The Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act came before anyone even felt pangs of hunger for lunch on Thursday, yet newspapers shouted the news over the next day’s breakfast as if the intervening meals and news cycles hadn’t taken place.
So why then did we journalists crowd our front pages with news that dropped almost a full day before the first daily papers dropped on doorsteps? And why did our headlines seem to presume that most readers hadn’t been anywhere near Twitter, television or the radio at all during the preceding 20 to 24 hours?
A quick sampling of what I mean:
- On its front page, the New York Times went with a courtly six-column, two deck headline presiding over four health care stories that draped like robes around images of the nine justices and constituted the entirety of the A1 content.
- USA Today made room for some gargantuan text by shifting its customary left rail down to the bottom of the page, above a nifty little ad.
- And the Chicago Tribune — a regional paper — gave the decision perhaps the most royal treatment of all, with a two-deck, all-caps main headline and two six-column dropheads. It managed to squeeze in a few stories below the Supreme Court coverage, though, as did the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post...
- see graphics...
- http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgathering-storytelling/visual-voice/180144/the-new-role-of-todays-front-page-as-a-third-draft-of-history/
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