I got a 60% on Thursday. Does that count as a passing grade?

I was too busy putting out Friday’s paper tonight to tell you about it. I’ll try tomorrow.

Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, the loquacious and longtime speaker of the U.S. of Representatives, declared “All politics is local” and liked the phrase so much that he wrote a book with that title.

For some readers, all news is local. If it didn’t happen here, they aren’t interested. When we do reader surveys, we find interest in national news is always lower than in local news and that foreign news ranks even lower. Of course, that ties in nicely with The Honolulu Advertiser’s primary responsibility, which is to cover Hawai’i.

On our Web site, we provide a few national and foreign stories, but the bulk of our coverage is local. If you want national and foreign news on the Web, I suggest you go elsewhere.

In the newspaper, however, we continue to report the most important and interesting national and foreign stories of the day. Our choices are not popularity contests; otherwise the death of Heath Ledger would have been Page One news for several days last week. But we do respond to readers’ concerns and, especially on foreign news, we tailor our coverage to local interests.

The top foreign news story is a no-brainer: America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Americans, including many troops from Hawai’i, are fighting and dying that is pre-eminent news.

Another easy call is our emphasis on news from Asia and the Pacific. That’s because many residents’ ancestors came from those places, because of strong business and tourism ties, because we share an ocean and environmental concerns and for other reasons. For instance, the story about Australia’s apology to its Aboriginal people was given a lot of space in Thursday’s paper because that island nation has much in common with Hawai’i. Last week, a story about the military buildup on Guam ran on Page One.

After Asia and the Pacific, the foreign news decisions get trickier.

Sure Canada is America’s biggest trading partner and a lot of snowbirds come here from north of the 49th Parallel. But Canada is so well run and prosperous that most of its news tends to cure insomnia in laboratory rats. Consequently, we don’t run a lot of stories out of Canada.

Mexico? There is a growing population here with Mexican ties but it is still a small part of the population.

Israel and the Palestinians? Yes, a lot of American taxpayers’ dollars goes to Israel and elsewhere in the region. And the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is the genesis for much of the Islamic world’s antipathy toward America. But that conflict has continued for so many decades with so many of the story lines repeating themselves that the area seems to call for only the occasional article in our pages unless events boil over.

Picking news from the rest of the world is a series of judgment calls with few powerful guidelines. We make our choices carefully and select what we consider to be the top foreign stories. If you feel some subjects have been neglected, I am interested in hearing from you.

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My score Wednesday for Thursday’s front page: 60%. I thought, for instance, that the Aborigine story was Page One material but it ended up on A3.

Dan Inouye is the most powerful man in the state. You might have been able to make that case even in recent decades even when we had a male governor. So when the senior U.S. senator from Hawaii announces that he is engaged to be married, where does The Advertiser play the story? How important is news about the personal life of a powerful public official?

Editor Mark Platte and Managing Editor Sandee Oshiro had a quick discussion and chose to run the item as an ordinary breaking news item online with a photo of his fiancée, Irene Hirano. They decided the news did not merit a “special module,” a breakout of major breaking news that appears from time to time at the top of our Web site.

There was more time for the discussion about where to play it in the newspaper. Initial opinions ranged from the off-lead position on A1 to putting it on B1, the Hawai’i section cover. The off-lead is usually the third story on a page and therefore one of the stories above the fold and visible in news boxes and racks. (The lead is the story with the biggest headline, of course, and the centerpiece is the dominant visual picture/graphic/story on the page; sometimes they are the same story). In Wednesday’s paper’s, the off-lead is the one-column story on the Florida primaries.

When Maggie Inouye, the senator’s wife of 57 years, died, the story was The Advertiser’s centerpiece on Page A1 on Tuesday, March 14, 2006. She had been a major part of his political rise and was well known throughout the state, so the decision to report the story prominently on Page One was obvious.

Inouye and his office yesterday made the announcement of his engagement, so there was no issue that we were intruding into the senator’s personal life. Because Inouye is Hawai’i’s most powerful man, and maybe the most well-known, I suggested the story of his coming marriage should be the off-lead. I felt the story was of high interest to our readers. People would want to know more about this woman who won the heart of the 83-year-old widower.

I suggested that we keep primary story on Page One but move it below the Inouye story.

Those who argued that the Inouye story should go on B1 said that news of the engagement, though interesting, had no impact on Inouye’s career or power. It was “social page” news. A national story about the deadly consequences of prescription drugs with similar-sounding names was a more important story, some editors argued, that had more important implications for our readers. (That story eventually ran inside the A-section.)

Some people said the Inouye story would be A1 worthy if Inouye or Hirano spoke at greater length (or depth), but all we had was a few sentences from the bridegroom to be.

The compromise was to put the engagement story on the bottom of Page One, an acknowledgement that the story was both high-interest and soft news.

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A few days ago a reader declined my invitation to second guess us on the front-page lineup. The reader called it “A rather difficult assignment, especially when you consider that readers do not have reporters and editors ‘pitching’ stories to us every day. Nor do we have any authority to launch investigative reporters, photographers, graphic artists, etc, onto a topic that seems at first to be innocuous.”

All true, but what I was simply trying to do was recreate the 3 p.m. meeting. It’s too late to launch investigations at that point; those things were done in the morning or days and weeks earlier. At 3 p.m., it’s more a matter of choosing from a menu that has been created throughout the day. And the results of that menu is what is in the next day’s paper. So I still welcome any of your thoughts on what should or shouldn’t be on the front page.

And I also welcome your suggestions on stories or investigations that you think we should be pursuing.

And thanks for reading this blog.

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My score Tuesday: 80 percent.

Decades ago, I read that the creative epicenter of dark humor was the trading floors of stock and other exchanges. That’s where fast-working, brainy people working under intense pressure fed off each other’s creativity to compose jokes that were based on the latest news. The jokes could be mocking, racist, sexist, even cruel, and often political. Then the jokes would spread like the flu throughout the world. Just the sort of jokes you now hear on “The Daily Show” when the writers aren’t on strike.

A psychologist might contradict me, but I always presumed the crude humor of those traders was a defense mechanism against the pressure of the job and the pressure of your livelihood (and your customers’ savings) being dependent on news events outside your control. A war in the Middle East sends oil prices through the roof. Or bad loans in America cripple stocks in Japan and Germany.

Newsroom people are also accustomed to using humor, cynicism and other defense mechanisms to cope with the misery they must report. They don’t start out that way. During college, I worked in a TV newsroom typing in “supers” for items on live newscasts. (Supers are the names and titles that identify people talking on camera.) I worked in the back of the control room, away from the director, producer and other grownups running the show. During one newscast, I teared up watching a heart-rending story about children starving in Africa. Watching the misery unfold on six different TV screens in stereo sound made it even more painful. Yet no one else in the control room paid attention. They were all chatting during about what what to do after work. I wanted to scream and scold them. Instead, I just felt morally superior.

I don’t feel superior anymore. I realize now that they had likely learned to occasionally tune out such news because it was too painful to see it twice or three times a day, every working day of their life, for decades. I try to retain my humanity, but I can’t read or watch anymore with the emotional intensity of that morally superior 18-year-old. The callouses have built up over the years from thousands of stories, each different, but too many embodying injustice and inhumanity. I’ve learned to digest them without allowing them to consume me. Otherwise, I would have become a missionary or an alcoholic.

Guess what? My world is now your world. What used to be the special privilege of news people — round-the-clock access to the world’s misery and cruelty — is now available to everyone. In addition to newspapers, there’s thousands of Internet on-demand sources, 24-hour TV news and so much more. Everyone is building up callouses that used to belong to cynical police reporters who had seen it all. Congratulations.

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My score on Friday was 80%.

Monday’s score was 100%. This congruity of news judgment is so out of character.

Editor Mark Platte’s and my A1 lists differed by one out of five stories, so he gave me a score of 80% on Thursday. That came after two days in which we agreed 100%.

Clearly, intelligent and informed people can have different views of what are the top stories of the day. What about you? What are your top five stories of today or anyday? How does your list differ from what ended up on the front page? What about A1 pictures?

I’d be interested in the reasons behind your list. Remember, there are no right and wrong answers. I won’t be assigning scores to anyone.