When it comes to covering local news, we know what to do. We cover as much of it as we can with the reporters we have and let it consume the bulk of our newspaper pages.

No other news outlet provides such a breadth of information about the South Sound, so we consider it our top priority. We also know readers can get regional and national news from other sources, and many do.

But sometimes we struggle with how to play stories that occur outside our coverage area, yet still deserve representation in our paper.

That came up a couple of times last week.

The first was following the Halloween night shooting death of Seattle Police Officer Timothy Brenton. The news broke throughout the next day. We ran a story and photograph about the shooting Monday morning at the top of Page A4, our regular spot for regional news.

On Monday morning, a handful of readers contacted our reader representative to say we’d underplayed the story.

“SHAME ON YOU NEWS TRIBUNE. Placing the story of the murdered Seattle Police Officer on page A4, is a slap in the face to the Public Servants who serve and protect us (including all of you),” one reader wrote.

Another asked why we would take up most of the front page with a story about stepped up police patrols at the Federal Way Transit Center “and bury our coverage of the Seattle police officer shooting on Page A4?”

Our other front-page stories that day had a local focus: a Tacoma City Council election preview; a story about Boeing’s run for the Air Force refueling tanker contract; and news that Afghan President Hamid Karzai had won a second term, a story with possible implications for Fort Lewis troops.

Reporter Melissa Santos, our reader representative last week, told readers we made content choices based on our local focus. She was accurate in saying we don’t have much readership in Seattle, and that’s why we put the officer shooting news inside, understanding it was still an important story to have in our paper.

Yet clearly this story transcended geography for our readers. It also dominated news on all the local television stations – which are located in Seattle but also beam into South Sound households. When that happens, many readers expect us to treat a story similarly.

Sometimes we think that’s appropriate. Sometimes we don’t. In this case, we should have given the story bigger play Monday, as we did later in the week.

A similar situation occurred midweek.

On Tuesday night, our efforts were focused on reporting local election results. We had six reporters, plus photographers, editors, a beefed-up copy desk and assistants filling our Web site and four full newspaper pages with results and analysis.

We saved room on the back of our A section for a roundup of national election results, dominated by a story about Maine voters repealing a gay-marriage law. We highlighted that race because of its juxtaposition with our own same-sex benefits ballot measure.

We also ran small items about Republican governors being named in Virginia and New Jersey, and about the U.S. House seat in New York State.

Clearly that wasn’t enough for the reader who called Wednesday morning with what he called a “total big complaint.”

“There was not one single item about any Republicans winning back East,” he said. “I know you are completely for Obama. I hope you have a lot of other complaints.”

Our items apparently were so small he missed them. Our reader representative pointed out that what we ran was typical of the amount of space we devote to East Coast races in an off-year election. Our story play was not based on partisan politics, but on our primarily local focus.

Yet national news Tuesday night was dominated by analysis of what the gubernatorial and congressional races meant for the Obama administration. That built an expectation for some that we would do the same.

While deadline pressure and newsprint constraints would have made it difficult, ideally we’d have run more analysis. On Thursday we ran a story analyzing the switch of independent voters from Democrat to Republican candidates.

There’s no doubt that The News Tribune’s primary mission is to report local news, and you shouldn’t expect our news lineup to look the same as that of other news outlets.

But we’ll also be on guard for times when we should give stories from elsewhere greater play in our paper.

Karen Peterson: 253-597-8434

karen.peterson@thenewstribune.com