Some newspapers don't get it...

Like tens of millions of people in America and around the world, I've become entranced with the practically round-the-clock cable news coverage of missing Malaysian Airlines flight 370.

This is the biggest and most befuddling mystery in the history of aviation.

So many false leads. So many experts with their theories. Very few shreds of hard evidence.

How in tarnation does a Boeing 777 airliner with 239 souls aboard vanish into nothingness? No sign of crash wreckage unless those most recent fuzzy satellite images a couple of days ago will finally prove that the plane is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. As I write this now, however, spotters aboard ships and planes have scoured that region (where the satellites supposedly snapped the images) about 1,500 miles west of Perth, Australia. And the spotters have found nothing.

I worked in aircraft control and warning (radar) eons ago in the U.S. Air Force. Because of that, my sister asked me about four days after the Boeing 777 disappeared what I thought may have happened. I responded that I was just guessing, like everyone else, but it appeared to me that the Triple 7 had been hijacked. At the time I shared that with her, hardly anyone else had that theory. Now it's on the front burner of what may have happened to one of the world's safest and most technologically sophisticated passenger jets.

Putting on my journalism education hat, I continue, here in day 13 or 14 of the search for the jetliner to be amazed at why so many newspapers seem to give the BIGGEST STORY ON THE PLANET RIGHT NOW such scant coverage.


Note the photos of front pages that accompany this blog. One is from yesterday's edition of the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press. The other is today's online front page of The (Rock Hill, S.C.) Herald. Neither one of these front pages has one single word about the missing jet.

Hey, folks in journalism, this blog post is a wakeup call: the story of missing flight 370 is what people right now all over the world, in small towns and large ones, are talking about. They are devouring it. Don't believe me? Ask a few random people eating in restaurants or shopping in malls for what news they're most closely following. It's not Ukraine or Crimea. No one much cares about the shirtless horseback riding Russian President Putin (although that WAS intriguing how he rode that animal.)

What they DO care about is missing flight 370. What's happened to it? What's become of all those "souls" (cable TV news' words) on board?

Come on newspapers! Key into what readers REALLY want to know about, and do it on your showcase front pages--while the story of flight 370 is red hot gripping.