News Junkie Smackdown

Michael Kinsley [from an earlier post]: It's interesting that both Tim and Sam chose the Dreamliner story. I would like to hear from the Web-only folks in D.C.: Did this story appear on your radar, and if so how? Was it No. 1? I doubt it. This is a good example of the kind of thing that Drudge and the Daily Beast aren't going to care much about.

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Emily Yoffe: No, I saw nothing on the Dreamliner. And as per your instructions, Mike, I have been avoiding Drudge, et al., because then I would be mostly reading newspapers.

Seth Stevenson: I did see the Dreamliner story—as one link among many on the edges of various Web sites. But no Web site played it big.

Timothy Egan: I doubt if Drudge, HuffPo, or any of them have a peep of original reporting on something like this. How could they? They don't cover American industry, as only handful of papers still do.

Sam Howe Verhovek: Interesting that both Egan and I (without prior consultation!) went large on the Dreamliner story. Since the Seattle Times broke some serious news here, maybe it will take a day or two for the national dailies to weigh in, but it's a big story. Yes, I'm an airplane nut, but this is supposed to be the plane of the future and Boeing single-handedly keeps our foreign trade imbalance from going all the way through the stratosphere. So this is just big news on eight different levels. This is still easily the most exciting jetliner in a generation, but if Boeing blows this and has to go back to the drawing board, it's a catastrophic loss. If they get it together and the thing flies, so to speak, airlines and passengers around the world will be happily flying this new plane with the bigger windows, cleaner air, greater roominess, quieter engines, etc., etc., for years to come. It's either a world-beater or an epic loss for U.S. industry. National dailies need to capture that, even if blogs don't care.

Kinsley: So here's one lesson from this experiment, I think: It's not so much a question of missing stories entirely, but missing the emphasis, importance, ranking of different stories. Clearly, I think, the Dreamliner story is more important than the Web-only folks realized from their reading. (Although, how did the Times and Post play it? No surprise that it was big in Seattle!)

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