We had an interesting newsroom discussion yesterday about the story we ran on Page One today about rising gasoline prices.

The story, if you haven't seen it, was that gas prices are going back up and will keep climbing probably until Memorial Day ... maybe hitting $3 a gallon for regular unleaded.

It was acknowledged that the issue was something that most everyone was aware of and talking about. But does that make newsworthy enough to put it on Page One?

The point was made by some editors that once you say the price of gas is going up, and that we're not really able to say precisely why, that there's nothing new to report. Put that in the paper ... either in the Local or Business section ... but not as a top story of the day on Page One.

The other argument (which proved to be the winning argument) was that one of our roles is to reflect what people are talking about, and what affects them most directly, and you can find no better subject than gas prices. The challenge in that is to provide as much information ... and new information ... as you can to make the story valuable and interesting. Luckily, we had veteran reporter Jim McLain on the story for today and he did his usual great job of layering the story with all the angles.

I think we played it correctly on Page One. But others disagree.