This time, it's the Gainesville (Texas) Register actually having local news of importance, but burying it in print.
The town of 16,000 had a shooting late last week. They had a story about it in the Tuesday, Nov. 5, print edition — and buried it on page 3. On the top spread in front, they ran something about local polling places and the election. That's fine. On a two-column, or wide one-colum, rail at the right? They ran something either from CNHI Texas-wide, or else the Texas Trib, about election security. And ran it all the way down the page. (An oversized football photo from one of the smaller schools in the county, not Gainesville, and a brief blurb about the end of the regular season in high school football coming up filled the four left columns of the rest of the front page).
That's NOT fine. The shooting had the additional angle of being a dispute between two brothers that boiled over. I'm not totally of the "if it bleeds, it leads," but that should have been on the front page.
It's also buried on the website. As of Thursday afternoon, when I was writing this, it was in the "most popular" tab at bottom right. But, not on the top half of the website at all. The only local "article" is raw numbers from local voting and it's not clearly identified as local.
CNHI sucks. It sucks so much it has one editor over this paper, Weatherford and Cleburne (maybe Greenville will fire its current editor eventually and expand this) who made that decision. Yeah, they're stretched thin, but it was still a dumb decision.
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