Hansen: One year later, the stories still taste sweet

Time flies when stories are told.

It was May 3 of last year when this paper started the Weekend section, enhancing the coverage of Orange County.

Normally, with today’s Internet infatuation, we get less news and fewer stories. Sure, there are endless online headlines to fill the day but how many really stick? How many reach into a neighborhood and talk about that thing — whatever that thing is?

News people call it “hyperlocal” coverage. It’s hard to do well. There simply aren’t enough reporters. Papers are strapped. Even big ones have to prioritize coverage.

So it’s left to citizen writers, bloggers and others. Maybe they minored in English or wrote on their high school newspaper, back when there were high school newspapers.

The result is as varied as you might expect. Sometimes, the passion and creativity is compelling, but other times, we’re left wondering if it’s really true. We know we can’t believe everything on the Internet, so how do we judge?

Brand value is still important. For example, are you more likely to trust something in the L.A. Times or on Reddit?

To me the answer is obvious, but my teenage sons would probably say Reddit because they don’t read regular newspapers.

Brand value to them is peer value. What do most people say? What do their friends say? What does DJ Khaled, with 3 million Snapchat followers, say?

As a dad, writer and follower of culture, I try to understand that mindset but it’s admittedly difficult.

When I ask my sons about local issues, they have no clue, but they can talk freely about so many other things — national, international and highly specialized things — that are a mystery to me.

So when I think about the Weekend section’s first-year anniversary, I know the stories are not trending on Reddit. Even the Orange County subreddit is lame, filled with rooms for rent and pleas for good handymen.

What it does have, though, are stories that people still cut out and frame. You might see a business profile by the front door of a store in Irvine Spectrum. A proud mom or dad will get extra copies to mail to relatives back east about their child.

It still means something to someone, somewhere, to be in the paper.

Especially because most people’s stories are not overly heroic. It’s not the dramatic retelling of a once-in-a-lifetime event. More often, it’s the affirmation of a small thing, a good thing.

Like when avid birder Steve Eric Smith jumped from a bridge at the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach into the muck of the wetland to save a baby tern that got caught in a mussel.

It wasn’t a baby in a burning building, but it still said something about the man.

There have been so many other Weekend stories — some incredulous, like the tale of Historic Wintersburg. It was a small agricultural community of Japanese Americans in the late 1880s that occupied a plot of land on Nichols Lane off Warner Avenue in Huntington Beach.

Now, the shuttered, graffiti-stained Japanese Presbyterian church sits as a ghostly reminder while next door, an elementary school fights an adjacent waste management company over health concerns.

More recently, we took a road trip along Harbor Boulevard, recounting its speckled past and ramshackle growth.

Indeed, it’s a strange, mesmerizing world, even in the walled gardens of Orange County.

For example, my first column was purposeful. I thought what better way to start telling stories than to begin at the center of the county.

Literally, I found out where the geographic center of the county was and went there. It turns out that it sits behind the gated walls of an Irvine subdivision, smack dab in the middle of a cul-de-sac.

I thought about what used to be there — farmland, of course. And so it happened that right outside the gates of the subdivision, there was one of the last remaining farmers.

Within a few hundred yards of the exact center of Orange County, I wrote, “you can stand in a strawberry patch, eat a berry and let the juice run down your hand.”

Those farms, like the stories, have a life. Will they ever trend on Reddit? Probably not.

But I have to believe that that’s OK.

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DAVID HANSEN is a writer and Laguna Beach resident. He can be reached at hansen.dave@gmail.com.