House passes historic bill: See page D52

Whether one likes or dislikes the outcome of the U.S. House vote last night approving the Senate’s health care reform package one might think some agreement could be found in that it was a historic moment.

Or so it would seem.

You don’t have to have spent 20 years in the newspaper business as I did to know there are some vast differences between electronic and actual newspaper consumption as to how news stories are conveyed to the reader. Headlines are what I am thinking.

Sure news via the Internet has headlines or whatever they’re called this week. But there is a world of difference — at least in my opinionated opinion (laugh track) — in the affect (yes, with an “a”) of the “72-point hed” of a newspaper and whatever size of a computer-generated headline. Those big, black, bold letters, be it on broadsheet or tabloid, just jump up, grab you and often times slap you silly. Then there is the judgment, or not, behind the big head.

A case in point is my local daily newspaper, the Beaumont Enterprise. The Hearst-owned publication is conservative in its editorial page side but usually doesn’t appear to cross the line too far on the news side with that stance. Their Web site is a whole different story and I just don’t have time to rant about it although the relatively new front-page makeover brings the dot-com element about a standard column and a half all down the paper’s right-hand side. Today it displays one of their idiotic Web polls which any thinking person — but if you read the reader comments on stories on their Web effort you will see thinking is in short supply — should realize means absolutely nothing.

Newspapers are a band wagon sort of enterprise, pardon the pun. One fad is a one-story front, or two, or three, big photos and so-forth. Today’s Beaumont paper has a main story and a sider as well as a third story on the bottom. Now one might guess that since the health reform passage was historic that it would be the main story perhaps with a sider of local reaction, doctors, political leaders and the like? No, it was a story titled: “Climb too steep” in an eye-grabbing but not “Second Coming” sort of point. The story was how the local Lamar University women’s basketball team, which was seeded 14 in the NCAA Regional Tournament in Austin, was defeated by the No. 3 seed West Virginia 58-43.

Now I watched that game while clicking back and forth to CNN to check on the status of the legislation as well as having had to surrender both altogether for the season opening episode on AMC of “Breaking Bad.” It was fantastic as I expected.

I suppose I can’t blame my local newspaper too much for its leading with the local team playing in the regional, losing, although I think something is a little out of whack whenever a huge sports story leads PI and is virtually absent in the sports section, cleverly named “@ Play.” My thought was: “Well, maybe I was wrong and the passage of a landmark health care bill wasn’t that big of a deal after all.”

So I checked out some of the papers showcased in the Newseum’s “Today’s Front Pages” section. I checked a few papers out at random and also looked at several which had local teams in the NCAA March Madness.

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, the Post and Courier in Charleston, The Des Moines Register, The Dallas Morning News, several of these fairly conservative publications, all led with and had noticeable headlines on the legislation. The Spokesman-Review in Spokane had a large banner head: “Health Care Bill Passes.” It had a men’s and women’s teams from Gonzaga playing in the NCAA. Now only the women are left. They did have a large photo of the men’s team, which lost, with the headline inside the photo: “Bullied in Buffalo,” relating to where their defeat was suffered.

In Green Bay, Wisc., which one would think is a huge sports town despite its population being about 100,000 and about the size of Beaumont, the Green Bay Press-Gazette ran with the large banner “Health care reform passes” and a sub-hed “Republicans unanimously oppose $940 billion bill.” The Wisconsin-Green Bay women’s team beat Virginia last night and advances. It has a “reefer” or referred to the story at the top of the page for the sports section. The other front-page stories were about local census issues and on a statewide hate crimes report.

And what about the area paper of the team that beat Lamar? Well, The Herald-Dispatch in Huntington, W.Va., had a colorful banner with a reefer to the inside on all the region’s teams still surviving including West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio State. Its large photo is of Food Network star Jamie Oliver topping a story about his show featuring Huntington. A large head and text fills the right-hand side of the paper with the story about the health care bill. Oh well. That’s kind of half and half.

You can check out the headlines yourself and you will find some that ignored the historic bill as the huge story that it was but I think many of the editors across the nation realized the event’s enormity.

I will not try to second-guess my local newspaper. I learned long ago that if you ever tried to bet on how a paper would play a story you would be a big-time loser. I suppose one other of the newspaper’s attributes that is lost on the world of electronic news is the historic sense of the publication. Have you ever saved a newspaper after a historic event? Maybe it’s just me but I have stored somewhere front pages when Reagan was shot, the Challenger explosion, my lead story in the paper where I was working at the time of the Columbia explosion, the beginning of the Iraq War, 9/11 and more. I think I have saved most, at least sections, of the newspaper of just about every major and some minor stories I wrote.

The electronic news platform has yet to find a way that will grip its reader with the sense of the moment and the importance of that moment the way the newspaper does and has through its existence. I am not particularly happy with my local paper’s choice of story play, but that’s what makes this a great country. That and we have had this extremely contentious issue of health care and haven’t had a civil war. That is, not yet.