Tell us all about it!

Let’s talk a little shop.
My first question is, what’s new with you? With your children? With your school, club, dance class, theater group, church or softball league? Unlike some folks who ask those questions, I, or that is, The Coast News, really, truly does want to know. We want details. We even want photos.
And that’s where I come in as Community News editor. Back in the old days, if you called the paper with an upcoming event, they would fire a reporter over there with pleasure. That reporter was on salary and needed to be kept busy. If somehow you missed it, the “old days” of newspapers and staff reporters is pretty much gone. I am not here to debate the pros and cons of this, at least not today.
Instead, I need to throw myself on your good nature and ask that you help us help you. You will be hard-pressed to find a paper with full-time staff writers anymore.
Reporters today are almost exclusively freelance. That means when we ask them to cover a story, they usually say yes, but they are allowed to say no. And the reason they might say no is because freelancers cannot pay the bills just writing for one publication. Unless they are a trust fund baby, they are going to have to have another job, maybe two. We dearly wish we could change that, but until every single business in our circulation area buys an ad every week, that’s not going to happen.
Where does that leave us? It leaves us asking that you do your best to write up the information package for us. Didn’t you always want to be a reporter? Well, now you are. You can even wear the hat with the Press card in the brim, if you’d like.
We need you to
sit down at the nearest computer and write down absolutely everything about your event or group that you want the public to know. Send it to HYPERLINK “mailto:[email protected]”[email protected]. It’s open 24/7, just waiting to hear from you.
It doesn’t have to be pretty. It doesn’t even have to be in complete sentences (although we are extremely fond of those). It just has to have all the facts that readers will need to know in order to avail themselves, or fully appreciate, whatever you have done or are about to do. No detail is too small but mostly you want to be sure to cover the who, what, where, when and why of it. There is no real length limit at your end, although I must confess I will probably shorten it as I pull the facts together in a newspaper style.
I can see your face on the front page now. You can’t win if you don’t play, as they say. And keep in mind that we need a fair amount of notice, so we can give the reader a fair amount of notice. We need your information about a week and a half before you want to see it in print. Yes, our entire newsroom lives their work days in the fairly distant future. We’ve been known to lose track of what day it really is.
Alright, Clark Kent or Lois Lane, as the case may be. Make those computer keys hum. Stop the presses. We want your news.