Perry Parks has been a reporter and editor for The Virginian-Pilot and a journalism adviser and instructor at Michigan State University. His book, "Making Important News Interesting: Reporting Public Affairs in the 21st Century" (Marion Street Press, 2006), offers modern methods for engaging readers in traditional news stories. He is a freelance writer and editor in Athens, Ga.
 
 On Saturday, Nov. 17, a Nobel Prize-winning panel of scientists declared that global warming is "unequivocal," that sea levels are destined to rise at least 4.6 feet, and that up to two-thirds of the world's species face extinction.
"As early as 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will suffer water shortages, and residents of Asia's large cities will be at great risk of river and coastal flooding," Arthur Max reported for the Associated Press. "Europeans can expect extensive species loss, and North Americans will experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater competition for water."
Much of the damage has already been done, AP reported, but the world's carbon dioxide emissions in the next few years could decide the fate of millions of human and countless animal lives. The two nations with the biggest say over the future are China and the United States.
The story urgently punctuated one of the biggest crises in human, and perhaps global, history, and it put Americans on notice that their immediate decisions will either mitigate or exacerbate the damage.
But you wouldn't know it to look at the nation's newspapers.
I examined 159 Sunday papers on the Newseum's front-page gallery on Nov. 18. One hundred thirteen front pages – more than 70 percent -- had NO mention of the global warming report, which broke on a relatively slow-news Saturday. Twenty-four papers ran stories – mostly the AP's – on their fronts, and 22 referred to the story inside.
If you want to contest my judgment on this particular story, you can argue that the U.N. global warming panel has already issued three dire reports, and that the latest is primarily a summary of the first three. Several of the biggest U.S. papers, including the Washington Post and New York Times, played the story inside.
But to quibble over a single story about the imperiled future of the planet would be to overlook a larger phenomenon, which is the dramatic disappearance of national and world news from American newspapers' front pages. Some of the papers I perused on Nov. 18 had chosen different nation and world stories for Page One, but most refused to stray beyond their community borders.
Publishers and editors across the country have embraced the all-local front page, rationalizing that readers can get national and world news from a variety of electronic sources and that most newspapers' only advantage is uniquely produced local content.
On the surface, that argument is compelling. Any small or mid-sized newspaper's greatest asset IS its local reporting – news and insight no one else can offer. And it's true that plopping an aging wire story onto your front page with no local input or context adds little value.
Unfortunately, the all-local argument has two major flaws that are helping accelerate the irrelevance of newspapers.
The first flaw is the assumption that just because people CAN get national and world news elsewhere, and just because many people SAY they get national and world news elsewhere, doesn't mean they DO get that news in any meaningful form. I'll be the first to congratulate anyone who has convincing evidence that Americans have improved their grasp of world affairs with the advance of the Internet and the retrenchment of newspapers. But when at least three in 10 people still believe Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, news organizations have little to brag about as informers.
The second flaw is the tragically narrow definition of "local" that most editors apply to their news judgment. Proximity is a great and enduring news value, but now more than ever, something doesn't have to happen across the street to shake up your readers' lives.
The rise of the Taliban and al Qaeda in the 1990s is the premier example of the danger of myopia. Many editors studiously avoided seemingly remote and esoteric Afghanistan news in order to be more reader-focused, and the next thing you knew readers were blindsided by the worst terrorist attack in American history. Afghanistan was local news all along, and better journalism might have shown it.
I can't think of a more local story than global warming, even if the Nov. 17 dateline was from Valencia, Spain. Every one of us contributes to the crisis, and all of us are affected. The U.N. report warns of more American communities competing for water in the future, but we already have Georgia, Florida and Alabama at each other's throats over a historic drought that's happening right now. If you believe the world's foremost climate experts – and the qualified skeptics are rapidly diminishing – this is just the tip of what's left of the iceberg.
Now is the worst possible time for newspaper editors to employ isolationist news judgment in the interest of differentiating content.
It's true that the Internet and niche media explosions have fragmented people's attention, but we are also more interdependent than at any time in human history. There are certain things everyone needs to know about, whether we like it or not. Our wars, and our contribution to mass suffering and extinction, are among them.
The challenge for newspapers is to present the most important news – wherever it originates – in ways that reflect the unique attributes of their local communities. That means putting national and world news on the front page when it directly affects your readers – but it also means more than slapping a local headline on a wire report.
I'd say three of 159 papers met this challenge with the global warming story on Nov. 18.
The Lawrence (Kan.) Journal World ran the news on its front page, but instead of going with the straight wire story, it bulleted the top findings of the U.N. report – getting right to the impact – and then referred to the full AP story on 2A.
The San Francisco Chronicle put two staff writers on its story, which elegantly summarized the global panel's report and quoted a Stanford climatologist who was just returning from Spain.
And The Record of Hackensack, N.J., produced a staff and wire story on the report, with comments from a Rutgers professor who had contributed to it. In perhaps a burst of serendipity, The Record also had a staff-written story about proposed state legislation to crack down on polluting power plants. The stories were paired on the paper's front page.
Talking to local experts, repackaging content to meet readers' needs and pursuing local impacts of broader events are a few strategies for placing your community in a larger context. Truly serving readers requires going well beyond the longstanding practice of occasionally and superficially localizing big stories. What's needed is a daily commitment to helping readers understand their place in the world and their power to act in it.
Some suggestions:
-- Establish a network of professors from a nearby university who lead study-abroad programs across the globe. When news breaks overseas, call on the closest professor, and her students, for perspective. The contribution can range from a few quotes enhancing a wire story to a front-page, first-person account that completely changes the way your readers understand the story.
-- Set up a network of local immigrants, visiting scholars and international businesses in your coverage area to provide background, context and humanity to breaking news.
-- Publish Q&A's with local historians, political scientists and other experts on important news and trends around the world.
-- Set up regular in-depth interviews with your congressional and state delegations about their votes and activities – probing beyond press releases and talking points to force your representatives to explain their decisions.
-- Establish a national/international beat that commits a staff member to deciphering the local impacts of, and contributions to, national and world events.
-- Include links to the organizations analyzing and responding to major news events so readers can get more information or contribute to a cause.
Newspapers are getting smaller. Foreign bureaus are closing. But Americans are more dependent on, and more responsible to, people all over the world than ever before. Readers need to be challenged and inspired by the dangers and opportunities that confront them from around the corner and the other side of the globe, and local newspapers ought to lead the way.
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