How and why the Eagle Times is different from social media

I have been paying more attention to social media, particularly Facebook, first because we have been advertising for open positions at the paper through this medium, and second to follow the threads that spin out on “What’s Up Claremont” and “What’s REALLY Up Claremont.”

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www.eagletimes.com

How and why the Eagle Times is different from social media By BILL CHAISSON 9 hrs ago 0 Bill Chaisson BETH CHAISSON I have been paying more attention to social media, particularly Facebook, first because we have been advertising for open positions at the paper through this medium, and second to follow the threads that spin out on “What’s Up Claremont” and “What’s REALLY Up Claremont.” Recently Facebook let me know — in their inimitable obsession with anniversaries — that I have been a member for 10 years now. I joined a decade ago out of curiosity about this “new social media thing.” As more and more people joined Facebook, I was amazed at (1) the people who came out of my past to “friend” me and (2) the wide-ranging conversations that took place on my “feed.” I have looked at other people’s feeds and frankly they can get a little out of hand, with lots of noisy slagging of each other about political positions. The quality of the “arguments” can be low, which is to say the facts are few and/or not facts and the logic is weak or lacking. Mercifully, my own feed remains fairly civil and continues to be a source of both a good laugh and the occasional lead for a good story. What is a good story? A good story is one that enlarges the world for you; you should learn something that you didn’t know and it should be something that allows you to make better decisions going forward. That is why we cover local government meetings, for example. It may not seem very exciting, but the decisions that are made at the meetings of the Claremont City Council, the select boards and school boards of the towns, and the county commissions and delegations will nearly all result in the government in question spending your tax dollars. Yes, they get money from the federal and state government at regular intervals, but some of that is your money too, just not as much of it. There are other kinds of stories. Many of these are more popular on social media and on aggregator sites like the Daily UV. These are stories that I think of as “other people’s misfortune and malfeasance.” They include stories about crime and punishment and about the personal lives of public people (generally when they have screwed up somehow). These are real stories in the sense that the events described most certainly occurred, but they don’t tend to enlarge your understanding of the world or help you make better decisions. Rather, they tend to confirm our prejudices, which if it doesn’t narrow your worldview, at least keeps it from expanding. We include these stories in the paper, of course, but they aren’t going to dominate the content, because they take away space we need to devote to good stories. Our coverage area is shaped like a square tilted up on one of its corners. The northern corner is at Lebanon and the southern one is at Westminster, Vermont. The eastern corner is at Newbury and the western one at Ludlow, Vermont. That’s 11 towns in Vermont and 17 towns in New Hampshire. The Eagle Times came together in 1974 when a Claremont newspaper (Eagle) and a Bellows Falls newspaper (Times) became one entity. We do our best to balance the coverage of this area from day to day and certainly from week to week, but it is certainly uneven. Sometimes the front page is dominated by Vermont news and sometimes by New Hampshire. Most of the New Hampshire news comes from Claremont or Newport because that is where most of the people are and where there is a lot more government action and, frankly, crime . The same goes for Springfield and Bellows Falls in Vermont. We have a category called “community news” that includes the achievements and milestones that occur constantly in small towns. We assign it to the “community” category if it largely is of interest to people in a single town because they know the people and/or the institutions involved. In thinly populated towns like Alstead or Cavendish, Vermont, community news is mostly what we hear about. We would like to be able to cover the select board meetings of these small towns, but we don’t have the staff to do so. In a bygone era, not only did newspapers have more staff, but they had more freelancers. These included people whose sole task was to cover the boards of their own town. It has been difficult to find such people since I started working in community journalism 15 years ago. If you are such a person, please feel free to contact me. Social media, in my experience, is dominated by community news and stories about other people’s misfortune or malfeasance. The ubiquity and constancy of social media may be causing people to think those stories are more important to their lives than, for example, how elected officials are spending their tax dollars. Social media participants are also happy to blur the distinction between fact and opinion. Unfortunately, there is also something called “advocacy journalism” wherein professional journalists do pretty much the same thing. The Eagle Times is neither a social medium nor is it advocating a particular political point of view. As an editor I am guided by reason rather than political ideology. I look for the stories that are going to give you information that you don’t yet have, so that you can make your own informed decisions. The public pronouncements of people on both the left and the right tend to be a selective amassing of facts that support their position. Since my first career was in science, this sort of rankles. We’ll do our best ask as many questions as we have time and resources in order to bring you good stories. Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times, and while he is a member of Facebook, he does not tweet.