Bizarro reefer of the (still-young) week

Here's a pretty striking example of News Routines Gone Awry -- in this case, the sometimes laudable goal of giving interested readers a quick hint on where to find related stories running headlong into a strikingly bad sense of what stories are about and how to determine what they have to do with each other.

The point of concern is the glorified reefer parked at midpage right, under the lede story. It's trying to wrap up all the latest papal gaffe developments without actually marring the front page with that annoying international news. (Longtime readers might recall the paper's experiment with a similar approach in 1990; the more things change, and all that.)

In case you can't enlarge it and read it (we're so far unable to upload a tighter shot of the item itself), there's a photo of a demonstration in Pakistan over the hed "Protests continue to rage against pope." The content consists of three grafs, or about one badly written brief; the concept is relying on the reefers (the "Inside" rail in the package) to take the reader to actual coverage appearing on facing pages inside.

Trouble is, nobody seemed to have asked a fairly fundamental question: Do the stories we're referring to have doodly-boo to do with the photo, hed and text on the front? You make the call:

Inside
Vatican deploys diplomats in an effort to contain anger over pope's comments/4A

Islamist rebels suspected in failed bid to assassinate Somalia's president/4A

White House revising its proposal for dealing with terrorism suspects amid resistance from lawmakers/5A

One for three. The first one's obviously direct kin. (Though it makes you wonder: Is there not a complete story somewhere, dripping with that pesky context, about the actual shades of reaction in the "Muslim world"?)

The second one, no. We seem to have confused a grisly individual murder (the shooting of a nun, in another city, which might end up being related to the issue at hand, though nobody knows) with a full-blown attempt to do away with a head of state or government -- sort of like mistaking JonBenet Ramsey for JonFitzgerald Kennedy.

And the third: Whatever you guys are smoking, one hopes you brought enough to share with the rest of the class. On what planet could these two stories possibly be related?

Unless, of course, Islamic anger at the pope is somehow related to anything in the world that has Muslims in it. In which case, where's the reefer to the Iranian soccer team? Nothing about the FBI's latest bumble in Havana-on-the-Hinkson? No room for the V&A's "Palace and Mosque"?

Time for our designer friends to chime in: Design is meant to organize, not decorate. Design serves content.

[Editor's note: Nicole's complaint below suggests that the above is aimed at the designers and that the aforementioned blunder is presumptively their fault. HEADSUP-L is happy to affirm that this is not the case; designers are by no means the chief suspects, and we ask that they not take offense.]

[Given the inept phrasing of the original post, though, one can see how they drew that conclusion. It is worth noting, as our good buddy Benny XVI has probably concluded, that while readers can't be expected to know what you meant, they often have a pretty good idea of what you said.]

Don't go out of your way, in short, to remind people you don't understand the news. They might think you mean it.