IDS needs front page balance

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! IDS front page dominated by sports coverage once again! Disturbing trend carries over into second semester!\nYes, it's true. The IDS has been unable to kick its bad habit of giving less-than-crucial sports news prominent placement on the front page. This is a trend the ombudsman noticed last semester but said and wrote nothing about, hoping that it would not continue.\nGranted, we're less than a fortnight into the spring semester, but already the IDS has published a single issue (Monday, Jan. 8) that featured not one, but two sports stories. Both had accompanying photos in the primary optical area -- the area of the front page located above the fold. Throw in a banner headline ("Hoosiers topple No. 1 Spartans"), and you've got a pretty decent front-page package -- for the sports section, that is.\nOK, so the unranked men's basketball squad knocking off Michigan State was big news and probably deserved its place as the lead story on the front page. The ombudsman (a lifelong Hoosier, incidentally) will concede that point. But the other Jan. 8 front-page story in the POA, which detailed the women's basketball team's loss to Purdue, could have been relocated to the front page of the sports section so that a news story could be placed above the fold.\nA successful front page contains many elements. One of these is balance. The IDS has achieved balanced front-page news coverage more often than not throughout this and last semester, but there have been way too many issues in which sports stories dominated the front page POA -- 12 too many, to be exact.\nDuring the course of some quasi-scientific research performed over the weekend, the ombudsman found that 12 editions of this year's IDS -- from the very first issue up until the one you are currently reading -- featured two or more sports stories in the front page POA. This is unacceptable.\nBut that's not all. My research also found that 39 issues of the IDS featured at least one sports story on the front page of the newspaper; 19 issues featured two or more front-page sports stories; and 30 issues featured at least one sports story in the front page POA. \nThese statistics need some explanation. Keep in mind that one of the biggest sports stories in the history of IU -- the firing of former men's basketball coach Bob Knight -- occurred last semester. Naturally that was bound to cause a dramatic increase in front page sports coverage. The community interest level in the Knight controversy was extremely high, which justified such prolonged and prominent coverage.\nIn "The Art of Editing," authors Floyd K. Baskette, Jack Z. Sissors and Brian S. Brooks write, "the front page should be distinctive, with a personality of its own. Although it should serve to set the tone of the entire paper, the front page personality should be one that readers like and respect because the news on that page is the most significant in the paper."\nThe front page of the IDS should not adopt the personality of the sports page. The legitimacy or newsworthiness of sporting events or sports in general is not the issue here. In fact, as was so aptly demonstrated by the Knight controversy, sports can transcend most --if not all -- other human affairs; they can both unite and divide us as sharply and fiercely as politics or religion. \nBut after that transcendence is gone, what are we left with? Politics, government, art, religion, academics, social and cultural issues, etc.-- all of which are sometimes more mundane than basketball or football heroics, but no less important. \nYes, sports are and will continue to be important, especially in a Big Ten university community such as this. But the IDS must strive to find a balanced personality for its front page -- one that consistently speaks to all its readers and not just the sports fans.