Extra, extra, read all about it!

This past Thursday I had the opportunity to spend the afternoon at Vespa's work - a local news paper office. Insight into how the news is delivered (one of the many mediums through which people receive information concerning local and regional events) is important to my research as I am interested in how different shared opinions are disseminated and understood.

I arrived just before lunch time so that Vespa could give me a brief tour of the building (a beautiful office replete with skylights, wood furniture, leafy plants, and a cozy coffee space) and have a quick coffee before our lunch date. Just as we sat down to sip our coffees we heard an AAAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEE! from the adjacent room. As it happens, one of Vespa's coworkers had had the misfortune to sit on a mouse that was hiding under one of the seat cushions of the wicker chairs set out in the main meeting room. There in followed much ado about what to do with the mouse remains and cleaning up procedures. Needless to say, these events did not whet our appetites for the impending lunch date.

No matter, when 12:30 rolled around Vespa, her coworkers and I trudged out the doors and down the main street to central Gouda where we had lunch at the Best Burger. The majority of us ordered groote cheeseburgers (actually 'cheeseburgers' not translated into 'kaas') and munched on mash potato fries and mayonnaise while we waited for our meals. There were trash mags on all the tables for our reading pleasure and we had fun trying to decipher (and translate) one another's horoscopes. Mine proved especially difficult but I should have guessed as much, not only was it colloquial Dutch but the message also came from the beyond! After our lunch we all walked back and Vespa and I got settled into teaching/learning the ins and outs of how the local news is created and delivered in a weekly newspaper.

As I found out, the entire process is quite intense as the journalists, columnists, graphic artists, photographers, layout managers, and advertisement sales staff work like dogs for the first three days of the week (this paper comes out every Thursday). The next two days are spent playing catch-up and preparing the following week’s edition that starts-up full speed ahead on Monday morning. Vespa and I spent our Thursday afternoon editing and ‘word-smithing’ a piece on her special print software. The rest of the afternoon was spent shooting down and cleaning out nagging leftovers hanging around under the press that week.

All in all it was an exciting and extremely insightful day. I learned that the local readership has a lot of say in what goes into their newspapers. The editors, writers, and photographers often use the news tips and stories sent to them and so the readers often set the tenor of the paper through their own participation. The more involved the readership, the more representative the stories. This surprised me a bit as I thought the readers would play a more passive role when instead, they played a more active role. While it probably doesn’t work this way at national or at all local and regional papers, I thought it was an interesting divergence in my usual foray into the science of neighbourhoods.