RE: Manufactured News

There was about two feet of snow on these steps before I shoveled it out. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

A gigantic and crippling blizzard blew through our area the other day (Wednesday, March 12th, 2014).
It left 15-20 inches of snow in my driveway I still have to remove — I have a large snowblower.
It also prompted emergency declarations from various local authorities, even the NY state governor, Andrew Cuomo.
Still snowing that night I turned on the TV-news. The local news was all blizzard, but it wasn’t on the national news at all.
Here we are, snowed-in-SOLID, totally incapacitated, and not a peep. Philadelphia or Washington DC get snowed in even less, and that’s news.
It got me remembering how we “manufactured” the news at the newspaper I worked at.
Editors would decide what should run on the front-page that day. Since it was a local newspaper, we’d try to get a locally-written story in the lede.
But we also got news from Associated-Press via satellite, and sometimes national news would trump the local news.
So Limberger and his lackeys loudly fulminate about how the dreaded media manufactures the news.
As if Limberger ain’t media!
Like we held furtive meetings to advance our liberal agenda.
Uh Rush, a deadline is looming!
Instead of furtive meetings, generating that newspaper was always a slap-shot. A page editor would call another above him saying he had an eight-inch hole to fill.
“Try that time-bomb story.”
It wasn’t “All the news that’s fit to print;” it was “Whatever fits.”
So we weren’t sipping coffee and eating donuts, furtively laying plans to advance a liberal agenda.
We were trying to slam together a newspaper before a printing-deadline.
What ran in the newspaper was what fit. That’s was how the news was manufactured. What ran became news.
A local story might might run first, which left space that was filled with AP filler.
I remember when I did paste-up, a page-editor cutting out half an AP story.
It was cut to fit.
And there was no time to be analytical about it. A printing-deadline was looming.
His cut was at a sentence-end.
Yet the tub-thumping Conservatives LOUDLY accused us of a liberal bias. Like mere reporting wasn’t as good as laying on a Conservative slant.
An example might be how we reported Obama drinking Pepsi. We might report that as “Obama drinks Pepsi,” whereas a proper Conservative reporting might be “Obama declares war on Coke.”
The Conservatives weren’t too diplomatic. They once got an editor crying. Our Executive-Editor had to shut the guy down.
He hung up on him!
And sometimes “what fit” was a joke. One time we ran a local story about a fly-infestation in the lede. A farmer had spread chicken-manure on his field.
Well, I’m sure it was important to fly-infested neighbors.
But this is front-page news?
The fact we had the awful temerity and unmitigated gall and horrific audacity to report a fly-infestation demonstrated our obvious liberal slant.
So how, pray tell, do the tub-thumpers react to that?
I don’t recall as they did.
So I can easily imagine a gathering of national-news producers in New York City.
“What do we lede with today?”
“How about that blizzard in Rochester, NY?”
“Not Philly or DC. And it ain’t the I-95 corridor.
They get blizzards up there. Rochester ain’t Atlanta. They can deal with it.”
Thus a blizzard in Rochester doesn’t get reported at all.
Our blizzard moved east to New England the next day. That got reported, but only about 10 seconds.

• The “newspaper I worked at” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over seven years ago. Best job I ever had — I worked there almost 10 years (over 11 if you count my time as a post-stroke unpaid intern [I had a stroke October 26, 1993, from which I recovered fairly well]). (“Canandaigua” [“cannan-DAY-gwuh”] is a small city nearby where I live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” —It’s about 14 miles away.)
• RE: Paste-up........ —When I first began work at the Messenger, it wasn’t fully computerized; that is pages weren’t produced in a computer. We had a semi-computerized system, whereby copy-galleys were sent to an old main-frame, and from there they were projected onto photo-paper strips which were developed, cut, and pasted to page-dummies which were later photographed to make printing-plates. A “paste-up” person had to be precise pasting these galley-strips to the page-dummies to be square. —Before I retired, the newspaper was converted to full computer pagination, and paste-up was removed.