It's a classic case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
The old axiom "no good deed goes unpunished" also comes to mind.
I got a letter this week regarding our coverage of the county fair.
I thought it was a little snide, but I'll let you decide.
"I have to comment on the coverage, or lack thereof, of the Kosciusko County fair. I have waited to see a picture of the grand and/or reserve beef steers or heifers to be in the paper. This is such a great opportunity for the paper to showcase good kids doing good things and you can't even put anything on the front page except the entertainment in the grandstands?! I'm sorry, but that's not what the fair is all about. I hate to compare counties and papers but that is all I have to go by. Having been a 10-year 4-H member myself as well as a former fair board member in Fulton County, I have to say the Rochester Sentinel's coverage of their fair blows you guys away! Every day, the Sentinel would have the grand champions for whatever showed up the day before as their front page headline and have a story to go with it! The snapshots in the Times-Union are nice, but they don't give credit where credit is due! These kids in all projects work very hard and put in lots of time and effort. A little recognition would be nice! It's one week out of the year. I think some of the 'news' could be just as well explained on another page! If you're concerned about the circulation of your paper going down, you may want to consider putting some articles about these kids in the paper. You just might be surprised that you would sell more papers!"
I especially liked all the exclamation points!This person properly submitted her letter with her name and phone number, but since I'm using it in this forum, I'm going to allow her to criticize us anonymously.
As of Friday morning, the Times-Union published more than 60 Kosciusko County fair "snapshots." The coverage consumed nine full pages of newsprint, not including what we did on the front page each day.
There are a lot more photos to come in Friday's and Saturday's edition and we've scheduled two full pages in Monday's edition because our photographer is backed up with photos of these kids. By the time the dust settles, we will have published more than 100 photos from the fair. That's quite a bit more than "a little recognition" in my view.
(By the way, the grand and reserve champion dairy steers were in Tuesday's edition.)
Our reporter and photographer have practically lived out at the fairgrounds this week.
If this letter writer was a 10-year 4-H'er, surely she remembers the way the Times-Union used to cover the fair.
Let me run through the evolution of fair coverage at the Times-Union since 1988. (That's when I came to work here.)
We used to do it precisely the way the letter writer suggests. Each day, we put the grand champion animal's picture on the front page from the night before along with a story about what went on in the grandstand.
Then we ran a special section the following week wrapping up all the other winners.
I always thought that was a good way to do it until several 4-H people criticized us for it.
They said it minimized the kids who were in the wrap-up section because it was after the fact.
O.K.
So we bagged the special section after the fact. We kept putting the grand champion animals and a story on the front page and running a couple pages of pictures of kids inside the paper each day.
I thought that was a good way to do it until several 4-H people criticized us for it.
They said that putting the grand champion big animals on the front page and the grand champion little animals and other projects on inside pages minimized the kids showing little animals and other projects.
Their view was that the kids raising rabbits and wrapping gifts deserved the same recognition as the kids raising cows.
O.K.
So that brought us to the current iteration of fair coverage. We run all the champion pictures inside the paper and put a feature story (like the blacksmith on Wednesday) or a story about the grandstand events on the front page.
I thought that was a good way to do it ...
Oh, well.
Hey, you know what, this is all my fault. I take full responsibility. Long ago I should have just stopped trying to please everybody.
Because no matter what we do, it's never going to make everybody happy. And each time I try to comply with the wishes of one group or another, a different group doesn't like the result.
It's like playing that "Whack-A-Mole" game at the fair.
Now, having said all this, I don't want anyone to think that I am averse to improving our fair coverage.
There are always ways to improve and perhaps next year will bring yet another round of changes.
Who knows?
But the letter writer is just going to have to suffer through the roughly 14 pages of fair stuff we publish this year!
