The Earth moved twice overnight. A 7.7-magnitude quake struck off Indonesia's Flores Island just before 5am local time; a 5.0 hit Granada, in southern Spain, around 1am. By morning the Mirror had live blogs running on both, and the two headlines agree completely about who the story happened to. Indonesia: "At least 38 dead as huge 7.7 quake rocks tourist spot." Spain: "Tourists flee and homes wrecked as tremor hits Spain." Two continents, five thousand miles apart, one protagonist: someone with a boarding pass. * Start with Flores, because 38 people are dead there and the details deserve better than set-dressing. The Mirror's own live blog — which, credit where due, carried a fresher toll than the wires all morning — reports that the dead come "from four different towns" on the island, per rescue official Fathur Rahman, that landslides have cut the roads rescuers need, and that a tsunami warning was issued and lifted. What the body does not contain, anywhere, is an injured tourist. The casualties are Indonesian. The towns are Indonesian. The only thing touristic about this earthquake is the postcode — and that's what made the headline. "Rocks tourist spot": the quake's offense, apparently, was its choice of destination. * Granada, same architecture. The tremor gets one human verb and it goes to the visitors: "panicking tourists running from their hotels." The people who actually live there appear in the headline as property — "homes wrecked" — which is a neat trick: buildings own the damage so their residents don't have to exist. Meanwhile the quote the Mirror itself carries, from Andalusian vice-president Antonio Sanz Cabello, is addressed entirely to residents: if "your home shows no damage, stay calm." The officials are talking to the people who live in the houses. The headline is talking to the people who might have booked one on Airbnb. * Control group, same morning: NBC — "Magnitude-7.7 quake hits off coast of Indonesia, killing at least 20." Al Jazeera — "At least 20 killed as magnitude 7.7 quake hits Indonesia." Geography, magnitude, the dead. Nobody else needed you to know, before anything else, that Flores is "east of Bali and a tourist destination known for its stunning scenery." The Mirror's URL goes further still — the slug reads "indonesia-earthquake-flores-bali-today." Bali was not hit. Bali, however, searches beautifully. * And this isn't one headline having a bad night — it's the desk's operating system. We counted the Mirror's world-news feed this morning: of fourteen stories, ten route through a British or tourist protagonist. The same missing British 12-year-old appears three separate times. There are "Brit kids" in an exploding steam room, a "Manchester-bound plane" landing in Russia, a British widow facing deportation from Sweden, an easyJet strike, and a Croatian wildfire measured in "locals and tourists" forced to flee. World news, as surveyed from the departures lounge at Gatwick. * Let's be fair about what this is. The Mirror writes for British readers, "is my holiday destination safe" is a question those readers genuinely have, and every country's press does proximity — American cable slices the planet by US passports too. Proximity framing is journalism. The problem is when proximity becomes the only grammar the desk speaks: then 38 people from four towns become the scenery of a travel advisory, before breakfast, in a paper that will — rightly, movingly — clear its front page for one missing British child. Both instincts are human. Only one of them got to write both headlines. * A magnitude number measures the energy a quake releases. The Mirror runs a second scale on top of it: how close did it come to a sun lounger. Next time the ground breaks somewhere Brits don't fly, watch how far down the feed it lands — that gap is a measurement too.