No one needs a detective to find the Super Bowl in today’s Sentinel.
The big game has yet to begin, and already the newspaper is chock full of so much information that a fan will have to speed-read to digest it all before tonight’s kickoff in Jacksonville. That sort of Super Coverage has been going on for days.
In fact, to put things into perspective, let’s go back to Thursday, when the Sentinel’s pages reflected three big but entirely anticipated events.
President George W. Bush took center stage, dominating two-thirds of the front page with his annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. Coverage of the speech — which, like most presidents’, was full of glowing accounts of the past year and grand visions of the one ahead — also consumed two full pages inside the A section.
That scheduled but important event, though, did not garner the largest amount of newspaper space that day. It came in behind another anticipated happening: National Signing Day, when high-school football players declare which college they plan to attend. That coverage filled 2 pages in the Sports section.
It wasn’t quite as prominent as the State of the Union address, but does that allocation of newsprint indicate that editors believe that readers want to know more about where high-school athletes will play football than where the president plans to take the nation next year?
Not exactly. The answer to that question involves the different scales on which “hard” and entertainment news are judged, but that’s another column for another day.
Both events were important to different people for different reasons, but the space they were allotted paled in comparison with that set aside for another annual event — and one that hadn’t even happened: the aforementioned Super Bowl. Going up against the president’s report to the nation and National Signing Day, the Super Bowl — still three days away — ate up more space than both those other events combined.
Some might see that as excessive, but it reminded me of an issue reader Earle Sanborn of Kissimmee had raised a few days before. He wondered how editors’ judgments compared with those of their readers.
“The most interesting thing for me would be to determine the difference, if any, between what daily readers want to see and what the newspaper professionals think is most important,” he wrote. “It could be they are the same, but I doubt it.”
I think he’s on to something. Let’s give it a try, picking one day — how about this coming Tuesday — and comparing readers’ judgments with those of the Sentinel’s editors.
If you would like to get in on this, let me know what you think just of the prominence and space accorded the news in this Tuesday’s newspaper. Let’s keep this to those issues and not to the way you think an event or issue was covered.
Please include your name, the city in which you live, your sex and a ballpark description of your age (25 or younger, 26-50, 51-75, 76 or older). Any other identifying information is at your option, but it might be interesting to see how men’s and women’s and older and younger readers’ judgments compare.
We’ll go over the results in this space in one week.
