Thursday, March 15, 2012

Remember When News Wasn't All About the Reporter?

Once upon a time, reporters weren't the news. Long ago, reporters told readers about community and world events. Reporter Brenda Barbosa's dislike of Ferris wheels and tall ladders wouldn't have qualified for either category.  But that was then, and now the headline is "Nervous Sun reporter tries hand at flying."  Barbosa's conversion from "scaredy-cat" to "wanna go 'Top Gun'" warrants front page play, with art, with a jump, and six more pix, most of which feature -- the reporter!

But in case readers missed that the story is bereft of news and all about the reporter, Sun page designers ran the same picture of the pretty young woman twice.

4 comments:

  1. Where does the story say the reporter took the stick? The headline implies she operated the plane but the story doesn't say this at all.

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  2. The other headline, "A wing and a prayer" is a reference to a John Wayne film ("Flying Tigers," 1942) in which a shot-through airplane struggles back to base. That doesn't happen in this case, either. This story is stoopid all through.

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  3. The flight instructor's school gets a free, two page, full color ad because he flew a cute brunette around for a while. Can't buy that kind of publicity. Would be a bit more ethical if David Dunn-Rankin had actually paid for the reporter's "instruction" hour, fuel, pilot, etc. etc. etc.

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  4. "A notebook and a prayer"
    A story about a person who works as a reporter — not is a reporter — doing stories about themselves and other trivia, while they hope that the Dunn-Rankin boys don't ever sell the paper to a quality newspaper chain that would fire people who write crap like this.

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