Copper went missing in September. Copper is a frisky 9-month-old
Viszla, a Hungarian hunting dog, and his 11-year-old girl was
heartbroken when he disappeared.
I was thinking about Copper when I read Rick Edmonds‘ piece on
Poynter.org, “As
Blogs and Citizen Journalism Grow, Where’s the News?” And while I
read doctoral candidate Chris
Anderson‘s paper, which was mentioned in a comment attached to
Edmonds’ story.
Most journalists have a definition of news that’s distant from the
lives of most readers. Much of the “news” is dominated by government
process, political sparring, celebrity gossip, and disaster tales that
ultimately don’t touch people’s lives. But they’re “important” and they
pass a “threshold test,” so they wind up in the press or on the air.
A lost dog isn’t going to make it past any newspaper’s threshold
tests, or onto any TV newscast. I see lost-dog and lost-cat posters
fairly often in my own neighborhood, nailed up on telephone poles. I
never see stories in the newspaper or on the 11 o’clock news.
But it was a big deal to Copper’s girl and her mom, who posted a community weblog
item about it on BlufftonToday.com. A lot of people posted
suggestions, offered sympathy, and asked follow-up questions about Copper.
But he was gone. The weeks went by, then months. Copper’s family began
to lose hope.
I was channel-flipping and stumbled across a History Channel
documentary in which someone claimed newspapers originated in London
coffee shops, where printers transcribed word-of-mouth gossip into
topical articles. If that’s true, then perhaps we’re returning to those
roots, because in the case of Copper, word of mouth worked.
Last weekend he turned up in Rincon,
Georgia, almost an hour’s drive away from home. Dog and girl are
reunited and apparently are doing fine, although Copper is headed for an
appointment with the vet in which he probably will lose his doggy
manhood, if that’s the right expression.
Is there a lesson in all of this for journalists and journalism? I
think there is. We have the ability now to dip below our thresholds and
actually touch people’s lives. That’s what “hyper-local” really means.
It’s not necessarily a place where professional journalism can or should
try to go. But it’s something we can facilitate that can coexist nicely
with those stories about government process, political sparring,
celebrity gossip, and disasters.
