 | Bob Gabordi is executive editor of the Tallahassee Democrat and Tallahassee.com. He can be reached through this blog, at bgabordi@tallahassee.com or (850) 599-2177 |
It is a good question and one that gets asked from various viewpoints from time to time: Who controls the national news?
It was asked again by a reader on Tallahassee.com, followed by this assertion:
“Someone is controlling the news, or else we wouldn't have the same 10 stories in the paper, on the radio and on TV news all on the same day. I listen to National Public Radio every morning and by the time I get here to TDO on my lunch break there is nothing new but Local drama and the Opinion page.”
A friend suggested on my Facebook page that I blame the Trilateral Commission. I think he was joking.
For real, there are a few things going on with this, none having to do with anything secret or devious:
Perhaps most significantly, for the most part there is general agreement among professional journalists – and most of the public, I would dare say – about what are the most important 10 to 15 national stories of the day. Readers will call me when we don’t carry a story for whatever reason that other media outlets are touting.
For example, most daily newspapers will have something today on President Obama’s health-insurance news conference. We carried multiple stories on the news conference, including where U.S. Rep. Allen Boyd and other members of the Blue Dog Coalition stand on the president’s plan.
Our editors at the Tallahassee Democrat also picked up stories from the wires on a Senate vote on a concealed weapons bill; the discovery of the mental-health records of the Virginia Tech gunman; the administration’s budget chief’s defense of stimulus spending; the Fed chairman’s opposition to creating a financial products consumer protection agency.
In general, I would bet there is agreement among editors and readers that these are among the most important stories nationally, at least in mainstream media, on this particular day.
But what our reader may also be noticing – and what I think is a cause for concern – is the impact of the economy and overall media financials on national news reporting. Fewer news outlets can afford multiple wire services. Many, including us, have curtailed some services.
Most of our wire news comes from The Associated Press, which is a membership-based organization with a board of directors. We are members of the AP as well as its customer. Members – more than 1300 daily newspapers and news outlets – own the AP and elect the directors to run it.
We like to think, as members and customers, we help control what the AP does, and not the other way around.
In addition to picking from stories written by AP’s journalists, editors at the AP cull stories from members’ newspapers and send them out on the wires, too. The local story in Tallahassee becomes a national story when news outlets – newspapers, broadcast and Web services – elsewhere pick it up.
Gone are the days when newspapers our size can afford three, four or more of what we used to call supplemental services. We are fortunate that we are still contract with McClatchy-Tribune Information Services and other syndicated services, but those are used primarily for opinion pieces and features.
Because we are a part of Gannett Co. Inc., we also have access to its new ContentOne platform, which provides news and information from Gannett’s national reporters, USA TODAY and its 85 U.S. daily newspapers, 23 TV stations and related Web sites. A report in Sunday’s Democrat will make use of a strong ContentOne report on how the president’s health-insurance plan would impact Florida, for example.
Still, it would be rare to see stories in the Democrat from other supplemental services, such as Washington Post-LA Times or Reuters. Some, such as United Press International, no longer provide general news articles for print.
It is not as simple as it looks at first, but you can be certain of this, even in these very hard times for newspapers: Even with fewer resources to work with, local editors and other journalists control what gets put into your newspaper, answerable to you and all of our readers for the decisions – good and bad – that we make.
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