However, we’re learning that some of our readership doesn’t check news websites outside of MLive. That means, if a national story breaks, and they don’t see it on our news or homepage, they don’t see it at all, unless by hearsay. And at that point, they are asking “why didn’t MLive have that story?”

An example my managing producer likes to use is “I heard about Saddam Hussein’s capture when I read it on MLive.” Yes, he checks other news outlets, but he happened to check MLive first that day and that’s where he got the story. We didn’t post every follow-up to that story, as that’s not our focus, but we do want to be able to at least give visitors a hint to big breaking news.

I agree with reserving the main package for mostly local items. We follow the same philosophy, unless it’s a story big enough to impact the lives of our readers. And I will admit, we have done a little posting of britney-type stories (lower down on the page) but the traffic is hit or miss on those.

My pilosophy is that one or two national stories need to be on the site, but they don’t need to be in the most prominent position.

I reserve the main package with art for local news. I sprinkly a few national stories in the update ticker.

Sites of our size tend to do the same. commercialappeal.com, al.com. Larger ones often do. chron.com, ajc.com, azcentral.com

It doesn’t belong on a local news site.

My basic philosophy is that we don’t try to take on the CNNs and NYTimes of the world. We try to keep the focus on local. However, when a story makes the jump to being something that everyone is talking about on a local level at the expense of what’s going on around town then we put it up on the homepage.

That strategy tends to lend itself to an overabundance of Brittney-type stories on the homepage, which always but always get a lot of traffic. It does have the side affect of eating away at our already shallow souls. So we try to only hit the truly high and low watermarks in the lives of our favorite celebrities.

What amazes me is that some national stories, even when we have a strong local element, only do so-so in page views.

Example: Hillary Clinton was in town Wednesday and there was a resulting controversy centered around her speaking at a Catholic university. We had well over 200 comments on the story, but it only ended up doing around 5,000 few thousand page views between the main story and the comments.

I guess the balance I try to find is giving the audience what it wants and also fulfill our mission of providing our users with important local stories and information.

We’re staffed pretty much from 6 a.m. through 1 or 2 a.m. So we’re usually in pretty good shape to cover breaking news when most people are awake.