I recently had a spirited conversation with a Sun City resident in regards to the Sun Day’s content, specifically its blend of content. It was the caller’s opinion that the Sun Day doesn’t report enough Sun City items that would be deemed “news” or more accurately “hard news.”
I’ve had conversations like this before. The Sun Day receives many comments throughout the year from readers asking for more of one topic and less of another or the opposite. The requests, criticisms, opinions are generally based on each reader’s specific interests.
Though this particular caller was well-intentioned and offered some sage advice, after hanging up the phone, I chalked the conversation up to “you can’t please everyone all the time.” When developing stories, we try to offer an even blend to appeal to everyone’s individual interests.
A couple days later, I received a rather impolite email that offered several criticisms about the Sun Day’s content but particularly that we don’t offer enough hard news. With this one coming on the heels of the caller, I paused and decided perhaps I was overlooking something, a question that led me to take an analytical approach to the Sun Day’s yearly content ratios.
On this page, you’ll see a graph mapping out the exact mix of stories the Sun Day ran in 2014.
For purposes of this analysis, a STORY is an item either assigned out by a Sun Day editor or developed by one of our reporters. They contain bylines at the beginning of the pieces and are NOT submitted by resident readers. A story is not a news quick, resident reporter, letter, political place, or the like.
The stories are broken down into 6 categories (Sun City News, Area News, Previews [of upcoming events], Sports, Health, Features).
Looking at the graph, you’ll notice the majority of the stories are Features, or Human Interest stories, with 51 published. Next is Sun City News with 32 published and Area News with 31 published.
Numbers in, the Sun Day does, in fact, publish almost double the amount of Feature stories as it does Sun City News items. However, if you combine Area News (all of which pertain directly to Sun City) with Sun City News, News items now outrank Features by 11 printed stories, making the Sun Day more news heavy than features heavy. Compared to like newspapers (weeklies or biweeklies), the Sun Day publishes more “News” than most other local or hyper local papers in the area. For weekly and biweekly papers, feature stories are the primary focus because news ages so fast and human interest pieces have a very long shelf life.
In light of both the phone call and email, what the numbers show is not that the Sun Day doesn’t publish enough news but perhaps not enough of the exact type of news some readers look for. Now that’s something I can and would like to work with. There are three email addresses listed boldly on this page to send story ideas to, and I urge you to do so. Let us know which Sun City news items you’d like to see, and we’ll strive to make them happen.
