With power failure coverage, editors give nod to Spain

When editors have to decide whether to go with a Barcelona, Spain, blackout story or one from San Francisco, which one gets into print?

Using yesterday as an example, Grumpy Editor finds, strangely, that Barcelona got the nod in most cases while a Bay Area power outage was spiked (or overlooked) by many newspapers.

San Francisco’s outage not only affected about 40,000 power customers locally, including the San Francisco Giants ballpark and cable cars, but millions of other individuals and businesses --- those who use major Web sites on the Internet  --- in the U.S. and around the world.

Without power, a large data center that houses key Web sites went down in San Francisco.  Included was Craigslist, the world's seventh most popular English-language online destination.  It was out for more than five hours.

Also hit for several hours were Six Apart, a blog hosting service; Technorati, a top blog search site; virtual world site Second Life; Yelp, a local entertainment review site, and Gamespot, a gaming site owned by CNET Networks Inc.

Meanwhile, Barcelona’s blackout affected 350,000 homes and businesses --- and effects were confined to that Spanish city.