🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sunday, both the Washington Post and the NY Times had
front-page articles on the civil war in Liberia. I find this
interesting because the stories seemed to be independent of each
other. Neither story had any news of a breaking event -- they
were both background stories about recent battles, alleged by
the Times to be the biggest in that part of Africa since the
Biafra war of 1967. The stories were each written by staff
reporters of the respective papers and each looked at different
"angles." 

Furthermore, there hasn't been any Liberia news -- in the Times,
at least -- since an item on November 3 about the burial of the
American nuns, whose death was front-page news on the previous
Sunday, November 1. Therefore there was no event of note
immediately preceding the publication of the background stories
that would have triggered them. 

If there were no breaking events, why did the editors of each
paper decide that it was time to run their respective background
stories? Background stories appear every day on front pages,
so it wasn't because Sunday might have been a slow news day. It
could have been chance; there is no practical way to rule this
out, but it's worth looking at some non-chance factors. 

One possibility is that each story contains some nugget of
information that was released by the Liberian government
simultaneously to all journalists and therefore synchronized the
completion of stories that had already been in preparation.
Another is that editors may have a penchant for running stories
on integral multiples of some time period -- week, month, year
-- after a previous related event. The fact that the nun story
was published on a Sunday suggests this as the explanation, and
those familiar with the aniversary sensitivity of much of
journalism will find this a highly plausible one.