Personal thoughts from within the Luxury Real Estate network
By Robert Lockard
RISMedia’s article entitled “Where the Truth about Today’s Market Really Lies” continues to interest me. It begs the question: Are media sources being fair in their coverage of the current U.S. real-estate market or are they being overly negative? To answer this question, I suggest that there is a stigma against covering positive stories in the news. I hope that this will not offend members of the press, but I really do think that negativity is far too rampant in the news.
Feature stories, or “soft news,” as they’re often called in the industry, are often where you find positive stories on good people, places and trends. But the real “hard news” is where you find all of the problems in the world. When I was a reporter, I noticed that “hard news” stories were almost always more coveted and interesting to my fellow reporters than “soft news” stories. I think that is part of the reason why we don’t hear more stories about positive and unchanged real-estate markets, though sometimes we do find them buried in an article.
It is perfectly fair to raise concerns about current real-estate markets because this can lead to positive changes. I would simply like to suggest that reporters should not just “dig deeper” into stories, but also broaden their search to include a variety of voices, positive and negative, in stories. Burying quotes on positive aspects of the industry beneath negative statements doesn’t count. I can empathize with the difficulty in getting both sides of a story because of time restraints and other pressures. But simply focusing on the negative side, because that is more popular or interesting than covering the positive side, isn’t fair to readers, viewers or listeners. I hope to receive some interesting challenges and comments from this post. Hopefully, we can change the way luxury real estate and other markets are being portrayed in the media.
Editor’s Note:
Robert Lockard is the Public Relations & Media Specialist with LuxuryRealEstate.com. I am Robert. I create all of Luxury Real Estate’s newsletters, write the editorials in LuxuryRealEstate.com Magazine and much more.
Bookmark It!
Trackbacks
Use the following link to trackback from your own site:
http://blog.luxuryrealestate.com/trackbacks?article_id=medias-objective-or-biased-look-at-real-estate-part-2&day=09&month=01&year=2008
Submit Your Blog
To submit blogs, articles or press releases for consideration on this web page for FREE, please send your materials to our PR Department:
Public Relations
- Phone: 206.838.2856
- Fax: 206.695.4837
- Toll Free: 800.488.4066x856
- pr@luxuryrealestate.com
Comments