DISQUS

Dear Nick,

I appreciate your discomfort in discussing your newspaper’s awards. Yes, it must feel a little immodest patting yourself on the back!

Anyway, you wondered how readers react to these stories. Here’s the view of one:

Investigative reporting is very important, and it obviously takes a large investment and commitment. But from my perspective, these enterprise pieces are often written more for judges than subscribers, and that this diversion hurts local news.

How? Well, I go to local town meetings on occasion, and I frequently see Telegraph correspondents in the audience. Yet half the time nothing is reported, and just as often it’s five or six days before a brief appears. True, what happened at the meeting may not have been of huge significance to the entire circulation area, but what did happen is the essence of local news. Not glamorous, not award winning, but the nitty gritty of why I buy a local paper.

When I see one of these multi-page Sunday masterpieces laid out on open pages so they look good mounted for a competition, and when I see a story about newspapers giving each other awards, what comes to my mind is this: I’d rather read 20 briefs about a two-day-old zoning quarrel in Lyndeborough and a school board’s attendance policy in Hudson than 40 inches on 63 Kazakh children with HIV. I don’t want to have to wait for my selectmen to start a blog to find what’s going on in town.

Thanks for listening!