A new twist in the news cycle

You know you live in the sticks when the big news on the front page is "[Our Town] makes national headlines." Let me get this straight: we're so plum tickled that Our Town ended up in other newspapers' headlines that we have to issue urgent headlines announcing the fact, so that now we're covering other news organizations' coverage of our event? This sort of gives a new twist to the phrase "News Cycle."

Headlines like these exist primarily because it's difficult for an entire town to jump up and down and shriek, "Look, Ma, I'm on TV!" This urge to have one's existence validated is familiar to anyone who has ever worked as a journalist. In my previous life as a small-town journalist, I frequently faced this desire for validation in its rawest form. Any photographer gets accustomed to having children call out "Take my picture," but I never minded that so much as the devoted mothers who believed that the newspaper could somehow validate their lives by providing full coverage of little Junior's every minor accomplishment--and if the newspaper failed to meet their high standards of coverage, who got the complaints? I did. Once a mother called and cursed me because I had failed to personally cover her son's Eagle Scout ceremony, and her anger abated only a bit when I told her I had been forced to pay an unexptected visit to the emergency room. Another mother unhappy with how her precious son had been portrayed in the news called me and threatened the lives of my children.

All they wanted me to do was to validate their existence, but what I wanted to tell these women (and the many ohers like them) was this: If you want something validated, go somewhere else; I can't even validate your parking ticket. It's just a newspaper. And if the only way you can feel good about yourself is to have your name or photo printed in a newspaper that will tomorrow be used to line a birdcage, you've got more problems than any newspaper can solve.

The same could be said of Our Town today. One of the reasons I love this place is that nothing terribly earth-shaking ever happens here, but that doesn't mean we have to act like total rubes when something does. Right now Our Town is in the news and some people think that makes us pretty special; personally, I think we're pretty special anyway and we certainly don't need CNN to tell us so.