We’ve had a couple of questions raised about why we didn’t cover a few recent events. The short answer is that we want to cover the news, not necessarily the event.
The two events were a candidate’s press conference, announcing that he would run for a county commissioner’s seat, and the city of Medford’s 125th anniversary celebration. In both cases, we made conscious decisions not to cover them, for somewhat different reasons. In both cases, the news was covered, just not the event.
With the candidate, there was a complicating factor: He had not officially filed for the seat, so we held off running a story on his announcement. It’s a simple safeguard to avoid an egg-on-face moment for us; we don’t run candidate filings until they’ve filed, although that’s a rule that could be waived if the candidate is a notable public figure.
Beyond that, there’s not a lot of value for us or our readers in covering a press conference in which a candidate (or anybody for that matter) delivers an announcement that we can get in a face-to-face interview. We can ask questions, dig for a few more details and generally get more information by sitting down with the candidate (which we did in this case) instead of listening to a prepared statement.
In the case of the city’s celebration, we ran a front page story on the Sunday prior to the event, providing a lot of historical information as well as information about the upcoming event. For most events, and particularly ceremonial events, we think it’s a better service to tell people about the event beforehand, so they can attend if they’re interested, rather than tell them after. It’s clear in talking with event managers that they absolutely prefer that — nobody wants to read after the fact about a great concert or civic event that they would have liked to attend, if only they had known it was happening.
We also want to cover what the event is about, rather than what various officials have to say about it. Medford’s 125th was interesting because of the history that accompanied it, not because of the speeches talking about that history or because of the cake cutting at the event. If you have unlimited reporter resources and space in the paper, you can do both the advance story and cover the event itself, but that’s not a luxury we have.
Ultimately, we want to cover the news, not the press conference. There are exceptions in which the press conference or event is newsworthy, but if it’s to announce the obvious or to provide a platform for self-promotion, generally we’ll pass.
