Complete Coverage

The New York Times has a slogan on the front page of every newspaper that reads, "All the news that's fit to print." It takes much longer than 30 minutes to read every article in a New York Times newspaper, so the Times can print much more news than a network can broadcast in a 30 minute newscast.

One of the challenges of broadcast news (and print news too) is determining what to cover and what not to cover. Another challenge is determining how much time to allocate to a certain story, but I am only addressing the challenge of determining what to cover.

One critique of local and network news is the disproportional coverage of the world. Naturally, and appropriately, the majority of the news covered is local to the United States. Beyond that, most of the coverage is of the Middle East, primarily Iraq and Afghanistan.

I decided to look at ksl.com to see how proportional, or disproportional, their world news was. The home page contains local news, so I clicked on the 'world' tab. The 15 stories on Monday night, April 5, break down as such:

Thailand
China
South Korea
Afghanistan
Mexico
Cuba
Pakistan
Great Britain
Haiti
Vatican
Iraq
Mexico
Nigeria
Chile
Haiti

Only Mexico and Haiti had multiple stories (2). 6 of the stories were significant U.S stories as well, which added merit to the coverage. Overall, of the top 15 world stories on ksl.com, 13 different countries were represented, including 9 that had little or no American involvement in the story.

For a local Utah news website, that is pretty diverse.