Every correspondent has a story about someone who wanted something covered and didn’t understand why it didn’t rise to a minimal threshold. But however you attack or defend it, news editing philosophy is always based on what consumers want.

Sure, U.S. news consumers are especially parochial and ought to eat more servings of vegetables than dessert. Does anybody seriously believe that there is so little actually going on in the world that MSNBC-TV has had to cover the US election to the exclusion of all else for the past few days? Is it surprising that Gannet’s major strategic shift isn’t toward in-depth coverage of Darfur, but data mining community message boards (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ntent/article/2006/11/06/AR2006110601142 .html)?

Even news professionals have a limited appetite. When I was training American’s Deskers in Washington to post to the original reuters.com which was permitted to have only five (5) stories at a time! each of these seasoned editors, who handled dozens of stories a day, belittled our tiny news hole. I would ask each of them how many stories from the day before they remembered (3 or 4, without exception) and how many of those they still cared about (0 or 1, without exception) and that was the end of that.

So, what should resonate vs. what resonates? Those who respond correctly are apt to be around long enough to help write the history of this next decade of Internet news. Those who do not will soon be writing pious memoirs that people will also not read.