The cyclone responsible for more than 22,000 in Myanmar is front-page news today in a wide range of U.S. newspapers.

The Washington Post and the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk are among those who made it their lead stories with large headlines and centerpiece photos. Others playing the disaster on the front page include the Dallas Morning News, Los Angeles Times, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Kansas City Star, the Omaha World and the Wichita Eagle.

The Times-Picayune in New Orleans only contained a reference to it in the front page skybox, those little teaser items at the top of the page. The Indianapolis Star, the Detroit Free Press and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel did not play the story on the front page. The Times-Picayune decision is a little surprising given that city’s Katrina experience, which might make their readers more interested in the story. The Indianapolis Star’s decision is certainly understandable because it gave dominant play to the Hoosier state’s important Democratic primary taking place today.

We had decided at our 4:30 news meeting to put only one wire story – about the increase in voter registration across the country – on the front page. We routinely put local news on the front page on the theory that local news is our franchise and that national and international news is easily available on television and the web. However, after the meeting, editors began suggesting Myanmar belonged on the front page, so we changed course and put it out there instead of the election story.

Disaster stories occurring on the other side of the world are not always easy calls for newspapers like ours. Proximity and familiarity are important criteria for deciding which stories make the front page and Myanmar is not one of those countries that many of us relate to. Nonetheless, the cyclone is the biggest natural disaster since the devastating tsunami that hit Indonesia in 2004 and the world is paying more attention by the hour. Associated Press reports today that in addition to the known deaths, another 41,000 people are considered missing.

What do you think? Are you following the disaster in Myanmar? Does it belong on the front page again tomorrow?

Award-winning author Buzz Bissinger, whose work includes the book Friday Night Lights, made quite a spectacle of himself last week on Bob Costas’show on HBO.

I’ve long admired Bissinger’s work, but I have to shake my head over his performance and his remarks. He verbally attacked a well-known sports blog, lacing his comments with profanity. The contradiction here is that in his attack on the bloggers, he criticized them for using profanity.

He’s since apologized for his tone and manner on HBO, but he still seems stuck in a contradiction.

In an interview with the Big Lead, the interviewer notes that Bissinger used the f-word 21 times in a profile of Don Imus that appeared last year in Vanity Fair magazine. In response to the interviewer’s point, Bissinger is quoted as saying, “I can tell you this – none of the uses were gratuituous or spur of the moment.”

Give me a break.

Despite what the presidential candidates might think, the economy is the most important story in America today – not the never-ending campaign.

Take a look at most any newspaper these days or watch any network or cable news show, and you’ll see an intense focus on what’s happening to consumer prices and the rising cost of services.

To further my point, consider today’s front-page headlines from three major newspapers:

As Gas Costs Soar, Buyers Are Flocking to Small Cars
The New York Times

Economic Troubles Multiply Requests for Help in D.C. Area
The Washington Post

Grocery Costs Test Shoppers’ Creativity
The Chicago Tribune

I caught a glimpse of a new CNN poll this morning that reported 49 percent of Americans surveyed believe the economy is the most important issue today. The second highest result was the war in Iraq, considered the most important by 19 percent.

Spokesman-Review editors were discussing the economy as a story just yesterday and decided to take a special look later this month at how families and individuals in our region are coping.

If you were going to talk to fellow consumers about how they are managing their finances in these difficult times, what kind of questions would you ask them?

I took a day off on Tuesday to take a relative on a scenic drive to Nelson, British Columbia. We were both first-time visitors.

The Nelson Daily News is an afternoon daily published Monday through Friday. It’s a tabloid format, which is not typical of most small dailies. The lead story in Tuesday’s edition was about the Holy Smoke Culture Shop owners, who admitted in Nelson provincial court to selling organic cannabis from their downtown store.

According to reporter Sara Newham’s story, owner Alan Middlemiss testified customers had to be 19 or older, sober and polite before they could buy drugs from Holy Smoke. “We asked that they say please,” said Middlemiss.

An interesting story, for certain, but the real reason I’m blogging about it today is that I wanted to share a photo of the newspaper’s building sign, which I think is one of the most distinctive signs I’ve ever seen at a small town newspaper.

Human nature and reader reaction, which are often quite comparable, are in plain view for us today.

Reporter Kevin Graman wrote a moving story for Sunday’s paper about a young family’s battle against addiction and homelessness as part of the Our Kids, Our Business project. He had written about them a year ago, so he revisited them to see how their lives had changed.

He received a tearful phone call from one reader who couldn’t thank him enough for following up on the Bridges family. She credited Kevin and the hand of God for telling the story of Christopher and Dejah Bridges.

Here’s where the human nature part comes in. Some people are not content to see someone battle their demons and display signs of personal responsibility and growth.

One former addict complained in an email to editors that his story should have been told, not that of the Bridges. He wants publicity for doing well. Even a family member of the Bridges called to complain, blaming the Bridges for bringing their troubles upon themselves. Granted, sometimes the family ties are irrevocably broken by addiction and bad personal choices. But in the end, measurable progress should trump personal animosity and jealousy, shouldn’t it?

The Bridges aren’t on the front page today. But their struggles will continue.

We are about to draw a close to our month-long Our Kids, Our Business project. It’s our second year of focus on children, their needs and our community’s efforts to provide them the protection and encouragement they deserve.

Thursday’s capstone event featuring Dr. Robert Anda of the Centers for Disease Control and Protection highlighted the unique cooperation of several media outlets.

The Spokesman-Review’s partners this year have been KREM-TV, KXLY-TV, KHQ-TV, KSPS, The Inlander and Fox28. The cooperation included participation in a jointly-financed community survey that prompted a series of newspaper and television stories, as well as a one-hour special this week on KSPS.

So, seeing this unprecedented cooperation among media partners who normally are extremely competitive and frequently critical or contemptuous of each other, it prompts me to post this question:

Should local media be more collaborative? Would readers and viewers be well served if the print and electronic competitors worked together on more stories of importance and interest? Would readers and viewers fear that more collaboration would ultimately result in a monopoly on the news and the elimination of disparate voices and stories?

In an interview with Michael Parks, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and outgoing director of the journalism school at the University of Southern California, writer Norman Corwin asked Parks what he would recommend to his successor.

Part of Parks’ reply in the spring issue of the j-school’s magazine follows:

“…I think that the challenge of this job is thinking about ways to improve the practice of journalism, to keep your mind on why we do journalism the way we do it, what are our traditions in American journalism, and to make sure those values and that sense of ethics continue, even as journalism changes rapidly. You know we’re in an era of active change, and some of the changes are discontinuous – that is, it is not a straight evolution. The digital transformation of so many means of communication has amplified the social and political and economic changes under way, and so teaching journalism in this turbulence is hard. Preparing students to do good journalism while everything is changing is hard, but good things are never easy.”

If you were teaching today’s high school or college journalists, what are some of the things you would want students to study and learn?

Permit me a small rant today. Katie Couric and Bob Schieffer are both good journalists with proven track records. But this exchange on Wednesday's CBS Evening News was just silly:

COURIC: Bob Schieffer, Bob, thanks a lot. And I like your tie, by the way.

SCHIEFFER: Well thank you.

COURIC: You're welcome.

Do viewers like this kind of informal chatter?

Many journalists can recall a trick question from a professor teaching the first day of class for beginning journalists:

"What's the main purpose of a newspaper?"

Students typically reply with a variety of replies citing the First Amendment, the public's right to know, the watchdog role and more.

Then the prof slaps them with this cold reality:
"The purpose of a newspaper is to make money."

It's true, of course, that a newspaper is a business and the owner intends to make money with it. But most journalists still like to believe there is greater meaning to what we do. A former Washington Post reporter and editor, Peter Osnos, says it well in his weekly Century Foundation essay:

“… the real purpose of journalism is eternally gritty: keeping tabs on a world that very much needs newshounds poking around.”

So, what is the real purpose of journalism?

“Covering Wall Street is like covering a wild party,” says Charles Gasparino, the on-air editor of CNBC and a veteran business journalist.

“These guys and (and increasingly women) appear as if they’re the most sophisticated, proper, well-mannered people in the world. And they ain’t. They’re insane. Reporting about this insanity is the best job in journalism, and anyone who wouldn’t want to cover crazy powerful people has got to be crazy themselves.

Catch the rest of Gasparino’s Q&A with a business journalist at this industry website.

Winning sports teams help sell newspapers. I’ve not revealing any industry secrets with that pronouncement. The evidence is plentiful. Just ask any body working in a circulation department at your local newspaper.

Today, in the wake of the Kansas Jayhawks’ dramatic victory last night in the NCAA championship game, the newspaper in Lawrence is selling better than the proverbial hotcakes. The Journal World doubled its normal press run of 22,000 and quickly sold out. At last report, they were starting up the presses again to print even more copies of today’s newspaper, which featured a gigantic photo of the victors on the front page.

I happened to be working at the Wichita Eagle the last time the Jayhawks won the title – in 1988. It was a blast in the newsroom that night. Everyone but the alums from rival Kansas State joined in the celebratory mood.

The Sunday edition of the New York Times contained a lengthy story and photos about the death of the five Schrock children and the ensuing trial of Clifford Helm.

The story was headlined, “In Deaths of 5 Children, a Friendship Born of Forgiveness.” The piece recounts much of what’s already been reported by the Spokesman-Review and other media. The only thing I hadn’t read or heard before is that according to the Times report, Helm helped expedite what Jeffrey Schrock said was a $500,000 insurance settlement.

The photos accompanying the story include one by S-R photographer Jesse Tinsley.

Paul Turner’s excellent piece today on the assassination of Martin Luther King and its impact on Memphis prompted me to relive an unfortunate and similar experience.

Vernon Jordan, then director of the National Urban League, was severely wounded by a racist sniper in my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, late on the night of May 29, 1980. I was then a regional editor at the News-Sentinel, an afternoon newspaper in a two-paper town.

Jordan survived the shooting and credited a Fort Wayne surgeon, Dr. Jeffrey Towles, with saving his life.

The shooting was a horrific event and captured attention around the world. Fort Wayne, too, struggled with the identity of being a community (think Memphis and Dallas) where a prominent person was the target of hate-filled violence. The shooter, an avowed racist from Alabama named Joseph Paul Franklin, was later convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

This is real inside baseball, but a colleague recently shared an excerpt from an old textbook on magazine and newspaper design:

“The secret is to hold on to old readers with familiar typographic landmarks while luring new readers with innovation.”

-- Publication Design, by Roy Paul Nelson, published in 1972.

Sometimes, as they say, what's old is new, eh?

As if the struggling newspaper industry doesn’t have enough problems, three recent instances at the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and St. Louis Post-Dispatch compound the sense of despair and frustration.

First, the Los Angeles Times published a front-page apology last week for an erroneous story concerning an assault on the late Tupac Shakur. The story was based on fake FBI documents apparently created by a convicted swindler.

Second, the Post-Dispatch issued an apology to its readers for an Easter Sunday feature on a woman who had supposedly overcome difficult personal and family circumstances. It turns out that the woman provided a fake name and concocted several false anecdotes about the difficulties she faced.

And finally, the New York Times published a lengthy correction on Sunday for a story it published on March 14 about sex workers. In this case, two of the women quoted at length in the story insist they never performed sex for pay. Sex workers, which include strippers, don’t necessarily perform sex acts, the correction explained. Why it took the Times two weeks to publish the correction is a mystery. Ironically, the two women quoted were allowed to use fake names in the story to protect their identities.

All three of these incidents hardly speak well of our craft. Of course, all three problems could have been avoided by a more thorough editing and reporting process. But if three large metropolitan papers of significant stature are unable to catch this sort of lying and deception, what does this say about our industry?

The killing of Spokane resident Dan Wortham on Friday was another stark reminder of the violent world we live in. The Spokane Police Department’s openness in the case is also a reminder of how well the public is served when authorities are forthcoming with details.

Lt. Dave McGovern, of the major crimes unit, spoke with reporters on Monday and shared remarkable detail about the suspects, their possible motive and what police are labeling as their confessions. The kind of detail McGovern provided reporters is in stark contrast to the tightly-controlled flow of information that normally accompanies any crime situation. Check out our video of McGovern’s remarks.

Our reporters, photographers and editors often find ourselves at odds with authorities who are reluctant to release relevant pieces of information. Our view is that the public expects and deserves information as quickly and completely as possible. News about violent crimes is of immense public interest in any community. Lt. McGovern’s decision to share information with the public in this case is a welcome development.

As part of its coverage of the five-year anniversary of the war in Iraq, The New York Times’ front page on Wednesday features a prominent photo of an Iraqi killed in a fight with Marines. I doubt the Times would have used a photo showing the body of a dead Marine.

The use of images showing dead people in most any circumstance is usually a carefully considered decision for several reasons. First of all, it’s our experience that most readers aren’t comfortable seeing photos of bodies, especially on the front page. For many readers and journalists, it’s an issue of respect for the dead and respect for surviving family members. Who among us would want to see a body photo of a dead relative or friend on the front page under any circumstance? Others, particularly critics of any war, might argue that dead body photos on the front page would drive home the reality of war and help readers understand the consequences.

Many editors simply have a ban on such front-page use. We would have considerable debate at the Spokesman-Review if we were confronted with a body photo that had particular relevance to our readers. In the end, I think we probably would avoid such a photo in almost any situation imaginable. There would have to be an awfully compelling reason to use such an image.

It’s been noted a number of times in the industry trade journals and other outlets that while U.S. editors rarely put photos of dead Americans on the front page, there seems to be a somewhat different standard when the bodies are from somewhere across the globe. Critics suggest that those decisions reflect insensitivity, a feeling that it’s OK if it’s an unknown person from a poverty-stricken country, a war zone or a natural disaster.

If you were making the decision, are there circumstances in which would you allow photos showing a dead body? Why or why not?

Barack Obama’s speech about racial division on Tuesday captured extensive play across all media platforms yesterday.

The speech captured front-page play in many of this morning’s newspapers, preceded by lots of cable airtime and debate on internet sites.

I’ve long suggested that race is the defining issue in this country. And it always will be. So as a journalist and citizen, I welcome this debate, difficult and messy as it might be. Only time will tell if his speech helps sustain the discussion across the country, or whether the collective attention span of an easily distracted electorate will quickly skip to the next message of the day.

Two dramatic presentations of the Obama speech caught my eye as I skimmed various front pages this morning. Take a look at the Chicago Sun-Times and the Portland Oregonian.

Do you think race will remain a dominant issue in the campaign, or is this week’s focus just a short-lived phenomenon?

The March/April issue of the Columbia Journalism Review arrived in our mailboxes today, so I’ll share with you some recent newspaper headlines collected by CJR that will make you wince or laugh.

Reptile and gun collector gets probation
The San Diego Union-Tribune

Experts split on impact in Bonds’ trial
San Francisco Chronicle

Study shows Goggling of self, others increasing
Ventura County Star

Peace council to protest torture at radio station
The Syracuse Post Standard

Police: Man kills self before shooting wife, daughter
San Gabriel Valley Tribune

The annual NCAA basketball tournament makes March the best month of the year for many sports fans.

The Spokane region, already blessed with the success of Washington State and Gonzaga, gets an extra bonus this year with the Sweet Sixteen round of the women’s tournament coming here at the end of the month. It’s going to be a busy time for our sports reporters and photographers. Jim Meehan, Steve Bergum and Dan Pelle will be flying to Raleigh to cover the Zags, while Vince Grippi, Nick Eaton, John Blanchette and Chris Anderson will be making the trip to Denver to follow the Cougs.

Take a peek at the Indianapolis Star’s front page today, which highlights the selection of Purdue, Butler, Notre Dame and TSIB (some native Hoosiers like me only use initials when we have to refer to That School in Bloomington -- TSIB -- because of our deep disdain for it). I love the Star’s headline.

Will you be allowed to watch the Cougs or the Zags while you are at work? If so, will you watch it on TV or on your computer screen?

If you are a newspaper staff in a large metropolitan city like Chicago, New York or Atlanta, you don’t spend a lot of time preparing for coverage of a tornado in your downtown area.

So, imagine what it must have been like last night at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as it reacted to a stunning weather development. Check out Saturday’s front page. If you click on the AJC image, you'll get a larger view of it.

Today’s Columbus Dispatch in Ohio gave unusual headline treatment to a criminal trial that wrapped up on Thursday.

You just don’t see this very often in the typical newspaper.

It never fails. Whenever I speak to a college or high school class of journalism students, I return home with new inspiration.

Rick Rhodes, teacher and adviser to the Sandpoint High School newspaper, The Cedar Post, was my host for a visit with the newspaper staff yesterday. We spent almost 90 minutes talking about journalism, editing, ethics and a host of related topics.

I had a lot of fun. The students were engaging, respectful, curious and impressive. Editor in chief Morgan Wills and her fellow students are a first-class group.

We talked about a story the staff is working on for the next edition of the monthly paper. Voters there are facing a $14.1 million school levy vote on May 20. Reporter Kat Vardell has interviewed school officials about what the levy would mean in terms of facility improvements.

I suggested she also talk to representatives of any taxpayer group that might be in opposition to the levy. Casey Dunn, another reporter, challenged me by saying that it doesn’t matter to their readers if there is opposition. The students, he said, are only interested in what the levy improvements might mean for them. Adding comments from opponents would only make the story longer and bog the student reader down in minutia.

I made the case that it only seems fair to acknowledge potential opposition to the levy and that as potential voters, high school students need to learn more about the participatory process of elections and how opposing groups and views can influence public outcomes. But Casey raised a legitimate argument and one that I suspect carried the day with his colleagues. Good for him.

Later, I gave Casey props for speaking up. He was doing what journalists should do on two fronts. First, he was thinking about what his readers would want and need to know. Second, he was challenging the assumption of an editor. Both of those approaches lead to constructive debate on how a story should be formed and presented.

High school journalism has a proud tradition at Sandpoint High School. My visit there this week gives me hope that the good work will continue there and at many other schools.

Wednesday’s newspapers in the New York area are saturated with coverage of the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal. The Democratic governor’s rapid fall was made official today with his resignation.

Some papers, such as the Chicago Tribune, featured front-page stories that asked why women stand by the Spitzers of the world. That’s probably an issue being discussed in many homes this week.

Here are today’s New York tabloid headlines:

Trystin’ in the Wind
Newsday

Happy Hooker
New York Daily News

Hooked!
New York Post

$80,000
a.m. New York

Your move, Spitzer
Middletown Times Herald-Record