The Daily devoted two news articles, one editorial, plenty of photos and an entire page of feature stories to Full Moon on the Quad during the past week. That seems like a reasonable amount of coverage for one of Stanford’s most, um, venerated annual events — until it’s compared to the amount of coverage that has been given to the two Stanford professors who won Nobel Prizes last week. One Nobel Prize winner is big enough news; two Stanford winners in a single year is titanic. All my love to Full Moon, but it just can’t compete with an occurrence like that.

There was a brief article about each professor last week, but these articles weren’t even considered the top news stories of their respective nights. When you picked up the paper on Oct. 5 and saw two articles about dining services ranked above the story about our second Nobel Prize-winning professor of the week, you may have wondered how and why The Daily staff makes the choices it does in highlighting certain stories. The article two days earlier about Stanford’s first Nobel Prize winner was similarly below the fold.

It is often said that we Stanford students live in a bubble, blissfully preoccupied with our sheltered and privileged lives as students. We have a tendency to focus on things like Full Moon on the Quad at the expense of larger world issues, and perhaps The Daily subconsciously reflects or even encourages this trend. But there are other factors involved here, and before writing the student paper off as fluff, we should consider what else is going on behind the scenes.

First, when ranking an issue’s stories, editors must weigh the relative merits of each article — not just on the newsworthiness of the story, but also on the substance of the article and the quality of its writing. Unfortunately, last week’s Nobel Prize articles fell far short on those secondary considerations. Both were essentially news releases that rehashed information provided by wire services.

This is not really the fault of Daily staffers, who were promised day-of-announcement phone interviews with the winners that never materialized. The writers were left relying on wire reports for information. It’s hard to write a highly original article about a Nobel Prize winner if you can’t talk to him and most news organizations have already published their stories. The article on Prof. Roger Kornberg at least provided some original spin on a story that could be found all over the Internet, by interviewing Kornberg’s son, a junior. Still, neither article was the strongest that the editors had to offer that night, and so were ranked behind better-written and more substantive articles. Nonetheless, these lead stories were decidedly less timely or important than the Nobel Prize articles.

Second, the editors assumed, perhaps naively, that students would read this Nobel news in other sources like The New York Times. By virtue of their time and resources, these sources had earlier and more extensive coverage of the Nobel Prize winners than The Daily could provide. And students expect The Daily to report on the Stanford-specific stories that The New York Times won’t cover.

This exemplifies a judgment call The Daily’s editors often must make — when they are in a unique position to offer coverage about campus concerns, how much space should they devote to an issue that students will probably read about elsewhere? Isn’t their greatest service to readers to keep them informed about news they can’t get anywhere else?

Well, yes, this is an extremely important — and perhaps the ultimate — function of The Daily as a student newspaper. But I’m not convinced that this justifies burying the two articles about the Nobel Prize wins. This was undoubtedly the biggest news story on each of those days, and it should have been splashed across the top of the paper. Even if the paper’s professed focus is on stories that won’t be covered elsewhere — even if the editors sense that a story about athletes’ Training Table is going to be more widely-read than one about a Medical School professor winning the Nobel Prize — it still has a responsibility to prominently report on matters of global relevance relating to Stanford, regardless of the novelty or insightfulness of the reporting.

So did the editors make the correct decision by not leading with these two Nobel Prize articles? I don’t think so. They can certainly argue that they had legitimate grounds for their choice, but I believe that the objective overwhelming import of news stories such as this should override the subjective analysis of an article’s journalistic quality.

In the paper’s defense, yesterday’s issue had a great lead story on the two winners. As soon as The Daily was able to speak to the two winners, the monumental event was adequately covered. But the fact remains that when the Nobel Prizes were fresh news, the stories were not given the weight they deserved.

As a final note, I love the comments I’ve gotten from people who are happy (and amused) that I’m still working for The Daily, even though my undergrad glory days are behind me. I don’t want to discourage anyone from keeping those day-brighteners coming my way, but I would definitely appreciate some student feedback about the quality of the paper, too.

Whitney Sado is a first-year law student. As public editor of the Daily, she writes biweekly columns assessing the Daily’s performance. Though she speaks for the reader, her opinions are her own. She can be reached at wsado@stanford.edu.