I know, I know. Newsrooms are shrinking, reporters have more beats to cover, no more enterprise stories, more articles on the weather, more AP articles, etc. I get it. But sometimes, you can really see the desperation to generate a story at all.
On Nov. 19, Madison’s online newspaper, The Capital Times, wrote a story titled “Boys and Girls Club CEO, grocery store owner go undercover as homeless men in Madison.” But the Cap Times didn’t end there.
Three hours and 15 minutes later, the Cap Times implored readers to check out the story in an article called “In Case You Missed It.”
The next day, the paper published a follow-up piece titled, “Men’s expedition into homelessness in Madison sets off lively discussion on social media,” which other than a handful of paragraphs mentioning the Boys and Girls Club Facebook page, was a complete rehash of the original article.
But wait, there’s more!
The day after that, the Cap Times wrote how Yahoo! wrote about the same topic in an article titled, “Story of Boys & Girls Club CEO going undercover as homeless getting national attention.” That was immediately followed by a mention of the Yahoo! piece in another “In Case You Missed It” article.
Finally, on Nov. 24, the Cap Times wrote a story on how its homeless story was its most read story for the week.
Let’s recap: one real story, one story to tell you to read the story, one repeat of the original story disguised as something else, one story on another media outlet’s coverage, a reminder of that story and then a pat-yourself-on-the-back story. Six articles for just one story!
This, my friends, is an example of the sad state of the media today.