The State of the (local) Media

I present to you the following "story," which was posted on KXAN's website Sunday evening. I'm posting the story in its entirety, completely unedited or excerpted.

*The Austin Symphony Serves Up The Sounds For Mother's Day*
May 13, 2007 10:05 PM

Sunday several Austin families came out to celebrate Mother's Day at the Austin Symphony.
The annual outdoor concert featured some well known tunes and musical numbers.
The concert was held at Zilker's Hillside Theatre.

That's it. I happened across this on Sunday evening, and I've been thinking about it ever since. Why did the "journalists" at KXAN post this on their website? The story is neither accurate, well-written, nor is it of any interest whatsoever.

Let's start with accuracy. The Austin Symphony did not play at Zilker Park on Mother's Day. The Austin Symphonic Band did. Different organizations altogether. I recognize that this distinction is not important to anyone other than the members of the two separate organizations (and probably more important to the actual Austin Symphony Orchestra since they, as professional musicians, probably don't appreciate being compared to a bunch of wannabes), but the fact remains that the subject of the story is inaccurate. The "several families" bit is misleading too--unless they were really, really big families, as there were several hundred people there. I'd estimate there were 350 to 400 on the hillside this year. There are only two other facts presented in the story: music was played (true) and the concert was at the Zilker Hillside Theatre (also true). So, this article, such as it is, is 50% wrong.

But let's move away from the accuracy to another journalistic issue: quality of writing. Whoever wrote this only had to generate three sentence and a headline, and this is the best he or she could give us? "The annual outdoor concert featured some well known tunes and musical numbers." Yep, we played tunes and musical numbers? You didn't know we had it in us, did you? Which did you like best? Myself, I preferred playing the tunes.

Finally, why the hell did they even post this story? There was, in effect, NO story. There was not even a picture that might make it an interesting human interest space filler.

The more I think about this (and clearly, the fact that I'm thinking about it at all is probably good evidence that I'm avoiding something much more important), the more flabbergasted I am. It makes me wonder what the real purpose of local "news" coverage is.