Demanding people, unusual vegetables differ on newsworthiness scale

The job of a newspaper reporter can be interesting at times, especially when people bring items they deem newsworthy to us, regardless of whether or not we, the professionals, believe it to be worthy of putting in the pages of The Gazette.
As long as it’s local with relevance to at least one reader, the staff at The Gazette will make every effort to let others know about it, either through a longer piece a reporter will write or through a brief news item in one of the many capsules we run weekly.
But every once in a while someone will call and make a demand of us that we can’t or won’t honor. I received one of these requests earlier this week when a business owner in a neighboring county wanted me to come and hear her story in order for me to write about it in this paper.
Apparently, another newspaper in that person’s county ran an article or something criticizing her business, causing her to receive harassing phone calls and other communication from people in her community.
The woman’s babble made no sense to me, as I wasn’t familiar with her, her business or the people in her community, nor had I read the original article about her business. The lady may or may not have a story, but I didn’t care because her situation had no local connection whatsoever.
I told her The Gazette is a local paper that covers local news, so we weren’t interested in going out of our way for a story in another county. She didn’t like what I had to say and hung up on me, which, by the way, is not the first time someone has ever hung up on me.
Curiosity had bitten me a little bit, so I e-mailed a friend of mine that worked at the paper she was referring to, asking about the situation. He e-mailed me back and said the lady was upset because the article talked about an occurrence in which she allegedly swore at and threatened a customer, facts he said were backed up by a police report.
It sounded like she was serving up a really big batch of poor customer service, and to counter this bad publicity she thought she could get another newspaper to give her some good press. It’s not the first time The Gazette has been called upon to counter something that may have appeared in another media outlet, but this was a situation that we neither wanted to rectify nor thought we should.
Situations like this are unusual, but another one that occurred later in the week isn’t unusual at all, nor as controversial. The situation is one we like to call “People with Vegetables.”
It’s simple. Someone calls us, or stops at our office, because he or she has an abnormally large, unusually-shaped or extraordinary vegetable, fruit or plant.
Unlike the previous situation, The Gazette is more than happy to accommodate giving a little press to “People with Vegetables,” usually in the form of a photo and caption, even though we’ve seen such a large number of these most unusual items that to us they are no longer unusual.
In my 12-year journalism career, I’ve seen quite a few of these vegetables, fruits and plants: big mushrooms, oddly-shaped cucumbers, tall sunflowers, plants that bloom at the wrong time of the year, super-sized pumpkins and even potatoes shaped like presidents.
Though they may no longer be unusual to me, I know others might find them interesting. So it’s somewhat easy to keep our pride in check and report about them to others.
But doing so isn’t something they teach in college, nor are there lessons in handling people who think we should drop what we are doing and listen to their story, even if it has no relevance to what we do. Someday I’m going to go back to college, not as a student but as a teacher, and present these valuable lessons to journalism students.
These lessons are ones many days I wish I had received.