Talk:Media of Marshall, Texas

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[edit] Why were these merged?

As it stands now -- 11:30 p.m. ET, Jan. 20, 2007 -- this page is a mishmosh of loosely related information. If I didn't know it had previously been separate articles, I'd request that it be broken up into several separate articles.

I'm not from Marshall and I didn't do any work on the previous pages, so I don't have strong feelings about this, but I would like to add my two cents as a Wikipedian in general. As it happens, I stumbled across the News Messenger page earlier today, and now the merged Media of Marshall page tonight. I prefer it the old way. Yes, some of the pages were stubs, or very short, but that's no reason to throw them together.

A newspaper is an independent voice in its community, as is a radio station or a television channel. They don't exist simply as entities of a "media of (insert city name here)." The News Messenger, for example, deserves its own page just as much as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch deserves its, or as much as The Orange Leader (there's a stub I wrote today) deserves its.

How does one decide which organization gets to "lead" the page? I see that the newspapers get that honor now; but if I were trying to look up KHMT -- now the longest entry in "Media of Marshall" -- I would expect to find a full article about a radio station, not to have to scroll down through paragraphs of unrelated information.

Then there's the ancillary stuff. I realize that you have preserved the original article titles as redirects, but this article itself is what will show up on automatically generated categories. If I know there's a newspaper in Texas called "News Messenger," and for some reason I want to find out more about it, I'd know to look in Category:Newspapers published in Texas, but I wouldn't know enough to check out Media of Marshall.

If there's something so unique about the Marshall media scene that the "media of Marshall," as such, are worthy of discussion -- the only analogue that leaps to mind would be a page called "tabloid journalism in New York" -- then by all means preserve this page as a forum for that discussion. But each independent media organization should have its own page.

I apologize for this rambling post, but I felt the need to share my viewpoint on this. Wiki Wistah 04:46, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

I appreciate your candor and see no reason for you to apologize. Bluntly, I was worried that the articles might be quietly deleted and had a better chance of survival together. I am the main author, former maintainer of the Marshall related articles and am no longer regularly active at wikipedia. If you want to maintain the other articles as well as the News Messenger, I have no objection to the articles being broken back off. A media sub-article in some form was always intended to be part of the Marshall sub-article series, so some sort of page needs to exist. Perhaps the current article can be moved to List of media in Marshall, Texas. -JCarriker 05:06, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Having done quite a bit stubbing and stub-reading over the last month -- I've been working on getting at least stub-class articles up for every Massachusetts daily newspaper (and just about every weekly newspaper company), and that quest has taken a detour into writing stubs for every Ottaway and CNHI daily -- I wonder: has there been a move afoot to delete newsmedia stubs? I can't see the rationale for deleting the page of any daily newspaper or licensed radio or TV station. This is especially true of a paper that belongs to a major chain (as the News Messenger appears to belong to Cox). It's not an orphan; to delete it would add another redlink to an existing corpus of related pages, i.e., the Cox collection.

To be honest, I have no interest in maintaining Marshall pages. As I noted above, I'm not from that neck of the woods and wouldn't know where to start in expanding them, or keeping an eye out for false information contributed by others (aside from blatant vandalism, of course). But I still think they ought to be restored to the way they were before today. Maybe I'm not the average Wiki editor, but I certainly would not have deleted the News Messenger page, or the KHMT.

Maybe the best compromise situation would be to keep "Media of Marshall" as a short page with only a sentence or two on each organization, and links to the full articles. Therefore, if someone deleted one of the shorter radio articles as a hopeless stub, at least the stub information would be preserved here. Wiki Wistah 05:28, 21 January 2007 (UTC)