News Is Where You Find It

Many an Illinois daily considered the story front-page news. A six-year-old boy in Normal, Ill., had disappeared, and divers were brought in from Chicago to plumb an ice-covered gravel pit that the child usually crossed on the way home from school. But the Bloomington Pantagraph (circ. 39,384) last week steadfastly played the story on page 3. Reason: it was local news (Bloomington and Normal are twin cities), and the Pantagraph never uses local stories on the front page.

The Pantagraph's strange ban has been in force so long that no one on the paper remembers when it began, or why. Some say it dates from the 1880s, when, for the first time, regular word of extra-Bloom-ington events came stuttering in over the newfangled press service telegraph and--in Bloomington, anyway--took a greedy grip on Page One. Today the sight of a local story on the front page would perturb editor and reader both.

The Associated Press's General Manager Frank Starzel, who served as the Pantagraph's news editor 30 years ago, recalls the time he rendered a regional bank robbery nearly invisible--by playing it on Page One. Several veteran Pantagraph newsmen searched page 3 for the story, rebuked Starzel for failing to run it. The backward progress of another bank-robbery story was a capsule of the Pantagraph policy. Since the rifled bank lay outside Pantagraph territory, the news broke on Page One; as the bandits fled toward Bloomington the story fled to page 2 (area news); when police trapped the culprits in Bloomington, the event was covered on page 3.

Now and then a careless Pantagraph printer may space out a short front-page column with a local item, but no printer commits the sin twice. Besides Frank Starzel, about the only Pantagraph editor to break the Page One rule was Adlai E. Stevenson, one of the five grandchildren and heirs of the late Pantagraph publisher William O. Davis. During a short hitch as assistant managing editor years ago, Stevenson (who is still a major stockholder in the Pantagraph) dared to put an area story--of a southern Illinois tornado --on the front page.

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