Back in June, friend-of-the-site Kim B. passed along a link to what has been called “the most Massachusetts news report of all time”.1 In it, reporter Matt Shearer interviews locals about the closure of the Market Basket supermarket on Boston Road in Billerica. No, not the Market Basket at 700 Boston Road in Billerica, the other one. No, not the 199 Boston Road location in Billerica, the other other one. Right, 496 Boston Road in Billerica.
Three Market Baskets in one ~4 mile stretch may have been excessive.
Shearer has been cranking out zany news videos, and now Boston Magazine has a profile of him. His secret to getting great content? “Let people speak”.
The real mastery, though, is in just letting people talk and seeing what unexpected turns their opinions will take.
“Nothing is funnier than reality,” Shearer tells me. “It’s way more fun and more rewarding to find people who say something that I could never come up with on my own. When I get a reaction that I would never expect to hear from somebody, that’s fun for me.”
It’s working well, and providing plenty of ridiculousness. Still, even for Shearer, I would be unwilling to break my “National news or no news” rule.
Footnotes:
This video is archived here. ↩︎
