Newspaper Content, A Day in the Life

The national papers also did not have the same news agenda. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, was more local, and less tied to the news of the day. It featured three local stories on its Page 1, plus another specific to California. It also carried two trend stories. That left two non-local news stories on its front, both international in nature.

The New York Times, by contrast, was more about breaking news of the day — violence in Iraq , the plane scare in Washington, the North Korean announcement, and the protests in Afghanistan . It carried just one feature, about trash in Japan.

USA Today, meanwhile, carried no breaking news stories on its front page. It led rather with two trend features — about farming and about smoking on the job. And the lead story was an enterprise piece about how the USA Today had discovered that an adviser on a federal study of laser guns was a paid consultant to the manufacturer of the product. None of the three national papers agreed on the top story this day. None of the local papers did, either.

The sense from looking at the media generally this day was that the national newspapers in the country are on close examination more different from each other than are rival national network television news programs.