Merry Christmas and a Happy New

The new-look Herald-Press began back on April 1, not coincidentally April Fool's Day.
Perhaps bringing a fitting end to the year, the staff closed out 2008 with another beauty, this time in the headline announcing their Citizens of the Year.
In choosing Joel Froomkin and Rich Najuch, the design of the page had a red box over the photo that said "Citizens of the Year." As if we didn't know what the story was going to be about from that, the headline writer decided to spell it out again in the headline, or at least attempted to do that.
Thus, we get, in large-point type hearkening back to the Reign/Rein debacle, is:

Najuch, Froomkin
named Citizens of the


I'm not sure where the mystical land of "the" is, but I'm sure Joel and Rich are proud to now be citizens of it.


As a sidebar to that glaring wonder, there is another headline in Wednesday's paper that also is terrifically misleading.

"Marion recycling begins January"

Where do we start? Is Tarzan writing headlines? How about "Vikings play North Arena?"

Me like. Headline good. Paper bad.

And what's with "Marion recycling begins." It seems to give the reader we're talking about Marion recycling (imagine thing that?) As a Huntingtonian, do I care about Marion recycling? Not really.
You have to read into the story to see that it's Marion Services who are taking over recycling IN Huntington.

See, there's that word "IN" that you might have been looking for. I guess the word "in" ran off with the word "year" that was supposed to be in the other headline.

Don't you hate it when words just jump off the page - literally.

Oh yeah, there's another Marion story at the bottom of the page. At least it's in the headline. The story only says someplace called Five Points Mall. We're guessing it's Marion.
And another thing - no Colts were there, despite the headline. It was only some cheerleaders and the big blue mascot.
But then again, it was in Marion, so why would anyone in Huntington care?

Have an Irish drought on us

While not up to the silliness evident in the Dec. 8 edition, the Dec. 26 edition of the Herald-Press was a day-after-Christmas gift that was truly a delight to unwrap.
The fun, however, was mostly in the cover -- the top half of Page 1, in fact.
We have, at the top, the Irish ending their bowl "draught." Green beer, we assume, which would be a good way for the Irish to end a drought.
We really liked the story about the dead truck driver. Four paragraphs, and it's a scream.
We start with the first paragraph: "At 9:30 a.m. Wednesday the body of a Woodburn resident was found."
The rules of English composition and the standards of good journalism say that the most important information should be printed at the beginning of the story. So the most important information was not where he was found or what he died from. The most important thing is that he was found.
The second paragraph: "He pulled over to the side of the road and was found dead at the scene." You know, if he had just kept driving, he might still be alive today. He was found, by the way, by "Sargeant" Tom Tallman, who used to be a sergeant, but that was in the old days.
The coroner said that he was "found fairly quickly." Probably because he pulled over to the side of the road. Dead men drive no semis.
Finally, the autopsy determined that he had died due to a pulmonary emboli. The media is good at reporting a fact like those.
We go on to the story about Warren's potholes. The fifth paragraph describes how the potholes are formed. I can't for the life of me figure it out.
The sixth paragraph is a gem: "Wabash Central's function in Warren is to service the mills, which Cartwright says is only 26 miles long and the mill isn't a big profit center for them." We have a multiple choice matching game here: Figure out what we mean by "service the mills," exactly what is only 26 miles long, and who or what is the "them" in the concluding sentence. We asked the people behind the Cray supercomputer to work on that; the computer blew up.
Also, the cutlines refer to "Warren Town Council Bill Cartwaright," which is (probably) supposed to be Warren Town Council President Bill Cartwright, but who knows? I ran it past my Italian friends and they said the "a" was in the wrong place. They pronounce his name "cart-a-right."
Don't mistakes just irritate you?

Back at it

One of our contributors has an entry:

Here we go. The Monday, Dec. 8, edition of the Herald-Press may be the silliest one yet.

First, we have a story on Page 1, under a six-line headline, about how Indiana State Police officers helped "solve (a) burglary investigation" near Sturgis, Mich. Now folks, let's lay aside the idea that an investigation needs solving. (Crimes need solving, usually because investigations are conducted.) An even better question is: WHAT IN THE WORLD IS AN INDIANA STATE POLICE NEWS RELEASE ABOUT AN ARREST AT THE MICHIGAN-INDIANA LINE DOING ON PAGE 1 OF THE HUNTINGTON HERALD-PRESS?

But wait, as they say on late-night TV, there's more!

The photo of Chris Dodd (not Christopher, as AP had it in the story) has the tagline: "Photo provided." Who provided it? Dodd's office? His late presidential campaign? The "Face the Nation" publicity flacks, who have their eye on the Herald-Press for its prominence in the political world? (The Page 1 mock vote from Lancaster School the day after election day should have been featured by Politico.com. What were those people thinking?)

Then we go inside.

On Page 4A, we have a letter to the editor from "J. Grimes, Director and CEO of the United Fascist Union." Oh, brother.

On Page 5A, we have an EIGHT-LINE headline. This is a new record and will be reported to the fine folks at Guinness. Not the world record people, the ale people. You need to have something to dull the pain after a while.

On Page 6A, we have a photo of a couple of cows. The caption for the photo says the cows "seem unaware" of an EPA proposal. Obviously, someone somewhere is an expert at reading cows' facial expressions.

On Page 1B, we have an illustration of Peyton Manning, apparently painted by Georges Seurat. Instead of "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte," we have "A Sunday at Lucas Oil Stadium." Nice effect.

Underneath that, we have the usual headline-photo-story construction used by the sports pages of the Herald-Press. That is done by no other newspaper in the world. Why is that? Perhaps it's because the reader cannot connect the headline to the story BECAUSE THE PICTURE IS IN THE WAY!

At the bottom of the page, the headline writer apparently ran out of words for the Oklahoma-Florida story. Weird.

The comics page is OK, but the David Gregory headline has only seven lines. That's impressive, but it's not a record.

What a newspaper! A delight to the eyes and a challenge to the intellect.

BREAKING NEWS

During a call to new Herald-Press publisher Andy Eads, a reliable source of ours was told the Tom Davis is no longer "with the company," and that the Herald-Press is now searching for a new editor.

The latest information from another source is that Mr. Eads told Mr. Davis that his vision for the newspaper did not match with that of Mr.Davis. Mr. Davis was given 15 minutes to clear out his office and leave the building.

More to come as developments warrant.

Everybody's workin' for the weekend!

We love the Sunday newspaper. We can't wait to read the promo headlines at the top of the page, and this weekend's were particularly spicy. You know it's big news when they use exclamation points. All the best journalists pound home headlines with the hammer.
First, there's "Weddings, births and more!" Well, we don't know if we can handle much more than that!
Then there's "More Forester sporting action than you can imagine!" Hey, we can imagine quite a bit. We just hope we're not disappointed!

Let's not forget the "Lots O Savings Inside!"

Monday's paper featured some more recycled press releases that staffers rewrite and slap their own name on.

There were more obituary disasters Monday. Poor Kat Garrison. She died on Nov. 2, and since that time, her obit has been in three times, meaning at least two screw-ups. On Sunday, they ran the obituary with the name "Mary J. Smith" in the headline.

Then there's Robert G. Brown, apparently a visitor from the future, or at least lost in time. It's hard to tell, because there were so many blatant mistakes.
First, he was listed in the headline as living from 1961 to 2008, but in the obituary, he graduated from Lancaster High School in 1946, quite an achievement for someone born in 1961. Or was he born in 1961? Also in the obit, he is listed as being born in the year 2928. So I guess by being born that far in the future, he may have achieved the ability to bend time and space.

Geez, is anybody actually proofreading these things? I would think those would stand out.

FRIDAY, Nov. 7

It was hard to believe that Tom Davis actually ran negative letters to the editor, these concerning the election coverage (or lack thereof). I'm sure he had plenty of letters to choose from. It was pretty inexcusable.
Mr. Davis tried to explain by saying that the Herald-Press strives to feature Huntington County-related stories. Well, that's fine, but there are times when national events supercede local stories, even monster local stories like the Lancaster Elementary mock election results.
We can't help but remember what Mr. Davis once told a friend of ours - "If people want national news, they can watch CNN." That's journalistic acumen at its best.

The Herald-Press is also now offering subscriptions for three days a week. Do we get to pick which three days we want? Does it really matter? The trick would be to decide what event you want to read about, then make sure you subscribe to the paper that comes out three days later. That should be just about right on the timing.

How many times can they recycle the same picture? Haven't we seen that YMCA picture at least twice before?

Speaking of photos, what's with running all the file photos, especially in sports? If I see a Notre Dame game story, I want to see a picture from that game, not some file photo taken last week or last year. That's the whole idea of news photography, to illustrate the story.
There's even a problem with pictures that don't go with stories. So many times they're days old. What happened to newspapers being timely? Oh yeah, this is the Herald-Press.

There's some good if you look hard enough

To be fair, there have been some bright spots in the Herald-Press.
Sports Editor Sean Giggy did a nice job with his article about Nick Johnson. It was a pretty thorough story. Mia Blocher's writing has also been solid in her stories, especially in her coverage of the school board.
Rob Edwards has a nice eye as a photographer, but his abilities are being wasted with the poor layout of the newspaper.
There's still plenty to be critical about. The election coverage, already a disaster after Wednesday's effort, was compounded when complete election results never made it into the paper or even online. One of the biggest items that are read after the election are the complete precinct results. The results are normally available pretty early on election night, even on the county's website, so the H-P should have had those numbers in hand well before deadline. They did run some numbers on Thursday and put some basic numbers on the Web site, but we'd really like to know how many people voted in my precinct and how many votes each candidate received. The grids that had always been run in the past were always easy to navigate and a concise way to see exactly what the breakdown was.
There are still more ribbon-cutting photos, with no accompanying stories about the new businesses, as well as the usual spate of regurgitated press releases.
We still can't figure something out - many of the stories in the print edition refer to additional information on the Web site, but then on the Web site, most of the stories are truncated referring readers back to the print product. Which do you want us to read? We've never figured that one out.
Besides, when are newspapers going to get a clue? If we go to a newspaper site and see that the whole story isn't there or they want us to pay for the content, we'll never go back there. But if we can read the whole story, we'll stay on the site (and might read the ads as well.) Don't newspapers realize that they generate more traffic if they put all their content up on the Web, and therefore get more views for their advertisers and can charge more for all those extra views? Many of the bigger papers have made that work, like the Indianapolis Star. The Herald-Press is definitely not the Indy Star, but if the people running the show had any brains, they would realize that increased traffic means increased advertising revenues. Just common sense.
Speaking of online, we noticed that the H-P is offering a PDF version of the paper that is e-mailed each morning. They guarantee delivery by 7 a.m. each morning. There's got to be a joke there somewhere, but that might be considered piling on.

Blogging the blogs

One of the newest features of the H-P has been the blogs. It's not bad enough that these staffers haven't yet learned how to write news stories, now they're being encouraged to write their behind-the-scenes thoughts about the stories they butchered in the first place.
I particularly like Jennifer Kannon making up words when she doesn't know the original word. My favorite is the use of the bizarrely-formed word "co-inside" when she was grasping for the word "coincide."
The one person who you would think should be blogging - editor Tom Davis - isn't. In fact, he rarely writes at all. Probably a good thing, because when he has written a story, it's nearly as unreadable as his staffers' efforts.
Last week, when sports editor Sean Giggy was out of town, Mr. Davis apparently covered the Huntington North football game. I say apparently, because even though he described the action (sort of), there wasn't one quote from Viking coach Rief Gilg or a player (Mr. Davis also misspelled Rief Gilg's first name). It was one of the best seasons in school history that ended with a tough, one-point loss, and it would have been nice to hear what the coach had to say about the game or his team's effort.
There was some sterling prose in the story. I'm sure the staffers at Sports Illustrated are starting to worry about losing their jobs. Here's the first few paragraphs. I think they can go without any further comment.

"By TOM DAVIS, H-P Managing Editor
Fort Wayne South did everything it could to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in its IHSAA Class 5A Sectional Semifinal football game at Huntington North on Friday.
However, The Vikings, who had to overcome a pair of major first quarter injuries, played along and allowed the Archers to enjoy their bus ride home following a 21-20 Viking loss.
The defeat, though heart-breaking to the Black-and Red faithful, culminated a third straight strong season under Coach Reif Gilg that has seen the local boys win 24 games over that stretch.
South had to have felt sick early on, as it watched Heath Frame, who closes his career as the most productive runner in school history, barrel his way to 20 yards in his first two carries. However, Frame struggled off of the field with an apparent hamstring injury following his second carry and spent the rest of the game on the sidelines. Despite the setback, the Vikings (8-3) leaned on the broad shoulders of senior Cory Blocker, who enjoyed a bittersweet birthday, as he finished with 155 yards on 22 carries and a score."

TUESDAY 11-04-08 Sports Time Warp

This is unfortunately way-too familiar.
The Huntington University men's basketball team opened its season Saturday in Illinois, likely ending too late for the ridiculously-early H-P deadlines.
But there was still nothing in even Monday's newspaper.
The HU opener finally made it in on Tuesday. The story conveniently never mentioned what day the game was played, so the casual observer would think that it might have occurred Monday.
But it was played on Saturday.
Even so, three days late, the H-P decided to splash it loud and proud at the top of the page.
Then there's the home HU volleyball tournament that mysteriously was held "recently." It actually happened Saturday.

WED 11-05-08 Covering the biggest election in a generation

Leave it to the staff of the H-P to completely miss the mark on the easiest story to cover in decades.
The election of Barack Obama was the most compelling event of the year, yet it only merited a tiny corner of the H-P's front-page coverage. Instead of running a story across the top of the page with a picture of the President-elect, the H-P brainstrust decided to run three head shots of members of their own staff, plugging their blogs on their website.
You've got to especially love the glamour shot of Jennifer Kannon. (her actual last name isn't Kannon - as a would-be actress/singer/performer, she uses a stage name).
Even the elementary school mock election of John McCain garnered more coverage than the actual election. By the way, that elementary election also was judged to be a bigger story than a local company eliminating 200 jobs.

******
A behind-the-scenes note on the election coverage: Mr. Davis sent a high school student who works part time for the H-P to the county clerk's office to, in his words, "cover the election." He didn't explain to her what would be going on there, who she needed to talk to, or what she needed to find out. She's 17 and has never even voted. How was she supposed to know what to do? What a horrible example of leadership and mentoring.
********


On the sports page, the story of the day was apparently the weekly press release about the Huntington University athletes of the week.
Secondary was the season-opening game for the HU women's basketball team. Sure, there was a picture, and a score, but where's the story?
At least the score was timely, unlike the men's opening basketball game, which made the H-P three days late.