minalisms

As though the cyclone in Myanmar last week that has killed nearly 30,000 weren’t enough, another natural disaster lashed out today, this time in China, where the death toll from a magnitude-7.9 earthquake has already reached 10,000.

The news followed up a sad weekend story, in which about 25 people in the Midwest and South were killed by tornadoes and violent storms.

And who can forget the weeks-long saga regarding unrest in Tibet, which I’m sure has not vanished but has merely turned into an afterthought, regarded as passé by finicky editors around the nation.

This is a snapshot of my work day, and these are the types of events that comprise it. I read story after story — violent crimes rising in cash-strapped cities, Shiite militias planting roadside bombs in Iraq, the number of home foreclosures hitting a record high — gauging whether one tragedy can top another enough to make it on the front page of a 15-by-22-inch newspaper.

In my industry that’s called “news judgment.”