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.