Tonight, some of us just might go to an extreme we usually avoid as we, for some reason, celebrate the passing of yet another calendar year.

While New Year’s excess comes once a year, excess may be all too common in our lives. Do we maybe have a cultural habit of going overboard, of bouncing from one extreme to another?

Maybe. Here are a few examples, taken from my own going overboard as a newshound. I read five newspapers a day and watch newscasts on PBS and Channel 5 (WABI in Bangor). Not to mention having all three house radios set to NPR, as well as my car pre-sets.

Marc A. J. Jalbert of Lewiston, in a letter on Dec. 22 to the Sun Journal, noted that “local” TV news stations often tell a story, in barely modified form, three times in a half-hour report. Had he waited a few days, he could have added that Channel 5 spliced four “weather reports” into each half hour. To be sure, weather was the story last week, but splitting the report into four pieces?

It’s not just within the newscast. WABI has expanded its “local” newscast period to 2.5 hours twice a day. From 4:30 to 7 a.m. and 4 to 6:30 p.m. How does WABI find enough local news to report? It doesn’t. Stories repeat as often as the person in the anchor seat changes. And “soft news” (celebrity sightings, warm-and-fuzzy puppies) fills most of the time, most of it from away.

After all, the local staff is too busy anchoring these fluffy newscasts to hit the streets for news.

Newsfolks always look for a “peg” for their stories. The peg is the event or idea on which we “hang” a story, what makes the story newsworthy. Or at least attention-worthy, to coin a word.

Can’t find a peg? Hang it on someone being the first to do something. And do it again and again.

As women’s editor in 1974 of The Montreal Gazette, I chafed at stories about the “first woman to …” do something formerly done only by men. In time, I pulled together some of those stories into a section front we called the “First Annual ‘First Woman To’ Awards.” All tongue in cheek. It included an item about the “first woman to” be a utility line(wo)man in Socorro County, New Mexico. How did editors in New York and Toronto figure that readers in Montreal needed this?

First thing next morning, the managing editor called me into his office and told me, “I’m sure you know by now that your ‘first woman to’ page didn’t work. Don’t do it again.” Maybe he thought my implied criticism of our business was excessive. Or his skin was too thin. Or both.

As I walked to his office, two news-side reporters told me how much they had enjoyed the page. Plaudits from newsroom working stiffs continued all day, but I never again pulled together a section-front without wondering “WWTBS.” What will the boss say?

Later, when we did a section front on the inflation ravaging Canada, we had an item on the cost of a gangland hit. A reporter who knew some hoods in her young days had learned that the price of a hit had gone up to $10,000. The managing editor never groused about that item or that page.

(By the way, best as anyone can tell, I was the first male editor of a “women’s section” in Canada. No one ever wrote a story about that.)

I had thought that by now we’d be past that sort of “first woman” reporting. But I guess not.

Scanning the past five weeks of The New York Times, I find these stories. Dec. 1, Stephanie Frappart, first female referee in the men’s World Cup. Dec. 6, first three women to sit on a Vatican committee to recommend bishops. Bet they don’t recommend any women. Also Dec. 6, New York’s mayor appoints first female first deputy mayor, up from a lower deputy mayorship.

Dec. 8, Janet Yellen, first female secretary of the Treasury to sign currency. Dec. 11, Karen Bass pulls off a bifecta, is first Black female mayor of Los Angeles. Dec. 15, Emma Tucker, first female to run The Wall Street Journal, and Claudine Gay, first Black female president of Harvard. Dec. 21, Is the excess getting wretched?

Also in The Times, Gail Collins wrote about 12 female governors, up from nine. She mentioned the new ones, never got around to toning the re-election of Janet Mills, who used to say she was proud to be Maine’s first. Only Mills meant the first from Franklin County.

The topper from The Times, a correction on Nov. 27. Ann Sarnoff was not, it turns out, the first woman to head a major film studio. She was only the first to head Warner Brothers.

To be fair, I found a story pegged to a woman’s credentials for the job and mentioning her “firstness” only in passing. Maybe the Gray Lady is catching up with the times (pun intended).

Reporters and lower-level editors often have to sell their ideas and stories to higher ups. We learn early on to pitch a story on what’s hot at the time. You might guess that these days a reporter is most likely to get her story into the paper or onto the air if she can work in the term LBGTQ. Or even just “trans.”

(I’m not complaining. As an old, male heterosexual — a gay friend of mine calls us “hets” — I don’t understand their situation, I just accept it.)

But, truth to tell, LGBTQ is today’s buzz-phrase and will get almost any story into the paper or onto the air. Have to wonder what’s our next big fad.

Bob Neal never enjoyed the morning after the New Year’s Eve. He recalls an Arlo and Janis cartoon in which Arlo was saying farewell to brain cells he would destroy on New Year’s Eve. Neal can be reached at [email protected].