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Making Sense Of How A Texas Newspaper Broke The News Of Scalia's Death

Wikipedia.org

The biggest news of what had been quite a news-filled week was the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Scalia was found dead in the bed of a luxury ranch in West Texas - closer to the Mexico border than a city of any size.

Yet the news wasn't broken by the New York Times, Huffington Post or Matt Drudge. It was broken on a Saturday by the San Antonio Express-News, a newspaper based 7 hours to the east. Now, this isn't some new blog - it's been around since the end of the Civil War and has a daily circulation of around 140,000.

Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies says it shouldn't  be a surprise that a story of this magnitude was broken by an old-school newspaper.

Check out this story on how the San Antonio News-Express got the scoop.

And here's Poynter's take on the story.

Steve Newborn is a WUSF reporter and producer at WUSF covering environmental issues and politics in the Tampa Bay area.
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