Lottery stories: Journalism or commercials?

[mvcg66b3r]

Lotteries and their occasional huge jackpots have become such a journalism trope that I worry we have lost sight of the negative aspects of lotteries and have become, instead, boosters and an important part of the lottery marketing ecosystem. We’ve fallen into the trap of doing a live shot at a store that is selling lots of lottery tickets, interviewing a few folks to learn their plans for their winnings, buying a ticket for ourselves and engaging in inane banter with anchors about how quickly we’ll clean out our desks and thinking we have done our job. But there is more to lotteries than that, and I hope we can start doing some real reporting again on this multi-billion dollar industry.

Wednesday night there will be a Powerball drawing for a jackpot of more than a billion dollars – the largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history. You and your station will cover it, even if you are in one of the few states that doesn’t participate in the Powerball. You will cover it more than your audience wants you to because it is expected and because it is easy, cheap, requires almost no heavy lifting or original thinking and even the most inexperienced reporter can handle the job.

“Lottery fever” reporting will pass for news when, in most cases, your reporting will be nothing but a thinly-veiled commercial for your state lottery agency. Your coverage will turn off the upper middle-class audience that advertisers desperately want, but you will not be able to not cover the story if only because every one of your competitors is. You will be reporting on the billion dollar Powerball jackpot during your evening newscasts, but you will be pressured to report it as if you are doing so during your morning program. You will ask yourself if this is what you went to journalism school for.

http://rtdna.org/article/lottery_stories_journalism_or_commercials

 

[nathannah]

Most of these stories only come with absurdly large jackpots though, and as it's been shown over the years, as the amount goes up, the interest of stations to care about sub-$600 million jackpots becomes virtually nil (with state lotto wins only mentioned in the 'ticket sold at location x' mode of coverage). Even the official lottery stations don't give a flip about lotteries about 98% outside of the daily numbers rundown. Look at the complete lack of coverage over the bomb that was the original Monopoly Millionaires Club game; nobody cared, not even the stations that would carry the game's game show.

Compared to most inane feature segments, the lottery ones are painless in the grand scheme of everything.

 

[TheBigA]

I agree that it's a billion dollar industry, but it's also a state agency. They do these lotteries in lieu of increasing taxes. If this is a problem, how about all the tax tips stations do, and coverage of taxpayers on April 15th? Ultimately, the people are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the lottery. It's created to endow education, health care, or senior citizens. What's wrong with that? Once the citizenry has voted to approve the lottery, they're also approving the coverage. It comes with the territory.

This article is really a one-sided editorial against lotteries. He's making the exact same case against coverage that lottery opponents make against lottery approval. But as I said, once the lottery has been approved, it's too late to continue to fight against it.

 

[Silkie]

You cast your lot with advice from previous winners to hire an attorney, an accountant and a therapist. In other words, you have participated in Shirley Jackson's lottery. No thanks.

 

[KML0224]

I worked on a CT lottery terminal where I worked from 1995 to 2001. We joined PowerBALL in late 1995. I remember one time when PowerBALL was at about $195 million. A crew from WVIT-TV (NBC) channel 30 of New Britain/Hartford did a piece in our store and talked to a couple of our customers. I didn't want to be on camera, so you saw my coworker in their story instead. It's so sad that $195 million wouldn't even get sniffed at today, despite that still being a huge sum of money. Likewise, now that we've broken the billion dollar barrier, the media won't even think it's worth it unless it gets to that level again.

(I sincerely hope there are multiple winners and get this nonsense over with!)

 

[MarcB]

10 years ago I was working somewhere when it went over $300 mill. A co-worker of mine said with a straight face he couldn't live on that money for the rest of his life

I bought only one ticket this time around. I had the option of going in on a pool at my work, but I passed. Now another co-worker he went in on the pool, but also bought several of his own tickets.

 

[PTBoardOp94]

A lot of "news", especially in smaller markets is effectively advertising for someone or other. If it wasn't for a bunch of "Neighbors oppose new Wal-Mart store" stories, I'd have no idea there were three new Wal-Marts under construction within 30 minutes of my house. I'm not sure I see a problem with this.

In addition to the "let's put a camera inside Circle K" stories, there have been a lot of explainers on just how low the odds of winning PowerBall are, especially on the national morning shows.

 

[TheBigA]

Interesting side note: The #1 most read story right now at WashingtonPost.com is the Powerball lottery.

So who decides what's news?

 

[JRH]

Interesting side note: The #1 most read story right now at WashingtonPost.com is the Powerball lottery.

So who decides what's news?

I haven't checked recently, but in the past on our station's website, the top stories people clicked on to read were overwhelmingly police, fire, court stories, arrests, etc. The "police blotter" (police stuff too trivial to put on the air) was one of the most read.

Stories involving dogs were big, as were occasional feature stories. But most feature stories weren't highly read. City council, school board, political stories were very low in the clicked-on counts.

 

[FreddyE1977]

I don't know how you could NOT cover this story, given the stampedes of people into convenience stores
and the general mania surrounding this thing.

 

[TheBigA]

I think the key thing is that the prize is over $1 billion. That's never happened before. Once that happens, it's news, regardless of one's personal view about the lottery. That's the difference here.

Covering the lottery as an on-going story might be silly, but this is new territory, and that's news.

 

[landtuna]

Question: Why am I not like the other lottery losers this morning?

Answer: I still have my $2 in my pocket.

 

[TheBigA]

If you think NPR is above reporting on such pedestrian things as the lottery, think again. They've done a lottery story every day for the past two weeks. However, they sometimes will get a bit creative in their approach, bringing up names like Charles Dickens:

http://www.npr.org/2016/01/13/462923346/great-expectations-dickens-and-the-powerball

 

[Silkie]

Question: Why am I not like the other lottery losers this morning?

Answer: I still have my $2 in my pocket.

Same here, especially after reading that Power Ball numbers rigging started with 2 states and has expanded to a few more. Imagine the people who bought 500 or more tickets.