Like most people, I follow a few local news sites on Facebook, which as expected are continuing to post regularly about both the lockdown and (thankfully) other unrelated stuff. Most of these stories, aren’t hard news but are still of interest and are a good way to break up the day, but for the people that read the Nottingham Post, unless it’s a piece of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism, it is not worth reading or publishing.

Now most people would scroll past an uninteresting story on Facebook, but for the select few, they will click on it anyway, read it, then proceed to comment on the original post how it was a complete waste of 5 minutes of their life, it was incorrect, that a certain place isn’t even in Nottingham and finally, ‘How can you even call yourselfs journalists if u dont publish proper news’ (I left in the spelling errors).

I understand that for a news site, people writing comments shows that the public are engaging with stories and it is more likely to increase readership – but at some point, all the negativity is going to bring you down. It cannot be helped that news is not always about Nottingham; not much happens here aside from crime. Likewise, the reason most stories are about COVID 19, is funnily enough, because there is a pandemic going on, so it is probably going to be relatively high up in the news agenda.

Attacking a journalist for not living up to the qualities of his professional title seems overly cruel, especially considering the person that wrote the comment was retired and semi-illiterate. So why do people feel the need to be an arse online, especially on Facebook where most of your family and friends can see. I doubt your relatives are going to be sending you congratulatory messages, stating ‘well done for that witty and insightful comment on a story about farming, I am proud of you’.

I am not a huge fan of any social media, most are echo chambers or people making themselves feel better for getting one over on a person they will never meet – but for some reason, journalists always seem to be the quickest and easiest target. From Donald Trump down to some Redditor complaining that the Daily Mail is being overly sensational (which is like saying water is wet).

Attacking the person that writes the news that you consume is not going to change it. It would be like fighting your postman for delivering awful bank statements – so won’t people just be a bit nicer to the friendly neighbourhood journalist?