Really stupid juxtapositions

Dear friends at the Washington Post: Mind if we suggest that, if your "breaking news" streamer says "Jurors reach verdict in George Zimmerman trial," now is a really, really bad time for your "George, you've never looked better" feature?

Unfortunate juxtapositions

Just wondering, but -- do you suppose the folks at Des Moines should have reimagined the potential impact of putting the "mmm, corn" and "Death Veggies Stalk Iowa" stories together at the top of the front?

Bonus Elongated Yellow Vegetable points for "the seasonal treat."

Peel me a ... no, don't

If you're coing to be glever, at least make sure the slice of fruit looks like a "G."

Are the kids over at Gawker serious, though? Worst headline in newspaper history? Somebody needs to get out more.

(Thanks to Cody for the share.)

Wha?

Dear Kansas City Star: You're entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own prepositions.

The defendants can be sentenced in a corporate spying case, as the online hed puts it. They can be charged with or convicted of corporate spying. They could even be sentenced for corporate spying. But they can't be sentenced of corporate spying.

Yeah, yeah, the 1A designer painted you into a corner. Find another way to paint yourself out.   

Run awaaaaaaay!!!!

All right, sports fans, who's ready to help The State out with The Answer to The Question posed by The Centerpiece here?

The choices that will better define who we are – and who we want to be ...
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On a hill far away

Say it ain't so, Old Hometown Newspaper!

"We are the cavalry," Ralls said.

Never mind.

The human eye being a willful creature, we tend to see pages in context, so "calvary" gave me a whole different first impression of the light tower in the skybox (right) -- as in, where's the other two?

Today in really, really bad writing

But first, this word from the HEADSUP-L design desk:

1) Don't make yourself do the same thing twice.
2) Particularly, don't make yourself tease twice.
3) Just don't.

But on to the main course!

As the name "Rodriguez" sails quickly into the sunset, another name comes barreling in, splitting the maize-and-blue waters like a battleship.
Read more »

Design fail: Cheers!

This one needs a bit of back story. Along with their generous three days a week of home delivery, the local fishwraps provide an online facsimile of the print edition. You can browse through it page by page and click on articles, photos or ads to get a readable version. With stories, one click gets you to a text-only mode, and the second click yields a full-size view of the article and its illustration.

Except when the program outsmarts itself, as seems to have been the case here. The art is meant to illustrate a top-of-the-page blurb promoting today's beer festival at Eastern Market, but when you click on the news briefs, guess what comes up?

It's an ambiguous design at best anyway, even with the (annoying) color screens. The simple solution would be to move the art to the right of the text. If that breaks a house rule -- well, break it!

The writing in the banker story isn't getting any better:

A funeral was held Friday in Detroit for Mt. Clemens bank president and CEO David Widlak, days after his body was found floating in Lake St. Clair and after a private autopsy commissioned by his family showed he was shot execution-style in the back of the neck.

That's one too many "after" clauses for me. And the bizarre participial adjective "shot" makes its way into heds on consecutive pages -- in addition to the "shot bank CEO" here, we have "Shot parole absconder is turned in" on 4A.

I think the hed writers are inferring a rule on the order of "any past participle can become a preposed adjective with the meaning of 'that was' or 'who was.'" Alas, there ain't no such animal. Some participles do. "Buried treasure" is treasure that was buried, and we couldn't write crime heds if "slain" didn't mean (as the OED puts it) "that has been slain; killed; slaughtered." Others need some help. "Eaten" survives with "half-eaten" or "moth-eaten," but "the eaten pizza" doesn't work.*  Still others have specific and limited uses, like the "killed virus" in vaccines.

"Shot" has some of both: special uses like "shot herring" and "shot velvet," along with compounds like "shot-down" and "shot-up." But the only cite meaning "person who was hit by a shot" looks pretty literary. I'd rule it out for heds.

Why did it show up? I suppose, given the dueling autopsies and the slight shadow of a doubt in the newer one, the desk wanted to avoid "slain," and "dead" seems pretty redundant given that it's a funeral. "For banker found dead in lake" might work.

But first things first. Preview the page before you publish it, and if the result is embarrassing -- as this hed-and-art collision certainly is -- fix it. Sheez.

* Except for the Swinburne cite, that usage looks like it faded out early in Modern English.

Welcome to Tombstone

Back when "design" was called "layout" and editors were expected to know how a proportion wheel worked, one of the first rules you learned was about bumping heds, or "tombstoning." As in: Don't. Or if you do, maximize the contrast (size, shape, weight) between the heds so they don't read into each other.

Bump bans could get extreme. Nobody's going to have trouble distinguishing a 1/30/4 from the 5/42/1 next to it on an elbow page. But when you ignore the basics -- as the folks downtown apparently decided they could do today with impunity (that's the top of 4A) -- the results can be pretty grisly.

Back to basics

Back in the Good Old Days, when "design" was called "layout" (and page dummies were drawn with rulers and proportion wheels, and disgruntled compositors would put billiard balls in the pneumatic tubes* if the newsroom was slow in moving the pages, and uphill both ways in the snow), one of the basic rules everyone learned was: Make people look into their stories.

The idea is simple: If there's direction in the photo -- somebody's looking or pointing or jumping or shooting one way or the other -- you want to use that direction to steer the reader's eyes into the appropriate story, rather than the one next door. And it really works -- put another way, when you do it wrong, the result really sticks out.

As it does in today's Denver Post reefers. If you're not a regular reader (or if you're the sort of reader who doesn't spend much time with the feature columnists), and you don't know what John Hope Franklin looked like, you can be forgiven for thinking that the guy in the picture must be the guy holding court with the "queen." And it would have been just as easy to take advantage of the eye's instincts and -- oh, do it right.

There's a lot more to complain about in this small sector of 1A. "Serious snow: Will it clobber Denver?" is the sort of Stupid Question TV stations ask before they head off to the commercials. Unfortunately, someone's already answered it a few inches higher -- that'll be the forecast of "heavy snow" you see just above the reefers.

The Stupid Question prize, of course, goes to the lead hed, "Is This Mess Over?" If you think "yes" is an option, you should probably avoid games of skill or chance, excess use of the pointy scissors, and the craft of hed writing in general. To its credit, that's not even the question the AP story suggests: the idea that "some people" may be "thinking the worst is over."

If newspapers are going to have a claim on the audience, it won't be through immediacy, or interactivity, or the ability to make the frontpage sound like a tank-town TV anchor in full cry. It might be through maximizing things we can still do well. But if the best we can be is a browser that you have to bring in from the driveway, or a TV that doesn't move or talk, we're going to lose without a fight.

* You may now raise your hand if you ever played Mortar Crew with the pneumatic tubes.

What was the question again?

What, exactly, is the Reefer Madness design at Bakersfield asking us to do here? Say yes or no to the dollar breakfast? Get a cheap breakfast, as long as we're willing to indulge in some light preprandial armed robbery? Eat, shoot, leave?

I can't find the breakfast story, but the handgun story is actually -- surprise! -- about a cop who shot someone who was drawing a pellet (or BB; the story says both) gun. Seem like something people ought to be told about, rather than asked about?

For extra credit, have fun diagramming this cutline:

A fake gun that looked like a semiautomatic handgun that was involved in a suspect being shot by Bakersfield Police that took place Sunday evening on 11th Street.

That's what he was when they found him

Striking unanimity among the Illinois fishwraps this morning, eh? Not so much the choice of lead story (even for the most up-to-date present- ation editor, the impeachment of the chief executive is hard to ignore) as the nature of the heds. Only one of eight bothers to include the subject ("Blagojevich"); for the rest, it's just IMPEACHED, above, beside or within a picture of the governor. James Thurber ("Dead. That's what the man was when they found him") must be smiling.

I don't think the topic-comment approach is necessarily bad, misleading or wrong. I do think the evidence suggests that we've passed some sort of watershed in the collective understanding of what makes for necessary elements in a headline or presentation. We're probably not entirely at the rebus stage yet, though that could get kind of interesting too.

It should go without saying that there are far, far worse ap- proaches to the Blago hed than "Im- peached." Charlotte and Detroit manage to get almost everything wrong:
Ill. House votes to impeach
Ill. House OKs impeachment
Sigh. One, Illinois is near the top of the list of States You Never Abbreviate If You Can Help It. It's fun in lots of ways depending on the font, from the numeric
Ill. Men Charged In Mass. Murder
to the Noahic
Ark. Man Kills Ill. Livestock
Two, the active voice is the enemy of cops-and-courts reporting. Particularly in unique-actor cases (you can't get an impeachment at the Home Depot), the object is nearly always more pertinent than the subject.
Three -- pace Orwell, S&W and more news writing gurus than you can shake a bludgeon at -- it's entirely possible for an active subject-verb-object sentence to be indirect. That often comes about when writers fall into the trap of emphasizing process over outcome, leading to sound-like-your-sources yawners on the order of "Police executed a search warrant" (rather than "Police searched a house") or "Police made an arrest" (rather than "Police arrested a naked, screaming, ax-wielding City Council member").

There's nothing wrong with writing an obvious hed, as long as you meet the underlying obligation of the hed business: Tell me why today is different from yesterday. "It's official" and "Pain at the pump" can't do that. "Governor impeached," on the other hand, does it pretty well.

Shiny jangly stuff

The craft of design is generally held in high regard around here. That's "design," the use of visual principles to help interpret and organize the day's events, not "design" as in "Let's throw some shiny jangly stuff at the page and hope people with the attention span of garden slugs will put some quarters in the rack and be temporarily awed." Guess which approach is in charge at Fort Lauderdale?

Once you've figured out from the new! improved! nameplate which paper you're reading ("Look, honey, Superman has his own newspaper!"), you might first notice that there isn't a lot of "news" out there in the world. Then you might notice that the most Cosmically Super-Important Thing Going is a public opinion survey. It looks like about two-thirds of the page; is that space well spent? There are a couple of ways to look at that: how the space is spent and what it's spent on.

The top hed -- the "How Florida would vote" thing floating around in the air above the dominant visual element -- is a good place to start. At best, it's overawed by the obvious: "Who would you vote for today?" is what presidential preference polls ask to determine -- you know, presidential preference. But it gets worse in a hurry. By turning the individual preference question into an assertion about what the state "would" do, it skids into nonsense. The statement can't be true; if nothing else, there wouldn't be an "undecided" (the 6% under Obama's left ear) if the election "were held today."

The visual centerpiece is striking for how little it conveys about anything. In case you didn't notice, it's a couple of mug shots, a couple of numbers, and some stylized parts of what looks like it was supposed to be an American flag. Thus, the entirety of "content" above the fold at the Sun-Sentinel can be summed up in this sentence:

"A survey of 600 likely voters in Florida, conducted Sept. 15-18, found that 46% said they would vote for McCain and 45% for Obama if the election were held today."

That's actually more information than the page gives you, since it includes the sample size and the dates the poll was in the field. Without a lot of effort, we could also add the maximum margin of sampling error (and the all-important confidence level), reminding us that the designers aren't the only ones at fault here.

Is this starting to sound like a broken record? There is no such thing as a "statistical tie" (just as your stylebook says, if you follow AP style). "Within the margin of error" is a meaningless term.* So a graf like this:

Obama has overcome McCain's earlier advantage in the state to reach a statistical tie of 45 percent to 46 percent, according to a statewide poll of likely voters conducted last week for the Sun Sentinel and the Florida Times-Union. The 1-percentage-point difference is within the poll's margin of error.

... suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the subject matter. It doesn't matter whether the New York Times gets it or not, or whether the story is from your Washington bureau chief. It's like reading that someone "scored a home run"; if you don't know how the scoring works, you undermine any conclusions you draw about the game.

There's a bigger, or at least a two-layered, problem as well. The story contends that Obama has overcome "McCain's earlier advantage," apparently based on this assertion: "Most pre-convention polls in Florida showed Obama trailing McCain beyond the margin of error." That suggests somebody isn't reading the paper: At midweek, the Sun-Sentinel was reporting a Time poll with the candidates at 48-48. At the beginning of the month, something that looks like an editorial proclaimed that "according to the latest polls," Florida was "pretty much up for grabs." Judging from the RCP log,*** a good way of stating the "most polls" thing would be: Some do. Some don't.

The best conclusion a careful newspaper would draw from all this is: Reply (still) hazy. Ask again later. This is a competently done poll that doesn't come anywhere near supporting the end-of-the-world treatment it got. Whoever's fault that was, please stop.

*If you're having trouble convincing a writer of this, feel free to call the 24-hour help line.**
** Or, until the help line is staffed, drop a note and we will try to help.
*** Good for results of individual surveys; just stay from the alleged "average."