Is it just me, or does the Roanoke media market feel more like a big metropolitan area like Atlanta or Las Vegas?

When I moved here in 1998, we rarely had breaking news. For years, many of our stories were what we called “enterprise.” That means we had to go out and dig up a story.

Don’t get me wrong, we still do enterprise stories. In fact those stories are a part of our
On Your Side brand. It’s an important part of journalism.

But, more and more, the news the Roanoke area is also being dominated by breaking news. Obviously, the events of the last three years at Virginia Tech (the Morva manhunt, the April 16th massacre, the tragic death of grad student Xin Yang, and the unsolved murder Heidi Childs and David Metzler) fit into that category.

But there are many more examples in just the past few months including the disappearance of Morgan Harrington, the post office stand-off in late December in Wythe County, the disappearance and now death investigation of 2-year-old Aveion Lewis, and most recently the mass killing of 8 people in Appomattox County.

All of those stories attracted either statewide or national media attention.

When you take all of that into consideration, you see why I asked the question at the beginning of this posting: are we becoming more metropolitan? Perhaps the better question is this: what’s going on in our communities? Why are we seeing more and more tragic, brutal crimes? What changed?

As a news reporter, I can tell you we are constantly looking for a story. Our producers have to fill the “beast,” what some call our newscasts, every day. There are still days when there’s nothing going on and it’s a stretch to fill 90 minutes of local news. They just seem to be fewer and fewer. And frankly, having reviewed the senseless crime we’ve lived through over the past four or five years, I somewhat yearn for those slow news days.