A view of Huntington WV

I've lived in or near Huntington WV for almost all my life. It can be a great place to be and it can be a frustrating place to be, but what city along the Ohio River isn't, at least in the eyes of its lifelong residents?

Here is one person's view of Huntington before she came here and after.

I, too, share her frustration with how local TV news is always playing up crime stories about the city, but there's something to remember. Crime is very easy and very inexpensive for local TV stations to cover, just as traffic accidents and fires are. A producer gets some information from the local emergency response agency, a photographer gets some moving pictures (folks in TV have different definitions of "video" and "footage" than you and I do, so I go old school here) and you have a bit of your newscast taken care of.

As newspapers lose more and more advertising and circulation, they, too, are going cheap. Often they have the added burden that their management usually has a view of the world that it wants to see reflected in the news pages.

But read this short piece about Huntington and ask if your hometown has the same image problem among its peers and its rivals.