The most outrageous story of last week – or any week in recent memory, actually – emerged from Chicago on Tuesday in the arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the release of some of the governor’s recorded comments.
The recordings, gathered by the FBI through wiretaps and listening devices, reveal Blagojevich as a man of grotesque avarice and extraordinary command of the f-word in all its forms. Among other things, he stands accused of trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat, of threatening to torpedo efforts by the Tribune Co. to sell Wrigley Field unless the Chicago Tribune fired an editorial writer who had called for his impeachment, and of discussing a delay in funding a children’s hospital until its chief executive made campaign contributions.
The Plain Dealer played the story on Page A5 Wednesday, telegraphing its presence with a small photo and a paragraph at the top of the daily News Minute on Page One.
Some readers wanted to know why it wasn’t on the front page – a reasonable question, if not always reasonably expressed.
I should say up front that I think the Blagojevich story should have been a major part of Wednesday’s front page. But the reason it wasn’t is more complicated than simply saying, “we blew it” – because it goes to the core of what has become The Plain Dealer’s approach to deciding what appears on Page One.
Not many years ago, front-page decisions here were made the same way they were handled at most big newspapers: Working from a list of the important news of the day, from near and far, editors would select the four or five or six most significant/interesting stories. Enterprise stories from the staff, and perhaps a humorous piece, or “brite,” would be mixed into the equation, and out of that would come the next day’s Page One.
Often, several news reports of national or international significance that were on The Plain Dealer’s front page would be the same as the ones on the front pages of the New York Times. And the Los Angeles Times. Editors even consulted wire advisories to see what the Timeses, the Washington Post and others were putting on their front pages, and would become concerned if their choices were dramatically different.
Readers came to expect this homogenized judgment of what constituted a Front Page Story – and to depend on it.
But then came cable television, with its 24-hour news channels, and the electronic behemoth that is the Internet. Suddenly, readers could get all the news they wanted about Afghanistan or China or Los Angeles from those sources, and they could get it right away. And it began to make less and less sense for a newspaper to use a big part of its Page One for a story and photos about, say, a raging forest fire in California – news that many readers had been watching on television and following on the Internet all the previous day.
So necessarily, The Plain Dealer’s approach to Page One began to evolve – from a compilation of news that readers could find many places, into a presentation of news, information and watchdog journalism that readers can find only in The Plain Dealer.
In a word: local.
It is a rare day that this newspaper’s front page does not have a high concentration – if not 100 percent – of stories that are rooted in Northeast Ohio. Go through any week’s worth of Plain Dealers, and day after day you will find enterprise pieces that are written and presented with Northeast Ohioans in mind – stories that you can’t find anywhere else. Now, editors would be concerned if our front page were anything like the largest papers in the country, and it is unusual for even one story on our front page to be the same as theirs.
So where does that leave Wednesday’s coverage of Gov. Blagojevich? His problems had nothing to do with Northeast Ohio.
But a core element in each day’s newspaper is the critical judgment of editors, who can’t blindly follow unbreakable rules for what goes out front and what does not. No matter what the commitment to local news, editors here would not relegate critical stories on the economy, or the national election, or major developments in the Iraq war, to inside pages.
The Blagojevich story didn’t match those in national significance, but the “Great Caesar’s Ghost!” factor was off the charts.
On Wednesday, I took a look at a Web site that displays the front pages of the 50 largest papers in the country. All but 13 had Blagojevich as a centerpiece or at the top of the page. Most of the others gave it more Page One attention than we did.
Usually that’s not a problem. Every newspaper has its own mission and standards, and the days of carbon-copy journalism are mercifully over. But that kind of percentage tends to get your attention.
We did a nice job of coming back with the story on Thursday, with an overall look at political scandals around the country, including some right here in Cuyahoga County. But I think Blagojevich belonged out there on Wednesday, also.
