The Palo Alto Daily News made the new issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, but not in a way that the paper’s staff would have preferred. CJR has a column called “Darts and Laurels” where the good and bad of American journalism is highlighted. Here’s what the column said:
- “[A dart] to the Palo Alto Daily News for blindly toeing the local line. ‘Everybody,’ as was noted on Slate’’s August 11 roundup of Today’’s Papers, ‘leads with the big, foiled terror plot in which twenty-four British men, mostly of Pakistani descent, were arrested and are suspected of plotting to bomb multiple airliners with liquid explosives.’ Everybody, that is, but the Palo Alto Daily News, whose policy keeps its front page bound to strictly local news, hand and foot. There the lead story on August 11 was not the terrorist plot –— which did eventually show up on the paper’’s page eleven –— but rather on some proposed new rules to strengthen the sanitary standards for pedicures.”