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A short inside look

Kevin Berger – Leader Staff Coming up with a column isn’t always the easiest thing in the world. Sometimes an idea jumps out at you, sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes, there are other considerations.

Kevin Berger – Leader Staff

Coming up with a column isn’t always the easiest thing in the world. Sometimes an idea jumps out at you, sometimes it doesn’t.

And sometimes, there are other considerations. I was set to write something about how the province changed the names of various school divisions to eliminate the word “public”, but I didn’t manage to finish the story on how that change affected Pembina Hills and we didn’t have room for it anyway. (There’s no iron rule saying an editorial or column has to connect to an article in the paper - it’s just encouraged.)

But then it hit me: do people generally know how we decide what articles get in the paper? I recalled a conversation I had on the subject the other day with a fellow at the Barrhead Art Gallery.

The guiding principle in all news is, for lack of a better term, is impact. This is kind of hard to define, but basically, the news value of a story is measured by the amount of impact it has on the lives of the readership.

Finances are one way of measuring impact: if the Town of Barrhead announced this week that it was, say, doubling what it charges for water and sewer, the impact it would have on residents and businesses would be huge.

On the other hand, if the utility increase occurred the same week that a meteor struck Barrhead and killed dozens of people, that would obviously supersede the news value of the utility increase.

But individual or group achievement also factors into the equation. Let’s assume the Barrhead Public Library doubled its membership fees on the same week that a local athlete won a national championship - while the library fees affect more people, there is more value in celebrating that athlete’s achievement.

There’s no hard rules governing news value, just general guidelines. It can be hard during a busy week deciding which story hits the front page, just as it can be hard to come up with a front page story during a slow week.

As for the stories inside the paper, those spots are generally governed by practicality. After the ads are placed, we run stories based on where they’ll fit, and whether or not a story HAS to run a certain week. (There would be no point running an event advancer after the event, for instance.) And though we’d like to run every story the same week as it happens, that’s not always possible - sometimes there’s just no room.

Sometimes it’s a struggle filling the spaces between the ads, sometimes it’s not. The end product is never perfect, but hopefully, it proves to be informative.

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