Infant death rate definitely warrants front-page

Anna Wallis PHOTO/FILE

An exasperated, angry reader rang the paper yesterday about our front-page story on Wanganui's infant death rate.

He was concerned that we had just had an excellent weekend that promoted Wanganui and our story did the opposite.

The reader is advocating that we shouldn't report Wanganui warts and all, or at least not on the front page. This is not a new discussion, and others have argued before that putting bad news on the front page while editorialising about promoting the city is just tosh from the Chronicle.

So should we take any heed of his concerns? Newspapers have standard replies to such advice: good news doesn't sell newspapers, we are a business, our credibility wouldn't survive such manipulation and we do put so-called "good news" stories on the front from time to time.

But on this occasion we can argue quite forcefully that this issue of infant mortality in Wanganui absolutely has to be a front-page story nearly any day of the week. This paper is not a politician; nor is it the promotions arm of Wanganui Inc.

These figures were from a major report which not only showed Wanganui had the highest rate of infant mortality in New Zealand but it had risen when comparing four-year blocks of 2007 to 2011 with 2011 to 2013. The information was from the Whanganui District Health Board's Child and Youth Mortality Review Committee.

We will do a follow-up story from the district health board on how they are going to address this frightening statistic. It will probably be on the front page, but that will be a news judgment on the day. We will also follow how this rate can hopefully drop with the right measures in place.

This issue needs as much air as possible to both highlight the situation and the solution.