THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 9, 1995 TAG: 9507090184
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
SOURCE: COLE CAMPBELL, EDITOR
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
On Monday, which would have been Arthur Ashe's 52nd birthday, some Richmonders were planning to break ground for a statue commemorating the late tennis star and human-rights advocate.
But tomorrow's ceremony was canceled because of continuing controversy over the statue's location on Monument Avenue, near the legion of Confederate generals memorialized in Ashe's hometown.
As staff writer Margaret Edds reports on today's front page, Richmond is wrestling with issues of aesthetics, politics and identity. Councilman Timothy M. Kaine says the controversy ``gets at the heart of a lot of things by which this community defines itself - race, history, notions of progress, our relations to one another.''
Also on today's front page, staff writer Debra Gordon writes about a personal subject that often dominates self-help magazines:
``Let's face it. We Americans are fat. One-third of us are more than 20 pounds overweight. . . .
``We try to listen to the doctors and scientists, but their messages are confusing. Diet. Don't diet. Exercise an hour at a time. No, spread that hour over the course of the day. Fat is bad. But olive oil is good. Cholesterol is bad. Unless it's the good kind of cholesterol. Drinking is bad. Except for moderate drinking.''
Race. History. Progress. Our relations to one another.
Fat. Diet. Exercise. Our search to improve our lives.
What do these stories share that places both on the front page?
And did the paper devote or waste space Monday when it ran Motoya Nakamura's 12-column photograph of holiday crowds at the Oceanfront?
Was Timothy McVeigh held up to condemnation or adulation when a profile of the accused Oklahoma City bomber ran atop Wednesday's front page?
And when Thursday's Daily Break profiled ``Alice & Carol,'' a couple who have been shunned and embraced after declaring their homosexuality, was The Pilot:
A) Trying to sell more papers.
B) Trying to provoke some readers to cancel their subscriptions.
C) Condoning homosexuality.
D) Condemning homosexuality.
E) None of the above?
These questions touch upon the art and science of news judgment, the blend of empirical knowledge and intuitive insight with which journalists decide what stories to cover and how to present them.
News judgment involves hundreds of options and dozens of often-conflicting variables: importance, interest, timeliness, timelessness, uniqueness, universality, prominence, proximity, whatever else is in the news or in the hopper.
In the newsroom, we often disagree among ourselves about the relative merits of stories. So it's little wonder that the 500,000-plus of you who read the paper every Sunday have widely varying reactions. Public Editor Lynn Feigenbaum reports some of them in today's Commentary section.
In the end, we're guided not by what will make us popular, but by what will make us valuable.
Much of it comes down to covering our relations to one another and our search to improve our lives.
In today's Commentary, two notable American journalists reflect on what constitutes news.
Max Frankel, the former executive editor of The New York Times, says:
``However amorphous the idea of news, serious journalists are not hard to define. Deep down, they think of packaging news not as a business but as a public service.
``They want to provide the information and analysis that a citizen would - or should - want to have to make political choices, to prevent abuses of power and to enhance quality of life.
``But it's public service with a show-biz flavor. To make the news tastier, the best editors also look for gripping narrative, tales of human heroism and depravity that illuminate life, and then they'll sprinkle in some entertaining spice.''
Geneva Overholser, ombudsman for The Washington Post, writes that stories about human foibles are not simply interesting: ``They're meaningful. They teach us about who we mortals are, about what we forgive and what we don't. They help us be more honest with ourselves and with one another. They may even help us make better public policy.''
That's why I'm proud of staff writer Elizabeth Simpson and staff photographer Beth Bergman.
In Thursday's Daily Break, their considerable gifts as journalists captured much about who Alice Taylor and Carol Bayma are, about what we forgive and what we don't.
We published their story in the hope it would help us all be more honest with ourselves and with one another. by CNB