans-Canada Highway.

The first was east of Portage in early July. A truck had rear ended a car that was turning off the highway and the crash killed the female passenger. Being late on a Friday, I was the only one in the office, so I had to cover the crash.

So many emotions were running through my body when I arrived at the scene to take photos of the wrecked metal strewed across the highway and into the ditch. The passengers and drivers were taken from the scene already.

When talking to people who witnessed the crash, they would all say, "I can't imagine how the family feels."

Even worse are the cases where families find out about deaths by media - instead of police.

This leads to the question: Should media sources rush to get the names of deceased out to the public? Now, I'm not talking about murders or crimes such as that.

In the cases of car accidents, hit and runs and other incidents of that nature, I don't feel it is important to have the names released to the public.

But in the current day of media, where every news source wants to be first to the punch, I feel they disregard the feelings of families just to break a story first.

In Portage, we wouldn't release the names until we felt enough time would have passed and family members of the deceased would have been notified.

Because Portage was a such a small tight-knit community, everyone knew everyone, and that made the subject a little more touchier than a death in Winnipeg for example.

I'm not sure how other newsrooms work, but I think for Portage, it was the right choice.

Winnipeg is a much different market. As sad as it is to say, people are used to murders here in the city and unlike Portage, communities are not as close.

This is why Winnipeg papers have a much different feel than smaller towns. While Portage certainly doesn't shy away from harder stories, there is a focus on feel good stories.

And that is something that isn't seen much in the Free Press or Sun.

As a writer, I always hated covering the fluff stories. I wanted to break a drug bust or some harder breaking news. But when that hard news rolled around, it didn't do anything for me.

It's not that I didn't want to beat Portage Online (the Portage rivals) to the crash scene, or the large fire; it was that I realized that I would rather be covering a feel good story than a death or anything of that nature.

Either way, it's interesting to compare rural papers to the big cities. The difference in stories is just mind-blowing. With the horrible stories you see day-after-day, it's nice to open a paper and see a strong community doing great things.







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