Me subject, you object

If you really can't bear to break that old J-school rule about not having conjunctions in heds, maybe you could just fall back on "blames fight on 'bad day.'"

What fight, you ask? Well, it's not as if you'd find out from the lede:

Former Fox Sports Detroit analyst and Detroit Tigers announcer Rod Allen spoke with Free Press business columnist Carol Cain on the “Michigan Matters” program on Sunday morning on WWJ-TV (Channel 62).

Stop press! At least, until you've waded through three prepositional phrases and the relative clause that reminds you why you might care to get to something that he said:

In Allen’s first public comments about the Sept. 4 incident with play-by-play broadcaster Mario Impemba, which turned physical and effectively ended the duo’s 16-plus year run calling Tigers games, he said the situation was largely blown out of proportion in media reports.

Though maybe not really his first public comments:

... Last month, Allen published his first remarks since it was learned that neither he or Impemba would return to the Tigers' booth via a letter on social media.

Here is what he told Cain:

Asked if he would have done anything differently, Allen said, “You know, it’s funny that you say that because I’ve thought that over and over and over and I really can’t come up with anything differently that I would have done. We had a bad day, there’s no doubt about that. I didn’t have a good day, he did not have a good day as well, and because of that, it was an argument. There was no choking, there was no fighting, there was no chasing down the hallway.

So the "incident" that "turned physical" (according to the cutline, a "physical altercation") wasn't a fight? Or was it just a fight without any fighting? OK, find another headline. But please pay attention to the pronouns if you do. Poor old "whom" may be a lost cause, but you don't have to let "me" become a subject.

A county far, far away

This is a strange sort of prepositional phrase to encounter in a newspaper whose first name is "Detroit," don't you think?

The estate is being audited by the IRS, which filed a claim this month in a county probate court north of Detroit.

In addition to having Canada to the south, Detroit has quite a few counties to the north of it -- perhaps this would mean one of the far-distant ones where they're still upset that they didn't get to vote for Wallace again in 2016? Here's the eighth graf:

... At the time of her death, Franklin owned a home in Oakland County's Bloomfield Township. The IRS filed the claim this month in Oakland County Probate Court in Pontiac.

So a county "north of Detroit" is actually "the one you hit as soon as you cross 8 Mile on Woodward going north"? About one weak single up the middle away from Detroit? The sort of point you might want to make at the outset for your local audience when editing a story that appears to have been meant for a national audience?

That's one data point, but when you come to this feature* three pages later, it starts to be a pattern:

 

I wouldn't expect even an unusually obsessive rimrat to add an "8 1/2 hours southwest of Detroit, give or take," and to be fair, "just a couple hours from Rosine" won't help very many of you out there.** But -- assuming you actually don't want the space to go to waste -- could you maybe locate the dateline city in relation to Louisville or St. Louis or even (given the subject matter) Fort Campbell?

The space thing is worth mentioning because, counting the open page for national and international news (three border/immigration stories, five briefs and an Amos Oz obit***), this story takes up a third of the news hole for stuff outside Michigan. Since you can't go back in time and unmake that decision, you might as well put some time into making the story accessible to your audience.

That, after all, is the point of editing -- not to see whose stylebook is the more excruciatingly trivial, but to make sure that your readers can get to the stuff they need by the most efficient route (which is also the argument against thumb ledes, POVs and other things that are still worth disputing). 

The Guild's complaint about the latest sad news from Cleveland -- "Local news will suffer if the people editing and fact-checking it don't live here" -- has never been a perfect defense against offshoring. Indeed, if you can't be bothered to look at a map while editing and the editor at the faraway hub can, it's not much of a defense at all. But it does suggest that careful people applying smart principles on behalf of a specific audience are, on the whole, going to make decisions that are both more palatable and more valuable. There's a Cleveland equivalent of being reasonably confident that your Detroit readers know where Pontiac and Oakland County are, and the local paper needs more people like that making decisions, not fewer.

 * Not on the freep.com site, so the link is to the originating paper.
** You know who you are.
*** Good call.

On getting both sides

Oh, how to keep the faithful at a fever pitch when things are looking a little rocky for the home team? I know! SQUIRRELS!

A Marine Corps veteran and his wife are fighting their Texas homeowners association after the group refused to allow them to fly their American and Marine Corps flags outside their home.

It's been a while since this classic outrage theme has cropped up; Fox seems to have been preoccupied the past year or so with teacher-student sex. But you can see where it gets its staying power. Relax your vigilance for a moment and the  enemies of freedom will lop off another stray limb of our American heritage, or something like that.

Cpl. Michael Pereira, who served three tours in Iraq from 2002 to 2009, moved into a Kingdom Heights subdivision in Rosenberg, Texas ,*about two months ago with his wife.

After moving in, they proudly displayed the two flags in the driveway of their home.

“They represent this county. They represent a brotherhood I was a part of,” Pereira told KPRC. “[They] show respect for all the people I went to war with and the ones that didn’t come back.”

Pereira said he would raise the flags every morning and would lower them every night. He never expected it would be a problem with the homeowners association.

Until now.

Cue dramatic music. Although at this point, you might be wondering ... OK, when do we bring the malefactors to justice?

Read more »

It's bigger on the inside

Somehow, you'd think a live appearance by an ancestor of the Great Man would have been worth more than the No. 4 play. Alas, the hed and lede have now been fixed:

A descendant of Civil War general Robert E. Lee and the mother of a woman killed earlier this month in Charlottesville, Virginia, took the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards to denounce white supremacists.

... but the link still says "civil-war-gen-lees-ancestor." And whatever you do, don't diagram the noun phrase so that the elephant is in your pajamas.

A date which will live in ... wait, what?

Thanks for letting us know it was "an editor's error," Ohio's Greatest Home Newspaper. Do you suppose it might have made a difference if "an editor" had been in the same time zone as the rest of the paper?

True it is that we've been putting these on quizzes in the editing class since before there was a War on Editing, because people have been counting the toes and forgetting to divide by 10, or something like that, since more or less the dawn of time.* And equally true that no single error can be causally linked to any single policy or personnel decision. Eventually, though, do you think we might want to pay a little more attention to the correlations?

* Thucydides was unimpressed by the ship tallies in Homer's war stories, because poets.

When spark plugs attack

See if you can guess where the Editor In Chief Emeritus of the Washington Times is going with this one:

The Donald finally caught a break in Paris, basking in rare Franco-American bonhomie as he joined the new president of France on Bastille Day, this year to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the American arrival on the battlefields of World War I.

A contingent of American troops even led the parade down the Champs-Elysees. Not even a president can resist a parade, especially a military parade with marching bands and serried ranks of fighting men. On Thursday, President Emmanuel Macron of France did not even try.

I think you've got the wrong "not even" -- is there some reason heads of state should be especially immune to the old blare of bugles and ruffle of drums? But we're about to get to the point:

Neither did Donald Trump, once a schoolboy at a military academy. Regimental flags floating on a peaceful breeze, despised as nationalist symbols to some, are but reminders to all that “greater love hath no man than this,” in the words of Christ as recorded by the Apostle John, “that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

So whatever his offspring have been up to with the Russians, the Bright Sun of the 21st Century is still reminding Europe who's the real defender of Western Civ. Which makes the Times's venture into period history all the more interesting:

... The 100th anniversary celebrations are particularly poignant reminders of Franco-American friendship when it was backs-to-the-wall time.  ... When the Germans, advancing through a grain field, got within a hundred yards, the Marines opened ferocious rifle fire, mowing down the ranks of the Bosch until the survivors fled into the woods.

Read more »

Halfway round the world

In which the fake news gets halfway round the world -- OK, about 220 miles south, given the I-75 detour -- before the editors put on their trousers:

Columbus received a top ranked among 75 other cities in a comparison done by QuoteWizard, an online insurance comparison marketplace. Unfortunately, the ranking isn’t good news. It’s for the worst-driving cities in America.

And you can write the rest from there. A competent spellcheck* probably should have caught "received a top ranked," but it wouldn't tell you that the "comparison" is meaningless babble designed to snag a few bursts of free publicity for QuoteWizard. For that, it would help to have an editor, and guess what the Dispatch** did that doesn't bode well for editors?

Please don't mistake that for a cause-and-effect argument. We're no more hospitable to post hoc claims now than back before the War on Editing began. But it's worth pointing out that if you're, oh, the New York Times and you want to avoid running stupid post hoc editorial claims about the better-forgotten Sarah Palin, you probably shouldn't start by eliminating the job classification*** with the highest proportion of people who will call your writers on bogus reasoning.

* Word didn't, from which you may draw conclusions next time Word questions you about the passive voice.
** Your Editor and frequent commenter RayB are somewhere amid the throng in this crowd shot.
***  Which is still holding the bridge with class, if you've missed it.

A red, white and blue streamers

What a long day it's been for the Fair 'n' Balanced Network! Let's just enjoy the evening ledeall on Massster's foreign adventures. Text is verbatim, with occasional highlighting for the curious.

President Trump on Saturday began his first overseas trip as president with a stop in Saudi Arabia, calling the visit a “tremendous day” and pledging to work with leader King Salman to bring peace to the Gulf region and forge stronger economic ties, in large part through a roughly $10 billion arms deal.*

“That was a tremendous day,” Trump said shortly after signing the arm deal. “Tremendous investments in the United States. Hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs, jobs, jobs."

The arms deal is part of large, $350 billion economic packages between the ally nations.

Trump and first lady Melania Trump were greeting in Saudi Arabia at the airport by 81-year King Salman, in a red carpet ceremony that also included a military flyover in which several jets left a red, white and blue streamers.

Trump called his visit to Saudi Arabia "a great honor" joined the king in a brief coffee ceremony at the airport terminal before heading to his hotel and the official events of the day.

After signing the deal in Riyadh and talking with top Saudi leaders, Trump and the first lady are scheduled to participate in a royal banquet dinner and a museum tour at the Murabba Palace in Riyadh.

Trump is also scheduled to make a major speech Sunday in which he’s expected to show support for America’s Persian Gulf allies, a likely reset after months of talk about Muslim extremism.**

The next stop in the president’s nine-day trip will be Israel, where he will have an audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican,*** then meet with allies at a NATO summit in Brussels and the Group of 7 wealthy nations in Sicily.

“Great to be in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,” Trump tweeted upon landing in Saudi Arabia aboard Air Force One. “Looking forward to the afternoon and evening ahead.”

The first lady wore a black pantsuit with a golden belt and did not cover her head for the arrival, consistent with custom for foreign dignitaries visiting Saudi Arabia.

Trump shook hands with the king, compared to**** then-President Barack Obama in 2009 appearing to bow before then King Abdullah, a move some viewed as a sign of American weakness.

Trump, during his winning presidential campaign and in the first several months of his presidency, has argued that the United States can no longer be the world’s police officer and that other nations must become more self-sufficient in efforts to combat such terror networks as al Qaeda and the Islamic State and in protecting themselves against rogue nations like Iran and North Korea.

After two days of meetings in Riyadh, Trump will travel to Israel where he’ll have an audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican,***** then meet with allies at a NATO summit in Brussels and the Group of 7 wealthy nations in Sicily.

The multi-billion dollar arms deal “in the clearest terms possible” shows the United States’ commitment to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf partners and expands economic opportunities, the White House said.

The deal will include tanks, combat ships, missile defense systems, radar and communications and cybersecurity technology. And it will support tens-of-thousands of new jobs in the U.S. defense industrial base, the White House said.

Trump did not address the cameras. But Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Saudi Foreign Minister Abdel al Jubeir held a joint press conference.

Jubeir said Trump "certainly has the vision and, we believe, strength to bring about Middle East peace.”

He also called the Trump’s trip a “truly historic visit.”

Said Tillerson: “We’re very proud of this relationship we're embarking on.”
He also took a question about a recent news report about somebody within the White House being a person of interest amid ongoing investigations into whether Trump and his associates colluded with Russia to help Trump win the 2016 presidential race.

Tillerson said he had “no knowledge” about such a person of interest.******

White House officials hope the trip gives Trump the opportunity to recalibrate after one of the most difficult stretches of his young presidency. The White House badly bungled the president's stunning firing of FBI Director James Comey, who was overseeing the federal government’s investigation into possible Russia collusion. 

Trump on Sunday will also hold meetings with more than 50 Arab and Muslim leaders converging on Riyadh for a regional summit focused largely on combating the Islamic State and other extremist groups.

Still, the centerpiece of Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia will likely be the speech Sunday at the Arab-Islamic-American summit.

White House aides view the address as a counter to Obama's 2009 speech to the Muslim world, which Trump criticized as too apologetic for U.S. actions in the region.

Trump will call for unity in the fight against radicalism in the Muslim world, casting the challenge as a "battle between good and evil" and urging Arab leaders to "drive out the terrorists from your places of worship," according to a draft of the speech obtained by The Associated Press. The draft notably refrains from mentioning democracy and human rights — topics Arab leaders often view as U.S. moralizing — in favor of the more limited goals of peace and stability.

It also abandons some of the harsh anti-Muslim rhetoric that defined Trump's presidential campaign and does not contain the words "radical Islamic terror," a phrase Trump repeatedly criticized Hillary Clinton for not using during last year's campaign.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

* $110 billion elsewhere at Fox, but who's counting?
** "Likely"
*** Are we leading with the earthquake? 
**** "Compared to" 
***** It actually doesn't get better when you leave out the comma 
****** Stop press! 

A date which will live in ... wait, what?

Here's the paragraph as it appears at the Herald's website:

Lawyers at the Guantánamo war court had wanted military judges to obtain and preserve copies of the report for use in the Sept. 11 and USS Cole death-penalty cases of six men who spent years in the CIA prisons called Black Sites. The chief judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, refused but eventually ordered the Pentagon to safeguard one of its copies.

Shakespeare's job is safe. There are no early entrants for Clause of the Year here, and that's fine.  Reporting is less like a first rough draft of history than a first rough draft of furniture. Reporters go into the forest and return with freshly hewn lengths of news, which the factory then shapes, sands and polishes -- with an eye on demand, space on the assembly line and the like -- into finished journalism. There's a lot to learn from what happens at different stages of the assembly line: in this case, a story's transition from the wires to the individual paper (here, the Freep, though I can't find the story on its website).

I'm glad Black Sites was lowercased, though I probably would have put it in quotes as well, under the old "words as words" concept. I'd want to  unstack the noun pile* in the highlighted sentence, too. But since even the AP Stylebook says "Sept. 11" (or "9/11") can stand by itself, it's hard to see what exactly was improved by inserting the year after "Sept. 11." Particularly if -- just a suggestion here -- you insert the wrong year.

It's worth noting that none of the grisly battlefield photos from the War on Editing are unique to this particular stage of industrial upheaval. The same mistakes showed up when we were plucking and sharpening our own goose quills, and they'll be around when we edit with eye-mounted lasers. That's one of the reasons no single mistake can be blamed on any particular change to the process. But the really glaring ones do contribute to the steady erosion of the assumption that the assembly line adds value just by being there.

* Should we start a pool on when "nounpile" becomes one word?

Leave my garage out of this

On the bright side (unlike -- could it be a year ago Wednesday?), the local paper isn't telling us not to put away the snow shovels yet. But it's still hard to see the journalistic value in telling me how to prepare for using a snow shovel, rather than estimating the likelihood that the ... oh, no.

Once again, it is not "the white stuff." It is never "the white stuff." There are no circumstances under which "the white stuff" does not place your mortal soul in danger. Shun it forever.

What about "windchill"? Not soulwise, but one word or two? You could ask what the story says, but it wouldn't help -- no mention of wind chills in the print edition. This is from the online version, which is a few grafs longer:

The average temperature this time of year is about 26 degrees, she said. Today, temperatures are in the upper teens in the Detroit area, but the wind chill makes it feel like 6 degrees.

Two words, just as the AP Stylebook has it. Though the stylebook probably would have let you figure out on your own that "6 degrees" doesn't mean "below zero."

Elongated predatory felines

What do you call a mountain lion on second reference?

It was an even bigger deal when the photos hit social media. Suddenly, it seemed Kansas was over-run with the tawny-colored predators.

But wait -- there's more!

... So, is Kansas becoming overrun with the large, predatory felines?

Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/sports/outdoors/article110088707.html#storylink=cpy

Not only a double helping of Elongated Yellow Fruit, but a coin toss on hyphenating "overrun.

(h/t the Bremner Editing Center, world clearinghouse of the popular orange vegetable)

Polling sins: No, no and don't

Sigh.  In order, more or less: 

1) Polls don't have "error rates." That figure isn't a rate, and it doesn't count errors. (Your fielding average actually does produce an error rate, if you subtract it from 1 and move the decimal point around.) 
2) You can describe the figure as "percentage points" if you want, but "4.9%" is simply wrong. Take some finding in any poll that reaches 50% -- "do you approve or disapprove of the job Rudolph is doing as lead reindeer?" -- and add 4.9% to it, and you'll get 52.5%. Should Rudolph poll at 10% approval, adding 4.9% would give you 10.5%. The "margin of error," on the other hand, applies equally to any point in the distribution. That's what the next sentence means, but ...
3) Adding and subtracting percentage points is not "statistically adjusting" a finding. It's "addition and subtraction." Third-graders can do it. It really is that simple.
Read more »

Read it before you post it

Dear friends at the Old Reliable: If you can't be bothered to read it before you publish it, why should anyone be bothered to pay for it? 

But Smith endured, managing the stress with equanimity. After all the challenges, he came back to reign in the ACC again before retiring in xxx at age 66.

Considering that you said "1997" earlier -- well, fill in your own strained metaphor for basketball ineptitude here.

True, the canned obituary is one of those traditions than can lead to problems -- say, when the writer has moved on to more prominent pastures before the file has to be used. And I'd be surprised if any desk of this century has a quiet enough night that someone can safely utter the ancient phrase "Hey, let's polish up the pre-obits a little." All the more reason for a bit more care on the front end:
 
His commitment to building a championship program strained his marriage, however. He divorced his first wife, xxx xxxx in xxxx, with whom he had three children. In xxx he married xxxxxxx, and they had two children.

In fairness, the xxxx and xxxxxx have been cleaned up* -- but the sister is still "Joanne Ewing" on her first appearance and "Joan Ewing" on her second. The mystery guard "Jed Dalton" turns into "Ged" in one quote, suggesting he might be the Ged Doughton on this roster. And copy editors were put on this earth to wring redundancies out of sentences like this:

In 1971, Smith also treated the media covering his Tar Heels in the 1971 NIT in New York City to dinner at Mama Leone’s.

Newsroom lore has long held that sports audiences are the pickiest. Whether that's true or whether it's the sort of morality-play-disguised-as-ghost-story that we tell young copy editors at bedtime is a question for the ages. But your Dean Smith obit is going to be read far beyond the confines of the sports pages, meaning a lot of people have a chance to form judgments on your outfit's professionalism. Doing stuff right really does make a difference.
 
* Yes, the story's still a little confused about "X's and O's" vs. "X&O."

How are we going to get THAT home?

Considering how easy it seemed to be to work in some sort of preposition -- "at Rose Bowl tailgate," say, or "in Rose Bowl parking lot" -- you have to wonder why the idea didn't catch on more widely.

Today at Vacation Bible School

What are those pesky Satanists up to now, The Washington Times?

Florida agreed Thursday to let the Satanic Temple put up a holiday display at the Capitol, effectively putting to end a First Amendment lawsuit being filed by Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Women and children off the streets! What would the display have looked like?

The state had previously denied the satanists from building a display of an angel falling into the fires of Hell right next to a more Christian-themed one of a nativity scene. But the Americans United for Separation of Church and State — citing the Hobby Lobby case — said it would sue on behalf of the satanists, on the grounds that the state couldn’t constitutionally keep out a display it deemed “offensive.”

Maybe the writer meant "Christmas-themed*?" Because as Christian themes go, you'd have to say that angels falling into hell ranks right up there:

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.
 
... And the deuil that deceiued them, was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night, for euer and euer.

It's kind of like Alinsky Fever -- you'd like to think the people who wave a book around and scream about the coming apocalypse would want to, you know, open the thing every now and then and see if the lyrics have changed.

(And no. You could say "denied their request to build" or "blocked them from building," but not "denied them from building.")

* A Little Drummer Boy falling into a lake of fire? Works for me.

That's not much better

Well, speak of the devil and he will surely park his satanic vehicle on the street the day they're supposed to sweep the leaves. No sooner do we get done complaining about the prevalence of the Thurber Lede at certain downtown founts of knowledge than this appears:

On the night accused shooter Theodore Wafer fatally shot an unarmed woman on his porch, he was overcome with fear, yelling from the backseat of a police squad car: “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God.”

That’s some of what the jury can expect to hear in the highly anticipated second-degree murder trial of Wafer, who is charged with killing Renisha McBride last November after the 19-year-old showed up on his porch of his Dearborn Heights home just before dawn, within hours of crashing her car into a parked vehicle.

Why the paper bothers with "accused shooter" when the next two words say he did it is a little puzzling, but it supports the idea that details in general are going unnoticed. So does the glitch toward the end of the second graf: "his porch of his Dearborn Heights home." And the lede of the next story downpage (now fixed online; print version shown here). And the second graf of the 1A lede story:

Gov. Rick Snyder officially approved the state’s portion of the grand bargain Friday, signing into law a package of bills provides the state’s share — $195 million — of the $816-million deal in which ownership of the city-owned museum would be transferred to a nonprofit trust, with proceeds going to ease deep pension cuts.

OK, maybe that was an extreme case of the strange belief that journalism always get better when you take out "that." But otherwise, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that nothing but the occasional spellcheck stands between the writers and the audience. That's unsettling for the audience, but it should be really, really scary for the writers -- the unreported victims of the War on Editing.

War On ... oh, the hell with it

And there were in the same country shepherds Christmas tree farmers abiding in the ... O hai! Wondering how the "Christmas tree 'tax'" got to be the third most super-important story of the afternoon at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network? For that, you're going to have to travel back in time a little bit -- specifically, to November 2011, when the Kenyan Muslim socialist (not pictured) had just imposed a tax on Christmas!

Or not:

The push for a Christmas tree "tax" is back.

Think there's a reason for the scare quotes?
Read more »

One born every minute

Really? "Human need to know the future boosts popularity of psychics"? Tell us more, biggest surviving daily in the state!

Her grandmother read tea leaves in the kitchen. Her mother was an astrologer and medium.

Now, Your Name Here of Attica is carrying on the tradition.

“My guides and angels connect with others’ guides and angels,” explains Here, who has dark hair, a calm face and long, graceful fingers. “I contact people on the other side.”

Well, no. No, they don't, and no, she doesn't. (Contact "people on the other side," that is; she does have dark hair and a calm face.) The county fair is made for people who believe otherwise; didn't we go over this back at Halloween?
Read more »

A tarantula on a slice of angel food

The game was as taut as the preceding paragraphs. 

Raymond Chandler's dead. Throw strikes.

In this grinder, there came a display of the lineup depth that makes these the highest-scoring teams in the American League: When have you seen a 2-1 game in which the Nos. 9 hitters drove in all the runs?

"Nos. 9 hitters" could be the awesomest Safire plural in the history of the world in space. Do writers actually do this to themselves, or was the copydesk making the new guy carry the grammar bags back to the hotel or something?
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That's kind of why it's "news"

We haven't checked in on the dominant local fishwrap's "it's official" tally since -- why, since the same reporter wrote about the same radio personality back in May. Let's see what the staff has been up to since then:

It’s official: As promised, Alex Rodriguez has appealed the 211-game suspension that was to have started today. (Aug. 8)

It's official: Spartans hire Curtis Blackwell to oversee recruiting (Aug. 2)

It's official: Oakland University is a member of Horizon League (July 2)

It’s official: Kid Rock will step on stage Aug. 20 and propel himself into Detroit’s record books. (June 19)

It's official: M. Roy Wilson new president of Wayne State University (June 5)

What, you have to wonder, could be the appeal at this point of "it's official"? Will someone please just stop?