In the past two weeks, I have received a barrage of angry letters from readers questioning the placement of front-page articles. A major point of contention surrounds our coverage of the Madrid terrorist attacks on March 11.Students' biggest grumble over our coverage of the Madrid attacks was not the story's placement-dominating the front page of our March 16 issue-but that the attacks in Spain were covered when the all-too-common occurrence of suicide bombings in Israel seem to be overlooked by our news section.

"I still have not figured out what makes something 'news,'" wrote one reader in response to last week's issue. "Is it news to discuss the safety of students in Madrid, but not news to discuss the safety of students in Haifa, Ashdod, Jerusalem or Tel Aviv?"

The short answer is yes.

Most state, national and international stories don't have a place in our news section. We bow to the glut of "real" newspapers and humbly point our readers toward them for coverage that exceeds our capabilities. Of course, every once in a while a story so big comes along that ignoring it would be irresponsible. Such was the case with the Madrid bombings.

Not since Pan Am Flight 103 crashed over Lockerbie, Scotland has Western Europe witnessed an attack of such staggering magnitude. Realizing this, News Editor David Cutler '06, who later penned the story, immediately placed it on the news budget for the week.

As a university paper, we must make far-removed stories compelling and especially relevant for our readership. We look to localize the story. In such situations, "Where's the Brandeis angle?" becomes our mantra.
In the case of the Madrid bombings, the Brandeis angles were clear.

Eight Brandeis students are studying in Madrid, one of our school's hottest foreign study locales. Of course, one might argue, similar considerations are just as relevant after a bus bombing in Jerusalem. But the reason we chose to cover what happened in Madrid was because of the event's scale and not its scope.

Naturally, if there were an equally large attack in Israel tomorrow, we would cover it in a similar manner. But most of the recent terrorist strikes on Israel might as well be yesterday's news. They fail to demand the attention of many Americans because of their unfortunate regularity, and the fact that their occurrences generally do not convey new information or insight into a complex social situation.

It required news judgment to determine that the story on the Madrid attacks should run on page one. But first, it required a fair degree of value judgment for editors to recognize the importance of the Madrid story-not only within the scope of world news, but to the Brandeis community.

Such value judgment can often get us in trouble with readers. But by comparison to some situations, the decision to put Madrid out front seems clear cut.

Buried in the International section of the New York Times Web site, two clicks off the main page, a two-paragraph brief filed yesterday from Katmandu by an Associated Press reporter languishes in obscurity.
Someone decided that the story of 500 Maoist rebels who died in a brutal 12-hour battle with Nepali forces isn't compelling enough for American readers. Some value judgments, I guess, are easier to justify than others.

Editor's Note: This column will appear on a monthly basis, featuring commentary relevant to the production and operation of the Justice.