Dart to the Palo Alto Daily News, for blindly toeing the local line. “Everybody,” as was noted on Slate’s August 11 roundup of “Today’s Papers,” “leads with the big, foiled terror plot in which twenty-four British men, mostly of Pakistani descent, were arrested and are suspected of plotting to bomb multiple airliners with liquid explosives.” Everybody, that is, but the Palo Alto Daily News, whose policy keeps its front page bound to strictly local news, hand and foot. There the lead story on August 11 was not the terrorist plot — which did eventually show up on the paper’s page eleven — but rather on some proposed new rules to strengthen the sanitary standards for pedicures.

Editors’ Note: In taking poetic license to describe the paper’s page-one policy as being bound "hand and foot" to local news, we neglected to note that rare exceptions can be made if and when, in the editor’s judgement, circumstances warrant.

Dart to the Vineyard Gazette, for stealing the fruit of a neighbor’s vine. On August 1, The Martha’s Vineyard Times, the rival weekly that also serves the Massachusetts island, prepared under the byline of its news editor, Nelson Sigelman, a richly flavored, full-bodied obituary of a modest local fisherman, a copy of which it sent to the funeral home, as is routine. The obituary itself, however, was far from routine: as the enterprising Sigelman discovered, the popular fisherman had earlier spent some thirty-eight years as a Secret Service agent whose feats included heroically protecting President Gerald Ford during an assassination attempt. On August 2, the Gazette, having been (routinely) sent a copy of the obituary by the funeral home, e-mailed the Times about its intention to use the “lovely obituary” with only minor changes but without a...

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