The real reason why " the media " don ' t cover certain stories

Ever heard of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn? They drew the TCP/IP protocol on a napkin and today the whole Internet runs on it. Both men are still alive and lending their considerable intellects to thinking about ways we can be better served in cyberspace. Cerf these days is a vice president with Google, but when I lived and worked in Washington, D.C., he was with Washington-based MCI and I interviewed him a couple times. Both MCI then, and Google now, hired him to think. He's good at it. He's also a genial man who speaks well. The Pacific Telecommunications Council this week held its annual telecoms conference at the Hilton Hawaiian Village and Vint Cerf was its main speaker, speaking of the rapidly approaching wide adoption of Internet protocol version 6 and interplanetary Internet connectivity. So I walked over there and interviewed Cerf, asking him about the effect of computers and the Internet on the recent Wall Street meltdown. Describing computer trading the way an engineer would instead of a broker, he made it clear how inevitable market volatilility is when "everybody gets the same information really fast and then acts on it using similar programs." He also predicted that some e-commerce sites -- Hawaii is replete with those -- could actually benefit from the recession because online sales can be done cheaply. Good story. But this was Monday, and everyone was focused on the next day's inauguration of President Obama, so the producer suggested I file the package for Wednesday, when the presidential stuff would die down a little. Okay, fine, no one has the story. But the package was bumped again and did not run until Thursday. I'm done talking about Vint Cerf and ready to get to my real point. Newspapers have finite paper and TV stations have finite time, and sometimes stories don't run because other stories run instead. Everyone who learns about something that he thinks should have been splattered all over the news seems to become convinced that the story was "suppressed" by some Star Chamber of evil editors, but what really happens behind the scenes is not so malignant as that. My story was reasonably interesting, but not compared to the excitement in Washington. During World War II, intelligence analysts used a process called "content analysis" to try to learn more about the Soviet Union. They knew officials controlled the newspapers. They knew that newspapers have finite space. So they measured what percentage of newspaper space was devoted to various issues. The thinking was that issue X could not get a lot of play without bumping issue Y from the news, and calculating this could provide hints to official thinking. Even in American newspapers, with virtually no centralized control even in large chains, content analysis specialists found that new issues tended to bump old ones. Broadly speaking, gay rights bumped feminist issues which in turn had bumped civil rights issues. If you analysed network television coverage over the past year you may find that war coverage lessened as economic crisis coverage grew. One interesting complication. Let's say every story's importance can be rated on a scale of 1 to 10 and everyone would agree on the rating. Well, the story you care about may be a 4, while the guy across the street cares about a story that's a 6. Yet your story led the news tonight, since all the other news today was a 3 or less, while his story, a 6, didn't on at all because there were three stories worth a 7 and one worth an 8 on the day his story broke. Official Washington likes to announce bad news on Friday afternoon because some people don't bother to watch the news on Friday night and lots of people don't very carefully read their Saturday morning newspapers. And did you notice how many companies made layoffs announcements on inauguration day?

Comments

[DKM]

"buried" or "bumped" because of a larger story is the oldest trick; yeah I know, lots of people don't realize that. But what would be great from a news source is something I think could be refreshing -- take all the bumped stories and summarize them into a Tweet, or into a "After the deadline" call-to-action. I know those exist, but take it a step further, and drive traffic to your website by making these calls-to-action more prominent in the normal broadcast/print. I'd say that's how you'd capture the non-paper-reading and non-tv-watching generation x, y, and z to get involved on the news. I'm probably too old to be GenX, so maybe I'm GenW but nonetheless, even I get how it's supposed to work "these days." Just my 2 cents.
[Actually, not a bad idea. Some all-news radio stations already use their websites for information they didn't have time for, like long articles on medical reports they tossed off in a couple sentences. Your idea is a logical extension of that. HMD]