Staff reporter Brandy Brubaker occasionally drives me to distraction with her writing style and today is a perfect example.
Headline: Downtown club loses license
"The liquor license of a downtown
nightclub has been suspended
during an investigation into the
alleged serving of alcohol to underage
patrons and an alleged sexual
assault involving a patron.
State Alcohol Beverage Control
Administration (ABCA) officials
suspended the liquor license held
by Tabu, on Chestnut Street, until
further notice, ABCA Spokesman
Gig Robinson said Monday."
Why, oh why, oh why are we forced to wait until halfway through the second paragraph to discover the name of the club?
There are only three possible reasons for this silly device:
1) It's part of AP style. To hell with AP style. AP style is boring, stilted and verbose for the sake of verbosity.
2) Purely to fill column inches i.e. 250 words of fact stretched to 500 words of prose
3) Ms Brubaker, her editor and/or others believe it adds drama, tension, suspense, etc.
I'm partial to UK newspapers for their terse, direct style. They would have identified Tabu in the first paragraph, perhaps the first sentence.
In fact, the second paragraph should be the first paragraph. In fact, the first paragraph should be struck entirely except for the mention of underage patrons and an alleged sexual assault - items which could have been incorporated into the second paragraph.
Maddening.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Monday, April 12, 2010
Stefanie Loh moves on
In a move that was kept as quiet as the relocation of the Baltimore Colts, (former) WVU football beat writer for the DP has moved up the road to Harrisburg, PA's Patriot-News. She is now writing on their high school sports (!?) and minor league baseball (!?).
A quick Google shows that this paper had advertised a vacancy and it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to work out the rest.
One could say that Harrisburg is a larger market (if we include Lebanon, Carlisle, York, etc.) but it's in the sports wilderness given the huge Philadelphia market to the east.
College football is one subject where a beat writer can gain some traction and build a name by being associated with a particular program as the go-to person for information. It works in countless college towns in the SEC and Big 12. But the subject never changes - literally - so one must be committed to the cause.
But Ms. Loh was a West Coaster and Morgantown was almost certainly going to a be a short-term proposition for her. I'm sure there was more than a bit of culture shock upon arrival.
On balance, she did her best and it generally was good enough but the DP continues to suffer from Lack of Institutional Memory syndrome. There is nobody there - with the possible exception of Todd Murray - who can personally recall people, games, stories and other moments in Mountaineer history and this lack of historical perspective, by definition, hinders any ability to provide context for the events of the present. 'History repeating itself' and/or 'exorcising the demons of the past' are stock constructs for game stories yet the lack of experience at the DP means they can't even manage to rely on these hoary cliches.
Ms. Loh was often reduced to pumping the sunshine for the only coach she had worked with - Bill Stewart. Stewart's optimism in the face of very long odds can be endearing at times but can also be a bit maddening and Ms. Loh occasionally demonstrated symptoms of madness-by-association when defending what was, at best, a mediocre team and a string of uninspiring opponents. It was all borne out by the egg laid on the 50 yard line of the Gator Bowl (next to the flaming spear planted by Coach Bowden).
To be fair, the beat writer had a frequently thankless job by playing up the positive qualities of many WVU football recruits while ignoring or sugar-coating their shortcomings (criminal backgrounds, broken homes, children fathered out of wedlock by multiple women, academic deficiencies). One can only imagine being instructed to submit 500 words on Johnny Linebacker-loves-his-mom and attempting to make it seem compelling.
The bread-and-water rations at the DP appear to be the meal of the day, every day, and it remains to be seen if a football writer will be brought in or if musical chairs (don't forget to take one away!) will be employed to shuffle assignments yet again. Todd Murray has, either out of common sense or necessity, been assigned to spring football along with his editor Drew Rubenstein.
A quick Google shows that this paper had advertised a vacancy and it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to work out the rest.
One could say that Harrisburg is a larger market (if we include Lebanon, Carlisle, York, etc.) but it's in the sports wilderness given the huge Philadelphia market to the east.
College football is one subject where a beat writer can gain some traction and build a name by being associated with a particular program as the go-to person for information. It works in countless college towns in the SEC and Big 12. But the subject never changes - literally - so one must be committed to the cause.
But Ms. Loh was a West Coaster and Morgantown was almost certainly going to a be a short-term proposition for her. I'm sure there was more than a bit of culture shock upon arrival.
On balance, she did her best and it generally was good enough but the DP continues to suffer from Lack of Institutional Memory syndrome. There is nobody there - with the possible exception of Todd Murray - who can personally recall people, games, stories and other moments in Mountaineer history and this lack of historical perspective, by definition, hinders any ability to provide context for the events of the present. 'History repeating itself' and/or 'exorcising the demons of the past' are stock constructs for game stories yet the lack of experience at the DP means they can't even manage to rely on these hoary cliches.
Ms. Loh was often reduced to pumping the sunshine for the only coach she had worked with - Bill Stewart. Stewart's optimism in the face of very long odds can be endearing at times but can also be a bit maddening and Ms. Loh occasionally demonstrated symptoms of madness-by-association when defending what was, at best, a mediocre team and a string of uninspiring opponents. It was all borne out by the egg laid on the 50 yard line of the Gator Bowl (next to the flaming spear planted by Coach Bowden).
To be fair, the beat writer had a frequently thankless job by playing up the positive qualities of many WVU football recruits while ignoring or sugar-coating their shortcomings (criminal backgrounds, broken homes, children fathered out of wedlock by multiple women, academic deficiencies). One can only imagine being instructed to submit 500 words on Johnny Linebacker-loves-his-mom and attempting to make it seem compelling.
The bread-and-water rations at the DP appear to be the meal of the day, every day, and it remains to be seen if a football writer will be brought in or if musical chairs (don't forget to take one away!) will be employed to shuffle assignments yet again. Todd Murray has, either out of common sense or necessity, been assigned to spring football along with his editor Drew Rubenstein.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Headlines and Priorities (?)
Lessee....West Virginia University's men's basketball team is a #2 seed in the NCAA Tournament and won their first game in this eagerly-anticipated event.
What did the sports editor select as the lead story on the sports page? Baseball. In March. During the regular season. Against noted baseball power Eastern Michigan from the sports hotbed of Ypsilanti. Oh - there's a wrestling blurb in there also but it requires moving to a jump page.
Oh - look - there's the basketball story halfway down the page! It's the USA Today Attention Deficit & Hyperactive Disorder school of layout and design! Here a column! There a sidebar! There a teaser for stories inside - but you must travel all the way to Page 6-B for coverage of the most important sporting event this month!
Just imagine if the critical (apparently) stories on college baseball were moved to the prime (apparently) real estate on Page 6-B! Why you might even have enough room to publish the entire game story without the need for a jump page, thus serving your readers AND making your layout less chaotic! What's that? Yes - you can also move a non-story about non-WVU players being paraded like cattle at the stockyard in anticipation of the NFL Draft.
Also included is a story on a WVU recruit. But he's still in high school! Before we cover the people who haven't put on the uniform yet why not cover those who are currently wearing the uniform?
Wow - now there's plenty of room - even for those whose common sense has temporarily disappeared!
Newspaper types will say, no doubt, that 'readers want to see all the previous day's results at a glance.' Erm, no. Readers want to see the IMPORTANT results. The opening round of the NCAA Tournament involving the #2 seeded college team is important. Baseball against a MAC school is not important. Football players running around cones in the off-season is even less important.
What did the sports editor select as the lead story on the sports page? Baseball. In March. During the regular season. Against noted baseball power Eastern Michigan from the sports hotbed of Ypsilanti. Oh - there's a wrestling blurb in there also but it requires moving to a jump page.
Oh - look - there's the basketball story halfway down the page! It's the USA Today Attention Deficit & Hyperactive Disorder school of layout and design! Here a column! There a sidebar! There a teaser for stories inside - but you must travel all the way to Page 6-B for coverage of the most important sporting event this month!
Just imagine if the critical (apparently) stories on college baseball were moved to the prime (apparently) real estate on Page 6-B! Why you might even have enough room to publish the entire game story without the need for a jump page, thus serving your readers AND making your layout less chaotic! What's that? Yes - you can also move a non-story about non-WVU players being paraded like cattle at the stockyard in anticipation of the NFL Draft.
Also included is a story on a WVU recruit. But he's still in high school! Before we cover the people who haven't put on the uniform yet why not cover those who are currently wearing the uniform?
Wow - now there's plenty of room - even for those whose common sense has temporarily disappeared!
Newspaper types will say, no doubt, that 'readers want to see all the previous day's results at a glance.' Erm, no. Readers want to see the IMPORTANT results. The opening round of the NCAA Tournament involving the #2 seeded college team is important. Baseball against a MAC school is not important. Football players running around cones in the off-season is even less important.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
And the wall came down....
Let's see if I've got this recipe correct:
1) Take a steep valley previously only suitable for use as pastureland by some presumably agile cattle (with the proverbial one pair of legs shorter than the other).
2) Build hundreds, if not thousands, of student condos using the cheapest construction materials available. Perch them precariously on hillsides.
3) Clad most/all of it in that boring, tacky, ubiquitous tan vinyl siding.
4) Ignore minor details like draining and a road actually capable of handling the traffic to, from and past your development. Hint: the golf cart path known as West Run Road wasn't and isn't up to the job.
5) Inconvenience everyone who uses nearby roads by failing utterly to plan for the traffic impact. Rely on local traffic engineers to stick a traffic light up thus turning one bottleneck into four.
Well, the karma has been building and while nobody wants to see any injuries, the cynical developers may be starting to see their bill come due as nature and gravity are starting to push back. Here's a pic of a retaining wall that couldn't.
1) Take a steep valley previously only suitable for use as pastureland by some presumably agile cattle (with the proverbial one pair of legs shorter than the other).
2) Build hundreds, if not thousands, of student condos using the cheapest construction materials available. Perch them precariously on hillsides.
3) Clad most/all of it in that boring, tacky, ubiquitous tan vinyl siding.
4) Ignore minor details like draining and a road actually capable of handling the traffic to, from and past your development. Hint: the golf cart path known as West Run Road wasn't and isn't up to the job.
5) Inconvenience everyone who uses nearby roads by failing utterly to plan for the traffic impact. Rely on local traffic engineers to stick a traffic light up thus turning one bottleneck into four.
Well, the karma has been building and while nobody wants to see any injuries, the cynical developers may be starting to see their bill come due as nature and gravity are starting to push back. Here's a pic of a retaining wall that couldn't.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Fonts: Back To The Future
The new font lasted only 5 days - the January 6 edition uses the old font.
With or without the reversion, the conversion was hardly 'seamless to the eye' as editor Geri Ferrara claimed. It was, in fact, quite jarring and bringing back the old font is unassailable evidence that readers, employees or both decided the new font was unacceptable.
While I applaud the move it's a rather quick and humiliating climbdown considering all the breathless hype trotted out by DP editors & management less than one week ago.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
It's smaller - but it is improved?
The DP has joined the huge number of dailies in trimming itself down from traditional broadsheet width to a more narrow format.
Nothing new under the sun of course but newspaper hacks cannot resist the urge to imply that this somehow qualifies them for collective sainthood. Cue the greenie litany: less ink, less newsprint and soy-based ink (yummy)!
This new skinny paper is a wonderful thing. How do we know? Because the people at the paper say so dammit! Editor Geri Ferrara and her lieutenants may have fewer columns to work with but that still gives them plenty of room to gush: dedication to local news, increased ad value (read: they will charge more for less), streamlined (presumably for the car-based carriers who must toss each copy), reader friendly. Yes, reader friendly - this paper now purrs like a cat when you open it up! No more paper cuts or stains on hands! In fact it may have curative properties but the FDA has not evaluated such a claim.
Back to reality...the decreasing size of newspapers mirrors perfectly the decline in the role they play in news coverage and in the (abusive) position they have played in influencing public opinion. Even papers 'leaning right' typically support every and any government boondoggle and expenditure. One-horse towns buying property, police cruisers, computers and other things they don't understand let alone use is just ducky with the DP. With six columns or five you can be sure the DP will never call for an accounting of all those dollars flowing into the system but never flowing back out.
As for the physical look of the paper the other big change is the standard typeface used. Inexplicably the DP has bucked the Internet-inspired trend of clean, neat fonts that aid legibility even if they lack a certain artistry. Instead, they have gone with a serif-heavy font (i.e., lots of little lines, wings and so forth on the letters) and a surfeit of mysterious, inconsistent spaces between words and letters that harkens back to the age of manual typesetting when type had to be 'slugged' in order to create clean column edges. A charitable description might be text produced using an early version of PageMaker for the original Macintosh computer. It now looks like text in a high school paper.
I haven't yet mustered the energy to compare individual news items from the old and new DP to see if this brave new version is actually an excuse to also cut down on article length but obviously fewer columns mean less real estate on offer for all stories.
Nothing new under the sun of course but newspaper hacks cannot resist the urge to imply that this somehow qualifies them for collective sainthood. Cue the greenie litany: less ink, less newsprint and soy-based ink (yummy)!
This new skinny paper is a wonderful thing. How do we know? Because the people at the paper say so dammit! Editor Geri Ferrara and her lieutenants may have fewer columns to work with but that still gives them plenty of room to gush: dedication to local news, increased ad value (read: they will charge more for less), streamlined (presumably for the car-based carriers who must toss each copy), reader friendly. Yes, reader friendly - this paper now purrs like a cat when you open it up! No more paper cuts or stains on hands! In fact it may have curative properties but the FDA has not evaluated such a claim.
Back to reality...the decreasing size of newspapers mirrors perfectly the decline in the role they play in news coverage and in the (abusive) position they have played in influencing public opinion. Even papers 'leaning right' typically support every and any government boondoggle and expenditure. One-horse towns buying property, police cruisers, computers and other things they don't understand let alone use is just ducky with the DP. With six columns or five you can be sure the DP will never call for an accounting of all those dollars flowing into the system but never flowing back out.
As for the physical look of the paper the other big change is the standard typeface used. Inexplicably the DP has bucked the Internet-inspired trend of clean, neat fonts that aid legibility even if they lack a certain artistry. Instead, they have gone with a serif-heavy font (i.e., lots of little lines, wings and so forth on the letters) and a surfeit of mysterious, inconsistent spaces between words and letters that harkens back to the age of manual typesetting when type had to be 'slugged' in order to create clean column edges. A charitable description might be text produced using an early version of PageMaker for the original Macintosh computer. It now looks like text in a high school paper.
I haven't yet mustered the energy to compare individual news items from the old and new DP to see if this brave new version is actually an excuse to also cut down on article length but obviously fewer columns mean less real estate on offer for all stories.
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