Plane crash (in Canberra) kills four, the banner headline read in 27mm-high type on Monday. Underneath was a piocture that ran across the page. In the bottom right in type 4mm high rant he headline, “”Indian quake toll rises to 15,000”.
It invites the comment that The Canberra Times thinks that one dead Canberrans is equal to about 4000 dead Indians. But, for a change, we were not innundated with that comment.
I hope it is not because readers have given up caring to make comments about the paper. I suspect not because readers were quick to point out the misspelling of practice (noun), the “”your” instead of “”you’re” in the cartoon and so on.
Rather, I hope that the conclusion was not drawn because it was not warranted. For a start the tragic Indian earthquake had been the main article on Page 1 on Saturday, the biggest circulation day, when the death toll was still in the hundreds. So the samller items on Sunday and Monday were follow-ups, up-dating the toll. However horrible an event, as time goes on, its impact lessens. It is not as newsworthy so gets less prominence.
So, the reason something is placed withmore prominence than something else depends on this elusive quality called “”news value”. News value is indeed a value judgment. It is subjective. It is what the editor or news editor thinks will interest, inform or entertain readers. Thus geography is important. Nearly all Canberrans have taken off from Canberra Airport. Perhaps one in 30 have been to India. Reader experience is important. Many have been in a light aircraft. Few have been in a significant earthquake, let alone a destructive one. Also, The Canberra Times is the only newspaper where you would get the detail of a Canberra event, so there is a duty to give events in the town prominence. Reader emotion is important. Many dead anywhere attracts interest, sympathy and in the case of large disasters, response to appeals for money.
An American magazine once satirised The New York Times’s news values by accusing it of applying a Sensitivity Index which reflected the prejudices of its editorial executive.
It thought that for The New York Times, 3000 Pakistanis killed in a flood equals 250 South Africans killed in a mine disaster equals 20 Britons killed in a train accident equals nine Kentucky children killed in a house fire equals one Upper East Sider killed in a hit-and-run accident. The magazine published a formula which it said would reveal how much space The New York Times would give to given disaster. An article in column inches was equal to: One-third the square root of the (number of people killed plus one-third the number of injured), plus one-fiftieth of an inverse square of the proximity of the incident from The Times building in New York or Jerusalem (the Times is big on Israeli news); plus the sensitivity factor times 1.5.
Sensitivity Factor examples were: 0 = Urban one-car mishaps. 1 = Thai or Sri Lankan peasant’s death. 2 = minor natural phenomena. 4 = Ethiopian war casualties, and most Bronx stories. 5 = most drug-related fatalities (though crack rated higher). 7 = victims of house fires or lightning in Brooklyn. 8 = victims of undergraduate high-jinks. 9 = death tolls in the hundreds. 10 = Israelis, Palestinians, Nicaraguans and members of the FBI. 10-20 = cop killers, terrorism victims, and gruesome or melodramatic deaths involving babies. Thus when a three-month-old son of a Chinese immigrant who worked 70-hour weeks to pay his son’s medical bills was beaten to death by his baby sitters, the sensitivity factor was rated as 12. It was down the road from the Times, worth nine proximity points. The formula said the space should be 19.95; it got 20 inches. When 51 people, including 35 schoolgirls, were killed when a bus collided with a train in Sri Lanka, proximity was rated as nil as was sensitivity (no extra points allocated for schoolgirls) and the formula suggested 4.4; in fact it got 4.5 inches.
Put like this is seems highly cynical. Alas, though not precisely calculated, these factors run through news editor’s minds all the time. As it happens, news editor’s would prefer not to make these fine judgments because it means too much news has happened on the one day and therefore not enough on other days. Better the Pope die two days after the Federal Budget than on Budget day. Better the President be shot a week after an implosion or Thredbo landslide.
It is more difficult for tabloids. They can only fit one article and a picture on Page 1. Broadsheets can have two or more major items on Page 1, each with similar weight. That way you can attempt to attract a greater range of readers. We run five or six. So we typically have something local, something national and then three of four others from international, sport and business, or perhaps a second local or national item.
The aim is to have something for everyone on Page 1. Well, nearly everyone. We were chided by a reader who asked, “”what advantage do you think you are gaining by having six unfinished stories on the front page. . . . Could you advise me how you suggest readers tackle this. Do we read six half-finished stories and then go looking for the remiander or do we read one story at a time but tracking backwards and forwards?”
It is good to have such a diligent reader, who reads all of all stories. Most, however, read all of some of the stories or some of all of the stories. If we never ran spills we would have to run fewer stories on Page 1, reducing one of our services to readers: highlighting what is important, so the hurried reader can get the best or the best, quickly. Hoping tha the diligent reader who has more time will not find it too inconvenient to go to the spill. That inconvenience is reduced, at least, by our practice of spilling only to Page 2, unless there are solid reasons for not doing so – like spilling to a special page devoted to that event.