Five years later

Photo intern Joe Barrentine opened this morning’s meeting with a selection of front pages from around the country. The treatment of the 9/11 anniversary varied widely around the country, and many papers used the opportunity for some very experimental designs.

Our front page, by comparison, was rather tame, but no one at the table expressed concern about the coverage being underdone. Steve Smith said he saw the coverage as a series of “live events,” rather than reflection. “I don’t think of this event as having completed yet,” he said.

It has become common practice for newspapers to commemorate anniversaries in intervals of five years, but some of the editors who have been in the business for a while didn’t recall this always being the case. Opinion page editor Doug Floyd said he would be curious to see if front pages in 1946 had anything on the fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor. “The idea of commemorating the anniversary of events I think is of fairly recent origin,” he said.

This Baltimore Sun article appears to support Floyd’s observation:

Five years after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, an Associated Press photograph shows about a dozen soldiers saluting as the “shrapnel-torn flag” that had flown that awful day was raised at Hickam Field in Honolulu. The Navy opted to do nothing. As one officer commented in the AP story, “We want to forget - not remember - Pearl Harbor.”

The article continues:

…on May 8, 1950, President Harry S. Truman let the fifth anniversary of V-E Day slide by practically unnoticed. He was busy barnstorming through the Midwest to pump up his new four-point farm policy initiative.

The author, Tom Dunkel, poses an interesting theory about why anniversaries of news events are such a big deal these days. Well worth a read .

People Upset With Us for Various Reasons™

For some readers, the revelations late last week that Gonzaga University covered up sex abuse by its president in the 1960s stirred outrage. Not outrage at the rape of young boys, and not outrage at the “artificial scenario” used to keep a lid on the truth, but outrage that we wrote about it. “What part of that story was important enough for front page headlines about an injustice of the past?” wrote one reader.

Assistant city editor Dan Hansen fielded a call from someone who felt that we didn’t write enough about the Spokane Polo Club , which was featured in a Northwest section centerpiece today. The caller was also upset, Hansen said, because we failed to publish a photograph of the women attending the event, some of whom were wearing interesting hats.

“That club gets more pub per the amount of people in it than anyone in town,” sports editor Joe Palmquist pointed out.