How do you know it might be time to revisit your Official Standards For Front-Page Story Placement? When readers complain that too much “bad news” appears there? What about when you read a dig at your news judgment (specifically, a recent A1 placement) in the pages of your own paper (specifically, the Styles section)?
See if you can find the dig — hint: see the last paragraph of this article about how “today’s White House press corps (competing for up-to the-second news) has elevated the most banal doings to a coveted ‘get'” such that one reporter says she feels “physically pelted by minutiae” and therefore, presumably, has no choice but to pelt back. (Unrelated to the dig at hand — but not, perhaps, to news judgment — this reporter, The Washington Examiner‘s Julie Mason, says that when she “talks to normal people, they want to know what these people” — people like President Obama’s speechwriter or the chief of the White House Office of Management and Budget, both subjects of recent “news” “pelts” — “are really like away from the camera.” Wonder where Mason finds these “normal people…”)
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.