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"Great. Family wiped out in crash tragedy. Love it. We've got three hours for the interviews, photos. Let's get cracking."

Kevin East's mood was somewhat more upbeat than half an hour previously. Then he was struggling for a front page lead. "Road deaths and injuries down twelve per cent" was not the sort of headline that was going to pile a few thousands on the circulation.

Then Steve Young punched the air in the newsroom and screamed: "Hold the front page! Accident. Mum, dad, three kids wiped out." The office was abuzz with excitement. The tragedy that would cause so many tears elsewhere changed the tense atmosphere in the newsroom to one of triumph.

Details of the crash and photos were splashed across the first three pages of that evening's edition. The editorial comment was devoted to sending everyone's condolences to the victims' family and loved ones. But it might just as well have read: "The timing of this accident couldn't have been better."

Sales of the newspaper rocketed. In the weekly dust-down meeting to discuss each edition, the editor told his staff: "Wonderful stuff. Just what readers want. Thank you everyone, including God."

It is hard to argue with his belief that people do indeed want to read of tragedies. As long as more people buy newspapers with hard news stories on their front pages, then editors will continue to look for the sensational.

The editor's idea of sensitivity was to consign the report about local roads becoming safer to the waste bin. "We have to be sensitive about this," he told his reporters. "Just imagine what the family would think if they saw a report about our roads being safe when five of them have just been killed."

In more than twenty years on local newspapers, I have seen good news stories constantly suppressed. The saying that, "All news is good news" is absolutely not the case. A more appropriate motto would be, "Bad news is good news"; or even, "Good news is bad news". The driving force is supposedly giving readers what they want, code for selling more newspapers.

So, I have seen a front page story on a woman whose broken leg was missed on the X-ray by human error. Hidden away on a late left hand page was the news that levels of the MRSA superbug in the same hospital had dropped to the lowest in the country. I have seen a front page story of three young men beaten up' even though none of them was hurt seriously enough to warrant hospital treatment in the same week that statistics showed the town they lived in was in the top ten safest places in Britain.

Recently, a bar manager in the town fed up with the constant stream of more violence' stories started a campaign to boycott the local newspaper. The newspaper ran a story on its website saying a pub manager was angry at the newspaper, but conveniently forgetting to mention his boycott call. It appealed for people's comments. A few days later, it ran a front page story headed, "You say we are right", in which it claimed readers felt stories of violence should be given due prominence. It omitted to say that the majority of people were actually critical and only a small minority approved of its scare tactics.

The newspapers will argue that they can only report what is happening. They do not make the news up. But evidence suggests that they do manipulate what happens. As a result, they influence people's views in a negative way.

Learn more about this author, Phil Hill.
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