Originally published in Countryside Post, Issue 2.2.
IF YOU WANT TO SEE SOMETHING WRITTEN UP IN COUNTRYSIDE POST, WRITE IT UP AND SEND IT IN.
I half wonder if I shouldn’t say this in every issue. It makes me tired when people complain that they attended an event and were disappointed when they didn’t see anything on it in their paper. Of course not—if you didn’t write anything about it, what makes you think anyone else did? Whatever happened to that saying, “If you want something done, you gotta do it yourself?”
Lemme point this out: The Post isn’t one of those papers where the staff produces everything. First, the staff isn’t big enough. Second, that doesn’t fit with my philosophy that you can’t have a “community newspaper” if the community doesn’t get to contribute to it. More often than not, a paper’s community doesn’t contribute to it. Sure, they get to write letters, but if they offer to write anything else, they wind up getting grilled by the editor to find out why they’d want to do such a thing—what their “angle” is—before they’re politely but condescendingly told that only the reporters get to do that. And if you skip that hog-wash and just send them an article, you often find it rewritten to pieces—or one of the reporters has “coincidentally” written about the exact same subject.
Part of this comes from an attitude you pick up in the biz: Because reporters often know more about news than the average person, they start to think they know better. Well, the Post will never claim to know better, and everyone who does know better is invited to write about it. I don’t write “If you’ve got something interesting, bla bla bla” at the end of these columns to fill space, y’know. I actually mean it. Call me on it any time: 268-3420.
Kent Leslie, managing editor
Update, 10/20/2024. Countryside Post had a staff of two: Jill and me. Obviously we couldn’t cover everything.
So I came up with a policy where, whenever someone complained, “How come you didn’t write about [an event I think is important]?” I’d respond, “Were you there?”
“Yeah.”
“Could you write something? Nothing huge. Just a little description of it. If you’re worried about your writing, I’ll clean it up for you.”
Some took me up on this and wrote something. Others were a little dumbfounded and stopped complaining ’cause they didn’t know what to make of this ploy of mine. But that’s how I handled those complaints: I recruited them as writers. Some of ’em actually became regular contributors.
More newspapers ought to try this. But editors, like I said in the column, honestly don’t trust the public enough to let them. Or they think it’ll somehow lower the public’s estimation of the press. Well, in the present day, what with bloggers basically taking over more and more of the press’s functions all the time, this should be less of an issue. Yet you still see some of that unspoken snobbery in much of the traditional media. It’s gradually disappearing, but it’s largely still there. And it’s most of the reason why the traditional media are fading away.