The Daily News story that got killed in the night

Parents are outraged about those fat cat educrats at Tweed Courthouse, at least five of whom earned between $1.7 and $6 million in salaries and investments last year, the Daily News was supposed to report in today’s newspaper — but didn’t, after a late-night move killed the story.

Here’s what I saw on my Google Reader when I woke up this morning:

And here’s what popped up when I clicked the story:

My understanding is that the story was slated to run today both in the newspaper and online, but then got scrapped late last night. This appears to have happened because of an outside intervention, since the story had already been uploaded to the paper’s Web site, meaning it had gone all the way through the editing process. Word of the decision to kill the story — not postpone or delay or just put on the Web, but kill — came to both print and Web designers, who dutifully destroyed it, except for one thing: the Web headline, which was still visible this morning.

Did reporter Meredith Kolodner find something that was so juicy it had to be killed? I know when I was at the New York Sun Chancellor Joel Klein would sometimes learn about a scheduled story, dislike it, and make a phone call to the newspaper’s leadership to complain about it. To the paper’s credit, no story was ever killed.

David Cantor, a Department of Education spokesman, declined to comment on both how the story was killed and what it contained.