THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 15, 1995 TAG: 9510140001
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LYNN FEIGENBAUM
LENGTH: Medium: 91 lines
Is religion coverage as important to the newspaper as it is to readers? If you take the pope's visit to the United States as an example, the answer would have to be no - especially during the early days of his visit.
At almost any other time, Pope John Paul II would have been the man in the news. But it was the week of The Verdict. And instead of reading about his historic trip on the Pilot's front page, readers had to look inside for a brief account - including one that ended in mid-sentence.
``Why,'' asked a Portsmouth woman, two days after the Simpson trial concluded, ``does your paper continue to be the best press agent that O.J. ever had? I'm not Catholic, I'm Methodist, but I think the pope deserved to be on the front page today.''
The pope finally made it there the next day, Oct. 6, after his speech to the United Nations. But even that story was overshadowed by the aftermath of Hurricane Opal and a hoped-for truce in Bosnia.
Readers took us to task. ``We want to see something every day,'' said Gloria Wiggins of Virginia Beach, ``what he's doing, his schedule, what he's saying to the faithful.''
In a way, some saw the papal visit as a spiritual antidote to the garish hype surrounding the Simpson trial.
``Good people and good values need to be proclaimed,'' said one caller, who didn't leave her name. ``But all the newspaper seems to be doing, all the media seem to be doing, is a feeding frenzy of O.J. stories and negativity.''
It annoyed some readers that the newspaper referred them to the Pilot Online for such extras as the full text of the pope's U.N. speech. ``Not all of us have computers,'' said Albert D. Petrulis of Virginia Beach. (True, but more and more do - prompting even the Catholic Church to set up its own web page!)
Our papal coverage did improve over the weekend. Religion writer Esther Diskin interviewed a Virginia Beach deacon and others heading north to hear the pope. And the pope's appearance in Baltimore was the lead story on Monday.
Wiggins particularly liked the Associated Press photo that day, showing a young woman receiving communion. But it wasn't enough for Margaret Pickard of Virginia Beach, who - with her husband and two toddlers - made the pilgrimage to Baltimore.
``It was an important day for our family,'' she said.
Returning home Monday, she hoped to read about other local families' experiences, how seeing and hearing the pope impacted them. That was missing. The newspaper had sent a reporter to cover Hurricane Opal in Florida but not the pope, ``and he was only three hours away,'' said Pickard.
I'll agree, we should have been there. But I don't think it was any contest with the Simpson story. O.J. may have been 3,000 miles away but The Verdict was the big story. Still, that didn't preclude more extensive coverage of the papal visit.
Usually, a historic visit by an important world figure prompts a series of analyses, commentaries, round-table discussions - something to set the stage for the event.
Obviously, most analysts were busy rehashing the O.J. verdict a hundred times over. But surely someone out there noticed that the pope was coming. The Sunday Commentary, for example, could have examined how American Catholics view the pope or revisited the pope's image today as a world figure. It didn't.
Ironically, Pickard was relieved. Most of those analyses, she said, lack balance - they just dredge up the '93 Gallup poll, pointing out what percentage of Americans supposedly disagree with the pope.
Well, that's a risk, but it would have put a big story in perspective. And perhaps paved the way for our coverage through the week.
HOLIDAY LETDOWN. Monday was a federal holiday, Columbus Day, and guess what? We forgot all about it. Maybe that's because it wasn't a holiday for newspaper employees.
A number of readers scolded us for leaving out the holiday infobox that tells us what's open, and closed, and changes in trash/recycling pickup.
As one man said, ``It's in the public's interest to know this type of thing and I can't understand why y'all don't have some little thing in there.''
He's right, we let y'all down.
A FAIR REQUEST. And finally, to those of you who think that only your newspaper is biased, unfair and can't spell its own name, take note of this item. It ran in a column last month by Boston Globe ombudsman Mark Jurkowitz:
``All sorts of creative - and in rare cases, nasty - Globe critics make their opinions known to this office. But this letter from a West Roxbury woman stands out as a gem of poetic succinctness.
`` `I am 79 years of age and read your paper every day,' she wrote. `Be fair once before I die.' ''
MEMO: Call the public editor at 446-2475, or send a computer message to
lynn(AT)infi.net
by CNB