It's still ten feet

I love Hoosiers. I love TV news. Combine the two, and that's something after my heart.

One of my favorite new blogs is TV News Grapevine. It's written by a veteran in the news business who offers a new piece of advice/wisdom each day. As someone now entering his second year in the bid'ness (thank you, Dan Garrity), it has been wonderful to get some perspective about what we go through in this industry.

Today, he takes one of Hoosiers' most iconic scenes and applies it to the TV news industry.

It's still ten feet.

I could not agree more.

It's a strange thing about being in a small, beginner market. The news may seem different than what you will find in a larger city, and certainly it can seem like there's less of it. But TV stations in small markets are sometimes caught in this strange space - they either want to accept the small town aspect and say nothing important ever happens in that city, or go the exact opposite and push back against the small town image, trying to make every story the most important story ever. One week you will do the cat fashion show story, the next week you will be told a school fundraiser isn't "hard news" enough.

The trouble is that you cannot get stuck on one end of the spectrum or the other. It's a delicate balancing act. The end result, however, should be to believe in everything you cover. Have a reason to cover it, then treat it with the respect it deserves.

In the smaller markets, not everything is going to be hard news. But being in a smaller market shouldn't prevent you from taking a serious approach to hard news. The rules for good reporting are the same everywhere.

It's still ten feet.

A few years ago when I wrote for my college newspaper, I spoke to our newspaper staff, and gave a fairly scathing critique of the way the paper covered a more serious University story. Basically, the layout treated it as a joke, practically making it into a cartoon on the front page. I said if we didn't take the story seriously, our readers wouldn't take it seriously.

The editor who designed the layout shot back with "We aren't the New York Times."

"Yes," a fellow editor and I said back. "But that doesn't mean we can't strive to be."

In the years since, as I've watched "small-market" TV news from across the country and read news stories online, I've sensed a feeling from some people working at news outlets - some of their employees think they cannot be the New York Times, simply because of where they are geographically. Not everyone subscribes to that line of thinking, but an attitude like that from just a few people can make a big difference on the whole. I've met people who have shared the thought of "there are six people watching, what does it matter?"

Then let's have some great coverage for those six viewers.

If a small-time mentality takes hold, whether it's a college newspaper or a professional TV station, it can be hard to get out of. But it's still ten feet, no matter where the newsroom is located.