This morning’s Post-Dispatch had some strong local news reporting that dominated the front page.  It’s not uncommon for local news to fill Page One.  Readers can get national and world headlines from many sources. But our reporting numbers allow us to be No. 1 in covering and reporting local news.

Today, Tim Bryant wrote an informative profile of Adolphus Busch IV,  a key name in recent stories about InBev’s bid for the brewery. We devoted two full inside pages to a “History of the Busch family” graphic and continuations of the two Page One A-B stories.

Business’ Tim Logan put May’s jobless figures into context, Deirdre Shesgreen of the Washington Bureau profiled gubernatorial candidate Kenny Hulshof, and food editor Judy Evans chronicled the local chef who won the Fox reality series “Hell’s Kitchen.”

All in all, a strong and wide local news report.

The one downside: The Nation/World report got really squeezed. Three nation stories, one world story, a People column, a digest package of Nation items and another of World items.

The main news section had its normal allotment of space for news — equal to about 5 open pages of space. But after accounting for the strong local stories on A1 and related items,  about 6 columns was left to wrap up the national and world reports.

On this day, that tradeoff seemed worth it.