A quick check of the websites for the local television stations and The Joplin Globe show only one mention of the Academic Honors Signing held Friday at Missouri Southern State University.
Each year, a number of the top area students sign academic letters of intent to attend MSSU and a ceremony is held to commemorate the occasion.
Only KSNF featured any mention whatsoever on its website about the signing ceremony. Let me see if I understand this...any athlete in any sport can sign a letter of intent to attend any college or university and it receives a story of its own in the Globe and on the local television stations, even if it is an athlete who competes in one of the so-called minor sports, but a massive signing ceremony involving 35 of the top students in the area is held and it is not even news.
This seems to be an incredible case of misplaced priorities.
When I was editor at The Carthage Press, I personally covered the MSSU signing ceremony every year, featuring a photo and usually a story on each Press area student who received one of the full-ride scholarships. Of course, The Press was as guilty as any other paper about running individual stories on each athlete that signed with a college.
But this is the kind of opportunity that local news organizations should cherish, a chance to do a positive feature on something that eventually will pay off a lot more for society than the signing of a football player at MSSU.