Do the news sources you access expose you to the onsite face to face type of stories I posted about?

My mother was a newspaper reporter from the late thirties to the mid fifties in Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio.

One day, her editor called her in to his office and griped that it had been a slow news week. He was worried about circulation numbers…. So could she please find something new and exciting to write about?

She made her way to the police blotter where all the police statistics were kept- arrests, murders, thefts, breaking and entering…. that sort of thing.

And she noticed something she’d never really noticed before- bicycle thefts. There had been 18 bicycles stolen in the city of Dayton, Ohio during the previous week.

Oh why not, she thought? This will do….. so she wrote an article about bicycles being stolen in Dayton- even interviewed one young boy whose bicycle had been stolen.

The next day, one of the radio stations jumped on the bandwagon. And pretty soon the rival newspaper in town picked up the story, and for the next week, everyone was talking about the bicycle theft crime wave- stories about the victimized, stories about what areas of town were prime bicycle theft territory, advice about how to keep your bicycle from being stolen.

Long letters to the editor were written, complaining about the crime wave of bicycle thefts and why weren’t the police doing anything about it?

And then- within a week, everyone was focused elsewhere….

“The funny thing,” said my mother, “was that bicycle thefts were no greater that week than the week before, or the week before that, or the week after.

There was no crime wave.”