J. TODD FOSTER: JV Baseball Story Struck A Chord With Our Readers

ON THE WEB:

Registration may be required, but read Friedman’s column at: www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/opinion/04friedman.html

Read about the John Battle JV controversy and the reader comments at:www.tricities.com/tristate/tri/news.apx.-content-articles-TRI-2008-05-05-0003.OFFSET__121.html.

An acquaintance, avid reader and critical thinker whom I respect and admire – even though he routinely infuriates me – questioned the rationale behind a front-page story last week.

Why, he wrote me, when America is only a shell of her former self, would we lead Monday’s A1 with a story about some junior varsity baseball players getting benched?

The reader, an Abingdon resident, had just read the John Battle High School article after reading New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who lamented the deteriorating state of our country.

"We are not as powerful as we used to be," Friedman wrote, "because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents’ generation – work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means – have given way to subprime values: ‘You can have the American dream – a house – with no money down and no payments for two years.’ "

A TRIPLE Pulitzer Prize winner, Friedman has bigger fish to fry than does the Bristol Herald Courier. His newspaper covers the world, but not Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee. That job falls to the Herald Courier.

We are a community newspaper whose focus and future has to be on reporting local issues, including a controversy involving junior varsity baseball players. (Parents of ninth- and 10th-grade players have alleged that John Battle High is benching their sons unjustly in order to play eighth-graders from a local middle school in an attempt to create a varsity powerhouse four years down the road.)

"I gagged when I saw the lead article on your front page this morning and what Battle parents have gotten themselves in a lather about," the Abingdon reader e-mailed me. "It is nothing, at least nothing that is important. This is a true modern-day case of fiddling while Rome burns.

"... A PLACE on the second-string team is not that important, especially when the world in which little Johnny will have to live and compete is crumbling around him and his peers. ... These parents simply have their priorities wrong, and while we are talking, the newspaper could do the community a favor and not foster such wrong thinking by giving it all that newsprint and ink."

Agreed, the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But it’s The New York Times’ job to cover the journey. Ours is to cover local news. Because unlike the reader who cancelled his subscription last week over the dearth of international news in this newspaper, the vast majority of our readers want local news.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t localize the impacts on our residents of gasoline approaching four bucks a gallon, or the war in Iraq or the subprime mortgage debacle. We have and will continue reporting on those topics.

But the bar on whether a story belongs on our front page cannot be raised or lowered depending on the world’s whims and problems.

WE WILL print important international news inside the paper and hopefully not print any news about Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton at all.

However, A1 is reserved for our best local stories, even seemingly myopic ones about a baseball controversy.

We knew the John Battle JV baseball story would resonate and were validated by the Web traffic that piece generated. As of Friday at lunch time, that story was read by more than 5,700 people on our Web site, TriCities.com, and had 112 reader responses, many of them emotional, some of them nonsensical and a few of them rank.

This story, by Brian T. Smith, clearly struck a nerve. Far more than a local controversy involving just a handful of parents, the story speaks to larger societal issues – winning at all costs, bending the rules, class and social standing.

I’M ALSO betting that 10, 20, 30 years from now, when those freshman and sophomore ballplayers are hitting their mid-20s and then middle age, the slights they perceived were done to them in high school will carry far greater psychological scars and morals than the grand question of whether America has lost her way.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier. He may be reached at jfoster@bristolnews.com or (276) 645-2513.