Kurt Greenbaum is online news director for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He can be reached at kgreenbaum@post-dispatch.com

ON APRIL 16, IT’S POSSIBLE THAT ALL OF US POSTED THE SAME LEAD STORY on our Web sites. That’s the morning that a gunman massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech.

Maybe we did that morning in October 2006, when a gunman killed five girls and himself at an Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pa. Or on April 2005, when Pope John Paul II died.

These are the “big stories,” the ones that you barely need to think about to understand their impact on readers and how to play them.

But during the regular hum of a news day, how much attention do you pay to national and world news on your Web site?

“It’s not something we have heated debates about,” says Kathy Best, managing editor for digital news and innovation at The Seattle Times. “I think we all have a pretty clear idea of our mission.”

The mission, she says, is local news and information, and it’s reflected in the traffic she sees to national and world news on seattletimes.com.

Best recalls March 6, the day Lewis “Scooter” Libby was convicted of lying to a grand jury in the CIA leak case. That was also the day the former U.S. attorney for the Western district of Washington, John McKay, testified about his dismissal in the U.S. Senate.

Her instinct: Lead with McKay, the more local story. Times editor David Boardman pushed for Libby. The compromise: Libby was the centerpiece photo, but the highest headline was McKay.

The result: Libby got modest traffic, Best said. It wasn’t awful, but it certainly didn’t threaten the Times’ server capacity.

In my own newsroom at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, we often discuss the best play for national and world news. Some of my colleagues are disheartened by the apparent lack of interest by online readers.

Example: On July 24, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told a Senate committee he had not pressured predecessor John Ashcroft to reauthorize the domestic eavesdropping program. The revelation contradicted sworn testimony from an earlier witness and opened the door for a possible perjury investigation.

We led our site with that story – a story that had some local ties since it involved Ashcroft, Missouri’s former governor and senator – but it barely registered on our page view reports. It was pushed out of the top 15 stories by the St. Louis Cardinals, the St. Louis Rams and local headlines such as “Cave-in closes downtown street” and “Shots fired at Clayton burglar,” stories that got three or four times as much traffic as Gonzales.

“We know anecdotally and through traffic that people are coming to us for local news and local figures. They’re not coming to us for the Gonzales story,” says Stan Austin, senior online editor at The Kansas (Mo.) City Star.

National and world news editors are always included in their morning meeting to discuss stories for the kansascity.com Web site. But they all are learning to recognize what registers with online readers.

None of this suggests that newspaper Web sites ignore national and world news. The Seattle Times, for example, maintains a section on its home page devoted to the topic, and site visitors can even move that block higher or lower on the page. The question is when those stories break into the top of the site.

Most of us notice that our traffic favors the workday, when people are in front of their office computers and don’t have access to breaking news on television. And breaking news is the key, as newspaper newsrooms quickly reinvent themselves to respond faster.

“Significant national and international stories are more likely to make it above the fold on the home page if they break on our cycle,” Best says. It’s the next-day analysis stories – the ones newspapers feature on their front page, that “have a very tough time breaking out of the nation/world section.”

Think about those computer users in their cubicles, watching your site during the day. What’s going to get them to pop their heads over the wall and ask their neighbor, “Hey, did you see this story?”

Maybe it’s a major national or world news story such as Virginia Tech or the pope. But it’s probably local.

Says Austin: “More people get it and know that the engine that drives us is breaking news. *