Good localization stories have several key elements in common:
- They are timely, often surfacing as an “in the wake of the news” piece.
- They are valuable to local readers in a clear and specific way. (In other words, it’s not a “President unveils middle east peace plan; Area high school students say it won’t work” story.)
- They deal with things that could or have actually happened. (I once had to write a localization about what would happen if Boris Yeltsin, then the president of the Russian Federation, were to die in office, based on a hunch an editor had that he would. Yeltsin survived his term and lived a decade longer.)
During his Academy Award acceptance speech, Joaquin Phoenix took a rather circuitous route through his thoughts, deciding that it would be a good time to crap-talk the dairy industry, among other things:
We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow, and when she gives birth, we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. Then, we take her milk, that’s intended for her calf, and we put it in our coffee and our cereal, and I think we fear the idea of personal change because we think that we have to sacrifice something to give something up.
Less than a day later, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporter Rick Barrett turned around this localization for his Dairy-State readers. It’s a great example of knowing an audience, touching on a key topic of interest to that audience and getting a good story together in the wake of the news.
Let’s break down some key things that you probably want to emulate if you need to localize the topic.
Start with the lead:
Dairy farmers are pushing back against an Oscar’s award acceptance speech by actor and vegan activist Joaquin Phoenix who claimed that farmers are cruel to cows and newborn calves.
It’s a straight-up inverted pyramid lead that nails down both the local angle (dairy folks) and the tie to the national story (Oscar speech, ripping on farmers). It doesn’t try to do too much, it makes the point and then it moves on. It also avoids trying to be cute with something like Dairy farmers “having a beef” or “having a cow” about this.
He then moved into a good bridge as well as some key background, before sliding back into the local angle:
The performer, who on Sunday night took home the Best Actor award for his role in “Joker,” used his speech to rip on the dairy industry and the breeding of cows.
“We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow, and when she gives birth we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable,” Phoenix said. “And then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.”
That didn’t go over well with dairy farmers.
The experts do a good job of explaining WHY they think the actor was wrong and HOW the cow/calf situation works based their experiences. This is done with good quotes and solid paraphrases that don’t fall victim to jargon:
A newborn calf is taken from its mother, about 20 minutes after birth, but it’s for their own safety, said dairy farmer Tina Hinchley from Dane County.
“If that mom had manure on her, we would risk that calf, our best genetics on the farm, getting contaminated with Salmonella, E. Coli or Listeria, along with Tetanus and all the other stuff that hangs out on the farm as well,” Hinchley said.
Barrett used quality reporting to cover his bases in outlining the story. Check out the sources for this:
- dairy farmer Tina Hinchley from Dane County
- dairy farmer Carrie Mess from Lake Mills
- lan Bjerga, spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation
In probably a couple hours (given that this story was posted by 12:30 and that Phoenix didn’t make his statements until about 10:30 the night before), Barrett got three good people with a background on the topic to speak intelligently about this. In addition, he wove in quotes from the Oscar speech and reporting on previous elements of Phoenix’s life.
The piece closes well with a decent closing quote that has both a sense of closure and the potential to look ahead:
“We have a free country, with freedom of expression, but we do wish that Joaquin Phoenix would talk with us, rather than at us, because if he did he would learn a lot about the commitment that dairy farmers have for animal welfare,” said Alan Bjerga, spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation.
“This isn’t the first time he has made remarks like this, but it gets more prominence because it was in an Oscars speech,” Bjerga said.
Overall, the story is short (About 530 words), well structured and chock full of information. It ties a local interest to a broader concern and it provides background context as well.
In short, it’s a textbook example of how to build a great localization piece.
