On clues and having them

Today's pro tip: When you're looking at a story on a left-hand page (2A, for example), look at the upper left corner of the page for a thing called the "folio line." That will tell you the publication date of the daily fishwrap in your hands and -- should the city be part of the title -- where it was published as well! Say, "June 20" and "Detroit," just for example:

Those hints provide some "context" for interpreting a fact claim like "it has felt like summer for at least three weeks," to which an appropriate response on June 20 in Detroit is something like "lolwut?"

Just a bit downpage from the folio is an unusually useful visual representation of quantitative data:

 ... which, in case you were out and about in today's rainy-with-a-high-of-63 in midtown, should make clear that you were not deceiving yourself. It has "felt like summer" for at most one day this year, and that wasn't in the past week. If we need to run a two-day-old story from USA Today in the spot on 2A usually reserved for breathless announcements of new ice cream flavors, could we at least look at the folio line and check whether we're likely to set off uncontrolled hilarity among the audience?

OK, one more. Let's leaf through those folio lines for page 17A:

For you out-of-towners, the best guess is that the guest columnist here is talking about the annual Mackinac Policy Conference,* which the paper covered in its usual fulsome detail when it happened -- at the end of May. I don't see a need to blame the columnist for this, but if you're going to sit on guest submissions for three weeks, do you suppose it might be a minor courtesy to your writers if you allow them to update their work?

I wish it went without saying at this point, but seriously. If you want people to pay for the thing (and apparently you do):

... shouldn't you pay some people to read it before you send it out into the Marketplace of Ideas? You could call them -- I don't know, "editors of copy" or something.

* You can tell a lot about news routines by what they take for granted -- for example, the idea that the annual policy conference everybody has to be at if they want a say in public education (among other topics) is sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce. Apparently, raising this point in Detroit journalism would be sort of like bitching about the drinks menu at a vampire gala.