What's news? [Updated]

I'd consider yesterday's YouTube shooting in San Bruno, CA to be the news cycle's top story.  Apparently, local newspaper editors disagree.

https://twitter.com/r0eland/status/981361949366784000




This morning, the editors of our local suburban newspaper, the Northwest Suburban Daily Herald, put the following stories and items on the front page:

• The top story, in big block letters: "Trump: Military to guard border"
• Above the Trump story, at the very top of the front page, a local story: "Arlington Hts. ready to allow microbreweries"
• To the left of the Trump story, an item that promotes content inside the paper: "Martin Luther King Jr. - gone 50 years", including a large black-and-white closeup of King giving his final speech/sermon in Memphis, and references to three additional stories inside 
• Below the fold, another local story and photo: "$1,500 in first lottery draw in '74, $1 million today" (apparently, the person who won Illinois' very first lottery drawing recently also had a much bigger winning ticket).
• In addition to these stories and photos, three other items are teased/promoted: 
• "WGN personalities told to keep quiet about Sinclair's required script on media; they comply" - a story about a conservative media conglomerate that is buying a local television and radio station
• "Coming to Ribfest" - a story about a celebrity(?) named Pitbull who will make an appearance at a local suburban summer festival
• "Tiger, Phil pals?" - a sports column about a friendship between professional golfers Tiger Wood and Phil Mickelson
• There is a strip of advertising at the bottom, for on-sale items at a local supermarket.

This is an interesting variety of stories - some local, some national; some hard news, some the opposite of hard; some about new news, some with more retrospective content.

What isn't mentioned, anywhere on the front page, is that there was a shooting at YouTube headquarters yesterday.  

A reader who doesn't pay attention to other news media and who doesn't have the time or motivation to turn the page, would have no idea that there was another shooting.  I would have supposed the shooting would be yesterday's top story.  When I took the plastic wrapper off the newspaper this morning, I scanned the front page for that story, and was surprised not to see anything.  Clearly, the editors didn't feel it was sufficiently important to land on the front page.

Perhaps part of the issue is that the story is still developing: as I write this, stories are starting to be reported in other media that the shooter had some sort of a grudge against YouTube, seemingly because of the company's content-filtering policies, which she thought was filtering out her content.  But I haven't seen a story yet that explained what those policies are, or why the company would choose to filter her. 

It's also being reported that she didn't know anyone at the company, so apparently this wasn't personal (although earlier, seemingly-erroneous reports were that she did know someone there).  

The shooter's name, Nasim Aghdam, is one that sounds vaguely as though it comes from the Muslim-majority part of the world.  That, combined with the fact that this was, in a sense, a suicide attack, suggests some superficial similarities to terrorist and terrorist-wannabe attacks.  But if there is any evidence of  the shooter's allegiance to or sympathy with ISIS, al-Qaida or another terrorist group, apparently it hasn't been reported yet.  But neither does the YouTube-content-filtering theory (yet) contradict a terrorism theory; we'd need to understand why her content, which seemed to cover such items as personal fitness, a vegan lifestyle, and cruelty to animals, would have been deemed unsuitable by YouTube.  UPDATE 4/4/2108 11:10 pm CT: As reporters (thank the Lord for them) do their jobs, we are starting to get more context.  Abby Ohlheiser, who writes about digital matters for the Washington Post, provides a much-needed article that explains that YouTube is a platform which generates revenue streams for some content creators.  Aghdam seems to have been one of these.  The relationship between the company and its community of professional content creators hasn't always been amicable, but in the wake of this shooting by a content creator, some of the most prominent creators are showing solidarity with the company's employees.  One of the strange aspects of this story is that the shooting seems to transgress the boundary between the virtual world and the real world where real people live and die.  

It also seems that Aghdam's family had tried to warn police that she might be looking to "do something" at YouTube, but whether police who could actually do something about it received the message, and if so whether they acted upon the information, is still unclear.

So there are some interesting hooks to the story: the shooter was a woman, which is unusual; she seems to have a Middle Eastern background (some of her YouTube content was in Farsi); the fact that her family seemingly tried to warn authorities suggests that she was known to be unstable; and somehow she was in possession of the gun.

Regarding the point about the gun - the main point in all this surely is that this story is about a shooting.  And shootings have been very big news recently - most recently because of a series of very large marches and demonstrations, including those in which Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school survivors took part.  

So my supposition in all this is that the newspaper editors decided that the story isn't well-developed enough yet to put on Page 1.  The shooter's motive isn't crystal clear yet.  And the story itself is sort of hard to categorize.  It wasn't a school shooting; it doesn't seem to be a terrorism incident; it wasn't done by a man; the body count was not particularly high (although that may be more because of the shooter's incompetence than anything else - she is reported to have fired dozens of shots).  However editors decide what a story means and how it fits into larger story lines, it seems that this story isn't yet a good fit.