Monday, March 19, 2012

A Violent Weekend in Charlotte Leaves at Least Three People Dead and Local Media Confused

A stabbing, a shooting and an attempted murder and suicide.

Aside from the violence there is the confusion of main stream media when it comes to headlines and geographic locations.

The Charlotte Observer's first headline regarding the stabbing on Ginger Lane read "East Charlotte" later it was changed to "Northeast Charlotte" then NE Charlotte.

FOX News Charlotte took the unusual approach naming the location as East Charlotte in the Hed and North Charlotte in the body of their on line posting.



This is not the first time Charlotte's main stream media has been confused. In fact this has been an ongoing issue at the Observer's news room for years. Just ask Steve Lyttle who gets continual grief from posters like Mytemp001:

"Why does this say "East Charlotte" this was in northeast Charlotte. (They are back to capitalizing directions of the city again?)"

The poster is often incensed that the Observer labels a vast number of homicides as "East Charlotte".

A lot of this has to do with perceptions. Cedar Posts lives in "South Charlotte" not south Charlotte. As far as my neighbors are concerned South Charlotte is the name of an area and not a direction. When the Charlotte Observer reports a homicide in "South Charlotte" I don't expect that they are talking about Scaleybark Road, which is anything but South.

The trouble with the Ginger Lane homicide is that most everyone considers Sharon Amity and W.T. Harris as being east. Ginger Lane is just south of Old Concord Road and based on the compass is east of downtown. However it is less than two miles from North Tryon and just around the concern from "North Park" mall.

Eastway doesn't run east it runs north. North Tryon never runs north, from the square is runs northeast and then east. And if you get lost in Myers Park just look for the coner of Queens and Queens and turn left.

At some point all the Charlotte news rooms need to have a meeting and map out these areas, taking into account neighborhood perceptions and Charlotte's cow path road history. Ginger Lane is "east of Downtown Charlotte" and not East Charlotte.

Or is that Uptown?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Remember crime is down!

Anonymous said...

North, South, East and West must always be captitalized, according to proper grammer.

You should correct your story, and if the damn paper hasn't been editing properly, so should they.

The bigger issue of them misidentifying locations of crime is just more of the stream of misinformation from local media. This is partly due to the stream of misinformation fed to them by CMPD and their willingness to chew it up and spit it out to us.

Sad day for lots of families with all these murders.

Horrible time in our city with this corruption.

Anon said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

funny how press releases are almost never released by the "press" -- even the ones CMPD bothers to put out, spin included