Ah, Memorial Day weekend. The barbecue, the beach, the summer dresses. But there’s one perennial treat that we wait for every year with bated breath: the endless stream of stories about traffic and gas prices. Like a groundhog announcing the arrival of spring, this story is a staple of early summer. Here’s the Baltimore Sun: “Gasoline prices in the region are at near-record levels. Hotel rates are up 13 percent since last year. The roads, bridges and tunnels are going to be crawling with police. And more Marylanders will be on the road this Memorial Day weekend than ever before.”
The same sentence can be found in a plethora of papers today:
Here’s Newsday: “As the Memorial Day weekend approaches, the unofficial start to the summer vacation season finds most things on the up and up, but that’s not entirely good news for travelers. A day before the holiday is set to begin tomorrow, gas prices are up.”
And here’s the Boston Herald: “As Memorial Day approaches, annual pilgrims to Cape Cod can anticipate trading at least 20 minutes of traffic headaches for 20 minutes of relaxation.”
You get the picture. We could go on and on.
Look, there’s no doubt that Memorial Day brings traffic and a reminder of high gas prices. But it does that every year. Journalists are probably itching to get out of their offices, but would it hurt to find at least one new angle on this tired story?
Not sure if the writer actually works at Columbia. If I took the subway everywhere, I'd get bored with stories about rising gas prices. But out here in the world beyond the iconic Saul Steinberg cartoon, gas prices matter a great deal and, by golly, Memorial Day is about the time they go up -- this year to an all-time high.
Out here in the land beyond public transit, people who desperately need work and who certainly can't afford hybrids are paying more than ever for gas to get back and forth from jobs that already position them on the brink of poverty -- and some of those jobs are 30 miles or more from where they live.
I'll grant you that any recurring event can be covered with cliches -- snow doesn't always have to be called "the white stuff" and every story about conservation doesn't need to reference Kermit the Frog's theme song.
But people are talking about gas prices, they're concerned about them and they want to know what to expect, especially at a three-day weekend when they have a chance to go visit family or just spend some time with their own family at someplace nice, for the first time since winter lost its grip.
Don't turn up your nose at the notion of writing stories about things people want to read about. For all the notions about saving newspapers by going high tech, blogging, changing paradigms and so forth, there remains some merit in giving people what they want.
Posted by tjdestry
on Sun 27 May 2007 at 06:00 AM