If you cover a big city with rambling and varied regions and neighborhoods, your reporting and writing should reflect that.
Yet, from a culture of journalism that cycled reporters through various markets to urban decay that encouraged too many of them to live outside those big cities they covered, one of the more common complaints I have from established, legacy media is a frightening disconnect from where they report.
There’s surely no better example of that than the wildly popular Right NEast/Wrong NEast column from Northeast Philadelphia hyperlocal news site NEast Philly, which skewers the very common mistakes by TV and newspapers here, when the get the wrong neighborhood name, street name or worse: tiny details that matter very little to reporters who have never been to those places but matter a great deal to those who live there.
But there’s a more subtle example of this that has long frustrated me, particularly here in Philadelphia.
Continue reading Local media should be more local on first reference, says Philadelphia man
