Missing a local story

With the rainy, cool autumn, people in Los Angeles have been noticing—and complaining about—ant swarms invading homes and apartments. Today's Times picks up on the buzz, sort of. The story about Argentine ants on the move is datelined Sacramento. The closest anecdote is set in Merced, 275 miles north of Los Angeles. That's further than Boston is from New York; if you want to get technical, Southern California is not even on the same continental plate as Merced. To be fair, it's a story about ants in California. But some reflection of what people are talking about in the region where most of the paper's eroding readership lives might have made sense.