The Chevaline Murders and Journalism on the Two Sides of the Channel LONDON - Headlines to compare and contrast: Sept. 7, bbc.co.uk, "Annecy killings: French media hunt for answers in murder case;" Sept. 9, guardian.co.uk, "Alps shootings: how French press buried the story." Both related to coverage of a grisly, multiple murder of a British family and a French cyclist last week near the village of Chevaline in the French Haute-Savoie region, also covered by my colleague Harvey Morris here on Rendezvous. But could the level of French interest in a murder of Britons on French soil really have changed that much over two days? Not at all, said my colleague Richard Berry in Paris, referring to wide coverage by French newspapers and television stations, which sent reporters to the Alps and to the family's home in Britain. News, of course, means different things to different people, a phenomenon I explore in my latest column in The International Herald Tribune. And, as the old saw puts it, all news is local. A murder of Britons in a French forest, it seems, was local enough for French and British media to leap on the story, to the point of rivalry or at least intense curiosity about the often divergent practices of journalists on their side of the Channel. The case had all the right ingredients for headlines in both countries - execution-style shootings, the absence of an evident motive, and the miraculous discovery eight hours after the mysterious attack of a four-year-old girl sheltering under the bodies. Equally, it seemed that the British press, assailed at home in the phone hacking scandal, reveled in its quest to get back to its gumshoe roots to track down the story. "The French viewed the descent en masse of Her Majesty's press on Chevaline and Annecy with incredulity that, as the days passed, turned into a mix of astonishment and admiration," Kim Wilsher reported from Paris in The Guardian. On the night of the murder, Le Figaro said in France, the local prosecutor in charge of the case "was awoken by a call on his cellphone at three o'clock in the morning from the BBC."