h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A round-up of the events from local villages the proceeding week will always say two lines about the most important thing to happen ever ("village gets awarded Nobel peace prize") and then has half a column on what was said by Mrs M Snodlacker, organist (rtrd.) at the WI meeting.

Apart from the horror-of-the-modern-world variety, there's another very important category of articles involving young people. Usually they're about some school or other youth event.

'Fifteen junior school pupils gain their 50m swimming award'
'School head demonstrates new computer room to form 3B'
'Youth club stages production of West Side Story'

I reckon they're not written for people to *read* as such, they're really written in order to get pictures of groups of children into the paper, so that their parents, godparents, aunts, uncles, grannies, etc. will all go out to buy a copy (preferably several copies) of the paper with one of their younger relatives in.
(The Golden Wedding example is similar - more pictures = more faces = more sales. )

Ideally, the publication date of any given article will be left somewhat vague, as that way someone might have to buy several issues to be sure they get the right one.

I'm fairly sure that the (mostly elderly) readers of my local paper (The Market Rasen Mail) consult it for the deaths column They may also have an interest in who's got planning permission for what, followed by the pictures of their grandchildren (see above) which are always "not reallyt very good of him"

You're bang on about the pictures thing. Every time we're in a local paper, it's a copy for the portfolio of our drama group, to impress grant-awarding bodies. The dates are always vague because even they have no idea. They don't care. We have about 4 local papers, and once photographers from all of them turned up at once. One-up-manship? You don't know the half of it.
And *why* do school productions always have to be something dreary and predictable like West Side Story? When we did plays at our school, we did Gogol and Brecht.
How does the Oklahoman compare to a British right-wing rag, like the Daily (General Pinochet is a damn fine bloke) Mail?

Our Master, Terry worked on a local newspaper for thirty years, so he should know the whys.

1. Older people have more clout, not only do Do more for the community, but also they all seems friends with the blasted editor. Terry had many a story pulled for taking the side of teenagers against old middle-class fowk.

2. Younger people do not real local newspapers, so they don't really care, as long as "Watson"'s there, and the national football results, that is often it.

3. You need to experience life to do well in it. There is a lot of older people uncatered for, there were on the local estates, often one only went there to talk about crime, this is terrible to say, but most people are just not very interesting. You can cover the estate saints, the foster-mothers and so on, then what? "Old Tom went home drunk again, and was sick over his wife's new washing"?