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Harvey, Heidi and Hoeven

There certainly has been plenty in the news the past week as this long, strange trip of a year rolls toward winter (boo!). There’s been so much happening at the national level that every news cycle seems to bring something different. Inside the newsroom at Minot Daily News, the challenge has been to curate national and international copy while making sure readers don’t lose sight of what is news here in our part of the world.

It is a news story that hasn’t been placed prominently in MDN that leads me to this column today. At the end of the week, a very polite woman called me to say that she appreciated the fact that we weren’t splashing the dreadful Harvey Weinstein story all over the cover of the newspaper. “I imagine you could sell more papers with smut like that on the cover, so thank you for sticking to real news.” She went on to cite a couple of things she believed were vastly more important than Hollywood scandals and which were prominent items in the paper this week.

The call prompted me to pause and wonder if people are so interested in something like the Weinstein story that they would actually pick up MDN to read about it. I promised this caller I would address her comments by way of explaining our philosophy and practices in today’s column.

Our whole editorial “model” at MDN is to deliver local news, supplemented by national and international news which, when possible, is paired with local impact companion pieces – all the news you need to be an informed resident and informed citizen.

We really couldn’t see any news value to the Weinstein story in our neighborhoods. So, the increasingly freakish Weinstein story didn’t get prominent play in MDN. I will let you in on a little secret, too. We weren’t terribly interested in the Eminem-bashes-President Trump-in-an-effort-to-be-relevant-again story, which seemed everywhere for a day or two. Nor did we focus on the childish name-calling and gotcha games in D.C. This one wore the wrong shoes to a press conference; this one mispronounces a name and is thus stupid; yatta, yatta, yatta.

However, I am not patting us on our collective back for this. The Weinstein story and these other largely irrelevant things dominated much of the media last week, so some people, somewhere must want to read about it, and some newspapers must not mind providing it. So, while I accepted the complimentary call, it isn’t a slam dunk – after the call, I wondered if maybe we would have “sold more newspapers” plastering Hollywood scandal all over the paper!

Every Saturday morning, I take the newspapers from the week and review them as a collective – examining how I feel we did that week when it comes to local coverage. Part of it is statistical, part qualitative. So, yesterday that’s exactly what I did.

In terms of content focus and positioning, MDN this week “felt” that readers would be best served by and most interested in potential changes to income tax and to healthcare, and where our D.C. delegation stood on the issue. We “felt” that the Las Vegas tragedy remained relevant, in particular local links to the story and the still-unfolding details. For many in our area, Las Vegas is a pretty frequent destination. We “felt” the California fires were important, as well as the struggles in Puerto Rico, because there will be huge economic impact from these things on all of us.

Of course, local stories were most important and claimed most of the high-profile placements in the newspaper, but in terms of national and international stories, MDN believed these items were more important than Weinstein and the latest Twitter rant from one celebrity or politician or another.

So, would scandal in the entertainment industry attract more readers for a few days? Would someone new to the paper pick it up, read story after story about celebrities, and then decide to subscribe? Or is it more likely that reading about things that will absolutely affect a new reader’s life in our region for years to come, end in better results? Personally, I think it’s like comparing candy with a balanced meal. Which will reasonable people choose most often. There is a place for “scandal” stories that are gossipy even if distant. There is a place for light, entertaining stories – a la our fun story today about the pleasure or plague of the pumpkin spice phenomenon.

Still, most of our moms taught us better than to make a regular diet out of candy. I’d like to think the same applies to us intellectually.

To my friendly caller – who really did brighten up an otherwise challenging week – that’s the long explanation. This is why Harvey loses out on attention from us while we focus instead on Hoeven and Heidi.

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