People buy people

I was just listening to No Agenda with John C Dvorak and Adam Curry where they were talking about the news and the proliferation of entertainment news into every aspect of reportage.

The suggestion was basically that the news media (including the BBC) need to include, or at least ALWAYS seem to include a celebrity in every story they report.

The example Adam gave was the story of the Camden Market fire. The article on bbcnews.com he found made reference to musicians like Amy Winehouse who used to visit a pub that was burnt down.

This is the story >

Now - to a certain extent I agree with Adam Curry’s point of view - the media, including the BBC can be far too celebrity led - it can put too much emphasis on entertainment media but there IS a reason for this.

It’s all down to the simple philosophy that ‘people buy people’. Or, if you put an individual at the heart of the story, somebody people can relate to - then they will take more of an interest.

What he didn’t pick up on was that ‘Camden - Britain’s musical Mecca?’ story was just one of many on the same subject - it was an illustrative piece giving a different angle.

Other articles from the BBC on the subject include:

Camden Market faces new threat (from BBC London)

Camden Traders count the cost

Market Owners set up fire fund

And stories from the day it happened - with the facts - Blaze Shuts famous market area, aftermath in picture and Source of Blaze Identified.

So, there you have a mix of the entertainment piece, the facts and figures piece, the background piece, the gallery and with ‘Camden traders count the cost‘, the people piece.

It isn’t just the BBC that cover a big story from a range of different angles - you get the same from almost every national newspaper - it’s something that has always been the case - except now, instead of searching through five editions of the paper you can get it through a search.

There is an argument that the Churnalism culture journalists seem to be finding themselves in (a mass of space to fill with fewer journalists and less time to fill it) has led to the simpler entertainment pieces - after all it’s pretty easy to throw a few words together about a celebrity visiting a bar.

But there is also a counter argument that the Entertainment piece, about a bar being a musical mecca in Britain IS a good piece of feature journalism as long as it operates alongside the facts and figures piece and not instead of it.

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