What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
A third of it should be serious reporting about international news.
A third of it should be serious reporting about national news.
A third of it should be serious reporting about local news.
None of it should be devoted to sports or entertainment. Those should be in a separate section, at the back. The occasional "human interest" story is okay, but not on a daily basis.
After reading the first section of the newspaper, which should take about half an hour, you should be able to discuss, in broad terms, the most urgent domestic and international stories of the day.
The front page should assume you are intelligent enough to grasp this:
It should not assume this is all you can handle:
Reading a newspaper, daily--or somehow following the news at the level suggested by the first image--should be viewed as a basic obligation of citizenship. Reading the news should not be "fun" or "entertaining." It should be hard work.
If you don't do that work, you are lazy and frivolous and unworthy of the freedom you enjoy.
Do I sound judgmental?
Good.
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Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
Isn't the Amarillo Globe-News just responding to a changed market where readers can get their national and international news from a non-local paper? Their comparative advantage is in providing local news that CNN or the New York Times won't cover.
I'm a voracious consumer of news but I don't want my Alexandria Gazette covering international, national or even commonwealth news. Just the local stuff is what I ask for.
Even from the time I was a kid, reading every single page of both the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post (box scores are the reward you get at the end!), the news market has changed radically.
Aug '10
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
What if I get all my news from Ricochet--is that fun, or hard work?
Dec '10
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
I agree with you in spirit, Claire, but I think Molly has it right.
Newspapers specifically and the news/media in a general sense reacts to what people want to read. It seems that blame should be placed with the readers and not with the news industry.
Frankly, is the average American intelligent enough for actual news? Or at least interested enough?
I'd hazard a guess of "maybe" for the former and "nope" for the latter.
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
Michael Horn: I agree with you in spirit, Claire, but I think Molly has it right.
Newspapers specifically and the news/media in a general sense reacts to what people want to read. It seems that blame should be placed with the readers and not with the news industry.
I'm blaming them.
Aug '10
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
Sure, the reading markets have changed. No question. However, I think the broader point made here is that of overall levels of comprehension. From my end, I've had adults (in middle and upper management positions) read the Gettysburg Address aloud. They stumble and stammer though it. The words are tough for them, both in pronounciation and meaning. I think these two points--the comparison of newspaper front-pages from two eras and the difficulty of handling the G. Address--are sadly, perhaps ominously, linked.
May '10
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
Claire, your paternalism is showing.
As a free-born individual you also have the right to be ignorant.
Apr '11
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
I once had the pleasure of looking through a compilation of the US front pages of major newspapers starting in 1914 going through 1918 covering WWI. Every newspaper back then was wall to wall text, black and white with only a few pictures and graphics. Man those news papers were great.
The sad truth is I haven't touched one news paper in like probably 2 years. I surf the internet for my news articles, and I have google give me the top stories, domestic, local and foreign. This seems to work very well. I also follow links from sites like this and other blogs I follow. The fact is newspapers are a dying media they should accept it and scale back.
What is needed is for a site to filter through the chafe of news that exists to pull out the really interesting and well done articles printed in English across america and the globe.
Dec '10
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
EJHill: Claire, your paternalism is showing.
As a free-born individual you also have the right to be ignorant. ยท Jul 19 at 8:49am
I know you're right, but at the same token aren't we as free, independent citizens supposed to have some base level of awareness and understanding about current events and our country's state of affairs?
A free society requires that each citizen, to some extent, act as a steward. Our Republic can not endure when her citizens are ignorant, apathetic, unaware and lazy.
Today's citizen is too busy flipping between the Jerry Springer show and Jersey Shore to care about anything besides immediate self gratification. Skyrocketing debt? Another war? Who cares, The Situation is about to carry off another drunk college floozy to have his way with her on camera.
Our mores are too base and decadent for actual news.
If you're unable to muster yourself to read a half hour of news a day, you don't deserve your liberty.
Apr '11
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
As with playgrounds, so also newspapers. No unPC thoughts, no big words, no abstruse or educated references, no deviating from the progressive line, always use approved leftist talking points. Keep it safe and calm.
Mar '11
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
"As a freeborn individual you have the right to be ignorant"
Just so. And in so doing, you are sure to have your liberty seized from you at the earliest opportunity by tyrants and despots.
Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, and a nation that presumes to be ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be. (h/t to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson).
Jul '10
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
Sorry, my national and international come from:
Plus the commentary feeds:
And no, I do not look at it all daily. I may not even get to all of the headlines until the weekend. And no Google managed feeds are included because Google likes to try to map my home network and other stupid pet tricks. And I am in no way interested in what any of the editors of my town's three major dailies might consider proper story selection, any more than I am interested in what the network news producers might consider proper story selection. That inane, patronizing system is toast in the Internet Age, a vestigial artifact for the comfort of sheeple. And good riddance.
Edited on July 19, 2011 at 6:30pmAug '10
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
I can agree with this line:
I can't agree with this:
Shades of 1984 aside, it's questionable just how much education one can get from a newspaper, RSS feed, or your favorite new sites. It's sufficient to make you aware of some facts, though not necessarily to help you understand them.
But there's a structural problem of rational ignorance here. Self-education costs time and money, so if you want to justify it you have to show direct tangible benefits. An individual vote has no real political power and therefore no direct benefit.
If we're just talking about being informed so as to be a good citizen, then it is better for the average productive citizen to ignore the news for 364 days of the year, then study up on the day before elections. Still no direct individual benefit, but it meets the squishy requirement of producing an "informed" constituency.
May '10
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
Is it better to be uninformed or misinformed? You could spend hours with the mainstream media and be just as ignorant as the person who ignores it.
I like to think that my fellow Ricoteers and I are more informed than the average news consumer. But I am beginning to doubt myself.
Because of all of this deficit talk have I only recently become aware of Modern Monetary Theory and the realization that its adherents are probably the folks who are driving the bus. Yesterday I tried to start a conversation about it and it drew four responses. Meanwhile all the Keynes vs Hayek talk drone on.
Dec '10
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
Wow, look at what's happened to professional newspapering, no wonder the readers have moved on.
Jul '11
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
EJHill: Claire, your paternalism is showing.
As a free-born individual you also have the right to be ignorant. ยท Jul 19 at 8:49am
True, which is why universal suffrage was a bad idea. Another thing the founders were right about.
Aug '10
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
Individually, it's sometimes better to be uninformed. But the explanation requires more than 200 words, so I tossed a tangent conversation on the members feed if you're interested.
Edited on July 19, 2011 at 7:32pmApr '11
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
Borders is done.
The NYT is next.
The rest of the media we grew up with follow them.
What we do here is just the transitional housing ... the camps, the shelters of refuge on the path to the new media.
It will be both more amazing and more terrible than what you can imagine. It will reflect our desires and capabilities for good and for awesome.
As a servant to the information consumer, the new media will have no equal. Sadly, some consumers are more equal than others.
Jun '10
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
The masthead of my daily paper reads: "Seriously West Coast", from which you can conclude that I am "lazy and frivolous and unworthy of the freedom [I] enjoy", as I almost never read the sludge this paper puts out.
As an aside I was once telephoned by the editor of the letters page. She encouraged me to write letters to the editor as often as the spirit moved me. My response was that I didn't want to be branded a crank with a word processor. She replied that I was decidedly no crank, as they knew who the cranks were. Oddly enough, whenever I submitted a letter that was even slightly conservative in bent this "Seriously West Coast" newspaper never published the submission. So, because I am typically "lazy and frivolous and unworthy of the freedom [I] enjoy" I stopped submitting letters to the editor.
Aug '10
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
"I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it." - Thomas Jefferson
Jun '11
Re: What the Front Page of Your Local Newspaper Should Look Like
As an employee and (former) editor of a local community newspaper, I could comment ad infinitum on the topic, but I'll try to keep it concise.
First, I wholeheartedly agree with Claire that reading a newspaper should require work and I despise the trend of appealing to the lowest common denominator of readers. That said, Mollie is correct that our readers expect local, local, local.
State, national and international news is available in other sources, and our readers expect to get that news from those venues. At the same time, the declining industry has forced crippling cuts, which leaves our newsrooms barely staffed. I would argue these cuts foster the need for more cuts. But, knowing that NO ONE other than our reporters and those of our competition will cover the local board of education meetings month after month, the city council meetings, the chambers of commerce, etc., that's where our resources are dedicated.
OK - I've hit my word limit...
Edited on July 19, 2011 at 7:59pm