Wednesday, February 27, 2008

If It Happened in Cleveland, It's Not Local

After deep-sixing "Arcadian" in favor of generic "Our Town" banners for the various local fronts of America's Best Community Daily, the old name is suddenly resurrected this morning.

Old Word Wolf rattled the pages in delicious anticipation of real, local news. She snapped the crease out of the fold and ... gasp! ... the top local news is Clinton and Obama had a debate -- in Cleveland.

Oh, well. OWW challenged the cubs to a breakfast debate about "local" and heard a quick consensus: If it has a Cleveland dateline, it isn't.

Those Pesky Five W's, Again ...


Ever the optimists, the folks in charge have handed "Police Beat" to John Lawhorne. Not one of our ace reporter's entries in this much-read section includes mention of "when" except one. It's the fifth item in Neighborhood Watch: "A caller reported his boat had been tied to the docks and it was gone this morning." Now that's timely news.

Why is OWW so grumpy about this? Here's why: One of this morning's timeless items reports "a truck was reported to have hit a pole with wires fallen onto the road."

Ignoring the awful grammar, readers legitimately wonder if that happened yesterday, the same day most of south Florida suffered a power outage. Folks south of Arcadia endured a three-hour blackout -- but they have no news about whether this was the result of the truck hitting the pole down the road or was part of the regional news story. The Five W's help readers make sense of their little corners of the world. OWW will continue being grumpy until Lawhorne learns this little bit of journalism.

In the Zone ...
Charlotte Deputies set speed, light-running zones Let's see: a 55 mph zone is where we travel 55 miles an hour; a pedestrian zone is where we walk; a school zone is near a school. The cereal set can be forgiven for giggling at the sleepy, careless copy editors who repeatedly (as in every single week) post headlines that says exactly the opposite of the facts. Accuracy anyone?

2 comments:

  1. Ha! You are better than the paper! Keep it up, Old Word Wolf!

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  2. Comment to New Fan: We need to draft OWW to start a local paper that has real news! And why can't the Sun staff read what they wrote out loud to see if their sentence at least makes sense! (I already know they cannot get their facts right - but grammar should be easy..??)

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