Monsignor, these baptismal registers are a hundred years old. Can’t we just throw them out now?
Sure, what else are we gonna do, save them for posterity?
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All news stories
The TV news stories should be stored on your website, with a table of contents arranged by date, one page for each day. This will allow researchers to find a story in your news archives. Often a search box feature produces unwieldy results with unrelated entries where one or two words happen to be similar. Search engines won’t find pages through a search box, because they won’t enter search terms into it.
The TV news clips should be uploaded onto YouTube and also the other video hosting websites such as Vimeo, Dailymotion and the like, both domestic and foreign, in case future geo-political developments bring a temptation to erase as much of history as possible. Each news story should have its own page on your website, and each page should contain all the links to the video.
Each TV news clip should be prefaced with a screen identifying the TV station, its location, and the date and time the clip aired, whether or not that identifying screen aired. A century from now, that preface might be the only clue for the date and place of the story. If 12-hour format is used, the designation a.m. or p.m. should be included. The location is important to persons who do not know your TV station, and therefore it needs to say whether it is Manchester, New Hampshire or Manchester, England; Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon.
See an example of such a screen at https://youtu.be/nb7pouY1tjs. The type at https://youtu.be/pmx9sCaoh-w may make it easier to modify with location and date information. A common form is found at the start of https://youtu.be/KFFaOIFHL74.
Each clip should include the news anchor introducing the reporter.
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Crash-related news stories
Don’t call a drunk driving crash an accident. Call it a wreck, a crash or a collision. Drunk drivers sometimes get convicted of murder, and murder by definition is not an accident.
Don’t express the driver’s blood alcohol level as a multiple of the legal limit without also giving the number. You are telling persons who might not know your State’s legal limit. Besides, unlike a speed limit, a BAL threshold is not a limit because you can get convicted at a lower level.
Express the ages of the persons involved, where you have that information. Drivers 21 and older are free to buy all the booze they want, and victims under 21 never got a chance to drink alcoholic beverages lawfully.
Don’t say the driver was going the wrong way on a divided highway. Say which way, such as going east in the westbound lanes.
A car does not become airborne except in extremely strong winds, such as a tornado. Merely transiting through the air does not make something airborne because the air is not bearing the weight of the object. That's why you never hear of astronauts being spaceborne. Space does not bear their weight.
Where a victim or family member sues a drunk driver, the news should explain that federal bankruptcy law does not allow for discharge of any debt for death or personal injury caused by the debtor’s operation of a motor vehicle, vessel, or aircraft if such operation was unlawful because the debtor was intoxicated from using alcohol, a drug, or another substance. (U.S. Code, Title 11 §523(a)(9)) This will make some drunks think twice at closing time.
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