Last Updated: May 01, 2000
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Pages across America
Connecting with the world in Spokane
Through links with the community and wires, eastern
Washington is learning about its many links to the world in the Spokesman-Review
By Kevin Graman
Building on The Front Page feauture from the 1999-2000 year of The American
Editor, we will be looking at innovative pages and sections throughout
the newspaper in 2000-01. Send your good ideas to Chris Peck, The Spokesman-Review,
P.O. Box 2160, Spokane WA 99210.
The Associated Press has bureaus on every continent and newspapers boast
of subscribing to every wire service available to them. What good is it
really if no one’s reading world news? A recent Belden readership survey
at The Spokesman-Review showed its international pages had the lowest readership
of any section in the newspaper.
We weren’t ready to give up on world news. The challenge was to make
world events more relevant, more connected to the lives of local readers.
Editors felt that if we could show that world news had a bearing on local
events, the chances were improved that readers would pay attention.
Our Connections page was the result.
Begun as a project of the ASNE Wire Content Committee in 1999 and built
from research undertaken by the Freedom Forum’s international news project,
the Connections page now runs as a regular Sunday page in the Spokesman-Review’s
main news section.
The page is edited and designed using four criteria:
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Every story must establish a link between the international news event
being reported and the local community.
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The page usually should contain a package of international news briefs
organized around 6 to 10 ongoing themes or issues our local editors feel
are important to the community.
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One story on the page should reflect an effort by the paper to work with
a wire service to get a local insert or localized international wire story.
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One story on the page should be focused on an economic issue that has some
tie to local commerce or local business people.
Local committee finds links
To help develop these local connections to international news, the Spokesman-Review
formed a world news committee composed of local reporters, a wire editor,
and a designer. Early on, we also included members of the public who had
a good knowledge of the community’s international connections. This committee
helped the paper identify and then computerize the local links people and
businesses of the Inland Pacific Northwest had with foreign countries and
international issues. A city desk reporter was assigned the task of keeping
the computerized links current.
Wire connection
The paper didn’t abandon news of the Russian economy or the war in Kosovo.
Instead, we looked for local links to this international story. We found
several thousand refugees from hard times in Russia had settled in Spokane,
and that there were some Kosovar families here who were having a real effect
on our own economy and culture. So we told our readers about these links
in a tight little story right along side that Moscow-datelined story we
asked The Associated Press to write for us about Russian emigration.
That’s right. I said the wire story that we — a 140,000-circulation
newspaper in Spokane, Wash. — asked the AP to write for us. The AP did
it, too, because the wire service also has become keenly aware that many
regional and smaller newspapers aren’t running much international news.
In the future, our hope is to work with AP to see if software can be
developed to help us identify links to Spokane and the Inland Northwest
from the entire AP wire report.
We’re not there yet. But the editors in Spokane have been pleasantly
surprised at how willing AP has been to help with the Connections page.
We even got a note back from its Beijing bureau, thanking us for a story
idea about the greening of China. (Spokane sells a lot of grass seed to
China.) The fact is, there are a lot of stories moving on the wire every
day, both world and national, that we never considered running until we
started thinking about how they relate to our readers.
Interoffice connections
In a lot of ways, the Connections page also has connected our wire desk
to the rest of the newsroom.
Got a wire story about a cyanide spill from a Romanian gold mine killing
all life in the Danube River? Waltz right over to a business reporter.
She knew about a mining company that’s trying to put the same kind of cyanide
leaching operation in our own back yard. Our health reporter breathed life
into a story about increased asthma rates nationally when he found out
Spokane has one of the highest asthma rates in the country.
Never happen, you say? Wire editors don’t ask reporters to do stories
in your newsroom? They do if you have an editor like Chris Peck. He put
his news editor in charge of a Connections team made up of reporters, a
photo editor, an assistant city editor, a business editor, a wire editor
and a page designer.
He tore down some pretty high barriers between departments, and he didn’t
add a dime to his payroll. The team members put out a full page of very
readable news every Sunday and occasionally come up with a Page One story.
They still have time for their daily duties, and there’s still room for
breaking news out of the Middle East or City Hall.
Meanwhile, is anybody reading your wire section? If not, the Connections
page might be a model for international news coverage that you should consider.
Graman is news editor of The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Wash.
