Randi Kreiss

Earthquake in Nepal? It’s a Herald story.

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When I was the editor of the Nassau Herald in the late ’80s and ’90s, the running joke when anything happened anywhere in the world was, “What’s the local connection?” And the funny thing is that there always was one.

When Ira Magaziner (anybody remember him?) was the chief health care adviser to Bill Clinton in 1993, I called him and got an interview. After all, Ira was once my classmate at Lawrence High School. We went ice skating together.

When O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder, we did a “Where were you when you heard the verdict?” story, making it local. When Nelson Mandela was released from prison, we interviewed local residents who had been born in South Africa and raised under apartheid. When the first gulf war was fought, we found soldiers from this area and interviewed them and their families.

We tracked down former Knicks coach Red Holzman, of Cedarhurst, whenever we needed a comment on sports. And we called Lawrence resident Donna Karan for the word on fashion. Whatever was the news of the day — AIDS, Rwanda, Monica — we at the Herald brought it home to our readers.

I see that as our primary mission: to recognize that national and global issues are relevant in our home communities and must be covered. And that mission has never been more urgent than it is now, when we are so inter- and intra-connected.

Not everyone in the world of weekly newspapers agrees. Tip O’Neill, the late speaker of the House, famously said that all politics is local, meaning that to get into office, candidates have to know and serve their constituents, down to the potholes and street signs. Weekly newspapers do the same, by covering school board meetings and local crime and the lives and deaths of local residents. That job is a sacred trust. The weekly is the official public record for Everyman and Everywoman. Local news has long been considered our special niche, our most important work.

But I see it as only part of the job. The other part, especially today, is to recognize that the world has shrunk, communication is instant, and we have to write about what people are seeing on CNN and on their smartphone screens. So we have to keep up with the big boys and girls.

Of course, weekly newspapers don’t have the budgets to cover national and international news, and that’s why we generally go for the local angle. But on our opinion pages, in the columns written by people like me, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to open the lens wide and look not just for potholes, but for the worldwide economic booms and busts, the conflicts and terror threats, the famines and natural disasters, the technology breakthroughs and medical advances that affect all of our lives.

When the Amtrak train ran off the rails near Philadelphia, it felt natural and necessary for me to write about the accident and connect it to the lives of commuters on the Long Island Rail Road. I’ve been doing the same thing throughout my career as a columnist. One of my first op-ed pieces for the Herald was a reaction to the anti-smoking campaigns sweeping the nation. I wrote about the need to be proactive and remove cigarette vending machines from our public spaces.

Many of my more than 1,500 columns have focused on hyper-local events like the Kelly Tinyes murder in 1989, the most serious crime committed in our community during my tenure. Or hurricanes like Sandy. Or school policies like the new dress code in Lawrence. But more often I have scanned the horizon to see what people are thinking about and how I can make it relevant.

Even when I write about my family, which has grown up on these pages, my hope is to strike a common note with others who suffer the same tribulations and celebrate the same joys.

I started thinking about the nature of columns, local and global, as I breezed through the newspaper this morning. It’s all local, I thought. ISIS in Syria? The Dow hitting a low? Apple adding music to its repertoire? MERS spreading in South Korea? The new gigantic telescope in Mexico searching for the black hole? The latest hacking at the CIA? And of course, the story of the Biden family, Beau’s death and the grace of our vice president under the pressure of such a terrible loss.

All of us can identify with the Beau Biden story. And all of us have the imagination to feel anxious about ISIS and MERS, two deadly forces heading our way. Any one of these topics is appropriate for a column in a weekly paper.

And then there’s the great escape story. Last week, two stone-cold killers drilled their way out of the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate Dannemora, and at press time were still on the run.

Was I the only one in our community waiting with great concern to hear the names of the escapees? The Clinton facility happens to be where Robert Golub, the convicted killer of Kelly Tinyes, is serving his life sentence. There’s always a local connection.

Copyright © 2015 Randi Kreiss. Randi can be reached at randik3@aol.com.