"The Readers Aren't Interested"

[Pacifist Patriot]

Maybe it is because I am home alone with six boys between the ages of 2 and 12 today, but if I hear one more time this week that readers aren't interested in reports of substance or import I am going to just lose it!

It started back in December/January when I took an editor to task for choosing not to publish stories about the Conyers hearing and the Electoral challenge. The political editor told me these stories were deemed "non-newsworthy."

Last Saturday night I asked why stories about election irregularities and the UK memo were not appearing in the local paper. I was told that the marketing department decided that their circulation would not read such stories. You read that right. The marketing department, not the editorial board.

Greg Palast's article about the Newsweek situation quotes Isakoff as asserting that readers don't give a shit about "issues of substance."

I call bullshit on the lot of them!

We did not lead the media away from The Federalist Papers and the likes of Nellie Bly and down the path of inane reports about rock stars who diddle with children and sports figures who can't take no for an answer. Maybe if they'd stop entertaining to the lowest common denominator they could help some of the brain dead in our country rather than numbing the rest of us.

Yes I know I'm pissing into a wind tunnel but I have not had a single day in almost a week in which I have not heard someone tell me that "readers don't care." It's a dangerous myth and one I'm heartily sick of. I don't know what we can do about it, but this paradigm HAS to change.

Rant over.

[oddmanout]

1. HaliFREAKINGluya!!!

I couldn't agree more with you! I am sick of scanning the papers for details on stories that I Know is out there! I want the details, This is a "free" country, I can handle the details and make up my own mind as to how i feel about them.



:dem:

[cyberpj]

2. Marketing decides what to print. That's just great.

Pardon my disdain but I'm betting it's a bunch of twenty-somethings who have no idea how interested "their circulation" is in a real story.

If memory serves me, I believe circulation goes UP when there's a good continuing scandal to follow. All they have to do is allow good investigative journalists to write on something for more than one day! Remember newspaper articles as series?

[Pacifist Patriot]

4. You know, I do have a vague memory of that.

*sigh* This has been quite a week.

[flordehinojos]

3. sounds like the meanstream media are spitting word for word something the

bushes might be directing them to say... and, for your consolation, if any is possible because america has soooooo lost itself in the claws of the bushes, they all say the same thing... i can name you three newspapers here in Florida whose response to my rants/letters to them have basically been the same: we don't care. you don't care. we see it this way. you see it that way. we have the press. you have not.