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The Dread Media &;Anniversary&;Story
By encinoman
If I ran the journalism world, the first thing I would ban would be the &;anniversary story.&; Even though I won an LA Press Club Award for this LA Times piece about the Rodney King beating.
Basically, a media &;anniversary&; is an excuse for journalists to write a little history, bring up some (generally lurid) event from the past or do some &;Trivial Pursuit&; style follow-up (where is Kato Kaelin now?!) on half-remembered players. It&;s a hook to write something that will get page views or blog hits, requires little actual reporting, and often gives the reporter the chance to play historian, draw parallels to our own time, or better yet, pontificate.
Certain dates are inevitable. I&;m sure November 22 this year (the 45th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination) will bring both memories of that tragic day in Dallas and the death of Camelot, and sober comments on the threats against President-Elect Obama.
A few guidelines: generally, anniversary dates have to be for events in living memory. Hence, 9-11 will generate recaps of the events and commentary for at least the next fifty years, but April 14 won&;t get much (the date of Abraham Lincoln&;s assassination 143 years ago).
Second, round numbers are key. Like my Princeton reunions or wedding anniversaries, the big ones are 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40 and 50 years. Thus, January 28 won&;t be an important media anniversary date until 2011, when it will mark 25 years since the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986.
Third, &;if it bleeds, it leads.&; Significant numbers of dead, or the notoriety of the incident, are sufficent reason for &;celebrating&; the anniversary.
The last few weeks of October and early November have brought major looks back at the Jonestown massacres and even at the murder of Nancy Spungen by Sid Vicious (relived in New York Magazine&;s Entertainment Section!), each taking place in 1978, 30 years ago. Each of these stories fits the &;anniversary story&; criteria perfectly: In living memory, lurid, and a round number.
A fourth criteria for the anniversary story, importance, is highly subjective and thus easily ignored. I was surprised and dismayed by the lack of update coverage on Los Angeles 15 years after the LA Riots last year. And the 70th anniversary of the Nazi pogroms of Kristallnacht, the terror against Jewish homes and businesses that ignited the Holocaust, while commemorated in Germany, received precious little coverage in the U.S..
As George Santayana said, &;Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.&; But whether we remember or not, all of us are condemned to a lifetime of anniversary stories from the media.
Tags: 9-11, Barack-Obama, Kato-Kaelin, Kennedy-assassination, Kristallnacht, media-anniversaries, Nancy-Spungen, Rodney-King, Sid-Vicious, space-shuttle-Challenger
This entry was posted on November 10, 2008 at 6:23 am and is filed under Journalism, media-anniversaries.
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One Response to &;The Dread Media &;Anniversary&;Story&;
Columbine and the Dread Media Anniversary Story « Monday Morning Media Quarterback Says:
April 20, 2009 at 1:53 am |
[...] I said last year, &;If I ran the journalism world, the first thing I would ban would be the [...]
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