That’s what we used to tell businesses that would call The Herald-Sun newsroom and ask that a story be done on their business. They always tried to find a news hook, but their goal was to get free publicity. There would have to be some compelling news reason to do such a story, for the local news pages or for the business page.
Why then, as newspapers are hemorrhaging ad revenue (just look at the size of your paper these days), do our local papers seem to run a lot of stories that are nothing more than free advertising for businesses.
Last Saturday, The News & Observer‘s Durham News featured a huge story with photos about the Broad Street Cafe, which has become a popular hangout for the tree-hugging and pot-banging folks in the Trinity Park and Trinity Heights area. The gist of the story is that the owner who revitalized the business now wants to sell. Boy, that story was certainly better than buying a classified.
And today The Herald-Sun does a story on an African-themed restaurant that just happens to have some tenuous connection with strife in Kenya. Another huge ad masquerading as a news story.
Are we to conclude that the mainstream media has suddenly become business-friendly? Not for a moment. Both Broad Street Cafe and the Palace International restaurant have one-world, lefty, PC qualities that exempt them from the journalistic rule that you don’t do stories on businesses unless they’re brand new and unusual, catch fire, get robbed or go bust.
