Jackson's death - Absolutely 1A story?

Indeed. The reason I didn't use that argument, even though my old shop was a weekly that would have appeared nearly a week after Jackson actually died, was because Jackson's death has remained in the collective consciousness of millions of people.

Like him or not, he was a transcendent figure. You have to accommodate the reality of the news. If it were any "normal" public figure (no joke about Michael Jackson's eccentricities intended), I'd agree with jfs1000. But Michael has been such a dominant figure in popular culture that not playing it big would be a disservice to our readers.

Someone (I think it was shotglass) once said something to the effect of "good journalism is giving people what they want to read." This isn't putting that cheap floozy Paris Hilton on the front because her toy chihuahua got run over. This is Michael Fucking Jackson dying of a heart attack at age 50 just weeks before he planned to kick off a comeback tour. You'd better believe it's news, even 26 hours after Jackson's death.

 

Preach on, f_t. Preach on.

 

Hey, I said it belonged on 1A...but for hyperlocal papers, where it's a close call anyway, being on the PM cycle makes it moot -- at least, I can understand the thinking

 

Not having read all 12 pages of this thread, I thought I'd chime in. I think it definitely needed a 1A presence, and a fairly prominent one at that -- big art, a big headline and at least a couple teaser grafs to send you inside.
The combination of his status as a pop culture icon, his youth and the suddeness of his death merit at least that much.

 

64 percent of a Pew survey say there was too much coverage of Jackson's death ...

http://people-press.org/report/526/coverage-of-jackson-death-seen-excessive

 

Too much TV coverage? Yes.

Too much newspaper coverage? Maybe not.

 

Inky, I think that's a nonsequitur for the original question, whatever side of the argument you come down on.

Front page presence the day after he died is one thing. Doing what people judge as way too much beyond that is another.

Although, certainly, people who thought there was way too much coverage certainly included those who didn't think the death of a "pop star" was worth front page of a newspaper.

 

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it had anything to do with the original conversation.

I just piggy-backed on this thread since it was already on the JTO board. I didn't think there was any need to start a second thread here about Jackson.

 

No, that would have been too much coverage.

 

On the PM paper thing. We aren't necessarily small podunk, but we got a big metro right there who has the same AP story. We got to differentiate between us an our competition.

We operate knowing we aren't the only outlet for news.

We put a refer, photo cutout and all, out there, and ran second day reaction piece which was actually quite formative.

 

Just like all Pew Surveys, I have more issues with their definition of "the public" than I do their definition of "too much coverage." Pew has a bad habit of never defining the sample. "African Americans?" "The public?" Jesus Christ. What is the purpose of indeterminate, unspecified vagueness? That is, other than to give Howard Kurtz, Richard Perez-Pena and James Rainey cite material.