Monday, August 15, 2011

Monday Bits and Pieces

A Charlotte Sun senior editor and occasional columnist likes to compile lists of unanswered questions and call it a day's work. OWW thought it would be fun to do the same.

Starting at the bottom: Why is The Journal of Lake Placid running a political cartoon, "Anchors Away," that comments on a story about a motor-boat club on a lake in Springfield, Ill.? (Just to be clear, LP's in Florida. But then, it does have "lake" in its name.)

Why wasn't the almost-last observation, "... the two mediums said psychic ability depended on a healthy imagination ..." the lede in Jen Wulf's story, "A trip to the supernatural side"?

Why didn't a copy editor read David Morris' consumer column before pasting in this morning's irrelevant headline? The report is about the newest victim in the perennial duct-cleaning-and-mold-detection scam. That is not even remotely similar to the perennial too-good-to-be-true story that the kids-in-charge decided would fit.

Second from the top of the side bar: Did the copy desk kids and the file-foto tweens use different templates last night?

And finally, regarding the A1 Top Story: Why didn't anyone notice either of the misplaced modifiers or the missing plural inflection in the fourth sentence of Josh Salman's story about millionaire Republicans elected to the state house? While they made most of their money before being elected to public office, a growing number of local Democrats fear the conservatives have lost touch with the best interest of the region's middle class -- safe-guarding tax breaks for the wealthy on the backs of average workers.

Or its continuation: They point to controversial Gov. Rick Scott as an example of how politics and money can be a dangerous combination. No, "they" don't. Nowhere in the story does the antecedent of "they" point to what the sentence says is being pointed to. The reporter is the only person in the story to mention the governor's name.


2 comments:

  1. Two of the three pols mentioned are at the end of their 8 yr term limit. The CS couldn't have jumped on this a wee bit sooner?

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  2. Kreegle said with a smirk, sez the reporter. We would not recognize sarcasm without the editorializing? I'm no fan of any of the so-called GOP (Good Old Party?! Hah!) in this article, but this is the most unbalanced, biased and one-sided pieces of "reporting" that I've read in a while. Forgive me if I'm picking on a summer intern who just figured out where to find financial disclosure statements.

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