Little on the earth irritates me more than tuning into the morning news programs and watching a New York-based weather person going on and on about some disruptive weather front — a snowstorm, perhaps, or damaging thunderstorms — that’s paralyzing the East Coast. More often than not, it’s the same weather that two days earlier paralyzed Chicago, where I live, or some other place east of the Hudson River and warranted nary a mention.

Because news doesn’t happen, of course, until it happens in New York.

A series of journalism conferences seeks to address that. Called the Between Coasts Forum, the organizers brought their discussion to Chicago in early May and I joined them. The stated goal was to devise ways to get a higher profile for stories originating in that vast swath of the country that isn’t New York-D.C. or LA-San Francisco.

In other words, your stories.

I can think of many stories we’ve published in Meatingplace that I thought should have been ripe for mainstream or national media to pick up on. Surlean Foods CEO Neal Leonard and the A.E. Leonard Family Giving Council has for years supported dozens of charities in Texas to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars a year. Byron Center Meats in Wyoming, Mich., burned to the ground in 2007 and reopened for business three days later, thanks to its own bootstraps and the support of community. The way that meat company owners and employees saved lives during and after Hurricane Harvey and other disasters.

The entire ABC News/BPI trial and settlement.

I think every one of our Knowlton Award honorees should be featured in the local newspaper for his or her accomplishments, because they are above and beyond what’s on their resume or what their company’s profit margins are.

I think the research being done at universities and private company laboratories on everything from better animal welfare to pathogen control and the nature of a tender, tasty cut of meat is amazing, and that a broader audience should read about it. Although much of it is esoteric to the average guy on the street today, it will be part of everybody’s daily existence within a few years.

Those are just a few.

I understand the demands on a mainstream media reporter’s time. Much of what we cover for Meatingplace is far too inside-baseball to run on the same page as tax hikes, news out of Washington or even the local sports scores. But many of our stories are universal in theme, inspiring, educational, or just plain fascinating.

I gleaned a lot of great ideas during our Between Coasts discussion for ways to bring these stories to the forefront for an increasingly urban mainstream media audience, to whom much of the ag and food supply chain is invisible.

What headlines would you want to see from that country between the coasts?

What headline would YOU write?

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