Otterblog

So I took a call this morning from a person—and I don’t think they were a Carolina fan—questioning our decision to put the hiring of Sidney Lowe at NC State on our front page. Their general beef was that there’s a war in Iraq, gas prices through the roof, world coming apart, etc. etc. etc., and putting a story on basketball on A1 shows a further deterioration in the cultural compass that once was America.

It’s a good conversation point.

There’s a lot of thankless tasks in journalism. The front-page budget meeting isn’t one of them. It’s a dozen or so bright people talking about the next day’s paper. It’s not a democracy, but sound reasoning beats a fiat every time.

So why Sidney Lowe. It’s a no-brainer for us. One, he has what we call a great story line: He’s part of the once-glorious hoops past of the school. So he’s coming home. Two, he has ties to our city through his wife. Three, basketball is important. It’s what people care about. And it’s not just winning or losing. Sports is a huge business and part of the vast Education-Industrial Complex.

There’s a part of me that wishes people cared about basketball less and about Darfur more, but that’s not the world I live in.

Stories are like vegetables. You can’t make people read anything just by putting it out there and saying it’s good for them. That doesn’t mean most-common denominator journalism or giving up on stories that are important. But it does mean the balance between what people want to know about and what they ought to know about.