shakran

Well I've never done a minigolf shooting, but I've covered mall shootings, highway shootings, bar shootings/stabbings. It's just a way of identifying the incident. It's not used all the time but especially when there's a lot of crime to cover that week, it helps to differentiate the various shootings.


More intensely covered yes. Hyped up, sometimes, but not by everyone. You gotta realize though, people have been offing each other in bars pretty much since bars were invented.

Until Columbine, school violence on this level was practically unheard of. Even though it's getting way to often for anyone's taste, having someone shoot up a school is still unusual enough that it's going to get more coverage than the run-of-the-mill drunk bar shooting.

Add into the mix that kids are involved and therefore people are much more concerned about it, and you're certainly going to get a lot of coverage when something like this happens.

Sure, because PEOPLE love kids. This is a kid-centric society. If some guy started yelling and screaming while you were eating in a decent restaurant he'd be kicked out. A kid does it and everyone ignores it. It's all about the kids in the good old USA. So naturally if a bunch of kids get hurt in a shooting spree, the media's going to cover it more because people want that, and when you get right down to it the news media is, unfortunately, a business.

Personally I disagree with the kid-centric notion and I think you're correct that a kid's life is no more valuable than an adult (and if you wanna be a real asshole, from a logical standpoint it's less valuable because the adult is presumably contributing to society while the kid is not).

Now, in this incident, add in the Amish factor, and you have a guaranteed wall to wall coverage. They didn't do such an intense level of coverage of last week's Wisconsin school shooting which killed the principal.



Oh absolutely, the media loves to scare the shit out of people. Keeps 'em tuning in for more. But keep in mind that that's generally edicts coming down from the corporate bosses, and we trench animals despise it.

If the real journalists were allowed to run the journalism side you'd see a VERY different news product on the air every night. Unfortunately we have this evil entity in our profession called consultants, which is a fancy word for "people who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground" and they tell the bosses that scaring people attracts viewers. And they're right - it does, for awhile, until the viewer figures out that 3 day old "breaking news" and "will it kill you" pieces aren't as legit as you'd think, and then they start watching other things.

You might be interested to know that several local media outlets yesterday covered the Amish schooting from the angle of "is the media reporting this crap too much, is that causing people to do it more?" which I thought was a much better way to run it than the run-of-the-mill "hey local school kid, how do you feel about the school in PA" angle that's so typical and ridiculous. But I bet today those of us who covered it that way will get scathing emails from our consultants.

Well, actually, I've done the safe-at-the-mall story following a mall shooting. We looked into the security measures in place at the local mall (basically nothing except for a rent-a-cop that was too fat to catch anyone anyway) and showed people that anyone could get in any time with any weapon and not be caught. 2 months after our story, metal detectors popped up at all the mall entrances.

Sure, death sells. Should we stop reporting on news stories simply because people might watch it? Health segments sell too - in fact they sell better than death. By your logic we should get rid of those too. (not that I'd have a particular problem with dropping that crap )

And here's another tidbit for ya - the cable nets that covered the shooting yesterday went wall to wall for at least an hour - some for longer than that. That means they didn't run any commercial breaks, so whether the death sold or not, they lost money off of it. You can get all the viewers you want but if you don't run advertisements you're not making any cash. Any time you see a special report break in or no-commercial coverage, you can book it that the organization doing it is losing a CRAPLOAD of money. Advertising costs tens of thousands of dollars per minute (during a guaranteed audience blockbuster such as the superbowl it can go upwards of a quarter million dollars for a 30 second spot). That's a lot of money to lose by tossing out the breaks.