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December 16, 2005
Question No. 1
Questions I imagine readers asking, No. 1
How is it possible that the Iraq election story didn’t make your front page today?
It was a busy news day locally, but when we came out of our news meeting at 4:45 yesterday afternoon, the Iraq election was one of five stories scheduled for the front. The others were the Concord teachers deciding to cut back on what they do for students to protest the lack of a contract, the first personal look at the victim of a fatal fire in Concord, new information about a local man charged with a 20-year-old murder and a feature (a reader, we call it) about a reality television show that visited a New Hampshire household.
Then, shortly after we walked back into the newsroom, we heard that there was a verdict in the Tobin election phone-jamming trial, which we had followed closely for two weeks. This was clearly our lead story.
Our options: Add a sixth story to page one or move a story off. Adding a sixth story would have hurt the impact of the page on a big news day, so we decided to replace a story. Why not replace the reader? A good choice, but it was funny. We decided something funny was a plus on such a newsy day.
So why did the Iraq story move? It didn’t exactly, as I’ll explain, but my reasoning was that it was the one story we had scheduled for page one that most readers would already know about. The time difference between the eastern United States and Iraq means that news about the election had been buzzing on television, radio and the net throughout the day. By the time readers saw it in the next morning’s Monitor, the story would have been around for 24 hours.
Also, there had been two big developments: the election in Iraq and President Bush’s signing of anti-torture legislation put forward by his old rival, Sen. John McCain. We decided that our new design would allow us to give these stories real prominence without putting the stories themselves on page one. We put two bold headlines at the very top of the page – in what we call the skyboxes – giving the news of the election and Bush’s signing of the torture bill. These headlines directed readers to page A2, an open page where the stories got far stronger play than they would have on page one.
Posted by Mike Pride at December 16, 2005 10:26 AM
Comments
You are right. The hope of newspapers like yours is local news, not national stuff. Salt it with AP wire feeds if you must, but its the local stories that will make or break you. Also, stories about fat people, misguided teen girls, and poor unfortunatges undergoing chemo is great to win you a couple of stupid awards at press conventions, but it is boring crap. Keep it up and watch your readership sink.
Posted by: dd at December 19, 2005 09:44 PM