Fuel For The Front Page (And The Home Page)

Yesterday, news that a suspect had been charged with the murder of New York City graduate student Imette St. Guillen was one of the top stories at CBSNews.com. The CBS affiliate in New York has since scored an exclusive interview with the suspect, and today he was indicted. As a result, the case has remained among the top stories.

It's received quite a bit of prominent coverage on CBSNews.com as well as pretty much every other news Web site, not to mention newspapers and cable news channels.

The New York and Boston tabloids (St. Guillen was originally from Boston) have given the story a particularly substantial amount of coverage. In today's Boston Phoenix, Mark Jurkowitz took a close look the battle of coverage among the Boston dailies as well as a brief glance at how the New York Post and The Daily News have handled it (with headlines that appear to have come "straight out of a fright flick.")

While it seemed like a story that would be of greatest interest to New Yorkers or Bostonians, I asked Mike Sims, director of news and operations for CBSNews.com, why the story got top billing on the site. He agreed that it was a New York story, "but it received a lot of nationwide attention."

Placement at the top of the homepage is "gauged by the story and the interest level of the public," says Sims. The top stories are intended to offer a "mix of information that we think people need and want to know." How does he gauge the public's interest in a story? "Editorial experience … gut instinct. By being a newsman," he added, "and that's a very subjective line."

"Sometimes it's an obvious answer and sometimes it's not," says Sims. He and several editors meet throughout the day to determine story selection and placement. "We have these discussions a lot …and there's very little agreement" much of the time.

CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen offered some insight into why stories like this seem to take off the way that they do. "There are two different things going on here with this story, the first being the location," he said. Because it took place in New York City and St. Guillen was from Boston, the story gained steam because "those are two of the biggest cities on the Eastern seaboard and also two cities with the most intense tabloids."

"There's a sort of water-cooler dynamic that goes on and it's particularly intense in New York," said Cohen, who suggests that the reach of the story might have been different if the crime had taken place in a different city.

The second issue that drives stories like St. Guillen's is the relationship between the news consumer and the story. "A lot of young people – particularly young women – can identify with [the story]…people who go out to bars, who drink … they identify with being vulnerable."

"Does that justify the coverage? That really depends on what your philosophy is," he said. "You can cover a story because people are talking about it, or you can cover a story that you think people should be talking about."

Cohen recently wrote a piece for CBSNews.com in which he examined why some murders seem to get more attention from the media than others. He looked at the case of Neil Entwistle, who is charged with the murders of his wife and daughter. He says St. Guillen's is a similar type of story in which the audience seems to become emotionally attached.

"What happens is people become educated with the people involved in these stories. They identify with them, they become characters. Once the public invests itself, the story has legs," said Cohen.

Stories like St. Guillen's, says Cohen, tend to "take on a life of their own" once they are highlighted by tabloids. "And in the age of the Internet, it's that much easier to follow these stories."