Random observations

A letter from a reader in the Akron Beacon Journal the day after the election:

Thank God the election is over. Goodbye to Joe the Plumber and all of the TV experts..

The last line in a paid death notice for Ken Swanborn read: "In lieu of flowers, please vote Democratic." Somebody at the Tribune deleted the request. "If it's considered discriminatory or offensive, they take the line out," explains a woman on the paper's death notices desk.

Here's a letter from retiree Abe Zaidan that appeared in Voice of the People in the Beacon Journal today. Incidentally, did you know that if you type "Zaidan" in the search box, you are asked the question: Did you mean Satan? Here's the letter

Now that your cartoonist, Chip Bok, is amusing himself by depicting Barack Obama as an enemy of the people — at least those people who gave us eight years of George W. Bush — your less perceptive readers deserve an explanation of why he so satirically dismisses Obama's community service as a negative criterion for the presidency.

Such commendable service, it would be easy enough to discover, is but one of many attributes upon which Obama has built his campaign.

Cartoonists are expected to deal in caricatures, but in this instance, as well as other attacks on Obama, Bok has actually caricatured his own uninformed view of the Democratic candidate.

April 27, 2008
Correction box on page A1 of Sunday BJ:
Computer problems resulted in jumbled and missing type, incorrect names and missing names in a superdelegrates story in Saturday's paper. The Beacon Journal apologizes for the problem. The corrected story is being reprinted on Page A8.

April 25, 2008
The obit watch: It's getting slower
Old retirees like me would probably notice. There was a large 4-col. hed on a news obit for auto dealer Burt Greenwald on page B6 today. The services also are today. Did he die suddenly? Nope. The classified obits ran on both Wednesday and Thursday. The news department finally caught up on Friday. I can remember we used to get those little green carbon copies of classified obit and wrote an obit for each. The carbons went straight to the morgue which checked quickly for clips and photos in case it was someone who deserved a little extra attention--like Burt Greenwald for instance. Sorry about that Burt.
~Harry Liggett

April 24, 2008
Dressing for success in newsroom
As I sat on the rim earlier this week, I thought back to when I started at the BJ in the late Sixties. Copy editors (I think they were all male) wore ties, white collared shirts and slacks, dress shoes AND socks. Today, the last couple rims I've worked with and on have dressed like auto mechanics: work shirts, T-shirts, sweat shirts, warmup pants, jeans, sandals, tennies with/without socks (male and female). There's no dressing for success in today's newsroom. Maybe it doesn't make a difference, but I just can't bring myself to go to work looking like I'm going out to the mow the lawn. Is that too superficial?

On another note, take a look at the Media column in the May issue of Portfolio, the new Conde Nast publication. It's an excellent piece on the state of our business, its failings and some of the "business models" that might work in the near future. Brian Tierney, the new publisher of the Philly papers, observes that "I've got some (ad) salesmen who make $100,000 a year and have no interest in making $120,000." He finds this culture of the business side of "legacy newspapers," (traditional papers with old-fashioned journalistic values facing digital-age financial agonies) as the "the worst part" of his experience in newspapering. He continues: "There is a dearth of of talent on the business side of this industry that is shocking to me. No one goes to Wharton and says 'I want to run circulation at Knight-Ridder." In general, he adds, "the business side has let down the journalistic side of newspapers." Mort Zuckerman, who bought the New York Daily News, says the current business models for newspaper websites seem to be "substituting pennies for dollars" in replacing lost advertising revenue. And finally, back to Tierney who says he wants to "monetize" the most common surplus commodity in any newsroom: the reporters' nonstop gabbing about local politics, hometown sports, business, movies, wine, car prices, undiscovered restaurants, and so on. Letting reporters sit at their desks and share inside dope with a video camera in three-to-five minute bites is way more cost efficient than printing news on paper ... Gulp!!

[Larry Froelich still works part-time at the Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader, a former Knight Ridder paper now owned by McClatchy. The headline is ours. The comments came in an e-mail.]]

August 3, 2007
Would you call a buyout hush money?
Chicago Tribune employees have to agree to this in order to collect a buyout: "You will not in any manner whatsoever denigrate, disparage, or otherwise convey or cause to be conveyed an unfavorable impression of the Company to a third party or parties." Michael Miner writes: "What journalists find so obnoxious about these terms is that after dedicating their careers to the First Amendment they're bribed and bullied to surrender their own right to free speech."

July 30, 2007
--30-- means end of story--not the date
A correction in the New York Times:
An article on Thursday about the arraignment of three men in the shooting of two New York police officers, one of whom died, misstated the schedule set by a judge for a trial in the case. The trial is expected to begin by February, not by “Feb. 30.” The error occurred when an editor saw the symbol “— 30 —” typed at the bottom of the reporter’s article and combined it with the last word, “February.” It is actually a notation that journalists have used through the years to denote the end of an article. Although many no longer use it or even know what it means, some journalists continue to debate its origin. A popular theory is that it was a sign-off code developed by telegraph operators. Another tale is that reporters began signing their articles with “30” to demand a living wage of $30 per week. Most dictionaries still include the symbol in the definition of thirty, noting that it means “conclusion” or “end of a news story.”

July 18, 2007
A fish story by Ryan Karp
I have seen his byline before in the Dover-New Philadelphia Times-Reporter, but I got a chuckle out of a story today. The story was about The Ohio Division of Wildlife looking into what caused about 1,000 fish to die in Sugar Creek north of Rts. 39 and 516 near the Willow Glen subdivision in Dover Township. The fish story was written by Ryan Karp
~Harry Liggett

April 30, 2007
Do you remember?
All of us get those emails that have been forwarded by, forwarded by, forwarded by with a url at the end which lead to some crazy post or photos you really did not want to bother checking. So, it is with some reluctance that we provide this one below. It is called a "Do You Remember" and has some old Burma Shave signs in it. If you have nothing better to do with your time, click on it.

This is another report from Joe Strupp of Editor & Publisher on the American Society of News Editors convention in Washington, DC

In a surprise finding, online readers finish news stories more often than those who read in print, according to the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack study released Wednesday at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference here.

When readers chose to read an online story, they usually read an average of 77% of the story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57% in tabloids.

The survey, in which 600 newspaper readers from six different newspapers were studied, utilized electronic eyetracking equipment that readers wore while they read broadsheet, tabloid and online editions of newspapers. The research, conducted last year, focused on 100 readers from each newspaper.

The study looked at two tabloids, the Rocky Mountain News and Philadelphia Daily News; two broadsheets, the St. Petersburg Times and The Star_Tribune of Minneapolis; and two newspaper Web sites, at the Times and Star_Tribune.

Readers spent 15 minutes during each reading session over a 30_day period, according to the report. "This is a very large scale study and this is hard data," said Sara Quinn, a Poynter researcher. "We were amazed by these numbers."

In addition, nearly two_thirds of online readers read all of the text of a particular story once they began to read it, the survey revealed. In print, 68% of tabloid readers continued reading a specific story through the jump to another page, while 59% did so in broadsheet reading.

The research also found that 75% of print readers are methodical in their reading, which means they start reading a page at a particular story and work their way through each story. Just 25% of print readers are scanners, who scan the entire page first, then choose a story to read.

Online, however, about half of readers are methodical, while the other half scan, the report found. The survey also revealed that large headlines and fewer, large photos attracted more eyes than smaller images in print. But online, readers were drawn more to navigation bars and teasers.

Findings also revealed that news event photos received more attention than staged or studio images, while color got more interest than black and white.

Research subjects also were quizzed about what they learned from a story, revealing that readers could answer more questions about a story when it included "alternative story forms," such as Q&A’s, timelines, graphics, short sidebars, and lists.