Otterblog

Sometimes, I am struck by the difference between what is considered important local news and important national and international news. Like a lot of newspapers, we think our franchise is in reporting on local events, stories you can’t get anywhere else. But we also recognize that the world is a complicated place, and that readers ought to be able to get a reasonably complete snapshot of their world, soup to nuts, with their morning Ovaltine, green tea, coffee, coke, water, milk or OJ.

The result is a front page that is on occasion one of strange bedfellows. Take Sunday’s paper. We essentially have two lead stories. One is on North Korea and its nuclear ambitions, which are a serious threat to peace in the Far East. The other: “Utility-panel oversight to be considered.”

This is a good story, and it’s an important story. The City-County Utility Commission is an 800-lb gorilla in our community. They run the water. They run the sewer. They run the landfill. Think about that the next time you turn on the tap, flush your toilet or put your trash out. And there are some serious concerns about whether their autonomy is a good thing or a bad thing. But that oversight aside, the water will still come on tomorrow.  It pales in comparison to the threats posed by the Korean peninsula.

So what to do? If you measure serious news by the extent to which you or a lot of people could end up dead, we would have a very different front page than we have now. And that’s not what we’re aiming for, so when we choose stories for the front page, we look at importance and also relevance, which is why those two stories exist cheek by jowl.

GOURD UPDATE/OTTERBLOG CONTEST: Now that the fair has come and gone, it’s time to wait on the seed catalogs and stop musing about agriculture for a while. But here’s one last look at the harvest that was. This photograph moved across the wires this weekend. It’s of a pumpkin-canoe race in Wisconsin. Write me a headline. Best entry gets a Journal coffee mug.