Editor's Blog: Proud to salute community heroes
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The media is often criticised for dwelling on
bad news and filling news pages and websites with doom and gloom.
Those of us who have been in the business a while know that bad
news does sell – it’s simply a reflection of human nature. After
all, one suspects that if EastEnders didn’t have murders, rapes and
domestic abuse, and portrayed Albert Square as a Truman Show-style
community where everyone got along, their viewing figures would
plummet. A quick glance at web traffic shows that the most popular
stories are not happy ones.
That said, local papers have a responsibility
not to tap exclusively into this demand and to provide balance in
reflecting the positive side of its community. It’s important for
people to feel proud about where they live and the local paper is
an important agent for that.
So it was good to provide some postive news on
the KM’s front page today. Well, it was good news out of bad,
really. In deciding what to put on page one this week we noticed
that there were several tales of heroism within unconnected
stories, like the man who risked his life to save a neighbour’s
children from a fire, a man who attempted to save two people from
the River Medway, a woman who helped coordinate a rescue effort
following a large blaze and a mystery man who resuscitated a heart
attack victim. We were pleased to run all these examples of heroism
under the headline ‘We salute you’.
Once the paper was finished I was up to
Downing Street for a reception for regional editors. I’d been to a
similar event in the final months of the Labour government so it
was interesting to see if the place felt different under the new
coalition. At the January event, virtually the entire cabinet
showed up with Gordon Brown, while last night there was a distinct
lack of senior ministers joining David Cameron. Apparently Nick
Clegg turned up briefly and the only other recognisable faces were
Iain Duncan-Smith and the PM’s spinmeister Andy Coulson. I was
stood next to the editor of the Darlington Times when the PM
finally got around to us and when he mentioned a bright new MP for
Stockton to my colleague, I couldn’t resist adding that here in
Kent we have a new young MP in a certain Mark Reckless, for
Rochester and Strood. I didn’t even have to mention why (in case
you missed it, he got so drunk in the Terrace bar last week he
missed a three-line whipped vote on the budget). Cameron’s reaction
was to laugh it off so maybe Mr Reckless is genuinely in the clear.
I also mentioned that our Medway paper, which I also edit, had a
picture of the MP having his face pelted with wet sponges at a
local school fair THE NEXT DAY. This brought more mirth from his
boss who recalled how he’d been pictured in a national paper
dropping a pancake in a race under the heading ‘What a useless
tosser’.
Friday, July 16 2010
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