It’s hard to imagine a more perfect story than the piece we ran Thursday on the Wilkes County man who caught a state-record catfish on his granddaughter’s Barbie fishing pole after she ducked out for a few minutes to—as he says—“go potty.”
In the news biz, this is called a “talker,” and it’s the sort of story that quickly finds a home at the bottom of page 1. It has all the elements: quirkiness, family love; struggle and happy ending.
We ignore these stories at our own risk. Yes, there is a lot of serious news in the world. Some of it is incredibly sobering and painful and distressing. The Arctic ice is melting. South Ossetia, a place that many of us didn’t know existed, is the latest flash point in the world. People are excited about gas at $3.50 a gallon. On and on.
As I’ve said before, the goal is balance. I love serious and important news. But a Barbie rod and a 21 pound catfish. It is a story that everybody can relate to. If you do a Google search for Barbie and fishing, you get 4 million hits. Now, not all of them are our story. But you’d be surprised—or maybe not—how many times this story has traveled electronically around the world.
More naming issues: This is a follow up from an earlier post about what to call things. As we’ve reported, the NC School of the Arts is now UNC School of the Arts. That’s a mouthful. And it doesn’t exactly fit in a headline. So, one shorthand is its initials UNCSA. But saying U-N-C-S-A takes too long. So the acronym we use is Uncsa, pronounced UNK-sa. And my guess is that despite many people’s efforts to the contrary, that is going to become how it is known.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
Here’s another sign of the challenges you guys face. The story was picked up on Fark.com, which means it should have been a massive traffic boost for you guys. Unfortunately the link on Fark was to the AZDaily site, categorized under local news, and was a reprint of the NC Wildlife Commission’s press release. AZDaily is a site focused on, you guessed it, Arizona.
So a story from your home beat gets picked up by an Arizona news op, is run as a local story, and they get the love from Fark.com which as I said is a huge traffic generator. It really is too bad that you guys didn’t get the traffic.
It is a great story though.
You’re absolutely right. The aggregation of news/audience on the Web is a huge challenge for newspapers and other gatherers. It’s content without borders, which really means content without owners. That said, we got a huge amount of traffic off that story.
Though it is a great story you guys didn’t get the traffic,it’s so sad!
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