Let’s start with an email from a former Chapel Hill journalism student, Kevin Bullard:
Someone I know had a cousin pass from the virus Monday. I remember something you told us back in school: “All news is local.” I’ve never forgotten that, and look for local connections whenever I hear about something happening far from home.
Kevin just repeated what I learned from my 1948 journalism editing professor. Dr. Granville Price taught Texas journalism students to bring the news closer to the reader. Why would a story about wide-spread flu in China interest a news reader, listener, viewer in the United States?
Now, in the middle of a pandemic, we know ‘why.’ What started in Wuhan China, has spread to become all-day news in Raton, New Mexico…to pick a town name that rhymes.
Friends who email or post on Facebook and Twitter have been replacing anxiety with some ‘toilet-paper humor.’ Good for them. Reminds me of World War II when this teenager learned what SNAFU meant and heard where ‘Kilroy’ had first arrived.
But humor pales when a granddaughter in Oregon posts on Facebook about her mother, my daughter-in-law, with severe cold symptoms, and her cousin responds with supportive comment from Melbourne Australia. And what about our granddaughter-in-law, a nurse in Texas, who fights on the front line of a pandemic. That creates concern here in Knox, Indiana.
Kevin, you remember a lesson worth repeating. ‘News’ becomes important when the story moves close to home. And now this pandemic has become local news.
