Sometimes in the newspaper business, it’s not so much what you write about but where and when you publish it.
Timing and placement can mean everything. Two recent examples in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution come to mind:
The King of Porn on Father’s Day
A number of readers took the newspaper to task last week in Sunday’s Letters to the Editor column about the front-page profile on Gwinnett County’s “porno king” that ran June 16.
The timing of the story — Father’s Day — prompted many of you to ask, rightfully, what on earth were we thinking?
The story was a pretty typical profile, describing a man who likes the challenge of local pornography ordinances and is willing to spend legal fees defending his right to sell sexually explicit material and your right to look at it. (His name shall go unmentioned here. This editor believes he’s had enough publicity for a while.)
When someone stands up for the First Amendment, news organizations sometimes pay a disproportionate amount of attention to the defenders — even when their product is ugly and demeaning. Such is the fear of the loss of that precious freedom. In this case, that may have clouded our judgment.
Still, the story described the business he was engaged in and made no attempt to hide his disdain for those who believe there is merit in restricting what is and isn’t allowed when it comes to adult entertainment. Given his important role in that debate, it was a legitimate story to do.
But on Page One? On Father’s Day?
In a metro area of more than 4 million people, you can count in the single digits the number of them any year whose profile will make the front page of a Sunday paper.
Readers are correct to think that if the newspaper offers one that lofty perch, there is something about him or her that will leave you glad we brought him to your attention.
The porno king of Gwinnett County isn’t in that category. On Father’s Day we could have found, easily, someone else who was.
In fact, many readers did: The same edition of the paper carried a heartwarming account of a 75-year-old Bartow County man who is raising, on his own, his disabled son’s 9-year-old twins.
His name is Jim Sensenbrenner. The twins call him Pawpaw. His story probably should have been on the front page that day.
AIDS in older Americans vs. heart disease in everyone
The second lesson is in the placement and timing of two health stories.
Three days after the death of St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Darryl Kile from an undiagnosed heart condition, the newspaper ran a short story about the risks of sudden cardiac death faced by adults with a family history of heart disease.
Reader interest in stories about heart disease — the nation’s No. 1 killer — often peaks when someone famous dies from it at a relatively young age. Kile was 33 years old. He was an athlete and in seemingly good condition, without any known symptoms. But his father died of a heart attack when he was in his 40s, making Kile a high risk for inheriting coronary arteries that are more prone to blockages that might trigger a heart attack.
The story ran on the bottom corner of the front of the Sports section.
The same day, prominently displayed on the front of the Living section, was a story about the risk of HIV infection and other sexually transmitted diseases in single people over age 50. The story, a “Healthy Living” feature that runs on Tuesdays, came complete with an illustration of a man’s wallet containing an AARP card and a packaged condom.
Public health experts in the story made a good case that people who become sexually active with new partners in their 50s and 60s after years of monogamy have to be aware of the risks of life-threatening infections that they can contract through sex.
Given the relative size of that group — compared with those who face the inherited risk of heart disease and need to know some of the latest clinical techniques for detecting it — which story would you have chosen to be the most prominent on that day?
It wasn’t a matter of the porno king story or the sex-after-50 story being flawed. They were fine. But timing and placement can be just as important as what the stories say.
