Ask The Editors

Did I miss reading the announcement in the Bee about the Democratic Debate held last night? It seems that none of my friends were aware of this important event, and apparently NBC did not make a big issue of it. Will you be announcing the Republican Debate coming up? As a concerned, patriotic citizen, I need to see both sides.

Diane Woody

Thank you for your question. We, too, believe in an informed public, so we advanced news of the debate, which was shown on MSNBC, twice (on Page E4 on April 24 and on Page A4 on April 26), as well as included references to it on our Web site. (Subscribers even received a news alert giving them a two-hour countdown.)

We plan to advance all national presidential debates, including the Republican presidential debate planned for May 3 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley.

(And for those who may have missed last night's debate, we have an Associated Press highlights reel attached to the debate story at FresnoBee.com.)

Posted by Kris Eldred at 03:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Why are there no movie listings during the daytime during the week and on the week-ends in the TV magazine? I purchase this every week and miss on a lot of movies from 10:00 am to 7:00 pm. Please explain. If it is to save space for other channel listings then you need to make the room. Thank You.

Holly

A few months ago, The Bee began printing its weekly TV & Cable Guide as a tabloid section. The guide includes the general schedule for weekday mornings and afternoons, but we no longer print day-by-day grids for daytime hours. Keeping those grids would have required the TV guide to grow by 10 pages, which is a very expensive proposition considering that daytime television viewership is very low and daytime programming on most television channels does not significantly change day to day.

Posted by Jack Robinson at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What has happened to our newspaper? The stories you are putting on the front page, such as Meth Babies, Police Cars, and Sports stories, certainly don't belong there. You have cut out so much of the paper I enjoyed. I had a hard time finding the book section today. We used to have a full page. And your new "7" section is ridiculous. From the looks of it today, you almost forgot to put it in.

Put human interest stories in the appropriate sections and sports in the sports section. Hard news stories belong on the front page.

Thank you for listening and do hope some changes are made.

Sincerely,

Carolyn Cochran
"A long time subscriber".

Thanks for writing to express your concern. But our philosophy about the front page hasn't changed. We always look for the most compelling stories we can find. And, like other newspapers -- even the New York Times and Wall Street Journal -- we sometimes find them in the world of sports or culture.

(The story about meth babies, by the way, described concerns about long-term health effects facing children exposed to methamphetamine in the womb -- not, as you suggest, a trivial issue.)

There was a time, decades ago, when newspapers had a more narrow definition of the front page. Editors favored stories that were important but dull, like political speeches, official reports and foreign treaties. Today the importance of a story is only one consideration. We think a good front page must have a lively mix of topics that reflects the varied interests of our readers.

In any case, the front page is only one page. If our choices for A1 do not always please you, I hope you will find other stories that interest you elsewhere in the paper.

Posted by Jack Robinson at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)