Of Boston Globe and Its Tuesday Front Page

Photo Source: bostonglobe.com

The Boston Globe's Tuesday, June 23, 2015 front page contains five major stories:

• Conservative media eye local niche
• Sides remain apart on T fixes
• Aquarium sees harm in tower plan
• Precarious future for primary care
• Baker vows action on opioid addiction.

According to Bill Kovach and Tom Rosentiel (2014), journalism represents "the system by which citizens get news." In that sense, the above stories belong on the front page because they primarily present their readers with the current--and in the Internet-social media parlance, the trending--news within and beyond their communities. 

Besides this primary role of presenting the citizens with news, the stories also serve the purpose of attracting interests of varied publics. Given, as Kovach and Rosentiel also observe, different publics engage different news items differently depending on the issue. No one public is completely disengaged, "everyone is interested and even expert in something." Globe's front page presents a diversified menu (in reference to Dave Burgin) which ensures that different publics finds something of interest, albeit on different scales. Kovach and Rosentiel call Burgin's diversified menu the theory of interlocking public.

The layout of the page grabbed my attention, especially with the accompanying picture for the third story, Aquarium sees harm in tower plan. The picture presents an aerial view of the location of the aquarium and the proposed tower, highlighting the two sites in red, thereby drawing attention to their proximity. Such presentation gives context to the argument for traffic disruption, construction vibration, and shadow-obstruction made by the aquarium.

The first story in particular has an opinion which can be inferred from its heading, Conservative media eye local niche. The article references Harvard's communication professor, Matthew A. Baum, as saying that "in a state that has backed a Democrat in 18 of the last 22 presidential elections, it makes sense that the new enterprises looking for a piece of untrammeled territory would see opportunity on the right side of the media landscape. Whereas the first part of the above statement is fact, the second half of it is an opinion drawn from the the preceding half to buttress the point that the voting pattern of the state does not foreclose conservative media presence.