Just gotta ask if the Boston Globe is composing its front page according to the actual news, or to Globe bylines?
Case in point: Page One of yesterday’s Boston Sunday Globe. No quibble here with the two David Ortiz stories – one about his Who, Me? press conference, the other about the vagaries of doping in sports.
But then there was the piece on decaying municipal offices, and the story about the new Beatles video game, and the promo for the “never-before-told-story” about the Boston Harbor cleanup that occupied one quarter of the front page.
So what’s the problem?
The problem is, the Hudson River airplane-helicopter crash, which took the lives of nine people, was relegated to page 9.
I know Boston hates New York (and, coincidentally or not, the Boston Globe hates the New York Times), but really . . . does that story placement reflect solid news judgement?
Or is it a reflection of the Globe’s wanting just Globe stories on Page One, given that the rest of Sunday’s A section featured all of three Globe bylines. Everything else was wire stuff from (mostly) the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, the last of which supplied the Hudson River crash report.
Meanwhile, the hometown Times didn’t exactly cover itself in glory by playing the crash barely above the Page One fold instead of in the top righthand column, where the day’s most important news traditionally goes.
(For the record, that space was occupied by “Climate Change Seen As Threat to U.S. Security” – in which hypothetical people die, as opposed to real ones.)
Maybe it’s just a numbers game. Here’s the Times death-toll enumeration:
It was the worst air accident in the New York City area since Nov. 12, 2001, when 265 people were killed in the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in Belle Harbor, Queens, as it took off from Kennedy International Airport for the Dominican Republic.
It was also the worst air accident in the New York City area on August 8, 2009. And it deserved better treatment, both in the Times and the Globe.
Campaign Outsider 
An additional death, but really a much less interesting story than the car crash on the Taconic.
Why the obsession over small airplane crashes? More than 110 people die every day in car crashes. Three people a day are murdered in Massachusetts (including one a week in Boston proper alone), but instead you want the media to focus on trivial stuff like small airplane crashes in NY and Michael Jackson.
My guess is the Globe editors thought people had their fill of the small plane crash from the TV news — which offered wall to wall coverage the day before — and wanted to focus on either a) more important news or b) stories that weren’t already covered to death on TV.
Whoa, there gopher – I never called for more Michael Jackson coverage, so don’t tar me with that brush. As for car crashes and murders, their very prevalence reduces the likelihood of coverage. That’s the news business, for better (sometimes) or worse (much more often).