Jackson's death - Absolutely 1A story?

Then you tell your ME that the paper needs to localize it.
Go to a nightclub or elementary school dancebar and talk to patrons. Everyone will know he died by the morning and if that's what goes on Entertainment, then great.
But there needs to be some kind of story on the freakin front.

 

Respectfully disagree.

 

Honestly, I'm not a Michael Jackson fan. Not the most important news to me personally. But it's obviously important to a hell of a lot of people.

I'd be interested to see what else goes 1A and pushes this inside.

 

I got to agree, bad analogy.

I still think Michael Jackson belongs on everybody's 1A.

 

Ding, Ding, f-n ding.

 

I'm not saying this is on par with 9/11. I'm saying that the coverage is. This thing broke like wildfire.

 

Short of a 9/11-level event or the president being shot (and a few others, to tone down my hyperbole just a bit), if you're not putting this on the front, then you'd better not ever be putting any wire on the front.

I get that some places want to go hyperlocal or whatever stupid buzzword you want to use. If that's the direction your paper's going, then fine. (Well, not fine. Stupid. But you get my point.)

But if you're not putting this out front, then you don't get to use a wire story to fill out a random Monday front either.

And this is one of those where the event is one thing, but the STORY is entirely another, if that makes sense.

 

The only time we use wire on the front is if we simply do not have enough local stories to fill it, simple as that. It's a very reasonable mandate. The *only* reason people by *our* paper is for local news.

At bigger, better papers (which is almost all dailies), then I agree 100% it's an easy A1 story.

 

But why couldn't you go out and talk to locals about this? I'd like to see how people in my community are affected by this.

 

Why would we want to? Unless we had some local superfan with tens of thousands of dollars of merchandise in his basement, who in a small, rural town has anything interesting to say about this?

After we filter through a dozen "God smote him for making the rock musics," we'll be left with some random guy saying some random thing, and nobody who isn't related to that guy will care what he thinks.

 

Don't take this the wrong way, but I'd never subscribe to your paper if this is the way you treat national stories.

 

I wouldn't. I'm less a fan of "localizing" big stories than I am of ignoring national/international news in favor of an all-local, all-the-time philosophy.

And Rick, I'm gonna guess that you don't make these decisions at your place (and if you do, then, well, sorry), but I would imagine that you put something about 9/11 on the front, and that you probably put something about the presidential election on the front. If that's the case, then you don't only use wire when there's not enough local. So at that point, it becomes a matter of how important the non-local story is.

And is that really the reason people buy your paper? Or is that what your management tells you is the reason people buy your paper?