Jon Margolis, former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

"Queen of Queens” was the big news in New York on the last day of March.

It had to be the big news because it was the headline, in big, black, four-and-a-half-inch-high letters, of the lead story in New York’s Daily News.

The News, to be sure, isn’t what it used to be. It no longer calls itself “New York’s Picture Newspaper,” or sells more than a million copies  a day. Still, the current circulation, some 573,000 daily, (NY Daily News Circulation Figures in Bloomberg) ain’t chopped liver, as they say in some New York neighborhoods, so its importance can’t be dismissed out of hand.

In what may be considered the elite—or perhaps just the respectable—journalistic world, the big news of that morning was the headline in the newspaper across Midtown from the News. That would be The New York Times, which led its front page in smaller (the letters about a quarter-inch high), lighter, type conveying the message that President Obama was about “to open offshore areas to oil drilling.” (Obama to Open Off-Shore Drilling for the First Time).
 
Do not suppose that the News ignored that item. There it was right on Page 3, four paragraphs from Reuters, taking up not quite three inches including the headline: “Drill, Bammy, drill.” But obviously the News editors found their Queen more significant.

The queen in question is Mary Ann Jarou. If the name does not immediately ring a bell, she is the wife of Steve Lavin. If that name does not immediately ring a bell, you are probably not a big fan of college basketball. Lavin was once the coach of the UCLA mens basketball team, and he has just been hired to take over the head coaching job at St. John’s University.

Yeah, you guessed it. St. John’s is in Queens, where Coach Lavin and Ms. Jarou, an actress who has been in a few films and television shows, apparently plan to live.

I wasn’t planning to buy the News, just the stodgy old Times. After all, I wasn’t working, but spending three days of a ten-day vacation on the West Side of Manhattan, home to cultural and gustatory temptations rarely found at home in northeastern Vermont. But the headline was intriguing, posing as it did an obvious question: Why is it right there in big black letters on the front page?

Yeah, to sell papers. I knew that. I’ve been in this business a while (a very short smidgen of it with the News; I won’t even say when, but here’s a hint: the President of the United States then was a Democrat from Boston who put an ‘R’ at the end of ‘Cuba’ but not at the end of ‘vigor’) and I know that no editor decides his or her lead story without some consideration about whether it will sell papers.

But that just led to another question: why on earth would an editor think that a story about an unknown woman would inspire more folks to plunk down their 50 cents for the paper?

OK, Ms. Jarou is, from the male heterosexual perspective, fetching. There was a small picture of her pretty face on the front page and a larger shot of a side view of her face and roughly the top third of the rest of her on page three with the story. And the Red Storm, as the St. Johns’ teams are known, have a following in New York. The team’s home court is Madison Square Garden, and until recently, it was a basketball powerhouse, regularly getting into the NCAA tournament (though never winning it).

So there was a market niche to which the paper was obviously appealing. Still, how big a niche could it be? St. John’s is a big school, more than 20,000 students, and many of them stay in the New York area. But they couldn’t all be such devoted hoops fans. The odds are (that’s how they talk at Madison Square Garden) that at least as many New Yorkers are interested in off-shore oil drilling than in the new coach’s cute wife.

I’m not trying to knock the Daily News here. In fact, after buying both it and The Times all three days, I can report that the News contains much more than pictures of babes. It has lots of actual news.

Especially New York news. The News had more local stories each day than The Times. Some of them were frivolous, if fun, like the one about the two women high school teachers caught naked and canoodling in an empty classroom. Most were more substantive. They were shorter than The Times local stories, some of them shorter than they should have been. But then, some of those Times stories were longer than they had to be. Not all the stories in the News were written with that disinterested, professional, tone the best journalism requires. But they weren’t written badly, either, and from my (admittedly limited) three-day experiment, I concluded that anyone who lives in New York and wants to know what’s going on there should read both papers (though not necessarily the other tabloid, the New York Post; it’s a third-rate version of the News.). It’s the News, not The Times, that seems better connected with and to the city’s gritty, day-to-day reality.

Only the News, for instance, told New Yorkers that their subway system refused to allow advertisements that criticized Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s transportation policies. Or that a federal grand jury was investigating top political figures in Queens. Or that once-plentiful rabbits have all but disappeared from Central Park.

Good stories. Good enough that any one of them might have led the paper, rather than the “Queen of Queens” or the April 2 lead about some mope who embezzled $7 million so he could live like a mobster.

No doubt, the assumption on East 42nd St. is that those off-beat stories sell papers, and who am I to argue with circulation/marketing professionals who have access to all sorts of polling and consumer research?

Except that circulation at the News keeps going down. Just a year or two ago it was well above 600,000. Yes, circulation is going down all over, but there’s no evidence that putting those bizarre stories on the front page is reducing the rate of decline, just as there is scant evidence that television network news has lost audience at a slower rate as it has dumbed down its news content.

Last month, CNN, falling father behind Fox News in the ratings, hired trash-talking conservative blogger Erick Erickson as a commentator. Again, the folks at CNN must have some research results telling them Erickson will bring in some viewers. But plain common sense would indicate that the viewers who would find Erickson appealing are Fox watchers, and unlikely to switch just to watch one commentator, or at any rate to stay with CNN once Erickson had spoken his piece.

It’s as though it never occurs to TV news executives to spend that money beefing up their news coverage. Or hiring a commentator known for being incisive, original, and eloquent, which need not be inconsistent with being provocative or conservative.

Or to put it another way, good journalism might also be good business. More news organizations ought to try it.

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