How much is too much?

Ten days ago in Albany, NY, a deaf dog named Luna escaped from a vet’s office while she was being boarded in the middle of the night. She was videotaped getting out of her cage, making it through several more doors, and pressed the handle on the main door to escape. You can’t make this kind of stuff up.

The owners sent out an e-mail to local media, bloggers covered it, it was tweeted/retweeted/facebooked around, and the news channels and newspapers picked it up. People (including Luna’s owners) left messages and updates in the comment sections of blogs. It got so much press that this past Saturday, 75 people showed up at one place to look at her. 7-5. Who knows how many looked on their own schedule. Other people in the area left out food and water, just in case she happened by.

The best part of the story is that Luna is now safe at home. On Monday, she showed up on the doorstep of someone cooking bacon (again, you can’t make this stuff up) a couple of miles away. They recognized Luna from an article in the Sunday paper.

Yesterday afternoon, Luna’s owners had a press conference to show her off, thank the community for helping, and announce that the couple who found her (who chose to remain anonymous) wouldn’t accept the reward, but asked that it be donated to the ASPCA and local humane society.

Awesome, awesome, AWESOME story. And it truly shows what can happen when 1. People make the effort to help; and 2. The power that the media has to get the word out and engage people to make a difference in their community.

Of course, now there’s a huge debate going on regarding if it was TOO MUCH coverage—if it was too much for one lost dog, if the topic wasn’t interesting enough to warrant so much attention, if it was a person, it wouldn’t have gotten this kind of play.

I’m curious to hear your takes on this. What do you feel is too much coverage on a lost pet story (or a good story in general)?

From my perspective (one whose family has lost a dog and knows it takes a lot of people to bring her back) sure, it was a lot of coverage, but it got the result it needed. And honestly, I’d rather hear about the search for a lost dog than one more stupid story about the State Dinner Crashers (because crashing fancy parties is a sport in DC—it’s nothing new and everyone knows that. Heck, I crashed a Congressional party here even before my furniture arrived from New York. If you don’t want crashers, up your security) or Tiger Woods’ dirty mistresses.