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"The Roanoke Times looks like a real newspaper today," said my friend Katherine one day last week. She hadn't opened the paper yet, but I could tell from the front page she was right.

"McCain stomps Bush" read the large headline reporting results of the New Hampshire primary. Despite the fact that this is primary season, the presidential race has made the front page of The Roanoke Times only five times in the past month.

Other items on this particular front page included these: a local mail-order pharmacy's lawsuit against the state of Michigan, involving issues of interstate trade and the Internet; allegations that the Department of Environmental Quality allowed a sewage treatment plant to dump waste into a Henry County creek; and a photograph of a memorial for the victims of Alaska Airlines Flight 261.

There was also, of course, the requisite feature, placed somewhat unobtrusively toward the bottom of the page: piracy -- not corporate, but the Long John Silver kind -- is on the rise.

Notice I said "requisite."

If there's one thing I've noticed consistently about The Roanoke Times since I moved to this area in 1990, it's the paper's tendency to smack a big feature story or photo right in the middle of the front page.

I looked back over the front pages published since the last week of January, and here are the features I found: a family attending a reading program at a local elementary school, a new study confirming that cohabitation is a big trend, the "Confederate legacy" of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee at Washington & Lee and VMI, the "world's largest Valentine's Day card" and a judge who treats marrying couples specially on Valentine's Day (bet you can guess when those two ran), what people write on cards enclosed in floral deliveries, evidence of the use of fractal geometry in a remote African village, a study of whether the dirt we consume in food is actually good for us, a run-down on efforts to display the Ten Commandments in schools, a scene from tryouts for the new Roanoke arena football team, a local man drumming the afternoon away at Lakewood Park, the trend toward year-round school, a local student who aced the SAT, a controversy over how the wind chill index is calculated, a former Vietnam sniper, and the occasional shot of Roanokers enjoying or surviving wintry weather.

That's a pretty long list, considering that I'm only going back to the beginning of February.

Pet features are always popular. In my sample time period, we've also had page one stories or photos about the status of pet cloning technology, a chicken's death in England under mysterious circumstances, a sheep dog being groomed for the Westminster Kennel Club dog show in New York, the robins' early return, Shamu and Namu having a Valentine's Day kiss at Sea World, two happy Samoyeds pulling a sled, a golden retriever answering the telephone, and the baby panda at the San Diego Zoo getting a checkup.

Going back to Jan. 25, there have nearly a dozen animals pictured on the front page of The Roanoke Times and only three presidential candidates (Gore, McCain, and Bush -- each once).

Don't get me wrong: it's certainly not that I prefer presidential candidates to animals. It's well known that I'm an animal lover, and I'd vote for my own goat before a lot of people on any ballot. I just think that, in general, the front page of the newspaper should be reserved for news. When Katherine observed that The Roanoke Times looked "real" on Feb. 2, the front page was largely dominated by news stories -- about half national and half local. After all, the publication is called a NEWSpaper.

Monday, Jan. 31, was a particularly bad day. At the top of page one, we saw a local man trudging through the snow in Elmwood Park to visit a friend. Under that appeared a feature on a local family aided by the Interfaith Hospitality Network. These were bordered by a report about Elián González's grandmothers' return to Cuba-- the only story which might arguably have belonged on the front page that day. Below all this was a wire service version of the Kansas City Star's story about AIDS among Roman Catholic priests. Next to it was an update on the recent week's problems with national security computers. Frankly, on that day, the newspaper looked like a magazine.

Not that there was no news to report. When I opened the paper to pages two and three, I found some major news events. On page two, I learned that in the final weekend before the New Hampshire primary, the campaigning had taken a nasty turn. In a four-inch article from the "In the Nation" column on page three, I learned that Illinois has imposed a moratorium on the death penalty. Our last interruption in the death penalty was 28 years ago, and we live in a state that executes more people at a faster clip than most other states. It seems to me a high-school journalist would have had the sense to put that story on page one.

Between Feb. 1 and this Thursday, I could only find one day when every story on page one was news -- Tuesday, Feb. 1. Volvo had announced job cuts in Pulaski; the EchoStar move into Christiansburg was rumored; the Alaska Airlines jet had just crashed into the Pacific, and 29 doctors left Lewis-Gale clinic. And yet there wasn't a single photograph on the page which went with any of those stories. The two photos which ran were both unrelated features: a picture from the Family Camp-In at the Science Museum and a shot of Parks and Recreation Dept. workers shoveling the sidewalk.

What message does The Roanoke Times send with its front-page feature tendency? First, it says to readers, "We know you want your news diluted with some lighter stuff." This might be the journalistic equivalent of that spoonful of sugar which helps the medicine go down.

It also troubles me that so many of these features come from wire services or syndicates. Note how often you see The Associated Press, The Washington Post, Newsday, The Baltimore Sun, The New York Times, the Knight Ridder/Tribune service, or the Philadelphia Inquirer on the byline. Going back to the beginning of February, I discovered 19 articles I would classify as features (keep in mind that this excludes pictures), and only five of them were written by Roanoke Times staffers.

When the front page is dominated by news, the stories generally concern local events: the Tultex layoffs, Tara Munsey's murder in Radford, the physician walk-outs at Lewis-Gale, and the Vinton police investigation. I haven't counted actual articles, but it's my perception that less than a third of the news that appears on The Roanoke Times's page one is national.

International news fares even worse. Going back through front pages to Jan. 25, I found only seven articles --news or features -- that even made reference to any place outside the United States. Most days, you have to go five or six pages into the front section to find a couple of pages of international news. No wonder The Roanoke Times dropped "& World News" from its moniker -- the paper obviously considers itself to be primarily a regional news source.

I can imagine all the arguments an editor would make for putting features on page one. Readers like to see local people engaged in everyday activities on the front of the newspaper. A features-y front page sets a "folksy, friendly" tone. Features tend to lure younger readers and women, neither of whom have traditionally read newspapers as regularly as middle-aged and older men. And, if the company wants to be a regional news organization, that's fine.

But readers should always be aware of what they're reading -- and what they're not. The risk of reading only a regional newspaper is that we won't know things. People committing human rights abuses in other parts of the world -- the Taliban's abuses of women in Afghanistan, for example -- count on most small media outlets overlooking them. This is how Holocausts happen.

Just based on my own experience, I'd guess that most Americans' knowledge of foreign affairs is sadly lacking. Questions about international leaders and events on Jeopardy stump me more often than many other categories, and I think a major factor is that our media and educational system tend to give us a myopic view.

What can we do about that? Turn to news organizations which DO attempt to bring us the world: National Public Radio, The New York Times, and CNN (and I don't mean Headline News).

Decades ago, media theorist Marshall McLuhan promised us we'd soon be living in a global village, and in many ways, his prediction seems to have been realized. But sometimes our TV sets in this global village play only the local channels, and it's important to know how to improve our reception.