How important is it that a news story is new, that it just broke? Is the timeliness more important than, let’s say, how many people are affected?

As The Advertiser’s digital editor and today’s Behind the Headlines guest blogger, I thought I’d talk about the breaking news headlines we list on our home page.

I’m not talking about the really big stories, like last week’s coverage of the Aloha cargo division events. Those go in a special module at the top of the page. No discussion there. I’m talking about the daily breaking news that we run in a column in the top part of our home page.

We run the breaking news stories in that space in chronological order with the latest one first, by default. Many of our readers want it that way because it makes it easy to check in several times a day and scan the headlines to see what the latest news is.

But we didn’t always do it that way. When we first got serious about posting breaking stories around the clock, we weighed the impact of the stories and listed them with the heftier ones on top.

We heard from many readers who didn’t like that format because they would have to search for stories that were new. Sure, the story at the top of the heap might have been very important but they had already read it and they wanted something fresh.

That’s the reason why we decided to run the latest ones on top. (That and the fact that our boss, Senior Vice President/Editor Mark Platte, told us to do it.)

We know some of our readers disagree with this decision. They say we list stories that don’t qualify as breaking news in their opinion. These are readers who want us to make a news decision and keep the most important ones on top, even when other, less important events keep unfolding throughout the day.

Which type of reader are you? Would you rather see the very latest, or do you want us to weigh the importance?

Tags: breaking news

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.