Published: March 01, 2000
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The front page
A ‘very Jersey page’ before the holiday
By Charles Cooper
Planning front pages during the holiday season is a game of hope: you
wait for breaking news or effective enterprise so that you don’t have to
rely on Christmas photos and features.
As a regional newspaper, we put everything through a filter. We worry
about New Jersey first — especially the northern part of the state — then
the New York metro area, the Northeast and out to the other provinces.
We look to national and international stories for the front-page mix, but
weigh everything against the impact on our area.
So on most days, even in the week before Christmas, we’re looking for
a strong lead story out of New Jersey. On Dec. 22 we knew that a report
card on the state’s HMOs would be coming out, and had booked space for
heavy charts and extensive coverage. After the 1998 report, readers’ response
was heavy enough to indicate that they wanted more.
Early on, we heard about two surprising developments that would rate
Page One attention: A state Supreme Court justice was going to retire,
and there would be an announcement concerning the state police and a federal
monitor.
That meant we could count on having enough hard news so that the planned
holiday feature — how flood victims in the ravaged town of Bound Brook
would cope with Christmas — wouldn’t have to carry the page.
The state police story appealed to us because of our yearlong focus
on racial profiling. It was our coverage early in the year that revealed
the damaging numbers on arrest practices, and the announcement that there
would be a federal monitor confirmed the Justice Department’s concern.
We ended up adding a story that had been pushed for our state section
cover, a proposal to let newer cars bypass tough new emissions testing
as a way to address complaints over long waits at inspection stations,
a hot topic in New Jersey.
The main wire-service offerings were the indictment of an Algerian accused
of smuggling bomb materials into the United States from Canada, the repairs
on the Hubble Space Telescope, and U.S. embassy warnings to Americans abroad
about terrorist threats. A cargo plane had crashed in London, but we knew
the casualties were not extensive.
We normally select five or six slugs for Page One, and we expected Bound
Brook to supply the main photo. But the day’s best surprise came well after
the winter sunset, after we had built the page around the feature. A photographer
called to say he had captured the “millennium” moon behind the statehouse
dome. The winter solstice effect made it appear abnormally large, and the
photo was indeed a winner. We pushed the feature down the page.
We ended up with a “very Jersey” Page One, but a strong news mix for
the holiday period.
Cooper is managing editor of The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.
