A/N: A continuation of my reposts from AO3.
Most cities and towns have slow news days. Days when the top story is a local woman who found a fried band-aid in her chicken nuggets, which goes right into an exposé on corn processing, leading into a report of a local restauranteur showing the cameras how he makes his famous steaks, and all ending with the local weather report. Amity Park used to have days like this, but that was before the ghosts. Back when everything was peaceful, Amity Park was actually considered a fairly safe city, sure there was the occasional robbery or high-speed chase, but nothing which was ever considered national news. That is, until the 'Ghost Dome Incident' of 2004. When the entire city was launched into the Ghost Zone, the news teams still kept recording, despite not being able to air the recordings in an alternate dimension. When the town flickered back to reality, the media companies were quick to publish the videos online.
After that, the demand for Amity Park's local news rocketed exponentially. Amity Park was now the most haunted city in the world, and people were fascinated. All over the planet, people would log onto the city medias' websites to see what all had happened that day. It was usually a straight 44-odd minutes of the anchors in the studio talking to the reporters in the field about what was happening. Ghosts rocked the newscasts- usually fights of some degree or another. Sometimes it was a quick interview of an eyewitness. Occasionally the mysterious Phantom would be caught on tape. Since it was usually a quick streak of black and white, videos that captured him still for even a second usually gathered hundreds of millions of views, instead of just millions. The media companies just loved it, and because of their popularity, the local medias soon became some of the richest companies in the city.
The news channels loved Phantom so much that one in particular put out a $5 million reward for anybody who could get more than a couple of sentences out of the secretive ghost kid. People mobbed the locations of his fights for weeks after that, even though he never spoke with the media. Nearly a year later, and the reward was still unclaimed. However, it wasn't all fun and games for the local media. A few channels had contacted FentonWorks to buy a few Ecto-Guns for the reporters out in the field. It was at that point that the citizens of Amity Park began to get concerned. Sure, the media in Amity Park was more entertaining to watch than that of other cities, but nobody wanted some poor reporter to get blasted onscreen. It wasn't long after that in which Mayor Masters was essentially forced into passing a law making it illegal to broadcast within a hundred yards of a ghost fight. People breathed a sigh of relief that the reporters were now mandated to be safer when reporting in the field. However, Amity Park's media companies still have the highest rates of media-related job applications in the country. Very few people wonder why.