What's Up Front

For the past two years, the reader of an American newspaper has been virtually assured of finding a Watergate-related story blazoned across the front page. But now the drumbeat of daily Watergate headlines has died away to a faint, uninsistent thump. Suddenly, there is no "news." Or, to put the matter another way, all the news that fits is in print. Local gripes now receive fullblown front-page treatment. Crime makes a comeback. Sports stories normally relegated to back pages jump startlingly forward. The merely eyecatching, the determinedly trivial and the yawning of a new era are now featured boldly. Says the Boston Globe's assistant managing editor, Tim Leland: "Stories that would have struggled to make it into the paper before are now on the front page no less."

A sampling of recent front pages saw a re-enactment of an 1830 race between a horse-drawn train and a vintage locomotive given prominent play in the Baltimore Sun. As in 1830, the horse won. Late editions of the Los Angeles Times featured a lead story documenting a less-than-earth-shaking expose of the low standards for scuba-diving instruction, and the Bismarck (N. Dak.) Tribune snagged readers with a seven-column head declaring: FEWER SPECIAL DEER PERMITS AVAILABLE. The Swing is a slightly manic but welcome return to normalcy after a grateful escape from the long hail of bulletins issuing from Washington. No news might even last long enough to become boring, though it would be imprudent, given the past decade or so, to count on it.

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