Look at the big picture
You know those quick meetings where everyone huddles around 1A to see if they notice anything big? We all should be having them ... for reasons like these headline juxtapositions. (Yes, it's tough to write a perfectly good headline, only to have it killed for reasons out of your control. But them's the breaks.)
This one, showing world leaders holding hands, is from the April 26 cover of the Dallas Mornings News.
The example below is from an April 26 edition of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. (As Newsdesigner points out, it looks as if this problem was fixed for some editions. Their Newseum page had "It's decision time for college-bound.")
(Via Newsdesigner, via Matt Haughey)
posted by Nicole @ 10:53 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
We do have a huddle at the Strib after the first edition and the headlines weren't discussed. I think the problem was thatfor the first edition, the bus accident headline was different.Something like, "School bus hits, kills 5-year-old boy" The words "runs over" didn't show up until the metro edition.
Each night we have a job called the second floor proof person, who goes down to composing to triple-check jumps, refers, the end of stories and anything else. That was my job Monday night, and while I was down there before metro deadlined I noticed the heads. When the A1 designer came down, I pointed out the juxtaposition. She took it to the night supervisor, and he agreed. So someone changed "crunch time" to "decision time," and we did a makeover. I don't think it got on many papers, especially compared to most of our makeovers.
I don’t find the Strib juxtaposition to be much of a problem. As a reader, I’m confounded more by that headlinese comma. (Not to pick on the Strib. This just happens to be a handy example of a widespread practice.)
... I mean the "runs over, kills" comma in the Strib, not the "Bush, Saudi prince" comma in the DMN. That comma reads smoothly enough for me.
Interesting point, Peter. I hadn't really considered it. That comma's probably not technically wrong ("runs over and kills" makes sense), but it's certainly not elegant. Conversationally, we'd probably say "Bus runs over 5-year-old, killing him."
We almost did the same thing as the DMN, except we had the gay unions headline placed above the exact same Bush photo. Luckily, someone noticed it at the early meeting and it quickly went away after getting many a laugh.
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