It’s not often that our area is smack dab in the midst of a major national news story, but that is precisely what happened this past Friday and is continuing today and probably for months to come.

We received word from the Pennsylvania State Police that the suspect in the grisly killing of four University of Idaho students was arrested at his family home in Chestnuthill Township, Monroe County. The family lives in the sprawling 3,200-unit Indian Mountain Lake development, part of which is also located in neighboring Penn Forest Township in Carbon County. For those of you unfamiliar with the area, the development is not far from Albrightsville, Kresgeville, Effort and the Pocono Raceway.

Bryan Christopher Kohberger, 28, was charged in connection with the Nov. 13 stabbing deaths of Ethan Chapin, 20; Xana Kernodle, 20; Madison Mogen, 21, and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, in an off-campus apartment in Moscow, Idaho, a farming community of nearly 26,000, which had not had a murder in the previous five years.

During my 62-year journalistic career, I was involved in the coverage of just two major national stories that occurred in Monroe County. There were a few borderline cases, but none of the scope and magnitude of this one and the two others that occurred early in my career.

One of the most painful tragedies was on June 26, 1964, when a tractor-trailer loaded with dynamite and blasting caps exploded on Route 209 north of East Stroudsburg, killing four Marshalls Creek volunteer firefighters. The driver, from Port Carbon, Schuylkill County, was later charged with removing the “explosives” placard from the truck as he walked to a service station to get help because of a flat tire. As a result, the firefighters were completely unaware of the dangerous cargo they were confronting as they arrived at the scene. Two civilians also were killed in the devastating blast that also caused more than $1 million in property damage and freed poisonous snakes from a nearby reptile farm.

The other occurred in January 1962 and is arguably the most notorious double murder in Monroe County history. Despite being number one on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List, the whereabouts of the suspect in the killings, Edward Howard Maps, 38, are unknown until this very day. Maps is accused of bludgeoning to death his 22-year-old wife, Christine, then setting fire to their home at 510 Sarah St. in Stroudsburg to cover up the killing. The fire claimed the life of the Maps’ 4-month-old daughter, Julia Louise. Despite numerous reported sightings over the years, none panned out. There are many who believe Maps is innocent and that a shadowy other person was responsible for the crime, who then disposed of Maps’ body.

What causes a story such as the Idaho students’ killings to take on such public interest? This is the job of editors who must determine how “big” a news story is. Admittedly, it is a judgment call, and it reminds me of the old canard: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” In other words, does the news media’s coverage of a story propel the public’s interest, or does the groundswell of public interest send a message to the media that they are thirsting for more information about a story.

When I was teaching journalism courses for the State University of New York at Oswego, I told my students that there are seven characteristics of a news story that will likely determine its importance. I invented the mnemonic HITCUPP to facilitate their recollection. They are human interest, impact, timeliness, conflict, unusual nature of a story, prominence and proximity.

The Idaho murders story is off the charts on six of the seven of these characteristics; the only one which is not is “prominence” of the victims or the suspect.

When there is a major story such as this, the national media descend on the area to try to get as much information as possible about the suspect. The local media, which do their jobs day in and day out in the area, are sometimes pushed out of the way by the likes of reporters from NBC, CNN, The New York Times, USA Today and social media giant TMZ.

For the local media, however, this represents that rare moment when they are being measured by the coverage of big city papers such as The Philadelphia Inquirer. For the local media, it is “all hands on deck,” as Times News Editor in Chief Marta Gouger said about the paper’s coverage of this story. This means that small local and regional papers, whose resources have been greatly diminished in recent years because of the state of the newspaper industry, must be creative on how to use the talents of virtually every reporter on staff while still maintaining the effort needed to put out a daily product.

When you read these stories, you rarely think of the effort involved, nor should you necessarily. Our job is to get the information to you so that you are a more informed citizen. We do not expect any special recognition or praise for the extraordinary effort that went into getting accurate information, especially when official sources keep much information bottled up in cases such as these so as not to prejudice their prosecution.

By Bruce Frassinelli?|?tneditor@tnonline.com