Degree of difficulty and perspective

I’m always intrigued by Olympic sports that are scored objectively. It’s one thing to skate around an Olympic oval, ski down a mountain, or count how many times each team puts the puck in the back of the net. In those cases, it’s obvious, even to the most casual observer, who deserves a gold medal.

The sports I would love to better understand are those like figure skating, where certain technical elements are required but the ultimate winner is based, in large part, on an artistic score. To someone accustomed to scoreboard watching, that feels awfully subjective.

Adding another layer is the degree-of-difficulty multiplier, which can save the score of a skater who attempts a more complex routine. An athlete can fall and still score higher than another skater who delivers a cleaner but more basic program.

If you’re going to score diving, figure skating, or halfpipe skiing, it makes sense to account for the difficulty of the elements being attempted. I don’t always understand those calculations, so I rely on those who do to apply the degree of difficulty correctly.

We get feedback from readers from time to time who don’t love the way a story is written. Often, those comments help us improve the quality of our work the next time. Just as often, though, the person offering the critique is missing information that we couldn’t expect them to have.

I spend a good deal of time meeting with newsmakers around Las Cruces explaining that I love receiving news releases, but not for the reason they might assume. They are the way we find out what’s happening.

When we receive a release, my first instinct is to use the information it contains to uncover the story behind the announcement. I love storytelling, and that is the kind of work that makes up the Bulletin today.

I understand there is an expectation of hard-news reporting and the inverted-pyramid writing style, and those are important journalistic tools. But we are an understaffed newspaper that publishes once a week—and then sits on the rack for another week.

What is breaking news when a release arrives is often old news by the time the next edition is published. As a result, our focus is on storytelling: finding the story behind the news and delivering it to readers in a feature or analysis format.

I believe this is the best use of our limited space.

That also means that, at times, we receive news releases we are unable to explore more deeply but still believe contain information our readers would want to know. In those cases, we may publish the material as an FYI.

Those items are not intended to be powerful journalism, but rather informational. They occupy a different place on the degree-of-difficulty continuum.

Those of us in journalism understand that we open ourselves up to critique every day, and we’re fine with that. I hope this explanation of our process helps readers better understand why they see different types of stories in the Bulletin and on our website.

We’ll continue doing our best to provide stories that entertain, educate, and inform—knowing that sometimes we fall short. When we do, we get back up off the ice and move on to the next story, hoping to do it a little better.

Most of all, thank you for taking the time to read and to engage with us.