The perils of hubbing

Hard-hitting lead editorial from Ohio's Greatest Home Newspaper there, huh? (Especially for those of you who imagine a Wolfe at the door.) Shame nobody read the text before placing it on the page:

 Yes, mistakes happened in the days before editing was offshored. Yes, they happened in the days when editors all looked like Cary Grant and reporters like Roz Russell. But the Tuesday Dispatch seems to have been a bit long on entertaining "editor's errors." Makes one wonder how many errors went by that haven't been caught yet.

The mysterious Oriented-business

Tell us more about that law Stormy Daniels was accused of violating down there in Columbus, Ohio's Greatest Home Newspaper!

Police said they began enforcing the laws for sexually oriented-business employees touching patrons this past fall. Franklin County Municipal Court records show 25 people have been charged under the illegal touching law so far in 2018, up from 16 in 2017 and seven in 2016.

Even with its editing offshored to a Gatehouse hub, the Dispatch hasn't lost its high-school-student-like obsession with hyphenating compounds. This one's particularly charming because it sticks to the AP rule about not hyphenating compounds with -ly adverbs, yielding the memorable "sexually oriented-business." I suppose we're lucky it stopped there.

H/t to operative "Natasha" of the Central Ohio bureau. 

War on-editing

How did Ohio's Greatest Home Newspaper "mischaracterize" PBS? As a private television network? A tool of the neoliberal conspiracy? A public parking space?

 Any traces left in the story?

The makeover represents the grand prize in PBS’ inaugural “Teach Boldly” program and sweepstakes.

We can't see where the "editing error" might be, or otherwise figure out who might have changed "public television" to "public radio" in a story that rather distinctly mentions the local affiliate: "WOSU-TV (Channel 34)." But we do, I think, learn something about the War on Editing in the age of hubbing. Somehow, the memo about telling radio from TV didn't get to the GateHouse hub -- but the memo about the Dispatch's obsessive-hyphenation disorder apparently did.

The future of forbidden heds

Well, speak of the devil and he will surely sneak over and put his beer bottles in your recycling. No sooner do we learn that the Freep can start bagging its copydesk operations late next year than two -- count 'em, two -- Forbidden Heds show up on the front page.

First up, a double-dip on the Stupid Question: not just using the question mark as a hedge, but forming the question in a flagrantly ungrammatical way. Two rich dudes have declared their intent to bring a professional foopball team to town, which is fine and even newsworthy* -- but hardly raises the question of whether a franchise has been "scored." The headline's job is to tell me what happened, not what someone speculates might happen.

Regardless of the downtown back-scratching, that's not the kind of question the hed raises. You can form questions by sticking a question mark on the end of a statement, but that creates a distinctive form called an "echo question" that you might remember from "Apocalypse Now":

Lance: Hey, you know that last tab of acid I was saving? I dropped it.
Chef: You dropped acid? Far out!

That's a question, but it's very much not the same question as "Did you drop acid?" If you agree, avoid getting them mixed up in headlines ever again.

That's a "grammar" thing. "It's official" is just a cliche. You may remove it from any lede, or any subsequent graf, with no effect on the meaning. And that means you may never try to improve on a story by putting "it's official" in a hed. There are no exceptions -- no matter how important you think the story is, no matter how few times in your life you've seem "it's official." Just never.

What will hubbing do to the Great Cliches? I don't know, but if someone wants to stake that out as a research agenda, I'd really like to see the results. We've known for a while (I hope) that there's only so much mileage in being local. If the outsourced desk in Bangalore looks at a map while editing and you don't, they're going to catch a mistake you might miss. Will a centralized desk enforce chainwide rules against cliches in headlines, even if that's the suggestion from the originating paper? Or will a plague of "Christmas came early" break out of containment and spread all the faster?

I'd like to know, but I'd actually just rather have a local copydesk to complain about.

* Although it skates awfully close to Elongated Yellow Fruit territory when the perps are "the Michigan-bred businessmen" and "the Michigan State graduates" in the first two grafs

Guess how this is going to end

The Guild local has ratified a new contract with the fishwraps, and guess what the Freep will be "allowed" to do next year:

The contract allows the Free Press after 18 months to move copy editing and design jobs into centralized hubs operated by its parent company Gannett.

Last one out, get the lights. I'm sorry.