The latest issue of Columbia Journalism Review shoots one of its famous darts right through the heart of the small Palo Alto Daily News.    The dart went to the free paper “for blindly toeing the local line. ‘Everybody,’ as was noted on Slate’s August 11 roundup of Today’s Papers, ‘leads with the big, foiled terror plot in which twenty-four British men, mostly of Pakistani descent, were arrested and are suspected of plotting to bomb multiple airliners with liquid explosives.’ Everybody, that is, but the Palo Alto Daily News, whose policy keeps its front page bound to strictly local news, hand and foot. There the lead story on August 11 was not the terrorist plot — which did eventually show up on the paper’s page eleven — but rather on some proposed new rules to strengthen the sanitary standards for pedicures.”    First, full disclosure: I’m friendly with one of the founders of the Daily News (he’s no longer there) and one of its former editors. Further, Knight Ridder bought the paper and its siblings toward the end of my time there as a corporate officer. I have no ties to the paper today other than wandering into my neighborhood bagel shop and repeatedly seeing customers reading one of the siblings, the Los Gatos Daily News —despite the boxes right out front for the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle.    Here’s what bothers me about the dart: