The lead story in the New York Times this morning is the Tel Aviv suicide bomb blast that killed five Israelis, wounded dozens more and may have done great harm to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
That story made page 12 of the Albuquerque Journal, three paragraphs worth.
The Times put the latest news on the Pope’s condition second.
That story, too, made page 12 of the Albuquerque Journal. Four paragraphs.
The Journal also put the latest from Iraq (including the deaths of three more US soldiers) on page 12.
Ditto the latest from Afghanistan, where the Taliban – you remember them – killed nine Afghan soldiers and lost 10 of their own.
Page 12 was the last page of the first section.
On the front page, the Journal led with Governor Richardson’s decision to target "gaming addiction." Also on page one: a traffic accident involving a school bus, DOE’s report saying Sandia Labs understated "Nuke risks" and, at the bottom of the page, accounts of an Española cop who shot himself and a Belen teacher accused of offering to hide a student’s drug paraphernalia.
Outrageous?
Well, no.
Clearly, the page 12 stories are more important than those the Journal put on page one. But consider:
Newspapers – most of them - are losing circulation. Younger readers prefer TV and radio and the Internet for their information.
But those mediums do not supply local news. (We'll treat "local TV news" in a moment.)
So when local and regional newspapers cover news in their geographic base areas, they play to their strength. And serve the public’s interest in what is going on around them.
That is one reason we newspaper readers who complain when our local papers scant national and international coverage ought to think again. There is another. We who cherish national-international coverage above the local are better educated and more affluent than most in the community. Ours is an elitist preference.
So, no, I do not think the Journal editor’s decisions this morning were outrageous. Sure, I would have made room for one of those page 12 stories on the front page by moving the idiotic Española cop inside. But news judgement is endlessly debatable.
Something to think about.
PS Local TV news, so-called, pretends to be news, but it’s an illustrated police blotter, a fact-based entertainment product retailing fear. In fact, it relates to real news much the way "reality" programming resembles reality.