Left hand, right hand

How are things going at the local print product these days? Consider these facing pages from the Sunday morning A section.

To your left at the top, just under your thumb if you were reading this on actual newsprint, is the weekly Gruff Old Reporter column, this week about a county commissioner who was elected despite his troubles with the law. I have a low tolerance for "commish," "300 grand," "the feds" and the like (no "hizzoner" this week, because no mayors were involved) unless the next scene has either Roz Russell or Cary Grant shouting into a telephone,* but at least there's some substance amid the writering:

Newly elected Monroe County Commissioner Mark Brant says he's eager to serve his constituents — but first he has to serve time.

Brant is scheduled to report to federal prison in Morgantown, West Virginia, on Friday, making this a Thanksgiving he'll always remember — even if he'd rather forget. Brant was sentenced to 18 months in Club Fed, fined $500,000 and agreed** to give up the more than 300 grand the feds found in his Monroe home after he pleaded guilty to what Uncle Sam calls "maintaining a drug-involved premises."

Now over to the right-hand page:

MONROE -- On Monday, Nov. 18, Mark Brant was sworn in as District 2 Monroe County

commissioner by Monroe County Clerk and Register of Deeds Annamarie Osment.

Erm. OK, assuming we all know who Mark Brant is (but don't remember him from the facing page), just snick off that opening prepositional phrase, start with the name, stick a "Monday" after "commissioner" and call it a lede. But could there be anything of some interest to your non-Monroe readers?

In the Nov. 5 general election, despite a federal indictment, Brant won the election with 6,811 votes. Write-in candidates, Democrat Danielle Hoover and Dwayne Dobbs, received 687 votes collectively.

Oh my. And?

It has not been made public when and where Brant's prison term will commence.

Does something seem out of order here? Skip down to the fifth paragraph:

... In March, Brant pleaded guilty to one federal count of maintaining a drug-involved premise.

In the old days, people called "copy editors" sat around newspaper offices on Saturday night and ... edited. Not just buffing your grammar, writing your heds and making sure stories didn't begin "On Monday," but remembering stuff. If one editor didn't know whether Nixon was impeached (no) or how Edgar Allan Poe spelled his middle name (the Times was wrong again), another would. And somebody who either remembered where Jesus talked about the left hand not knowing what the right hand doeth or had the good sense to look it up would have wandered over to to the city desk and noted that a couple of the discrepancies here really ought to be fixed in a big smoking hurry if we expect people to pay for this stuff.

I'm staunchly pro-local-news, and I'm a subscriber, even if I read the morning paper on a tablet in pdf form. But somebody at the Gannett hub seems bent on making that habit seem unnecesary.

* If you have not seen a Linotype in action, just go ahead and get off my lawn.
** Pesky parallel structure.