By: Joe Strupp If anyone in Columbus, Ga. didn't know their local baseball team had won the Little League World Series on Monday, today's front page of the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer left no doubt.
Taking up all of Page One with a center photo of the local youngsters celebrating on the field at Williamsport, Pa. -- and the banner headline "World Champs!" -- the local daily gave up four pages of reporting on the victory, with plans for even more coverage later this week.
"It is the biggest story in the community since Jimmy Carter was elected president," said Executive Editor Ben Holden, referring to the former president's nearby hometown of Plains. "It is the biggest story of the two years that I have been editor."
The World Series coverage even knocked out a page of reporting planned for the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast region just a few hundred miles away. Holden said the paper had planned to devote two pages to the anniversary, but chose to replace one of the pages with World Series reports after Monday's win.
"For this community, it is a bigger story," he said of the little league triumph. "The Katrina story a year later is significant through the rear-view mirror. We were not really impacted, it was more people coming here after the storm."
Columbus played a somewhat significant role in the Katrina aftermath, Holden said, noting that about 100 Katrina evacuees took up residence in the area since the hurricane. In addition, the Ledger-Enquirer was involved in the post-storm reporting because it printed the Sun Herald of Biloxi, Miss. for two weeks after the hurricane.
"It impacted this area a great deal," Holden says of the hurricane. "We still have a lot of evacuees, a lot of them living here now." But he said the paper had already devoted considerable space to the anniversary on Sunday and Monday with front page stories and inside reports. "We haven't received a single complaint," he said of the reduced hurricane coverage.
But the real impact may not come until later this week, editors said. The paper plans to publish a special eight-page section on Wednesday, followed by a commemorative team poster in Thursday's edition. On Sunday, a 16-page section with individual posters of each player will be published.
Circulation Director John Kelly said the paper bumped up its single copy press run Tuesday by 20%, adding an additional 2,000 copies to hawkers and newsstands, in addition to the usual 10,000 single copies. "We put out an extra thousand and held back a thousand this morning," Kelly said. "We have been running around [adding] those for a sellout." Holden said the paper's Web site also has seen increased traffic, reporting 93,000 hits on Monday, up from the usual 60,000.
When asked about the last time the paper devoted all of the front page to a single story, Holden said, "We had a guy who killed his family a year ago. That took up all of Page One."
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