Stuck In The Middle With…Lots Of Our Viewers
Monday's tragic, horrible story of the four children who died in an early-morning house fire in Scotland County reminds me again how unfortunate it is that that area lies where it does.It's in the middle of too many media markets.
While really not that many people live in Scotland County (37,094 by 2006 Census estimates, compared with 129,021 in Robeson County, 131,297 in Florence County, and 238,493 in Horry County), those thousands are a big part of WBTW and WPDE's television market share. Without Scotland and Robeson Counties, our TV market rating would be dramatically lower.
Yet, we rarely do stories there.
I should know.
I lived in Lumberton and was charged with covering Scotland County for a year and a half. In that time and in the time since then, I became familiar with just how popular WBTW is up there. (Everyone there asks about Cecil. Everyone everywhere asks about Cecil, but the folks in Laurinburg LOVE Cecil!)
I appreciate the loyalty to WBTW there, and that is why I think it's a shame we don't--not that we can't, but we just don't--cover news there more often.
Laurinburg, Laurel Hill, Wagram, and Gibson are all nice communities, with stories to be told, but it takes a tragedy like four innocent children dying in a fire to draw coverage from the likes of WBTW, WRAL, and even The Fayetteville Observer.
That gets me back to this "in between" discussion. Scotland County is a victim of geography when it comes to news coverage. Laurinburg is just about square between Charlotte and Wilmington going west to east, and just about square between Florence/Myrtle Beach and Raleigh/Fayetteville going south to north.
While residents in Laurinburg and Scotland County are able to watch TV from Charlotte, Raleigh, Florence/Myrtle Beach, and (maybe) even Wilmington, they are not consistently covered by any of those stations.
The Laurinburg Exchange, therefore, owns coverage there, and the paper does a very good job of covering what's going on in the county.
The point of all this is: we owe to not only the residents of Scotland County, but also to ourselves as journalists, to do more stories from the area, rather than waiting for the next tragedy.
Posted by
on 09/25 at 04:20 PM
