From Lori Buselt, one of the editors in our feature department:
Are your funny bones ready? Four new strips officially have joined
The Eagle’s comic lineup this week, as you’ve seen in Sunday’s and
today’s editions. They are "Mother Goose & Grimm," "Bizarro," "Pearls Before
Swine" and "Sherman’s Lagoon." You can read more about the strips — and the artists behind them — in our story, "See these in the funny papers."
As part of our unveiling Sunday, we included a sample of each strip.
The
"Mother Goose & Grimm" offering (click on image at left for larger view) may have thrown some readers for a
loop. It included a parody of comic strip "Family Circus," illustrating Bil
Keane’s famous characters doing a tight-rope walk. The title of "Mother Goose
& Grimm" creator Mike Peters’ satire was "Family Cirque Du Soleil."
If you’re familiar with Peters’ strip, you know that satires are part
of his schtick. (That may not be a stretch considering Peters also is a Pulitzer Prize winner who creates editorial cartoons.) Another one of
his strips includes Disney’s princesses mingling during a cocktail party.
The strip, labeled "Disney’s Desperate Housewives," includes Belle of
"Beauty and the Beast" complaining, "My husband is an animal." Ariel of "The
Little Mermaid" says, "Mine wants me to wear fishnet stockings," to which
Sleeping Beauty retorts, "I just pretend I’m asleep."
What do you think of the new lineup? Funny? Boring? Let us know.
A reader, Bob, raises some good questions in response to Marcia Werts’ post Friday about our reporting on David Wessling’s death.
Bob asks why we, and most other papers, don’t typically report suicides and says we ought to as part of our journalistic responsibility.
My sense is that readers are more open today to media reporting on suicides than they were a decade ago. Still, I believe there are critical differences between reporting on public accidents or homicides and reporting on suicides.
One of the most nebulous concepts we debate in the newsroom is what is “newsworthy.†What is newsworthy to me may not be so to you sometimes. The most common question/complaint I typically hear from readers is, “Why is that news?â€
Here’s my take on the examples Bob mentioned: A homicide is obviously news – it has substantial implications for public safety. An accident in a public place, or with unusual circumstances or public safety implications, also is likely to be newsworthy. A suicide of a public figure, or in a public place, would probably be news.
But a suicide of a private citizen, in a private home, is a harder news connection for me to make. Is it the public’s business? Typically, my answer is probably “no.â€
Bob wonders why this is different from other deaths. But keep in mind that we don’t report on all other deaths. The Eagle’s obituary pages are full of deaths that were never reported as news stories.
Still, it’s clear to me that we – The Eagle, and other media – are not adequately reporting about suicide. Suicide is a major public health issue, and we haven’t done enough to examine the problem, the causes and solutions.
Does it help to magnify a family’s pain by making it public, if there are no other “newsworthy†factors to a person’s suicide? I’m skeptical that it does.
Incidentally, Bob also says it’s The Eagle’s job to present information we’re given, not to discern what people should and shouldn’t read.
I couldn’t disagree more.
The process of journalism is built on a “gatekeeper†function of the media – for many reasons.
First, we would never have the resources (in reporters and newsprint) to report and publish everything we know. And readers wouldn’t want to have to sift through all of that information to find what’s most relevant. It also wouldn’t be responsible for us to print everything we learn. Nor would it be fair. Nor legal.
Every journalist in our newsroom will never agree on the news value of every story. Every reader will never agree with every news-value judgment I and other editors here make. But we make those decisions based on our best judgments of what we believe readers want and need to know.