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Betsy Cahill
What’s Fit to Print? – How editorial decisions at two newspapers shaped the newsEvery day in the mid-to-late afternoon, copy desk employees of the world convene in a corner of their newsrooms to discuss their game plans. The goal: to fit as many stories as possible into what ever space each copy editor is allotted. The catch: limited space means some stories just won’t fit. What the copy desk selects to stay in the section is supposed to be the news – what readers want to read and what they should know about. If it was that simple, every newspaper in the nation should make similar choices, but they don’t. Each copy editor’s decisions on what will go in the paper and where it will be placed, shapes what readers will perceive as news. This paper examines the editorial decisions made in two newsrooms on the same day, with an emphasis on national and international news. Theoretically, each copy staff had the same list of wire stories and art before them as they gathered for the afternoon news meeting. But what resulted were two very different newspapers. The first newspaper examined was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The Post is located in St. Louis, but its circulation stretches beyond the metro area into north and eastern Missouri and south and western Illinois. The A-section of the Feb. 11, 2002 issue was used in this analysis. The Post’s A-section includes some local stories on the front page, but mostly national and international news throughout. On Feb. 11, the A-section was 10 pages and included 16 stories, 12 photos and 18 advertisements. The second newspaper in the analysis was the Chicago Tribune. The Tribune is located in Chicago, but circulation also reaches beyond the metro area. The first half of the Tribune’s Feb. 11, 2002 A-section was used in this analysis. Unlike the Post, the Tribune puts its national, international and local news as well as its opinions and editorials all in the A-section. For this analysis of the national and international news choices, only the first six pages of the A-section were used. In those six pages, the Tribune included 19 stories, 16 photos and 5 advertisements. Only five national or international stories appeared in both newspapers on Feb. 11. This is a small percentage, given the total number of stories each paper carried that day. As illustrated in Figure 1, the newspapers both agreed two of the stories should be placed on the front page: the Olympic gold for the United States and a recent Israeli-Palestinian incident. FIGURE 1 FIGURE 1 FIGURE 1 The Tribune ran 14 stories that were different from the Post’s. Seven of the stories were national news, while the rest had an international focus. A list of the stories and their placement in the newspaper is shown in Figure 2. FIGURE 2 FIGURE 2 FIGURE 2 The Tribune’s story selection shows its commitment to local angles. Four of the stories had a local angle, tying the Chicago area into national or international news. Newspapers often use this technique to show readers why they should care about international news. Many readers tune out events they perceive as having no proximity to them. The Tribune’s choices also show its emphasis on international news, with half of its A-section stories taking an international angle. The Post ran 11 stories that the Tribune chose to leave out that day. Two were of an international focus, one was a purely local angle and the balance was national stories. A list of the Post’s stories and their placement is shown in Figure 3.FIGURE 3 FIGURE 3 FIGURE 3 The Post’s choices show its zest for unusual stories. Three of the stories seemed newsworthy mostly in their novelty, rather than other factors for determining newsworthiness, such as timeliness or proximity. These stories included the front-page story about birds rummaging through the World Trade Center rubble, the page 3 story about drought in New Hampshire (which includes one of the more memorable pull quotes in recent history: “I’m telling the kids it’s time to take spit showers.”), and the connection between mice and human cloning, which ran on page 3. One reason why the Post may have chosen some out-of-the-ordinary stories for the A-section is the high number of ads. More ads translates to more pages and more stories. To fill the space, the copy desk may have needed filler, for which novelty stories are often used. The Post devotes little space to purely international news. In fact, only five of the A-section stories had international angles. This reinforces the general population’s mentality that international news is not as important as national or local news. For the space it had available, the Tribune ran more photographs than the Post. A photograph is like a giant “read me” sign on a story. Photos, especially color ones, draw readers into the story. Often readers will look at photos first, then cutlines and headlines before moving into the copy. A story without a photo only has the headline to lure in readers. The Tribune’s copy editors made conscious decisions to use as many photos as possible to attract readers to the stories. To its credit, the Post copy editors made an effort to place photos with the majority of the few international stories used in the paper. Though there were few international stories, the issues’ importance was shown by attaching photos to those stories. Another consideration in the decisions of which stories to put in the paper is who wrote the stories. The Tribune has a more stories from national and foreign correspondents than the Post. Eight of the 19 stories were from Tribune staff writers, with the rest from wire services. The Post used five stories by staff writers and the rest from wire services. Because the Tribune budgets the money for national and foreign bureaus, it makes sense that it would use its own copy rather than wire service copy. After all, the newspaper is spending all that money on foreign staff and should probably have something to show for it. Other factors, besides newsworthiness, went into the decision to put those stories into the Tribune. When each newspapers’ copy staff sit down to talk over what will be in tomorrow’s paper, they are also deciding what will be the news of the day. While some would like to believe it is a conspiracy, choosing stories that will support conservatives or liberals, it is actually a series of decisions based on availability of photographs, space in the paper and reports from foreign correspondents. Either way it is viewed, its clear that the news is different in Chicago than it is in St. Louis. |