What Front-Page Choices Say About The Times\'s Priorities

In the digital age, the matter of what stories are picked for front-page display in the print edition may seem archaic. Who cares, one might reasonably ask.

But editors still take those daily choices seriously and, because they do, the decisions can provide a useful window into editors’ priorities.

With that as background, I was struck on Wednesday morning by the contrast among the front pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times.

The New York Times’s seven choices (I’m counting six stories and one major photo element) bore no resemblance to the other thre.. In other words, not one of its seven elements appeared on the other papers’ front pages.

I talked with Dean Baquet, a managing editor who runs the afternoon news meeting and usually makes those choices. I observed that he seems to prefer Times journalists’ “enterprise” stories - what they dig up themselves rather than coverage of external news events.

He didn’t entirely agree.

“It’s not a move away from hard news, but more about something that is ‘only in The New York Times,’” he said. “It has more to do with what we think will interest a sophisticated reader. You can’t get away with giving that reader something they’re already aware of, unless you bring analysis or a different approach.”

Something, in short, that makes it exclusive.

Here are the seven elements, moving from the most prominent to least prominent positions on the page (according to an age-old practice understood by no one but newspaper people a! nd hard-core news junkies):

1. Successful lobbying by big health care companies has resulted in legislation that benefits them but causes problems for doctors and hospitals.

2. The Supreme Court decides to hear a challenge to federal campaign contribution limits.

3. Photographs related to the killing of the track star Oscar Pistorius’s girlfriend.

4. A college degree is becoming necessary for entry-level jobs.

5. There’sa new medical test that may help eliminate leprosy.

6. A Connecticut priest’s fall from grace as a drug suspect.

7. How Charleston, S.C., is dealing with the impact of cruise ships.

“It was a light news day,” said Mr. Baquet, which allowed a “great yarn,” like the priest story, to make its way on the front page.

Notable by its absence in The Times was a story that was on both The Washington Post’s and The Wall Street Journal’s front pages: The continued skirmishing in Washington ! over loom! ing budget cuts. The Times played that in two related stories on Page A16, and Mr. Baquet said he didn’t think the day’s developments were important enough to make the cut for Page A1.

The Los Angeles Times had only local stories on its front, which surprised me. And The Washington Post’s front page, too, was dominated by local stories (four of six), although it did include the budget maneuvering and Gen. John R. Allen’s decision to retire from the military and not seek NATO’s top job. The Wall Street Journal gave major display to a diamond heist in Brussels.

The Times put the diamond theft on Page A4. Mr. Baquet said, “I didn’t think it rose to the level.”

The Times’s approach - favoring that which is exclusive - has a whiff of something I’ve noted before: The self-satisfed idea that “it’s news when we say it’s news.” But more positively, it offers readers a deeply interesting and original front page, not always driven by the events of the previous day.