Small-town paper lambasted for NOT publishing news of Obama victory

Correction: The title should have read that the paper was crit­i­cized for NOT pub­lish­ing news of Obama’s win.

CNN reports about the 5,000-circulation Daily Herald in Salpulpa, Okla., which did not carry news of Barack Obama’s win in its Wednesday edition.

Some towns­peo­ple, many of them African American, pick­eted out­side the newspaper’s offices and told CNN cam­eras that they thought it was “poor jour­nal­ism” and a major over­sight. Some inter­viewed even accused the news­pa­per and its pub­lisher of racism for not car­ry­ing the news.

In response, the pub­lisher said that read­ers most likely found the news they wanted about the elec­tion else­where, on the Internet or on tele­vi­sion. The pub­lisher also told CNN that read­ers do not gen­er­ally turn to the Daily Herald for the “big news” — the paper, sen­si­bly, focuses on local news and issues.

For me, this brings up the ques­tion of whether a news­pa­per, any news­pa­per, has a respon­si­bil­ity to report the big, pop­u­lar, momen­tous news, even when it doesn’t fall within that paper’s “juris­dic­tion.” (I’ll admit, at the start, that I never heard of the Daily Herald before watch­ing the story on CNN. I’m not going to haul off to its Web site to quickly peruse its con­tent, either. We’ll con­sider this a thought exper­i­ment only.)

A small-town news paper should report small-town news, obvi­ously. The paper should report on the issues that mat­ter to its town and the news that hap­pens in its town. That man­date can prob­a­bly be applied to all news­pa­per, no mat­ter how big they are. News that hap­pens in that town is pretty self-explanatory, but “issues that mat­ter to the town,” that’s a whole other issue.

With that issue, we run head­long into the chasm between edi­to­r­ial phi­los­o­phy (what the news­pa­per thinks are the issues) and reader pref­er­ence (what the read­ers want to see in the paper). On the edi­to­r­ial side, the phi­los­o­phy could be based on telling the cit­i­zens of a democ­racy what they should know in order to be good cit­i­zens; or it could be based on try­ing to sell news­pa­pers, in which case the edi­to­r­ial phi­los­o­phy prob­a­bly pays a lot of atten­tion to the read­ers’ preferences.

On the read­ers pref­er­ence side, we have peo­ple who have some idea what the issues are and want to see those par­tic­u­lar issues cov­ered in the paper. Pretty sim­ple. Perhaps what the read­ers want to see isn’t par­tic­u­larly newsy (from a jour­nal­is­tic per­spec­tive) but it is “news” to the read­ers. It mat­ters to them. Some peo­ple might be more inclined to buy a par­tic­u­lar paper if it con­tains the types of news they want to see.

So in the case of this Oklahoma town, we have a news­pa­per that we being pre­scrip­tivist by omit­ting the Obama vic­tory story. The pub­lisher and edi­tors decided that the newspaper’s “juris­dic­tion” did not cover the national elec­tion results, and it didn’t cover the story.

I can sym­pa­thize, but I don’t think the publisher’s ratio­nale is good enough. The rea­son they didn’t pub­lish the story is because he thought his read­ers already had the news from other sources and because he thought the other sources could cover it bet­ter than his news­pa­per pos­si­bly could. At some level, the pub­lisher is admit­ting that he didn’t it was “news;” most peo­ple had already heard it, and his paper could not have added to the con­ver­sa­tion. That seems lazy, but it’s edi­to­ri­ally accept­able. I suppose.

But then there’s a nag­ging voice in the back of my head say­ing that the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion is major news that should be cov­ered every­where, even if every other news source in the coun­try has already cov­ered it.

Plus, there’s the race issue. As much as we may want to say that race wasn’t a fac­tor in the pres­i­den­tial race, race was and is a big fac­tor here. I’m not say­ing that the Daily Herald was being racist. Far from it. I’m say­ing that they ignored the race fac­tor, which made this elec­tion one of the most impor­tant in his­tory. Maybe it’s not the Daily Herald’s job to be report­ing on race and pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, but those things are still news, espe­cially when they col­lide like they did on Nov. 4.

One other ques­tion, though, before I go. Why do these peo­ple want the news cov­ered so badly in this small-town paper? Election Day has passed. Why berate this news­pa­per for a mis­take it made last week? Why not move on and let things be?

On some level, I sus­pect it might be because the read­ers in this town wanted a big, splashy head­line to save in the bot­tom of their sock draw­ers or in their photo albums, so that, years from now, they can look back and say, “Look at how big the news was! So big that even our lit­tle paper ran a 36-point headline.”

I don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong here. I’m not going to judge either. It’s just... a conundrum.