Mother Nature made it easy for us in at least one respect.

Sure, we all had to battle the elements to get to and from the office on Thursday so we could put out a newspaper for Friday. (There's no such thing as a snow day in the newspaper business).

But because Thursday's snowstorm wiped out the entire slate of local high school athletic contests, our sports section had plenty of room to devote to the big national story of the day - the George Mitchell report on steroid use in professional baseball.

Just from watching the television coverage of the news conferences and from glancing at the national news media Web sites on Thursday afternoon, it was easy to see this was the big story of the day. In fact, it was one of the biggest stories of the year.

At The Citizen, we decided to include extra space on the front sports page to the story as well as two pages inside the section. We also promoted the story with a banner above the masthead on the front page.

But what if the snow had not fallen and we had some local games to cover?

That's always a dilemma we face as a newspaper with a mission to provide local content, first and foremost. I'm inclined to believe we probably still would have given the steroid story prominent placement, but some of the space it wound up taking would have gone to a local game story or two.

I've had some really informative conversations and e-mail exchanges with readers on a number of issues in the past few weeks, and I'd love to find out what people think of these big sports stories that become news stories, as well.

Plenty of newspapers felt compelled to put substantial coverage of the steroid report on their front page, not just the first page of the sports section. One reason we choose to use a banner that directed readers to the sports section, rather than put an actual story on A1, was because as an afternoon paper, the news would be somewhat old by the time most of our readers picked up their Friday paper.

But maybe you disagree with that reasoning.

Some people, on the other hand, feel that sports stories never belong on the front page. I've heard from those readers in the past when we've posted stories about local teams playing in a sectional championship or doing something else that went beyond the ordinary.

My feeling about the front page is that is should be the space for the four or five stories that we think the most readers would be compelled to read. So if a sports, arts or business story jump into that mix, they're going to be on the front page.

Executive editor Jeremy Boyer's column appears Saturdays in The Citizen and he can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 231 or jeremy.boyer@lee.net