SACRAMENTO: 'Looking at ink blots'
by Gregory Favre, group editor, McClatchy

About thirty-five years ago, our American Press Institute class for managing editors was entertained at The New York Times with drinks and dinner and good conversation. Naturally, we wanted to say thanks and elected one of our group to offer a toast.

"On behalf of everyone," he said as he lifted his glass, "I want to thank The New York Times for its hospitality and I want to thank it for showing us everything we should do and everything we shouldn't do, all in the same paper." Thank goodness, we had already eaten dessert.

That was long ago and the times and the Times have changed, as have all of our newspapers. Some are better, some are worse, some are long gone.

Are those of us on this side of the Hudson River guided by the Times's front-page budgets or what the networks are playing at the top of their shows, or what the news magazines or The Wall Street Journal think the important stories are?

I think not.

This doesn't mean that we don't depend on news services headquartered in the shadows of Times Square or Rockefeller Center for some news and information that appears in our papers daily. None of us has the resources to cover all of the world.

But the fact is, local and regional news together are at the core of most of our franchises, recognizing that the definition of local is changing. It has more layers than ever before, more dimensions. It is more sophisticated, more complicated, and there are many more nuances to deal with.

California is the first state without an ethnic majority. That will be true of this nation by the middle of this century if projections are accurate. We have to understand and explain a society that is rapidly changing and we shouldn't need folks from somewhere else to tell us what is important in our neighborhoods.

I've read stories published in New York about our state or about our governors, past and present, and it was like a Rorschach test. Were we looking at the same inkblots?