Your Idea Of News Coverage.

[Feathers and Fins]

So the thread "This Guys Pretty Much Nails It" got me thinking. What would everyone here if they were the producer for a news show " local station " set the line up and stories.

Here is mine;

1st Local news - Currently ( LPGA EVENT followed by Construction accident in F-ville then add in a story on a local group doing some good work )

2nd Weather - Give local, National , Tropical and a 7 to 10 day and some pictures as well as boating conditions for the next day.

3rd National news - Sopranos start dies, Fires in different states and the advancement in cocular <sp> implants,

4th Sports- Cover the main sports, then local and FISHING REPORTS come on look at the major lakes lets have good reports heck use this website for real information on fishing.

5th- Highlight a local restaurant and entertainment events or movie release.

6th Politics and Stocks

7th highlight the weather / boating report to finish the 1/2 hour block.

[fishinwrench]

Regardless of what is covered I'd like to experience ACCURACY minus the reaction mining speak (keywords).

I'd rather hear reports of current events via a computer generated voice incapable of emphasizing all of the attention getting little terms and phrases.

Just once I'd like to hear someone tell me something without making it obvious how they FEEL about it.

[Quillback]

I'd be happy to have an accurate weather report, the rest of the stuff on local news I don't pay much attention to. It would be nice to have at least a once-a-week fishing/hunting report.

[rps]

I'd be happy to have an accurate weather report, the rest of the stuff on local news I don't pay much attention to. It would be nice to have at least a once-a-week fishing/hunting report.

If you are like me, you don't pay attention because it isn't worth attention.

For the brief period of time between the yellow journalism of Hearst and Pulitzer and the founding of 24 hour news as entertainment shows, you could find accurate, non speculative, and frequently unbiased reporting - if you were careful and learned how to read more than one source.

As soon as rating and dollars began to flow from entertainment news, that short heyday of real journalism disappeared again. The NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, And LA Times and dozens of other legitimate papers - and the traditional network news - have had to adjust their approach to be more like MSNBC and Fox. Otherwise they die financially.

Mencken and Murrow are crying.

[Jerry Rapp]

I like to visit drudgereport.com a couple of times a day. It is a very good clearinghouse of all the major outlets. I use to buy the post disgrace daily when I worked in STL, now I just look at their website main page, and go to the sports page. Their are plenty of weather web sites, and most of them are correct about 1/2 the time. Then I look out the window and regional radar and have a pretty good idea of what the day has to offer. LOL!

[jdmidwest]

I tend to glean my news from several RSS feeds from Reuters, Yahoo, Stltoday, and the local newspaper. The local TV is worthless. My weather comes from NWS.gov and Intellicast.

We had a little conversation the other day coming back from the 11 Pt regarding the local TV. They will break in and state "Car wreck on Hwy 60, 2 killed. Details at 10." Now anyone that has anyone traveling on Hwy 60 gets worried that someone they know may have been killed and they have to wait till they break it at 10. Or they show up on the scene of something and start spouting off the report, but they don't have any details.

I quit watching the news on a local station about 15 years ago. We were sitting at a little bar enjoying our late night meal watching the tube. There were several major international events taking place that really had an effect on the whole world and the lead story was about a kid that was too fat to make it too school all of the time. He had missed too many days that semester because he spent too much time shoving breakfast down his fat little face and the school decided he could not graduate because of his tardiness. It was a 10 minute tragedy that spilled out on the local station while the whole real world stories only got a blurb. May make a good Facebook story, but it was not newsworthy of a major media station.

[bfishn]

Like jdmidwest, I get my news from the web, (Google News is my home page). I agree that Rueters is one of the best, as in just the facts, sans personal opinion and spin.

What I like best about Google News is the ease of which you can read so many versions of the same event. Doing this repeatedly exposes the sources that regularly skew a story to suit their politics.

It's also enlightening to occasionally see how the rest of the world pans an event via the major outlets in China NZ, the middle east, etc. It's hard (if not impossible) to reach informed conclusions from a single source.

And there's plenty of left-bashing, right-bashing, and bash-bashing sources for those so inclined. :-)

[Al Agnew]

Yeah, that whole "details at ten" thing really ticks me off. If it's important enough to mention, it's important enough to TELL THE STORY. It's simply a transparent plug for ratings, and I agree that it's very irresponsible.

But we get what we, as a whole, deserve. If enough people WANTED in-depth coverage of important issues and news events, there would be more than one program like "60 Minutes". Others are tried regularly but don't get the ratings and either disappear or devolve into celebrity gossip and lurid accounts of sex crimes and weird murders. And even "60 Minutes" usually has at least one fluff piece every week.

[Old plug]

The new media has been destructive to society in general. The rumor mongering bunch is the worst of them. That is one of the bug reason we are where we are.