Front Page vs. Home Page
            

            Dear Katharine,

            I don't know anything about your reading habits, but these days a lot of my
newspaper consumption is online. There are a number of reasons for this: a
nomadic office life over the last year, which left me without a reliable
physical address; contributing to "Media Grok," an e-mail newsletter that
thrives on Web links; and the sheer amount of time I spend staring at my laptop
screen. Although I find the convenience of online newspapers compelling, I'm
also first to acknowledge that there are things you miss when not touching the
actual pulp.

            Take today's New York Times . Like most political mammals, I am drawn
to Adam Clymer's front-page story on the 25th anniversary of Nixon's
resignation. The piece itself is tame and perfunctory, but when you open the
paper to Page A12 where it continues, your eye travels immediately to the
continuation of another front-page story headlined "G.O.P. Asking Top Donors To
Contribute $1 Million." Forgive me, but if you've listened to those famous
Watergate tapes, you can't help but hear Nixon's voice echoing on how to get a
million dollars of hush money to the plumbers: "We could get that." I love that
both stories end up, as it were, on the same page.

            One could slyly infer from the A12 juxtaposition that with the GOP seeking
all top donors to give $1 million apiece, Watergate-style abuses will
inevitably reoccur. A facile assumption of the left? Sure. But at least that
would counter the right's facile assumption that Nixon's crimes were not
substantially different from those of his predecessors, the tack taken by David
Frum in a National Public Radio commentary this morning.

            My fascination here is not that one must take any particular meaning from
the play of the two stories, but that, as with a work of art, one can. The
"jump" of front-page news stories is a necessity borne of spatial limitation,
which the Web theoretically does not have. But working around those
limitations--and indeed manipulating them for narrative advantage--is one of
the great moments of the newspaper craft. (Headline writing in a narrow space
is another.)

            On the other hand, the Washington Post --which I'm reading today
online--displays one of the Web's great counterstrengths. You can click on
today's front page and get a reproduction of the Post's front-page
coverage from August 9, 1974: the Web as microfiche. The Post spoils the
effect somewhat: by calling its project immodestly "The Washington Post
Century," and running only excerpts of the original front-page stories. Still,
the historian in me applauds the widespread availability of primary documents,
and the media critic in me notes that the New York Times has no interest
in calling attention to the way that it covered (or rather didn't cover) the
Watergate saga.

            Sorry for the East Coast obsessions,
Jim