Why not depend exclusively on Spellcheck?

In my local rag, this morning, the editor ran an AP article about the move in some states to outlaw the common wildflower salvia divinorum (diviner's sage, a common plant indigenous to Mexico and points south). It seems some lawmakers think it's not enough to ban the actually dangerous drugs, and the so-called gateway drugs, and make it impossible for somebody with chronic sinus problems to keep a reasonable stock of decongestants.. now they want to ban another garden plant because some idiot might just ingest it and have a brief hallucination...

I gotta say, some of the stuff the local restaurants serve can probably cause a similar reaction.

The debate about legalizing vs. banning substances is a serious one, and most folks who know me know I'm not really big on government intervention in our private lives. I don't use the stuff, but I'm not agin the neighbors kickin' back and lightin' a doob, so long as they keep the high to themselves and keep the stereo turned down, once it's past my bedtime.

But that's not why I'm posting the article.

I'm posting the article because, even though there is such a thing as Spellcheck in most newspapers' computers, there is still a serious need for proofreaders. On the subject of SALVIA, our local rag ran this :


Kind of gives real potential for a spit-take, doesn't it?

Believe me or your lying, frost-sealed eyes?

So, this morning when I got out of bed, I was greeted by frost on my windowpanes, as usual. It is, after all, January in west-central Illinois. Not only was there frost on the window, though, there was this frost on the strike plate to my front door

Mind you, that's an interior shot, and the exterior is protected by a storm door. Those little spots of white near the center of the shot were hardened clumps of effing cold. It was (according to the television station only 50 miles away) subzero... at the time I was putting on my coat to go out and start the car, the weatherman said it was minus 15, with wind chills dragging it down to minus 35 or so. They had issued this warning on their website in the wee hours: Bitter cold temperatures create dangerous conditions.

Today's local rag, however, tells us a different story (from the print edition):

I'll believe it when I can pry my frosted eyelids apart and see it for myself.

local paper a lost cause?

Quite a few of the people with whom I speak regularly are now asking what I've heard about the local rag. I must confess that, now that the editor is no longer running the regular columns by local individuals, I have little or no interest in the daily goings-on of that publication.

It seems I am not alone in this sentiment. I have heard from at least a dozen long-time subscribers that they will not renew when their current subscription expires. "Why bother?" they remark. "If the editor's idea of 'improvement' is to print VERY BIG pictures to mask a lack of content, and to look at communities more than a hundred miles down the highway for 'local' events, the paper no longer meets our needs or holds our interest." At a hundred dollars per year, it's a pretty big chunk of change for something not even worthy of wrapping fish.

And, yet, the paper does occasionally provide me with amusement. For example, this week, the front page bore an article with this header: Schools gets grant . The day before, this article: What if Speck were held in jail?

To the first header mentioned, I grant that the article was quite clearly a press release, so the writing was fairly coherent. As long as nobody down at the paper tries to edit press releases they receive, they do seem to come out well. The latter link, though, has the usual convoluted lack of grasp of the English language for which the paper had long ago become famous:

["Spree killer" Richard] Speck was taken in for questioning in Warren County less than two months before the Chicago murders. What if Speck would have been held here instead of being released because he claimed to be ill?

In the case of both the headline and the above paragraph, we have a leetle teensy problem with tenses of verbs... If Speck were held in jail, he'd be mighty stinky by now, having bought the farm in 1991. If he had been held in Monmouth jail 42 years ago, things might have been different. As to the quoted graf, is it not more economical and accurate to ask, What if Speck had been held here, rather than released due to a claimed illness? Woulda, coulda, shoulda chopped the would.

And let us examine this other gem (emphasis mine):

However, according to the police records Speck managed to escape at least three investigations that involved homicides before committing one of the most heinous crimes in U.S. history. He could have been held in Texas and Indiana before going to Chicago.

Now, if he'd been held in Texas and Indiana, I'm pretty certain the courts would have had something disapproving to say about his dismemberment...

These sorts of stumbles come so frequently to the current DRA, I'm beginning to believe they're intentional, just to keep us snickering so much we won't notice the lack of local content (or, for that matter, any real content at all) to the local paper.


A few other choice tidbits, from other items, which got past the editor, (likely due to "underpaid, overworkedness" wink, wink, and an over-dependence upon SpellCheck):

1. County Clerk and Recorder Tina Conard said that if an increase in sales tax is passed, that the county would not begin to see those funds until as early as November 2009. The concern members of the committee expressed was that the county is currently in a deficit and does not have that long to wait.

2. Being understaffed, Edwards said he often finds his office playing the roll of news reporters instead of police officers.

3. Who needs to have radon tested in their home? [Contrary to the direction of the question, the article is not about testing radon, but testing for radon -lb]

I could go on all day, but there aren't that many articles printed in the local rag of which to make light.

I am grateful for the internet, these days, or I'd never learn what really happens in this sleepy little hamlet, for all the unintentional levity.

Update: Of course, I can't really blame the local rag for every gaffe. One of the news sites out of the Quad Cities ran this AP headline: Authorities: Teen killed by arrow appears to be accident.
Gee, in this day and age, a teen is an accident? Have the sex ed classes been teaching nothing, these days?

Apparently, apology not accepted

About two months ago, the local paper stopped printing my columns, without a word of explanation, without a warning... nothing. zip. nada. bubkes. After several e-mail exchanges, I finally wheedled out of him this explanation:

I have not used your column after a few readers brought your blog to my attention.
Am I the best editor in the world? No, far from it, but I have done a couple of redesigns to the DRA, increased the local story count by more than 60 percent, and before we purchased the Register Mail, we were beating them to the punch on big stories 80-85 percent of the time.
We still make mistakes. There are times when the articles are written in a hurry, and I have a newstaff of three, myself included.
I must have been doing something right. Before we purchased those papers, I received job offers from both the Galesburg and Peoria papers.
It is hard enough to beat down old reputations and perceptions without people who are supposed to be part of the team hitting us with friendly fire, for a lack of better words.

I didn't really have the heart to remind him, but, as a long-unpaid "guest columnist", I'm not really part of his team, now, am I? No, instead, I am simply a member of the community, one with high hopes (too high? Prithee not!) that said community will someday have a newspaper good enough to read daily.

I did, however, search my blogs to see precisely what might have offended him. I even told him I held no personal animus (end quote), and then he pointed out that I did get personal... it was, it seems, the Cracker-Jack reference.

I don't think he noticed that it was not about him. It was about the work he did.

Well, this week, he decided to go half-public, with directionless whine, in his editorial, which is not available online, so I will excerpt a relevant bit... the first two grafs will do nicely:

Two things a community cannot afford to lose is [sic] its school and its newspaper, yet those are the two entitles [sic] some residents seem to enjoy criticizing.

I'm not talking about construc-tive criticism, but mean-spirited, angry criticism.

He gives the standard excuses for his problems getting a good newspaper together -- short budget, short staff -- and then goes on to say that any mistakes are not malicious or intentional, that a small town needs its newspaper because where else would they get their information? and gee, whiz, we have increased local/regional coverage 70+% over the past year.

Wow. Color me impressed. After all, Monmouth's newspaper has seen a 70% increase in coverage of regional news, mostly because they've started running bunches of news from Macomb (where our current editor cut his journalistic baby teeth, and those teeth seem to still be coming in, if he's kvetching about his critics being mean).

Mind you, I'm not complaining. In a town where seemingly nothing happens, news is news, and it doesn't matter if the majority of events happen forty-five minutes' drive down the corn-lined highway.

And he's right when he says that a small-town paper is the only way we can hear the local school sports scores and local-league softball reports (if the paper were to go under, the other resources would like as not pick up the slack for sheer necessity), obits (maybe, check out the neighboring town's paper's obits online?), police reports, etc. Without a local paper, we'd be dependent upon the Chamber of Commerce to maintain a community calendar online and posted (billboard or old-fashioned bulletin-board style) within various locations in the town. We'd be back where we were last year, reading about Monmouth College events where we still usually read them, today.

A daily print newspaper can no longer pretend it will always be first with the most. It's (by all known laws of physics) limited in both time and space. All it has left is trustworthiness, superior to that of the super-fast internet and electronic gossip system (cellular phones with cameras). Eventually, print medium is going to have to prove it is (a) more accurate and (b) more cost-effective, in the long run, than electronic media, or it will find itself tossed out on its inky bottom.

Mistakes happen. But needless mistakes which happen daily -- such as misspelled words in headlines (have you never heard of SpellCheck?), murky photo images,* abysmally poor grammar, convoluted, uninformative articles,** and other failures to be a good editor -- indicate to readers not a lack of time, but a demonstration of a certain lack of seriousness about the job.

And if your readers don't take you seriously, why on earth would they want to spend a hundred dollars per year -- or more -- to have your silliness delivered to their doors? And, if you lose readers, don't you lose advertising revenues, as well? And when you lose both, eventually we lose a paper. Everybody loses.

If harsh criticism of an editor's work, including derisive (yet clean and appropriate for a preschool playground) language, is all it takes to hurt that editor's feelings so badly that he refuses to print relatively popular free local material, the editor may wish to take a closer look at his own priorities. And, if his ego is the highest thing on his list, then his employers may want to reevaluate their choice of hire.

Personally, I'm outrageously flattered that my words had such an impact on somebody in a position of such sway. I usually assume that most people take me for what I am -- a loudmouthed, blowhard broad with a desire to occasionally inform as I entertain folks. That I could utterly crush somebody's ego so easily must mean I'm very powerful indeed.†


*Photoshop can fix that in under a minute, for if you are too busy to really look at your own work. Up on the menu bar on a Mac is the word "Enhance." Click on that for the drop-down menu, click on "adjust lighting" select lighting/shadows, and let it do the work for you -- or you can go for the automatic options, or just play with it for a few minutes, and you can tweak it to just the way you want it to show up... but print it out before you run it to the big presses, to see if it will translate from monitor to paper. Take a lesson from Wired Magazine's first six issues, and understand that what works with pretty lights on a screen doesn't always work on flat paper with opaque inks. Unless you have years of practice crossing back and forth between media, I wouldn't advise just winging it too often, or the newspaper's reputation will continue to sink.

**KISS -- Keep It Simple, Stupid -- means use the five "W"s right from the beginning, and if you have time after that, add some filler and style. It can make even an idiot like me look like a competent professional. I know. I've done it before.


† The dog says, "They feed me and shelter me and love me... they must be gods!" The cat says, "They feed me and shelter me and love me... I must be a god!" I take my lesson from the cat.

Friday's Klips: Gimme That Old Dem Religion

My column is up, at its customary location. Not only that, but I'm informed it will also be in the local paper* again, this Friday, after some small strife. I'm operating under the faint hope that there will be peace in the valley (okay, in the shallow ravine off Broadway) for us.

If you know of any other newspaper editors who are looking for a little sumpin' new, though, I'm still available for syndication, too. You can point them in the direction of the Friday's Klips archives, and see if what they see suits their needs... hint hint hint. (Do I sound desperate, here? I hope not. It's more like a toe in the water. If nothing else, I might could use a little free advice on the subject... whatever that's worth.)

*whose editors have very kindly printed my columns almost every week for the past six years, at no cost to me

I'm shopping for a new paper

I've been published in the local dinomedia for nearly six years, now. More than two hundred eighty columns have I submitted, and, except for a couple of occasions when electronic communications faltered, the paper has run my column each time, at no cost to me.

I've done this work largely as my inexpensive version of psychotherapy (it keeps me focused on something other than my being depressed or manic or whichever), and as a sort of salute to the community, I guess. The powers that be know I'm not in it for the money, or the glory, or any such nonsense. In the first year or two, every day I'd read some far-left character trying to convince himself and the world that he was a centrist, when, in fact, that person would think the Daily Kos was a conservative site. Mostly, I started it because there didn't seem to be a regular conservative voice published in the region -- only the occasional letter from a member of the college's business department and the not-quite-so-rare piece by another faculty member (this time, from the history department), leaning heavily toward book reviews, not so much the political and regional commentary.

I rather considered myself a "townie," offering a separate perspective for the community to agree with or pick apart, as it saw fit.

I still do.

Unfortunately, for two weeks in a row, the paper has failed to run my words, and has offered me no reason, no excuse, no apologies for ignoring my work. Did I write something they felt was too offensive to be printed in small-town press? Perhaps it was the mention of a commode, in the header? Perhaps somebody threatened them with a lawsuit if they allowed me to continue to point out hypocrisy in the enforcement of unconstitutional laws? I really don't know. Nobody has bothered to reply to my inquiries.

Therefore, if you know of a print -- or internet -- news outlet in search of a moderately conservative columnist who works cheap, please let me know, or let the editors know I'm available.

One thing, though: I don't do Windows.