Sunday, March 11, 2012

MLive group honored for juvenile series

The MLive group was recently honored for a November series on juvenile justice. Although, I'm not a big journalism award guy, this is a good example of what newspapers should do.
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9 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you link to the story about the award you will see this is an award winning series that the readers HATED. As I write this there are 13 comments, ALL negative. The readers were offended by it and felt it was an afront to the victims. I didn't read the original series, so I can't say if they have a point or not. But it illustrates the question facing media now: should they give the audience what they want, or continue the longstanding practice of giving them what they want to give them? I don't have an answer, just an observation.

12 March, 2012 18:56
Jim of L-Town said...

To be fair, I wrote a fair number of investigative pieces that garnered a similar response (in those days it was phone calls to the newsroom not Internet comments) and sometimes you have to write those off as not being able to please everyone all the time. I did not see the original series so not sure if the comments are justified.

12 March, 2012 19:22
Anonymous said...

Readers always used to say they wanted more fluff pieces and nice stories in the paper, but what sold was bad news. Murder, mayhem, Flint Michigan!

I have heard from a good source that the Flint Journal store sales have dropped quite a bit since they dumped their single copy drivers and made the rest of them deliver that crap paper for eight cents a copy.

The drivers have NO incentive now to sell as many papers as they can.. In fact they prefer to not have to take as many out on Sunday's..

Jeff Talley

12 March, 2012 22:56
Anonymous said...

"I didn't read the original series"

So you're basing your opinion based on comments from one story? Got it.

There's just no pleasing some people.

13 March, 2012 01:05
Anonymous said...

So you're basing your opinion based on comments from one story? Got it.

Why not? The Flint Journal does it all the time with their editorials and columnists ...

:)

13 March, 2012 08:32
Anonymous said...

I did see the original series. It was well written and interesting, deserving of praise. But I am a journalist and look at it from that side. I can see where victims' families, or friends of them, would be offended.

Odd that MLive Media Group is honored for this... they weren't a company yet when this series ran. Booth Newspapers did the legwork and execution of this series, which ran on MLive because, well, that's where Booth stories went online. Credit really ought to go to the now-defunct old company, shouldn't it?

13 March, 2012 10:08
Anonymous said...

Anonymous 18:56 -- I don't think you can say the readers hated the juvenile justice series only based on the online comments. Most of them are of the "lock 'em up and throw away the key" crowd. Hard to say that this accurately portrays the opinions of most readers.

13 March, 2012 21:29
Anonymous said...

When did the comments of the mlive trolls become a measure of quality reporting and writing?

An earlier post had it correct. The series was NOT done by mlive but by the daily papers and before MLMG even existed. But as is so typical of mlive .... don't let reality and truth get in the way of things.

15 March, 2012 08:57
Anonymous said...

Here ya go Jim:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/3eef0bc4-6f73-11e1-9c57-00144feab49a.html#axzz1pP9YO1Sc

"A USC Annenberg School study reached the stark conclusion that most printed US dailies would be gone in five years."

"Departing executives and bankruptcy advisers have been among the few people making good money from newspapers."

"By putting the same content online for free that they were charging for in print, Berkshire Hathaway’s chairman said newspapers had been competing against themselves."


Jeff

17 March, 2012 22:09

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