Cancer scientist or lawn guy?

Whatever else you can say about Norman, we have our priorities straight.

Put yourself in the shoes of the editors of the Norman Transcript. You need to decide the layout of Saturday's paper and there are two stories out of the University of Oklahoma.  One of them is a story about the fellow who maintains the athletic fields ('the lawn ranger") for the college football team.  The other is about a research team that identified a cancer marker in stem cells. Whose picture do you run? The groundskeeper or the scientist? Whose achievement do you celebrate?

The first three paragraphs of the cancer story didn't even mention the name of the scientists involved.  Meanwhile, of course, the groundskeeper story was all about him.

The front page of the Norman Transcript had a photograph of the lawn ranger.   It was left to the student newspaper to carry a photograph from the cancer press conference.

P.S.  Yes, yes ... in their defense, they did put both stories on the front page, and both stories above the fold.  But this is the kind of situation where they could have chosen to run the lawn ranger story another day and devoted more space to the cancer breakthrough.

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