On your day’s to-do list, is reading the paper a must?

If you think about the 10 or 15 things you absolutely have to do today, and the various decisions you have to make about them, how helpful would you say your daily newspaper is likely to be in any of those endeavors? My guess is you’d say, “Not very� -- no matter what paper you read.

“We have become disturbingly disconnected from average Americans,� says Martin Baron, editor of the Boston Globe, “from their most basic concerns about getting by day to day, paying the bills, educating the kids, holding together marriages, making it through work.�

In large part, that’s because journalists define news as a departure from the norm -- something new, different, sensational, spectacular, terrible, tragic, triumphant, scandalous -- and they haven’t figured out how to stretch that definition to include the everyday. But the norm (driving through traffic, interacting with office colleagues, disciplining children) defines many people’s daily lives.

That doesn’t mean newspapers should ape the news-you-can-use approach of local television news. Most people buy a daily newspaper because they’re interested in what’s happening in the world at large -- especially when, as now, much of what’s happening is confusing, even frightening. People want help making sense of the day’s events.

So how can newspapers be relevant on routine, personal issues -- while simultaneously trying to explain terrorism, global warming and a faltering economy? There is room in a good newspaper for both functions, and the best way to balance them is to connect them.

Connecting the personal to the political and the global to the local is a matter of survival for newspapers, which have been losing circulation for more than 30 years. Knowing that they risk becoming irrelevant to readers who are busier than ever, and who have ever more alternative sources of information, many newspapers across the country are trying desperately to make those connections.

Workplace coverage

Some newspapers used to have full-time “labor reporters� who devoted much of their time to covering internal union politics. Now several papers cover the less contentious but, to many, more relevant issues of the workplace -- and in the process, connect the impersonal, at times mind-numbing statistics of the business section with the realities of everyday employment. The Boston Globe, for example, has a weekly “BostonWorks� feature that provides coverage of such workplace issues as health care, finding a new job, mid-career education and techniques for creating a positive work environment.

Other papers have tried to make a different connection -- between reader and community -- by providing the kind of neighborhood news and information once limited to small weekly newspapers. The Dallas Morning News has created a series of 13 localized regional zone sections that offer a list of new books in the public library; the addresses and prices of recent home sales; meeting times and places for social, civic and service clubs; and greens fees at local golf courses.

The Los Angeles Times, in redesigning all its feature sections, tried -- among other objectives -- to make them more useful to readers. It shifted many of its entertainment listings from Sunday Calendar to the Calendar section published on Thursdays, for example, figuring that would be advantageous to readers planning their weekend activities (although many readers actually complained about the change).

A growing number of newspapers -- the Orange County Register, Detroit Free Press, Seattle Times and San Francisco Chronicle among them -- are publishing weekly guides to local road construction, detours, blockages and mass transit issues.

“We have ‘Commuter Chronicles’ every Monday, but we still don’t do enough with it,� says Phil Bronstein, executive editor of the Chronicle. “We need to have reporters actually travel the problem routes and explain how you can avoid the traffic jams, provide alternate routes. This is useful, practical information about real-life, real-time experiences.�

But newspapers shouldn’t sacrifice their uniqueness on the altar of usefulness. They can’t surrender their role as public watchdog nor their functions of analysis and explanation to make room for “relevant� stories of dubious value. Papers can misfire badly when their quest for relevance leads them to superficial “how to� stories or misguided attempts to connect with readers by giving disproportionate attention to catchy subjects.

One day recently, just when the congressional debate on Iraq was ratcheting up, USA Today devoted its biggest Page 1 headline to a new study on obesity in America -- and relegated Iraq to Page 10.

Too often these days, some newspapers seem to be allowing their advertising departments, rather than their editors, to decide what’s “relevant.� New features are introduced with the announced intent of “serving readers� and “connecting to readers� when their real purpose often seems to be to lure lucrative advertising dollars.

“Many papers that have tried to be relevant have mistakenly interpreted ‘relevance’ as only what happens within a 20-square-mile radius of the office or as something very practical and direct -- where to buy a pillow, how to lose 20 pounds in the next two weeks or what to cook for dinner tonight,� says Sandra Mims Rowe, the editor of the Portland Oregonian.

“Those are all relevant to people’s lives, but relevance and what is useful also has a much broader definition and involves more complexity and depth and understanding,� she says.

Rowe and the Oregonian have been ambitious. Three years ago, the paper won a Pulitzer Prize for reporter Richard Read’s pursuit of a single lot of potatoes from a processing plant in Oregon back to the growers and then on to Singapore, where it went to a McDonald’s. The Pulitzer board praised Read for “vividly illustrating the domestic impact of the Asian economic crisis,� and Rowe says his account “couldn’t have been any more relevant, any more important, to our readers.�

Other newspapers have to be similarly creative -- and similarly ambitious -- in finding and reporting stories that show their readers how, and why, important social, political and economic issues can affect them and their families.

Fourteen months ago, most Americans probably didn’t think a small fundamentalist Islamic sect in the remote mountains of Afghanistan was terribly relevant to their lives. Judging from the decline in international reporting through the late 1980s and early 1990s, most newspaper editors and television news directors didn’t think so either.

Everyone learned differently on Sept. 11.

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David Shaw can be reached at [email protected]