Nothing travels faster than bad news, right?
While that may, in part, be true (many theorize it’s linked to our survival, fight or flight instincts), here at the Richmond News we’re finding that old adage doesn’t always live up to its reputation.
For sure, the more shocking the news, the faster it will carry across demographics and over multiple platforms, especially in today’s social media savvy world.
But as much as bad news generates initial Internet noise, it’s often fleeting and dies down as quickly as it erupted.
In our newsroom, as well as the time spent preparing and planning our print product, we invest a large chunk of our day feeding our 24/7 website at Richmond-News.com.
While doing so, we obviously track and monitor the progress and success of our stories and analyze as best we can what our readers want.
And while there is always a balancing act between what people want to read and what we believe they need to know, we’ve found lately that it’s not always the so-called bad news stories that people in Richmond are clicking on. (In fact, we had a record number of page views last month)
Mainstream media, in general, including the Richmond News are frequently accused in some quarters as “only reporting the negative.” (On occasion, I even hear from people who’ve checked out of all serious news coverage, aside from entertainment fluff, which I can't bring myself to label as “news.”)
But it’s simply not true and, I guess, it just depends on what people want to see.
I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve responded to readers online, lambasting us for focusing on the negatives and “ignoring the positives.”
Most of the time, in reply, it took 30 seconds or so to find half a dozen links on our website to stories bursting with more positivity than Oprah could shake a stick at.
As I said, it just depends where you want to look and what you want to see.
In the latest print issue of the News alone (and on this site), we have a fantastic tale of a Richmond man who found $8,000 on the street and went looking for the lost soul whose day had collapsed.
We have some very positive letters about Richmondites living and working in the city; we have an uplifting feature on a nine-year-old girl who battled a chronic skin condition to write her own book.
We have restaurants winning awards, young students preparing to crack the labour market, bidding to become the next generation of great scientists, helping fellow students transition to university and wowing the world with their amazing photography skills.
And did you read in sports about the achievements (on the front page in print) of our high school basketball teams on reaching the AAA provincial finals?
So see what you want to see, read us or not; call us what you will, but don’t label us as the Bad News Bears.
