Every day, the editorial staff at the UK wonders: What are we writing about, why are we writing about it, and how are we writing about it? A weekly look behind the scenes.
Some people seem to think that the UK has been paying (and continues to pay) too much attention to the American presidential elections. We did a series of questions and answers with American RUG employees, published several other separate stories, and early last night and in the early hours of Wednesday morning, we covered the Election Night USA event at the Groninger Forum.
Someone joked on Twitter: ‘Will the UK cover the next elections in Ghana this diligently?’
I doubt it. I also doubt the Groninger Forum will be organising an Election Night Ghana event, or that such an evening would sell out as quickly as the one about the U.S. has done.
70 Americans
We looked it up again yesterday: there are approximately 70 Americans at the RUG, consisting of 25 students and 44 staff members (this is not necessarily a current number because how many international students have enrolled this year and where they’re from has not yet been made known). Out of the total number of people at the RUG (more than 36,000), 70 is not a lot, but that is not the standard.
So what is?
News value is determined by a few strict journalistic rules. One quite unsympathetic but very important rule says that news value is the number of deaths divided by the distance to the Netherlands. In other words: the farther away it is, the less it concerns us.
That’s not because ‘we’ decided that: it’s just how it works. A shipwreck in the Philippines where 500 people drowned concerns us less than a boat sinking at the Waddenzee where five people drown. The former is far away, but the latter happens close by.
Impact
Another strict journalistic rule is ‘impact’. Who cares if Andorra’s national bank fails, apart from a few rich people who use it to launder their money? But when a large American bank such as Lehman Brothers fails (as it did in the autumn of 2008), credit ends up being crunch across Europe.
In a word, impact. Trump will exert a lot of influence over issues such as NATO, TTIP, the fight against IS/Taliban/Al-Qaeda – as well as numerous other issues we feel are important in the Netherlands. A new president in Ghana will not.
When it rains in Washington, it drizzles in Groningen. And when there’s a storm there, the UK feels a breeze.
Rob Siebelink, editor-in-chief