Who controls the media? Look in the mirror

While my blog primarily is a chance for me to talk about my wanna-be career, writing fiction for a living, occasionally I blog about my long-time career as a newspaper man.

Today is one of those times.

I recently came across a Facebook posting by a writer sort-of friend of mine. I call him that because he's a genuinely good guy, well-respected, a fantastic writer, not to mention a Dark Shadows man; we've exchanged Facebook posts, a few emails and I even interviewed him once years ago for my blog, but I've never met him in person. In his post he is low-key decrying the state of the modern news media. Rather than rant about the media, he linked to a column by Ben R. Williams, a journalist living and working in Southside Virginia. 

I don't really know Ben, and he most certainly doesn't know me, although back when I was managing editor of The Martinsville Bulletin I knew his dad, who was a General District judge in our community. My wife remembers Ben – she was his kindergarten teacher, and perhaps one of his first crushes, according to his dad.

I do occasionally read Ben's column in the Henry County Enterprise – he is a good writer, with a way of cutting to the truth of most subjects he discusses with concise, sometimes funny, sometimes biting, prose. His work is both enjoyable and thought-provoking.

In this particular column, he takes to task the sensationalist tendencies of the media, using recent reporting on the Joro spider as a prime example. If you've been online for any length of time in recent weeks, you've no doubt seen article after article about this supposedly dangerous, venomous, wolf-sized spider that's about to descend on the Eastern Seaboard, perhaps wiping out life as we know it.

Okay, that's not exactly what has been reported, but when reports of this spider first came out, a couple of years ago, I got the idea I was going to walk out of my house every morning to find the sky filled with these several-inch-long colorful spiders, floating through the air under little spun-web parachutes. We'd have to be dodging these eight-legged paratroopers whenever going outdoors, cover ourselves with gloves and long sleeves and pants to protect from venomous attacks while working in the garden, and always have the car's gasoline tank full so we can speed to the hospital if bitten by one.

Things didn't play out that way. In truth, they never were going to, but the headlines and some articles certainly made it seem this was our fate. More than two years later I have yet to see a single Joro spider.

For some reason the web is abuzz with fresh new articles about their imminent arrival, with the same headlines, the same sensational headlines, which I suspect will lead to the same big fat nothing.

Ben, in his column, calls this practice fear mongering by the media, and he's not wrong.

Yet, I would say that assigns far too much thought and planning to this monolithic creature known as “the media,” and, much like voters ultimately get the political leaders they deserve, the general public gets the media it demands.

The truth is, today's media is just trying to make a buck. It's always been that way, but more so in recent years. Ever since the advent of television, and to a lesser degree radio, the news media has morphed into entertainment media, a process that's kicked into overdrive as the internet has grown to maturity. It's a business, and the first rule of business is to make money (perhaps that is the real problem, that the supposedly independent press is largely made up of for-profit businesses, but that's a discussion for a different time).

Even Fox News, which has rightfully been labeled little more than right-wing propaganda, truthfully has no particular ax to grind nor cause to push. That outfit simply has found a niche – a large group of people who swallow that ideology hook, line and sinker without regard for truth or accuracy – and then sold access to that audience to advertisers willing to pay ungodly sums of money to reach it.

The founding of the network, if one does a deep dive into the facts, shows it was always about making money off of this segment of society, not about offering alternative, conservative-based news. Even today, a number of documented, undisputed reports show some – at times most – of the people working there don't believe a word they're saying, but they're rolling in money by saying it, and that's really the name of the game.

The rest of the news media, regardless of political or social affiliation, is largely the same. There's an old adage in newsrooms – if it bleeds, it leads – which perfectly illustrates this.

Essentially, that means if we have a hot story about a fatal wreck, a deadly shoot-out, or some other violent event, that's the lead story. Television news shows will make that the first, and often longest, story of the night. Newspapers will splash that across the front page, or put flashy red banners around it online.

Such stories aren't generally the most important stories – the tax rates your local government is imposing, how it's spending the money, regulations letting governmental control creep into our lives, how well local schools are educating – those are among the critical stories. But no one cares.

As a long-time newspaper guy, I can tell you back in the day papers with headlines about commissioner and supervisor meetings, changes in school curriculum, how local political parties are consolidating power with changes to candidate selection processes, and similar stories, sat in newsstands largely ignored. But splash a scandal or shooting or fatal wreck or minor drug arrest across the top of page one and the newsstands quickly emptied, even if we upped the press run that day.

In our more modern world where reader interest is measured in story clicks and average time on a page, it's the same. Important news stories go largely unread, while sensational headlines and world-is-ending tales can see their read count quickly surge into the thousands or tens of thousands, even on small community news sites.

As an industry, we in the news world should be better, we should demand serious stories be given their due, and we cannot escape blame when that doesn't happen.

But in a world where virtually all forms of media – news, entertainment, and otherwise – are owned by profit-seeking corporations, what sells is what is published.

Ultimately, that leaves final control over news content with readers – giving them the news media they demand. And the only person who can help change that is staring at you in the mirror.

I'm no longer blogging, I'm platforming (and other tidbits on where I've been)

Nearly 11 months ago, I restarted this here blog -- it had been somewhere around 8 or 9 years prior to that when I had last blogged.

At the time, in 2023, I wrote a bit about getting back to some old dreams and hopes – you know, the kind that get pushed to the back burner as life takes center stage, then get pushed off the stove top completely, then maybe get pushed into that funny little drawer under the stove never to be seen again, as one gets further into a career, raising kids, taking care of all the stuff that comes along.

My dream, my hope, of course, was to do far more during my life with writing. For those of you who know me, you know I have spent most of my adult life as a writer. Most of that time I've been a newspaper reporter and editor, interspersed among a few dalliances with the business side of the industry as a general manager and publisher. I've sold a number of freelance articles over the years, and have more than a handful of short story publications in the horror field to my name.

Most might say I've done okay, in terms of making a living in some form as a writer. I recall way back in my younger days when my dream was to be a fulltime writing, penning fiction and freelance articles. To me, for a writer, that was it -- there was no higher achievement or way of life. Then I came across a stringer who covered county government news for her local weekly, getting perhaps two or three articles a week for low pay. Her real job was writing novels -- she was regularly publishing two science fiction novels a year, through one of the major publishing houses, yet she needed the stringer work to have anything above absolute basic bills paid. She once told me that I, as a full-time reporter, had the dream job every writer wanted.

I never fully bought into that, but there is something to be said for a regular, albeit relatively small, paycheck, health insurance, and a handful of other benefits, all things full-time freelancers rarely see. With a family, those are all must-haves, so the novels and short stories eventually get put away and forgotten.

In those handful of blogs I published last summer, I told you all I had seen a few things recently, experienced a few events that got me to thinking that if I'm ever going to chase those old dreams, there's nothing like the present.

 And then I disappeared from the blogging world.

But I didn't just fade away. I have been writing. And writing. A lot of that has been for my full-time job as a daily newspaper editor, but I've managed to eek out a few words of fiction now and again.

I've penned a handful of short stories, sending two out to publishers. One was rejected, but the other was accepted for the anthology WRITER'S RETREAT: TALES OF WRITING AND MADNESS. I have a few others I hope to send out soon.

What I'm really excited about is my other writing. I now have a full-length adult novel completed, along with first drafts of two children's novels. Full disclaimer here -- the novel is actually a novella I wrote years ago, but over the past year I rewrote and revised, built that from about 35,000 words to 75,000 words. It's best categorized as a romantic supernatural thriller, with a few murders, some mystical evil and a bit of light humor. The two protagonists are a high-profile police detective and a reporter, each relentless in their pursuit of what is behind the murders, while finding themselves drawn toward one another despite their best efforts otherwise.

I've written, revised, edited, and rewritten that thing, and I'm ready to start querying literary agents, to see if I can get any bites on that. From everything I've read and listened to on podcasts, landing an agent is nearly impossible. Most of the ones who are accepting queries get anywhere from 20 to 100 queries a day, and many of them might take on four or five new clients a year. Not great odds.

But, as I told a writer the other day, you will never land an agent if you don't send those queries out. At present, I've more or less finished the query letter -- an arduous task in itself, trying to tell what my novel is about in less than 300 words -- and now I'm slogging through the evil synopsis. Once that's done, I will begin submitting those queries. I've set a goal to start that within two weeks -- by June 16.

After that, I plan to spend the following 10 to 12 weeks on the children's novels. To be more precise, they are aimed at the lower middle grade market, meaning I'm shooting for kids in the age 9 to 10 range. Both works are spooky children's horror novels. I've got the complete bones of the stories -- one clocks in at 18,000 words, while the other is around 21,000. I need to rewrite, revise, and build them out to the range of 30,000 to 35,000.

Hopefully, I can have them both written, polished, and be sending them out to prospective agents by the end of the summer.

Then, I'll be turning my attention to a straight-up adult horror novel I've already more or less outlined. Actually, it's from a short story I wrote years ago called The Dark Secret of Warren House, which was published in the Canadian magazine Dark Recesses. That story was about 3,000 words, but I'm hoping to build it into a 75,000 to 80,000 word novel.

And, I'll be blogging. Really I will.

Seems agents, and most book publishers, like the idea of their writers engaging with the public via social media. I guess that's no surprise. For non-fiction, it's a must -- you have 20 million engaged followers, you're getting a book deal. No followers? Crickets.

It's not quite the same in the world of fiction. A large following -- any following -- is a nice bonus, but it's ultimately the story which has to sell. But the following doesn't hurt. I suppose that means I'm going to have to start engaging a little more on Facebook, get busy on the dreaded X (formerly Twitter), and dive into Tik Tok (assuming the GOP -- the supposed party of individual freedom and the free market -- doesn't follow through and ban it).

It's called building a social media platform. You know, where you can go if you get a book published and shout from the digital mountaintop that everyone should go buy your book.

I also read that blogging is passé, that blogging has been passé for about a decade. We all know all trends eventually come back around, generally with new cool-sounding names. This is my push to bring bring about blogging's return, but we'll keep it hip and trendy by christening its new name --  platforming.

I'm officially platforming now.

Hopefully, I'll have more platforming for you all soon. For now, that's where I've been spending some of my time lately.

Thanks for reading!