By Kibret Markos
Depty Editor, The Reporter
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Wars and presidential campaigns never go unreported. Only a mad editor would leave out plane crashes or murder trials from his newspaper. These are stories that are so "big"—big enough to affect everyone, or shocking enough to rouse everyone's emotion. They should be in the newspaper when they happen, no questions asked.

Things are different in the "Neighborhood Times." Once I was asked to write about a tree that fell on someone's house. The tree fell on a lawn. Nobody was hurt, and no property was destroyed except a wooden fence that was only partly damaged. My editor asked me to write a story about it. I was puzzled. Who would want to read about a fallen tree that didn't kill anyone? And what am I going to write in this story? All the facts and everything else I had in mind fits in one small paragraph. When the story came out, my editors and people in the copy desk congratulated me for it. I even got a couple of phone calls saying it was a "great" story. I was a lot more frustrated than I was proud of myself; I couldn't understand what was going on and what I was doing.

Later on I found out that two out of three people who live in the St. Petersburg Times circulation area read the "Neighborhood Times." Nearly 70 percent of the people living around me ENJOY reading stories about fallen trees, even though those trees may not have jaws and are not man-eaters. Newspapers strive to win more readership. They do aggressive advertising to find more and more subscribers. The more readers they have, and the more spread out their circulation is, the more appealing their stories have to be for all those readers. Hence, stories traditionally have to be big and stirring enough before editors can assume that everyone everywhere would love them.

The "Neighborhood Times" is a different business. Its circulation is artificially restricted to a certain (small) locality. It has a much smaller circulation than the actual newspaper.

No presidential campaigns or terrorist bombings are reported in this section. Editors salivate for unusual stories, apparently because the assumption is that the abnormal, the bizarre or the rare is what captures the attention of the "normal" reader. At some point in the life of journalism, someone has questioned this status quo. Who said the normal would not also catch the attention of the normal?

"Neighborhood Times" stories are so far from being unusual, rare or abnormal that readers easily find themselves in those stories. When people read about a tree that fell on someone's house, why it fell, how it could have been prevented, and how the homeowner reacted to the falling of the tree, the tree that stands a few feet from their homes will strongly remind them of the relevance of that story in their lives.

The more a story is about "minor" things, the more readers will find it easy to relate to, because more minor things happen in people's lives than major, earth shattering things. But unlike the war or accident story, it's not necessarily self-evident why the neighborhood story is being told. Much of the story's significance depends on the teller's perspective, rather than on the magnitude of the event being narrated.

Working for the "Neighborhood Times," I found myself struggling with the mentality that I had formed in the traditional newsroom. I now know how to stop looking for "big," "unusual," "abnormal," "major" stuff. Instead, I'm now looking for "ordinary," "minor" things, and see how my angle of storytelling can make them worth telling.