Welcome to Our Ink-Stained World, Mr. Mayor

You might want to drop two bits into a news rack today--just this once, I add, in case my bosses see this--and check out the Daily News, for the World According to Riordan.

Mayor Riordan spent a few hours as a cub editor at the San Fernando Valley newspaper Tuesday, weighing in at the daily editors’ meeting to choose stories for today’s front page, maybe trying his hand at writing a few headlines.

For a lame-duck mayor it’s not a bad idea, casting about for something to keep himself occupied after he’s sworn out of office. He started years ago, spending a day getting real with city garbage collectors, tree-trimmers and other working folk.

So it’s a shame he plunged in at the management end of the news biz rather than the shoe-leather end. Think of the delicious mischief to be wrought by some city editor assigning Scoop Riordan to interview council member Laura Chick about her mayoral aspirations, or school district board member Vicki Castro on bilingual education a la LAUSD.

Not having been invited to the Daily News’ Page 1 meeting, yet relying on a close reading of the news, I’ve just gone ahead and made it up.

Heck, I think the mayor half-believes that’s what we do anyway.

Editor: OK, Business has the new Dow Jones record, and National has a story on those Texans planning to kill Clinton with a cactus spine dipped in rabies and the AIDS virus. See, mayor? We couldn’t begin to make up stuff that good. . . . Locally we have the heat. We’ll be popping thermometers for sure. Everybody go for that as the lead story?

Mayor: Wait, let me ask you, do you think that’s big news? I mean, July is always hot. So what’s a few degrees more or less? We don’t want to scare people, and just now we’re trying to get the Democratic convention to come here in 2000. This is a weather story for you: It was 98 in North Platte and 91 in Minneapolis today! That’s news!

Editor: Well, it’s news when the stock market breaks a record, and it’s news when the weather does. Anyway, we don’t have a lot of readers in North Platte, and with your business background you must understand about marketing. . . . Now. We have a follow-up on the “Dismal Scores” school testing story we had today. In case you didn’t notice, the Valley’s schools kicked L.A.’s butt. (Cheers at the table.) Everybody on board with that?

Mayor: Absolutely. Those scores were a disgrace. Our children aren’t failing us, we’re failing them. Hey, I’ve got a new line you guys can use--”The No. 1 crime in Los Angeles is education.”

Editor: Write that down. OK, the MTV awards. . . .

Mayor: Now that’s a real story, that the awards are back in L.A. It’s good news and it’s important. I was there. We could run that picture of me with Courtney Love and a big headline, “Mayor Denies Affair With Courtney Love.” Half the people would still think it was true. Your circulation would skyrocket. You wouldn’t need that negative weather story.

Editor: We were planning on using the photo of you signing that big slum-reform task force law.

Mayor: Why not use both? Courtney Love and those terrible apartments--”Beauty and the Beastly”! Whaddya think?

Editor: I think we all see where your talents lie. Here’s a story for tomorrow on a Valley secession study. Could you write us a four-column headline?

Mayor: Sure. (He scribbles for a moment.) How about this: “More Secession BS”?

Editor: That’s hardly balanced.

Mayor: So maybe it’s not balanced. It’s true. And it fits.

Editor: Bingo. Welcome to our world, your honor.

*

Riordan wasn’t wholly joking when he said earlier Tuesday, “Finally, I’ll be able to exercise some real power in the city.” Just as he didn’t realize the limitations of office until he got there, the constraints on newspapering aren’t obvious from the other side of the notebook.

“I suppose the thing to learn,” he mused, “is when you’re under pressure to get something out, you’ll do what a knowledgeable reader will hope you’ll do.” And context--there’s never enough of it to suit him. Too many stories “take what’s fed to them that day without saying what the context is: How does this fit everything else?” As every journalist knows--just ask the producer fired from CNN--context, maddeningly, can also be what ends up on the cutting room floor.

I wish he had come here for his newspaper Career Day. He could have told the rank and file of us what goes on in those top-top Page 1 meetings. And if he’d stuck around after deadline, I’ll bet he’d have bought the first round.

Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com