Playing the stock market story

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Reader Ken Reza of Burbank thought that the news of the Dow Jones industrial average scoring its biggest one-day point gain ever should have been on the front page Tuesday.

‘I just wanted to offer some advice on how your paper could help build investor confidence that we so desperately need and would hence help rebuild our economy,’ wrote Reza in an e-mail sent Tuesday. ‘Yesterday we just saw a record 900+ point surge in the market that had never been seen before on Wall Street. This should have been on the front page of today’s paper and here is why: It would ... help ordinary Americans feel more confident that [our] system is not broken, it would allow foreign investors to regain confidence that America is still the number one country to do business in and last of all it would help to just see a positive reflection of our economy. I would like to see more positive spins from L.A. Times when they appear so that way it can help restore the confidence in Americans in not pulling all of [their] money out of the stock market.’

The story about the Dow Jones’ ‘exuberance,’ as the print headline put it, ended up on the front of the Business section. The lead story on Page A1 Tuesday was news of the government’s pumping $250 billion into banks. On Monday, Reza might be encouraged to know, editors had discussed the possibility of putting the Dow Jones story out front on Page A1. But ultimately, as Business Editor Sallie Hofmeister said, whether a story will cheer people or not isn’t really a consideration on where it goes in the paper.

‘While the market rally is very important,’ Hofmeister said in an e-mail, ‘there was no way of telling yesterday whether this was a one-day blip or a sign that we had hit the bottom. At the end of the day, the news about the banks was more important. We don’t determine the placement of stories based on whether they would cheer people up or not. It has to be based on the merits and the importance. Markets go up and down and while we were up dramatically yesterday and could have justified putting it on A1, there was too much competition, with the fire and the elections around the corner. Today, the Dow is back down, showing that we are in volatile times that make it difficult to draw a conclusion.’

(For details on how stories are picked for the front-page, visit the FAQ link on the right rail of this journal.)