tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31308054447124399192024-03-05T07:23:23.009-05:00How to Write HeadlinesAaron Elson spent 40 years as a copy editor at the New York Post, New York Daily News and Bergen Record before being laid off in 2008. He is currently producing a series of World War II oral history audiobooks. One of his early ambitions was to write a textbook on headlines. These are some of his reflections.Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.comBlogger73125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-32998249608845685482022-11-08T11:44:00.001-05:002022-11-08T11:44:33.720-05:00A selection of headlines from my past<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhChyDP2I2_4PbvqQJBIj7HH9A9OkCwbeobvtkfMn1Zp7ULZ60g6Fem0Wg_cFxu0B6Jiq_UuHYoS7DmAnBAvokFKTZ2aYSPEe4UC-gCdO6QF_Qwr5dBQfswgalzgnct1ajug4vUuohBjOM0yYkWJpkokWp1mCwdZgqFsLsue6OMoqaDpmUvSEgdjRdtrkYjKLrc1g/s696/jurassic%20park.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="513" data-original-width="696" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhChyDP2I2_4PbvqQJBIj7HH9A9OkCwbeobvtkfMn1Zp7ULZ60g6Fem0Wg_cFxu0B6Jiq_UuHYoS7DmAnBAvokFKTZ2aYSPEe4UC-gCdO6QF_Qwr5dBQfswgalzgnct1ajug4vUuohBjOM0yYkWJpkokWp1mCwdZgqFsLsue6OMoqaDpmUvSEgdjRdtrkYjKLrc1g/s320/jurassic%20park.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; 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text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhldE20FbXoogcEpjPEwz5PvmC0pn45MoeseXQuPkVFz5_oqI7YW66mJCzelH81JyEB8Pq0LZ8EVDZrrLu4GEdKCcVG2JDmMdQay6vwhqc_fU5gqzEETNGehMBfKmaX-2NJbHs3EAkmwdOlXhPraZLKaYHQjOJcQmhK9XUyWTxk6CxQyyWazlrGDQiiXYDCDr-uSQ/s1034/windfall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1034" data-original-width="774" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhldE20FbXoogcEpjPEwz5PvmC0pn45MoeseXQuPkVFz5_oqI7YW66mJCzelH81JyEB8Pq0LZ8EVDZrrLu4GEdKCcVG2JDmMdQay6vwhqc_fU5gqzEETNGehMBfKmaX-2NJbHs3EAkmwdOlXhPraZLKaYHQjOJcQmhK9XUyWTxk6CxQyyWazlrGDQiiXYDCDr-uSQ/s320/windfall.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-69219754593429040412019-01-11T21:38:00.000-05:002019-01-27T10:04:59.833-05:00Top ten ways to pay for the wall<div class="separator" style="clear: both; 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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqhcAD52OQZ1u9HeScePlXPQKZ6QOEhDRa0FonUQPu1d66RXKq_LnjCddz2p3Hch_5l31WYLs5phz_zgxjklAqTfd27vbktUXCo1Erjfu9xGKcPV0Z57uUCkn1wbfW34Am2iAnFE7RHehVwGY/s1600/wall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="258" data-original-width="246" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqhcAD52OQZ1u9HeScePlXPQKZ6QOEhDRa0FonUQPu1d66RXKq_LnjCddz2p3Hch_5l31WYLs5phz_zgxjklAqTfd27vbktUXCo1Erjfu9xGKcPV0Z57uUCkn1wbfW34Am2iAnFE7RHehVwGY/s400/wall.jpg" width="380" /></a></div>
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<b>1) Naming rights. </b>Sell the right to sponsor different sections of the wall. Imagine the name recognition value of, say, Doritos on a section of the wall. And the publicity value of hundreds of young people walking around wearing "I scaled the Doritos Border Wall" T-shirts. There would be a mad scramble to lasso the rights to many sections. In fact, it would probably be so successful that companies like Western Union might even advertise on the walls of tunnels under the wall so that migrants would know immediately the best place to wire money back to Honduras.<br />
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<b>2) Reality TV.</b> "Survivor: the Migrant Caravan," and that's just for starters. Send a camera crew and two "tribes" down to Honduras and follow them north with various challenges along the way, such as the "Don't drink the water" challenge in which the prize is a six-pack of Aquafina, and the losing team is filmed with Montezuma's Revenge. And that's just the beginning. Advertisers would flock to "Beeg brother," with the revenue going to buy voluminous volumes of steel slats.<br />
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<b>3) Solar panels: </b>Build a wall and cover it with solar panels. According to the Solar Panel Association, such a wall, with an initial cost of $5.7 billion, would pay for itself in 60 years, 30 if giant floodlights are shined on the wall to make sure no migrants are climbing over it..<br />
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<b>4) YouTube advertising. </b>Build a 2,000-mile, 150 foot wall with a six-inch wide strip on top and have border patrol agents ride motorcycles along the top with go pro cameras strapped to their helmet, then play the videos on YouTube where they're sure to go viral, and raise $5.7 billion in advertising revenue. There might even be enough left over to pay for the funerals of dozens of border patrol agents who fail to negotiate the turn at Yuma, Arizona.<br />
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5) <b>Build the wall and make Russia pay for it</b>, by convicting Russia of meddling in the 2016 election and seizing all the Trump properties that were purchased by oligarchs.<br />
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<b>6) Tax the rich.</b> Impose a 70 to 80 percent tax on those making more than $10 million a year. Oh wait, the money raised that way has to go to pay for repairing bridges and roads, not creating a useless wall. <br />
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<b>7) Commemorative bricks.</b> Allow families to purchase an engraved brick with the name of a loved one who has been a victim of violence perpetrated by an illegal immigrant who snuck over the southern border. This might take several decades, since there would only be a potential group of five or six such bricks. More such bricks might be available if families who lost a loved one to the opioid epidemic were allowed to purchase them, but such bricks would need an asterisk noting that 95 percent of fentanyl sold on the black market in America came from China.<br />
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<b> 8)</b> You were expecting more? Trump can't even come up with one way to pay for the wall. Thank God.Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-31765485947590054952018-11-19T21:06:00.002-05:002018-11-22T08:56:26.636-05:00The Bread Man of Alcatraz<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFVo7214_F9VNqhTqZWUcvdCZbViyFmILChJXLOlXqXo8aW7dXC6GXSGoHmlQE2tx8OkeFSC18AnYIkhVTY5fY3AjhzkmBFqFpSS_Da8oV0EesvPuC6dMCehR3U03O-02lRW9-Y3HVaT04-cU/s1600/davesbread.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="176" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFVo7214_F9VNqhTqZWUcvdCZbViyFmILChJXLOlXqXo8aW7dXC6GXSGoHmlQE2tx8OkeFSC18AnYIkhVTY5fY3AjhzkmBFqFpSS_Da8oV0EesvPuC6dMCehR3U03O-02lRW9-Y3HVaT04-cU/s320/davesbread.jpg" width="187" /></a></div>
I was in Costco the other day and decided to try this "Dave's Killer Bread" that my former colleague and current food blogger Victor mentions every two or three posts, like it's some kind of culinary cult, so I put one of the double loaves in my cart. Sure enough, I had only traveled two or three aisles when one of the Costco sample server ladies spotted the loaves in my cart and proceeded to tell me the story of Dave's Killer Bread while I sampled a bacon and cheddar pierogi.<br />
Dave's parents owned a bakery, she said, and ever since his mother had "something in the oven," that something being Dave, he wanted to grow up to bake bread. But in his youth Dave turned out to be a bad seed, was in and out of trouble, and finally his parents threw him out. While he was homeless and drifting about, he would find a bakery, wait until it closed, climb in through the roof or jimmy his way in through a window, bake some bread and then leave. Until one day he fell asleep in a Dunkin Donuts and suddenly he heard a loud 'Time to make the donuts!' and the jig was up."<br />
"He got arrested?" I asked.<br />
"The judge looked at his priors and threw the book at him," she said. "He got sentenced to 15 years in prison."<br />
"Wow," I said, "the poor guy. What was the charge?"<br />
"Baking and entering," she said. "But luckily, he got a job in the prison kitchen, where he met a lifer who had developed a secret recipe for baking what he called 30 to Life Bread. Thirty to Life was so popular among the inmates that some of them would beat up other inmates just so they'd be punished by getting nothing but bread and water."<br />
"Wow," I said, "can I have another pierogi?"<br />
"Sure," the sample lady said. "This lifer's bread was so popular..."<br />
"How popular was it?" I asked.<br />
"It was so popular," she said, "that seven death row inmates requested peanut butter and banana sandwiches on 30 to Life for their last meal, and one of them had his sentence commuted when his lawyer argued that the prison substituted Pepperidge Farm 15 grain bread."<br />
"That's pretty impressive," I said, "but how did Dave get the recipe?"<br />
"He bought it from the lifer for a carton of cigarettes," she said, and 14 years later, when he was released, he convinced his parents that he was reformed and they took him back into the family bakery. The rest is history."<br />
"That's quite a story," I said. "He should write a book."<br />
"He already did," she said.<br />
"What's it called?" I asked.<br />
"The Bread Man of Alcatraz."Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-33279052218906204852018-07-07T17:38:00.001-04:002018-07-11T10:14:36.784-04:00Some headline writing tips<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Twenty-three years ago! Thanks, Bill Hogan, for the great illustration</td></tr>
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A colleague who's relatively new to the newspaper biz recently asked me for some tips on writing headlines, so here goes.</div>
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First, there's a paradox. Copy editors write headlines. As a copy editor, your job is to protect and defend the English language. What is that comma doing over here? I'm going to put it over there. Voila! Your job is also to make mundane copy sing like Beyonce. As a headline writer, your job often is to mangle that English language. Trump invited Tom Cruise to play golf? Headline: Trump considers climate Scientologist. And yet, the copy editor and headline writer are one and the same.</div>
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Second, these tips apply primarily to print journalism. A print headline should present the essence of a story in a handful of words, sort of like in a crossword puzzle: What's a four word phrase that means Number 1 on the FBI's list of most wanted criminals has been apprehended ... hmm ... did I say apprehended? I meant caught ... no, nabbed, Most wanted guy nabbed, there you have it, although on the Entertainment page that might also apply to the conclusion of The Bachelor. Online the headline acts more as clickbait. "Why was this guy nabbed?" (Click here and find out).</div>
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These suggestions don't apply universally. You have to use your judgment. If a story is about a budget, you ought to play it straight: Town Council rejects $262 million budget," not "Council has a cow," although atop a column that might be appropriate.</div>
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That said, here are some tips gleaned from 50 years of getting yelled at by supervisors:</div>
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1) The overline. One of the opportunities to use a bit of creativity is in the headline that goes above a "standalone" picture, standalone being a photo in which the entire story is included in the caption. Take the picture of an oversize replica of a check being presented to a charity. "Bikers donate X thousand dollars to fight cancer." Nothing at all wrong with that. But if you publish the same picture, different check, different recipient, day after day, you might want to vary it a bit. "Check this check out out," or "Lions take a bite out of cancer." What you want to do is focus on a key word, like "Lions" or "Kiwanis" or check, and come up with a bit of alliteration or play on a word that anchors the overline.</div>
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2) Free association. Early in his career Alex Rodriguez came to be known as A-Rod. Then A-Rod begat K-Rod (Frankie Rodriguez? Wait, where did the K come from? Oh, that's the symbol for strikeouts.) But then ... A-Rod becomes embroiled in a steroid scandal, and now he's A-Roid. You see where this is going? Playing with names depends on how recognizable the name is, but this applies to words as well.</div>
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3) Copy editors get no respect. They're the Rodney Dangerfields of the newspaper business. Once the copy editor got a modicum of respect: In big city union shops, they were at a slightly higher pay grade than reporters, but as contracts were negotiated, that difference was whittled away until reporters gained parity. But reporters are visible, copy editors not so. Over my decades in this business, I've seen many reporters start out covering municipal stuff, then some municipal figure runs for office, and the next thing you know a reporter who covered him or her is their spokesperson, or some government agency that a reporter covered needs a communications director, nobody ever calls the copy editor with a job offer. There are a hundred career-making investigative reports for every headless body found in a topless bar. That said, the headline is the most visible element of a copy editor's job. Nobody ever says "Great comma," but a clever headline will at least elicit peer recognition and bring a bit of satisfaction to a thankless job.</div>
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4) A word of caution. Just like some people become addicted to crossword puzzles or Sudoku, over a great many years I've become addicted to writing headlines. I can't see a development in the news without mentally writing a headline for it. Case in point, see above, when Trump fired Pruitt, within eight seconds I'm thinking he should hire Tom Cruise because he's a Climate Scientologist. But the mixing and mangling of words, the creation of new words by adding on to old words, the deployment of double and triple entendres, is the stuff of which good headlines are made. Once when an auto maker was going to retire a number of models, the headline I came up with is an example of this: The Jurassic Parking Lot. A few letters here, a suffix there, and you can work magic. It used to help having a page designer who had a sense of humor, but now page designers and copy editor/headline writers are one and the same, so if you have an idea for a creative headline, you can tweak the layout to accommodate it. How cool is that?</div>
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5) The best headlines I've ever seen. And these were not written by me. <b>1)</b> Mila Andre, a Russian emigre working as a copy editor at the New York Daily News, was assigned to edit a review of a new Russian restaurant named Caucasus. Her headline? "Ve vas hungry, Soviet." This was before the breakup of the Soviet Union, mind you. It also got poor Mila chewed out by the copy desk chief, who told her it had nothing to do with the quality of the food. Her response? It made people read the review. <b>2) </b>My late colleague Ed Reiter, who was treated horribly by the management of the Bergen Record after he recovered from a stroke, was assigned a story about an invasion of slimy creatures in lawns and gardens around northern New Jersey. His headline: "Slugfest in the Garden." <b>3)</b> The late Hal Frankel, who was a revered copy editor at the Daily News and I always considered a mentor, following the New York Giants' victory in the 1986 Super Bowl, when the News ran a two-page spread and a story about how they were going to hold a celebration in Giants Stadium and all the fans were going to be given kazoos so they could make some noise. Hal's headline? In I'd say 180 point type across two pages: "Start spreading kazoos" <b>4)</b> On the opposite end of the spectrum, a little two paragraph story came across the News copy desk about a woman who advertised her colon cleansing skills on the back page of the Village Voice. The woman was arrested when one of her clients failed to survive the cleansing. The little 18 or 24 point headline written by Joe whose last name I can't remember, was: "Public enema number one."</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
We interrupt this blog for a comment. I can't stand it. A former colleague just posted a lovely picture of greenery on her facebook page with the notation "The lysimachia is up in our front yard. In the backyard, the phlox is beginning to open." And like a reflex I started typing (although I caught myself and stopped), Don't let the phlox get too close to the henhouse. But this is what I mean, writing headlines too long can be addictive.<br />
<br />
And how could I forget one of my early all-time faves, written by an elderly copy editor named Lester Rose when I was just starting out at the Daily News circa 1980. This is similar to that giant check that keeps appearing in charity photos, except this was the back page of the Daily News where the main headline through baseball season always had YANKS or METS, and one other team in ALL CAPS, in probably 150 point type, which left room for one other five to eight letter word in the middle. Often on the radio when you listen to the sports scores you'll hear the announcer try to come up with fifteen or so different ways to say "wins," usually riffing on the name of the winning or losing team. So one day the Yankees were playing the Milwaukee Brewers, and Lester's imaginative was: MILWAUKEE WISCS YANKS. Lester finally did retire not long after that, and I eventually got kicked out of the sports department and wound up on the suburban copy desk, but that's another story.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSrl0p8b-nmbe-D2oJAULY2PsY1fGqWwamN3zWHuyaYw6mtZZjqjIYaNrUTqY8C3o-Nj5_B4UUGJGLnkxfxHkbHmAKJcjalIJd1AmvLEUaDU1MbwWm-1E6v38x73i679vahx62UZM59KGJtNQ/s1600/eau+de+nerve.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1023" data-original-width="688" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSrl0p8b-nmbe-D2oJAULY2PsY1fGqWwamN3zWHuyaYw6mtZZjqjIYaNrUTqY8C3o-Nj5_B4UUGJGLnkxfxHkbHmAKJcjalIJd1AmvLEUaDU1MbwWm-1E6v38x73i679vahx62UZM59KGJtNQ/s320/eau+de+nerve.jpg" width="215" /></a></div>
<br />
There are some more tips and tricks for writing headlines. I'll get
to those in a future post. Now excuse me while I answer the door.<br />
<br />
Knock knock<br />
Who's there?<br />
Lysimachia<br />
Lysimachia who?<br />
Lysimachia vote Democratic in NovemberAaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-2736696467698966692017-08-23T09:27:00.000-04:002017-08-23T10:30:59.637-04:00A total eclipse of the brain<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD1A_SfN5X8lCrF1OEjX4uqIcLWxLKzV4pQfbfqxIfYaJb4_Dv7S2pvNh5Mn2WXKgf0xvS6Rd65fRVco7F5RZO1l1KYHOcj_FKulZZfnbCnfwoowwBx6K79RNA3r1l7CyNXRe18aULIYq4IoY/s1600/eclipsecartoon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="610" data-original-width="610" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD1A_SfN5X8lCrF1OEjX4uqIcLWxLKzV4pQfbfqxIfYaJb4_Dv7S2pvNh5Mn2WXKgf0xvS6Rd65fRVco7F5RZO1l1KYHOcj_FKulZZfnbCnfwoowwBx6K79RNA3r1l7CyNXRe18aULIYq4IoY/s320/eclipsecartoon.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Desk clerk: Good morning, Buffalo Hilton. How may I help you?<br />
<br />
Me: I'd like to make a reservation for April 7, 2024<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: That would be our Eclipse Special<br />
<br />
Me: Oh, there's an eclipse then? I was just looking for a place to celebrate my 103rd birthday.<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: We have just one room left.<br />
<br />
Me: Whew, just in time. And what's the rate?<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: One thousand forty nine dollars and twenty-three cents.<br />
<br />
Me: One thousand forty nine dollars? That's outrageous. I could get the presidential/honeymoon/royal suite for half that.<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: And twenty-three cents. But you get 20 percent off at our breakfast buffet.<br />
<br />
Me: What will they be serving?<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: Bacon, we have an omelette bar, croissants, biscuits with sausage gravy ...<br />
<br />
Me: Thank you, but I'll just watch the eclipse, if like you say there is one, on TV<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: The Eclipse Special room has a 44-inch flat screen LSD television.<br />
<br />
Me: Why would I want to watch an eclipse on TV if I'm paying a thousand dollars to see it live?<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: And forty nine dollars and twenty-three cents.<br />
<br />
Me: I'm calling Motel 6.<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: They've been booked solid for that date for the past three years. Perhaps you'd like our Lunar Eclipse package for January 30 2018.<br />
<br />
Me: What's the difference between a solar and a lunar eclipse?<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: About eight hundred dollars.<br />
<br />
Me: And twenty-three cents? I meant what's the difference in viewing experience?<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: A lunar eclipse is way more intense, because it only occurs when the sun comes between the moon and earth. If it happens at night, the moon disappears but the earth lights up like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.<br />
<br />
Me: Doesn't it get hot when the sun is that close to earth?<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: During the last lunar eclipse, I was able to fry an egg on my forehead. But your room has solar powered air conditioning, and you still get 20 percent off our buffet breakfast.<br />
<br />
<br />
Me: Why would I want a buffet breakfast when I can fry an egg on my forehead?<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: Because your plastic cutlery is likely to melt.<br />
<br />
Me: Are you in the path of totality for the lunar eclipse?<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: According to Scientific Armenian, we'll have 99 and 44/100 percent totality.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs0wv9UwNgtRTvsBbnF4u5GXqjUr9MMukPjUJNA1DNGkQbx7_KOhAFqzB_0VmPFOaREaG2TmPBhNXeFCeZM_HccQt9PMxtrlPvoSES7uiDHvouy2G_xXbL0DCml8onah2l75rtx3dwdeh5JlA/s1600/scientificarmenian.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="703" data-original-width="450" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs0wv9UwNgtRTvsBbnF4u5GXqjUr9MMukPjUJNA1DNGkQbx7_KOhAFqzB_0VmPFOaREaG2TmPBhNXeFCeZM_HccQt9PMxtrlPvoSES7uiDHvouy2G_xXbL0DCml8onah2l75rtx3dwdeh5JlA/s320/scientificarmenian.jpg" width="204" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Me: Are you sure of that?<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: I'm 80 percent sure.<br />
<br />
Me: If you're 80 percent sure it will be 99 and 44/100 percent totali -- oh heck, I'll take it.<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: That will be two hundred twenty six dollars and 23 cents.<br />
<br />
Me: What if it's cloudy when the moon gets 99 and 44/100 percent eclipsed? Do I get a refund?<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: We're offering weather insurance.<br />
<br />
Me: And how much is that?<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: Eight hundred dollars and twenty-three cents.<br />
<br />
Me: In other words I'm still out a thousand dollars if I want to see a lunar eclipse.<br />
<br />
Desk clerk: And twenty three cents.<br />
<br />
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Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-2889906048330129052017-08-12T12:46:00.000-04:002017-08-14T23:33:47.346-04:0047 reasons to stick your head inside the mouth of a saltwater crocodile<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPXcCNqlkrWclWiljRbvRl5satztWR64p7fy9z2AUaxLOhsx7T_LrjgR5oOeOVptVV8w3iP4IMOQIwKDewHQjRhHO5EIhMhf0KnYqJICTfqCmPtfOxKtjzOb6jBL6TMQ5WJAr6QhakRmB59-Q/s1600/croc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="542" data-original-width="1030" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPXcCNqlkrWclWiljRbvRl5satztWR64p7fy9z2AUaxLOhsx7T_LrjgR5oOeOVptVV8w3iP4IMOQIwKDewHQjRhHO5EIhMhf0KnYqJICTfqCmPtfOxKtjzOb6jBL6TMQ5WJAr6QhakRmB59-Q/s400/croc.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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47) Take the picture, dammi -- ouch!<br />
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46) Your estate can collect the $5,000 reward for that missing chihuahua<br />
<br />
45) Think how you'll look on the wall of Mr. Crocodile's croc cave<br />
<br />
44) I'll bet this livestream goes viral. Now where's that darn record button . . .<br />
<br />
43) Can you hear me now? I said there is only one tRuth!<br />
<br />
42) What a great way to complete your bucket list<br />
<br />
41) 5 bars, wow! Hello Mom, guess where I am ...<br />
<br />
We interrupt this list with a comment on headlines. Orange may be the new black, but in the world of headlines, 20, maybe 30, even 47 is the new 10. Back in the day when David Letterman made the Top 10 list popular, newspapers and the fledgling Internet were discovering the popularity of lists. But whereas newspapers and magazines, where print, and in the case of magazines, glossy paper, were at a premium, 10, even 5, items on a list would suffice, web sites were learning to be sticky.<br />
I mention this because when I launched my first web site, tankbooks.com, which contained a wealth of stories and interviews from my conversations with World War II veterans, sometimes I would get an email from a visitor saying he read everything on the site. Someone I told this to said my web site was sticky. That was a good thing, he said, because the stickier a site was, the longer visitors would stay on the site, and the more any advertising on the site would be in front of their eyes.<br />
A few years ago, most lists on the Internet were still at 10. But then when the list titles got more compelling, and the web sites on which they appeared grew more ad-centric, throwing a big ad for something in between every three slides, or popping a video or a big ad between every few paragraphs, ten just wasn't cutting it anymore.<br />
The result? A veritable slew of sticky sites ... "20 of the Most Terrifying Animals in Australia" ... "30 Rare Photos of North Korea" ... "120 Bald-Faced Lies Told By Donald Trump ... Make That 121" ...<br />
<br />
40) Wait ... This isn't a plush toy?"<br />
<br />
39) Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"<br />
<br />
38) This is sure to get you a promotion to Lieutenant in the Fail Army.<br />
<br />
37) Maybe even to general.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO8TuNK5kyHdfRSfHJsHgFbdD5fgXGzjxpKnPCW7qamMdq-NGbVpdt8HelXdQbcGDPETWrZt8xaK-WjOVqnMuZPWb8WfSZqUXjvWRBFd5iYJAETAePWtJfPZO_KeOXDf9NjsZvTVghTJ3_sG4/s1600/babycrocs.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="414" data-original-width="571" height="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO8TuNK5kyHdfRSfHJsHgFbdD5fgXGzjxpKnPCW7qamMdq-NGbVpdt8HelXdQbcGDPETWrZt8xaK-WjOVqnMuZPWb8WfSZqUXjvWRBFd5iYJAETAePWtJfPZO_KeOXDf9NjsZvTVghTJ3_sG4/s400/babycrocs.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Q. What does a baby crocodile like for breakfast? A. Lady fingers </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
36) Double dog dare me, will you?<br />
<br />
35) I'll find that White House leak if it's the last thing I do!<br />
<br />
34) I said "Let them eat cake," I didn't say the chef at Mar-a-Lago was going to bake it.<br />
<br />
33) I thought this was an animatronic crocodile, now where's the plug? Uh-oh ...<br />
<br />
32) So this is where all those absentee ballots that voted for Gore wound up.<br />
<br />
31) No I'm not a Packers fan. What do you mean you ordered a Cheesehead?<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.ebay.com/itm/250707841942?hash=item3a5f5a1396" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtmOiXdY7BzRs3nNAcuJJxaiEXK-VuIfdiVjiY7efWD6tJVYNfNg4TThvseAEoFPJBg_-SKz2wqAZrX-sIvMmoXflfm-9cbw_IOqWxc4qQ8YuFBQOrzttYAm0KmeuwhY_iBEr1zwpI3ViIu40/s320/ddaycover.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.ebay.com/itm/250707841942?hash=item3a5f5a1396" target="_blank">Listen to sample tracks</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
30) Did I say 47 reasons? Help me out here, #FrederickClemens<br />
<br />
29) Your bff is filming it for the Croc Challenge<br />
<br />
28) You can't wait to tag five of your Facebook friends<br />
<br />
27) Think these are getting lame? You should see the first 40 of the 50 Scariest Scenes in "The Sound of Music" list.<br />
<br />
26) This should greatly improve your chances of getting the starring role in Crocodile Dundee IV<br />
<br />
25) A great way to protect your eyes during the solar eclipse?<br />
<br />
24) You might become the first person to receive a head transplant.<br />
<br />
23) Then again you might not.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Aaron-Elson/e/B003D2URN2/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1502687569&sr=1-2-ent" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="329" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuTnL8tA-NHA3XiNTNGj7FdXAeyR3y0Bs-N-tRLHyWfSuCohyphenhyphen2FfX7VymxOF4skN2OJvTIrsUoKLHN4DifexlaLuY5-3SeHK8MSh8JbmCdd_NznhtViF3dMlhAVJxLzpa8nLoyU611GdP4uGc/s320/ddaydozencover.jpg" width="210" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Aaron-Elson/e/B003D2URN2/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1502687569&sr=1-2-ent" target="_blank">Check out Aaron's Amazon author page</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
22) Are we there yet?<br />
<br />
21) No I don't come with a side of bloomin' onions.<br />
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20) Stick your head inside the mouth of a saltwater crocodile and kiss your dandruff goodbye.<br />
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19) You could set the Guinness record for world's shortest reality TV show.<br />
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18) Cut! Okay, you've got that cameo on Game of Thrones. I said Cut! Cut! Uh-oh...<br />
<br />
17) What do you mean tastes like chicken?<br />
<br />
16) Michael Rockefeller, I presume?<br />
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15) I think I just found the remains of Malaysia Air Flight 370. What a meal that must have been.<br />
<br />
14) So you think you're the toughest saltwater crocodile east of Australia? Bite me. <br />
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13) On second thought. . .<br />
<br />
12) Or should that be west of Australia? <br />
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11) Just one more take, and I'll show those producers that "Saltwater Crocodile Lagoon" will make "Shark Tank" look like the SS Minnow.<br />
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10) The game warden says this fellow is a vegan crocodile and only eats non-GMO people ... wait a minute, I'm non-GMO ... thank you Monsanto.<br />
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9) Help! My head is stuck in a bucket of Country Crock. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDB6c0LGjD9AJcQKFj7kQEfa7VGO1vW25GUVKeRAc_QUATfyilwHCoKPejKaDt72-TdDc4uloR0Y-fDFUnKYphVIS6RvyS3HfUVX0QsaeYN6j_B12S4G50zNG5sfRLEYyqnJybhCPXbsi1vuk/s1600/countrycrock.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="341" data-original-width="388" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDB6c0LGjD9AJcQKFj7kQEfa7VGO1vW25GUVKeRAc_QUATfyilwHCoKPejKaDt72-TdDc4uloR0Y-fDFUnKYphVIS6RvyS3HfUVX0QsaeYN6j_B12S4G50zNG5sfRLEYyqnJybhCPXbsi1vuk/s320/countrycrock.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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8) Holy Molar Batman! This guy's got more choppers than a Harley franchise.<br />
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7) If I can make this sale I'll be the dental implant salesman of the year!<br />
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6) Look Ma, I'm on the cover of the National Geographic!<br />
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5) Help me out here, #FrederickClemens, finishing this list is like pulling teeth<br />
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4) Go ahead and laugh, but according to climatologists, these puppies will be roaming the streets of downtown Miami by 2050. <br />
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3) What do you mean, I bring out the wildebeest in you?<br />
<br />
2) No, that's not a crowbar in my pocket, I'm happy to see you. <br />
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And the No. 1 reason to stick your head inside the mouth of a saltwater crocodile (like you haven't scrolled down already) . . .<br />
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1) Live, from Lake Okeechobee, it's Saturday Night!<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://headlineguy.blogspot.com/2013/05/an-audio-sampler.html" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="245" data-original-width="394" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQyQ2YgH4mAw5ieD9o8pifO6TKpbEMFI5XWeZRwG_5-TdvyLmkE5p2WNydvYbmT83HAmKaiJV0F2C7T9TMmXkT-ePn9BIqkBBniyfJFQrbmoOoFW7BsaPkSoD72HU0oYS7olbSfGHLV2zgVPo/s400/rushmorebackside2.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://headlineguy.blogspot.com/2013/05/an-audio-sampler.html" target="_blank">Check out this free World War II oral history sampler from an earlier post</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br />Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-14619982845032380552017-07-28T13:33:00.002-04:002017-07-28T13:33:45.797-04:00Momma, don't let your babies grow up to be micro managers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc_-C6I9G8kRWJoqfb0PSgxhY94OmRvENHsgR65S8v018d8itreFqOj5pwUMz0XZpp8WLgoBE25c11-JsO4_tENSO9aJy_3vE6QnievbTnjVUyO5c8ee8ei94FXfqxGfW1CQRi04LjA-h6LTY/s1600/micromanage.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="303" data-original-width="1000" height="120" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc_-C6I9G8kRWJoqfb0PSgxhY94OmRvENHsgR65S8v018d8itreFqOj5pwUMz0XZpp8WLgoBE25c11-JsO4_tENSO9aJy_3vE6QnievbTnjVUyO5c8ee8ei94FXfqxGfW1CQRi04LjA-h6LTY/s400/micromanage.gif" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br />
It's kind of a given that copy editors make mistakes. In many cases, a copy editor is the last line of defense from errors, but when correcting an error, a copy editor might introduce a new error, for instance, when rewriting a caption, he or she might misspell a word or name. Often, there is a reason a mistake was made or might have been avoided. I remember a time that a colleague of mine was called on the carpet, had the riot act read to him, and got reamed (figuratively, not literally) because a story he edited had the phrase "Jew Jersey" which appeared in the paper.<br />
How could that have happened?<br />
A little forensic copy editing would have shown that there was a recent rule passed by someone who enjoyed making up rules, kind of like our current embarrassment of a president, that, and I forget the exact wording of the edict, but that we on the copy desk were no longer to use N.J. in certain circumstances and had to write out New Jersey. Not a big deal, but the copy editor in question was simply following the rules.<br />
A forensic examination of the keyboard, however, will reveal that the letter "J" is above the letter "N" and 50 percent to the right. I believe the term is catty corner.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyfxIBbCdHfcs14Jbct_yp1bYRfkQYPsANn8KSecbILmv7OaqQQtNjCXP8ekqSHf5r-vch_gfEgM2c6G_V2PRZ3Q9C1fPw8SsD3gD9DtEmyAeGriH6OnNBOj_L8SbMwZi6hW9SP93mWuTJu9A/s1600/cattycorner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyfxIBbCdHfcs14Jbct_yp1bYRfkQYPsANn8KSecbILmv7OaqQQtNjCXP8ekqSHf5r-vch_gfEgM2c6G_V2PRZ3Q9C1fPw8SsD3gD9DtEmyAeGriH6OnNBOj_L8SbMwZi6hW9SP93mWuTJu9A/s320/cattycorner.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Oops, wrong catty corner</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> </td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGfVRQmAIM1cxA8AKL3xzizOs3pmATThh-SFNOKLJC7Y30cFJtqWFFPZ-mE23Rk4SicCNbWKBw5ixDVBwW1QipOntEE9lx9aiY8RpsThcH_gAtmXDfyTQjrbrwxcktJFNMBr4Yer_tmKF9aKU/s1600/keyboard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="138" data-original-width="364" height="151" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGfVRQmAIM1cxA8AKL3xzizOs3pmATThh-SFNOKLJC7Y30cFJtqWFFPZ-mE23Rk4SicCNbWKBw5ixDVBwW1QipOntEE9lx9aiY8RpsThcH_gAtmXDfyTQjrbrwxcktJFNMBr4Yer_tmKF9aKU/s400/keyboard.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Okay, correct keyboard. Note the position of the n and the j.</td></tr>
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So ... when following the new rule and thinking he was acting correctly, he accidentally depressed the "J" rather than the "N" and the result: Jew Jersey, for which said copy editor got his ass handed to him over a nothing little mistake that never would have occurred in the first place had a supervisor not been micro managing.<br />
That was then. This is now.<br />
The newspaper where I work has gone through a succession of managing editors in the few years I've been there.<br />
An email that arrived, addressed to the entire copy editing staff, particularly got under my skin. It contained the phrase "How did this happen" when all the managing editor had to do was ask me, as said managing editor knew that I had laid out the page, and I would have explained how it happened, but the point of sending the email to the entire copy desk was to reassert said managing editor's control by humiliating the alleged error maker.<br />
If this were the first "how did this happen" email it would have been like the proverbial water off a duck's back, but this is a pretty regular occurrence, so I decided to ask Mr. Google what are the characteristics of a micro manager, and the answer, although I am sure there are variations, fit this micro manager to a T.<br />
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<a href="https://blog.weekdone.com/lead-or-manage-6-symptoms-micromanager/" target="_blank">6 Characteristics of a Micro Manager</a> </div>
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I've made my share of mistakes, some of them clunkers. And I don't humiliate easily, so I wasn't humiliated by this particular email. But I did have my eyes opened to what is at times a stifling workplace environment. I'm not enough of an expert to say micro managing is any worse in a newspaper environment than it is in a corporate environment. But copy editors are often creative people, and micro managing in a newsroom stifles that creativity. The article points out that there is often a fine line between micro managing and effective leadership. There is also sometimes a hairline between an excellent, creative headline and a clunker of a headline, but if you don't consider the clunkers, you may never write the great ones.<br />
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PS: Thank you Victor Sasson for the kind mention in your excellent and evolving blog "The Sasson Report."Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-29118976532020443592017-07-23T13:58:00.000-04:002017-07-28T12:52:17.693-04:00Copy editors don't get no respeck<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhnSG-LplGjh2CrCjX8tAWm5lhRe2cVLFnYvh2l0tBvJXcm4CQDAFm1oASwEc7dvb6HFPoO36rDmpvQHz3YrU0mBR051QDzGMdEbtxJ5BqNdkEfGrSLo7WUzE5bjSHmNgu0HM0YrqoccYWYIE/s1600/strikeof78.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="485" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhnSG-LplGjh2CrCjX8tAWm5lhRe2cVLFnYvh2l0tBvJXcm4CQDAFm1oASwEc7dvb6HFPoO36rDmpvQHz3YrU0mBR051QDzGMdEbtxJ5BqNdkEfGrSLo7WUzE5bjSHmNgu0HM0YrqoccYWYIE/s400/strikeof78.jpg" width="302" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The 1978 Newspaper Strike Daily News knockoff</td></tr>
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Recently I had occasion to flash back to the Great Newspaper Strike of 1978. I always thought it lasted 78 days, but memory is funny, a google entry pegged it at 84. Whatever. My supervisor at the News at the time, Chuck Slater, got a job as the sports editor of the "interim" Daily Press and brought me along. It was a way smaller staff, if I remember correctly the entire sports department was five or six people, but it might have been less.<br />
But the thing I remember most about that time was riding in the elevator one day with a couple of colleagues. The Daily Press was in an office building, unlike the Daily News, which had its own Art Deco building on East 42nd Street. There were a couple of secretaries or receptionists in the elevator and one of them asked one of my colleagues if we worked for that newspaper. He said yes, and one of the secretaries said something to the effect of Oh, that must be so exciting.<br />
At the time she was right. But she might also have said Oh, that must be so depressing, and she also would have been right. Because people who work for newspapers don't work normal hours, which might be called office hours, and if you do that for a certain number of years, like a lifetime, that can be pretty damn depressing. People who work for corporations, of course there are variations, but if you average them out, they come into the office at 9 in the morning and leave the building at 5 p.m. So the elevators are crowded, the subways are mobbed, the lunch lines are long. I often think of the rare time when I was in my twenties and got a weekend off and went to a movie on a Saturday night. The people on line were cursing the lengthy wait to get into the movie. Me, I was loving it, doing something normal on a weekend instead of leaving the office at 11 p.m. and wondering what am I going to do now, then going home and watching old movies on TV until I fell asleep.<br />
I flashed back to 1978 because the newspaper where I work part time moved last week. It's a pretty old newspaper, and once had its own building in town with its own presses. Then it moved into a four-story building a couple of blocks away that it shared with an engineering firm, the newspaper on the fourth floor and the engineers on the second and third floors, until the engineering firm went out of business and the second and third floors were vacant. But it was still basically a newspaper building. No corporate nine to five types coming and going. Some departments of the newspaper left at five like normal people but they had relatively normal jobs, selling advertising, secretarial positions, things like that, and because the main office was right by the elevator and the newsroom was around a corner and down a hall, their five o'clock departure wasn't very noticeable.<br />
Last week, the newspaper moved again, into a modern three-story office building, modern at least for the town, which hasn't seen any significant new office construction in about a decade. The main tenant in the building is a mortgage company, which is one of the more prominent members of the town's Chamber of Commerce. Before the move there was a tour of the new office, which I didn't go on, but my colleagues were raving about the breakroom, which they said had three or four of those single serve Keurig coffee things and vending machines and tables, they said it was really cool.<br />
The actual move was less traumatic than anticipated, and the staff's lone IT guy not only didn't have a nervous breakdown but is probably weighing offers from Marvel to star in its next movie.<br />
We've been in the new offices for a week now.<br />
My first day there is when I flashed back to the "interim" paper of 1978 because this was very much a corporate building. The newspaper is on the third floor, along with the mortgage company. On the first floor there's a cardiology practice, which explains why the fifteen to twenty handicapped parking spaces outside the building were all full when I showed up at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday for my first shift in the new building; and a probate court (the building is right next to the Superior Court building); I don't know which tenants are on the second floor, except one of them is a lawyer with an LLC after his name.<br />
When I arrived, the large parking lot was almost full, meaning I had to park out in what I used to affectionately refer to as god's country. On the other hand, walking is good for you so I shouldn't complain.<br />
Then five o'clock came around. I was busy editing copy and laying out pages, so I didn't notice the exodus, which, I should add, included a large portion of the newspaper's staff. But when I looked out the window, there were only a few cars left in the parking lot, so far off you could hardly see them.<br />
And that fantastic, luxurious breakroom? I paid it a quick visit and there were indeed a lot of coffee pots, it would be a great place to have AA meetings on weekends, except I don't think they use Keurigs at AA. And then the word came down from our nice neighbor the mortgage company: No one from the newspaper was to enter the breakroom after 4:30 p.m. This was very bad news for my copy editing neighbor to the right, who is a diabetic with a two can of Diet Coke and a pack or two of chips from the vending machine a night habit. The news meeting ran late a day or two ago and he glanced at his watch and said he hoped the meeting would end by 4:30. It ended at 4:45.<br />
The next harsh reminder that copy editors don't live normal lives came at sundown. At the former building, staffers parked in a large municipal garage about a block from the paper. The town's infrastructure never quite caught up to its municipal garage capacity, so that while there weren't many cars in the garage when people left work at 11 p.m., they didn't have to go to the fourth or fifth floor to find their car.<br />
At the new building, come 5 o'clock the parking lot empties out except for the handful of reporters and editors whose cars are in the farther reaches of the lot. And as the sun goes down, the lights that are spread in rows throughout the lot don't come on. It's pretty eerie looking out at the empty lot with the shadows of a couple of cars way off in the distance, or a single car parked in a far corner of the lot. And on a moonless night, the parking lot is pitch dark. Sure, it costs money to turn on the lights, but did anyone consider this when hammering out the terms of the lease? Just like the availability of the break room, another reminder that copy editors and reporters are second class citizens, although reporters at least get out of the office once in a while.<br />
The other night, after a few days in the new office, the colleague to my left began getting a headache near the end of the shift. His eyes were bothering him, too. So he asked Mr. Google "What is the proper distance from a computer screen for your eyes?" The answer came back 18 to 20 inches. The new desks are very narrow, whereas our former desks were pretty wide, with drawers even, never mind that an occasional mouse liked to forage in those drawers for the occasional stray piece of Halloween candy, but I digress. So he got out his Stanley tape measure -- the office is located in New Britain, after all, birthplace of Stanley Tools and still home to Stanley Black & Decker -- and counted nine inches from his nose to the screen. Then he wheeled his chair back so that his nose was approximately 18 inches from the screen, only to discover that he couldn't reach his mouse. So, like Humphrey Bogart in "The African Queen," when he emerges with numerous leeches on his body and Katharine Hepburn has to burn them off with a cigarette, then after the Queen gets stalled again, right back into the river he goes, so went my colleague's nose back to nine or ten inches from his monitor.<br />
I was lucky in that I got laid off in 2008 before the Bergen Record moved from the spacious "Record building" to new, smaller headquarters in a corporate building in another town, which they had to do because the presses that took up the whole first floor of the Record building were no longer used and the staff which once filled the fourth floor was decimated.<br />
I wouldn't call it post traumatic stress because there's nothing particularly traumatic about such a move, but flashbacks are flashbacks, and I'm very much not liking this move because it's served as a glaring reminder of how far from a normal career my career as a newspaper copy editor has been. On the other hand, I'm still a couple of balloons short of throwing a pity party.<br />
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<br />Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-17614335235718456102016-12-07T03:10:00.001-05:002016-12-07T03:10:46.736-05:00Top ten ways you can tell someone has been writing headlines too long<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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1) Believes Trump has a stake in Google because he keeps encouraging crowds to chant "Look her up!"<br />
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2) Former colleague notes on Facebook that he's a Leo and you respond so that's why you're named Claude<br />
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3) Thinks Wait Wait Don't Tell Me is a diet show<br />
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4) Doesn't know who invented the Internet, but is quick to point out that it's driven by Al Gore-ithms. <br />
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5) Takes a cue from gas rationing and lawn watering: On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays hyphenates Wal-Mart, and on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays doesn't. (Alternates on Sundays if he can remember what he did the previous Sunday). This also applies to health care/healthcare and various other copy-editing scenarios.<br />
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6) When Cupid.com asks what type he likes, he says 120 point.<br />
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7) Asked what he thinks Trump's chances of winning are he says "As good as the chances of the Cubs winning the World Series. Ha ha."<br />
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8) Believes "Ford to city: Drop dead" was about an automotive recall.<br />
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9) Gets thrown out of France for asking which came first, the Liberte or the Eggalite?<br />
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10) Goes to a topless bar hoping to find a headless body<br />
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<br />Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-86741889287706410612016-11-27T10:20:00.000-05:002016-11-27T13:18:37.058-05:00An existential crisis<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Over the years -- okay, okay, decades -- I've kept enough food on my desk while plowing my way through a nine hour shift of writing headlines and editing copy to open a restaurant, neigh (how did a horse get in here?), maybe a chain of restaurants, Aaron's Copy Desk Diner. Every Halloween I scare up a few dozen extra mini Kit Kats and about Three Dozen Mini Musketeers and secrete them in the back compartment of the bottom drawer on the right hand side of my desk, while the bottom drawer on the left hand side of the desk, behind a batch of file folders which contain I have no idea what because they were left by the former employee whose desk I appropriated or maybe even the employee before that, is where I place whichever cookies I've brought in to get me through the evening. These I pull out from time to time to have with two or three cups of coffee thanks to Mr. Coffee and Mrs. S., the human resources maven who bought the coffee maker for the staff despite the fact that I'm one of only three people in the entire newsroom, and that includes advertising people, who drink coffee at work. The last managing editor kept all kinds of exotic tea bags and a bottle of honey on his desk; he only lasted about a year before losing his temper and his job; imagine how short his career would have been if he drank the kind of rotgut coffee I brew up at the start of my shift. But I digress.<br />
The 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor is fast approaching, heck, by the time you read this it will probably have been three weeks or a year ago, and my publisher asked if I could find a few local citizens and write about what they remembered about that day. So one morning last week, I was running late, but I decided to walk the five blocks or so to the local senior center to see what I could find. When I introduced myself at the front desk, the senor center director came out and said something to the effect that gee, that was a long time ago, anyone who remembered what they were doing that day would have to be at least 75 years old, and if they were only 75, all they could remember was being born. But, he said, let's take a walk through the facility and see what we could find. In the gym area we found a 93 year old man but the director said he probably wouldn't remember what he was doing the day Pearl Harbor was attacked because he was in Poland or Siberia at the time. What the heck, I said, I had my tape recorder with me and I recorded a 20 minute interview with him, maybe a bit longer, about Poland and Siberia and Baghdad and his time in the Polish resistance, pretty dramatic stuff if I can understand what he was saying, I'll listen to it later.<br />
But that was it. I found one lady who refused to tell me her name and didn't want it in the paper, but she was at a friend's birthday party the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. You must have been seven or eight, I said. She didn't answer.<br />
And that was it.<br />
By now I was late for work and I had no food to get me through the shift; even my Halloween stash was whittled down by a month's worth of nibbling. Nibbling. In the realm of literature, that's what might be called "foreshadowing." There still were a few Lindor truffles that I bought about two years ago but they were hard as a rock and were classified as for emergencies only.<br />
On the walk to my office I passed a C-Town supermarket, which caters to the large Hispanic and Latino population in the neighborhood. I ventured inside and was amazed at the great selection of mangoes and avocados which are way overpriced and underripe at the supermarkets where I usually shop. But it wasn't Take an Avocado to Work Day, and never should be, it was Take a Cookie to Work Day. Browsing the cookie aisle all I could find on sale was a large bag of Oreo cookies that was on sale for $2.50, so I bought a bag, figuring it would last three or four days.<br />
When I arrived at the office, sat at my desk and entered the password for my computer, I opened the bag of oreos while I waited, and took four cookies out. I didn't have to make coffee because it was one of the rare days when our IT guy, another caffeine fiend, made the coffee, so I poured myself a cup, set my four cookies in front of me, and placed the opened bag of Oreos in the rear compartment of the lower left hand desk drawer.<br />
Can you see where this is going?<br />
Now, this is the middle of November. It wasn't a cold November of the soul, but it wasn't Tahiti in July out either. Now do you see where this is going?<br />
A copy desk shift at the paper where I work has moments of intense pressure followed by moments with little to do followed by moments of intense pressure. It's during those moments of intense pressure that I like to pop a cookie or a half a mini Kit Kat into my choppers or take my half finished cup of coffee to the microwave in the back and pop it in for thirty seconds.<br />
Such was the case on this particular evening when, having long finished the four Oreo cookies I initially removed from the bag, I pulled the lower left hand bottom drawer out and was about to retrieve the opened bag of cookies when I saw something scurry across the bottom of the drawer. It was a mouse.<br />
I slammed the drawer shut, trying to slam it without making too much noise. At least I succeeded in that.<br />
Now I had a problem.<br />
Luckily there was nothing in the drawer that I needed besides a few more cookies, but my appetite was history so I could do without, and leave the drawer closed for the rest of the shift. At least there would be no getting out of the drawer for Mister Mouse and he could eat the rest of the bag of Oreos for all I cared, except I don't know what a mouse on a sugar high is capable of, and I didn't particularly want to find out.<br />
There were still about five hours to go in the shift. The human resources lady's desk is only about fifteen feet from mine and I didn't dare say anything because that was sure to trigger a universal email chastising reporters and editors for even thinking about keeping food in their desk and threatening probation or worse for anybody caught doing so in the future.<br />
And I didn't dare say anything out of concern for upsetting the woman at the desk next to mine who sometimes has a three-day old clementine or apple on her desk.<br />
Fortunately, I'm usually the last person in the office at the end of the night because the newspaper is printed at a different location and I have to wait for the pressroom to call and let me know that the presses are running, and in the event of a breakdown or other problem I have to do what I can, resend a page or whatever. Usually by the time I leave, sometime between 10:30 and 11 p.m., the cleaning guy has shown up and is busy emptying the waste baskets and cleaning the bathrooms.<br />
All of the other workers were gone when the cleaning guy arrived. I told him I had a favor to ask, I might have used the word "big," as in I have a big favor to ask. I told him about the cookies and the mouse, and I asked if he would open the drawer and see if the mouse was still there, and if it wasn't, would he toss the cookies in the waste basket?<br />
OK, so I'm a wimp. Sue me.<br />
He proceeded to open the drawer. No mouse. Whew. What am I saying, whew. That meant the darn thing got out of the drawer and hopefully went back to his hole but maybe through the nooks and crannies of the desk he was hiding in another drawer.<br />
Then the cleaning guy told me that that wasn't the first time a mouse had been seen in the office. There were three or four other sightings. Well, that made me feel good. For about a second. Then I thought, OMG, the place is infested. Almost everybody here has some level of food on or in their desk.<br />
So I didn't say anything. The next day, I cautiously opened the bottom left hand drawer -- there are two smaller drawers above it -- and glanced inside. No mouse. Whew. Then I began slowly opening the other drawers. In the drawer above the original perpetrator I found a wrapper of a small chocolate that had chew marks on it, and no more chocolate inside. In the bottom right hand drawer, home to the rock-like Lindor Truffles of two years prior, I found one empty wrapper with significant bite marks, and what appeared to be some mouse droppings (ewwww).<br />
And then I noticed all the little openings at the back of the drawers for the desk's legs and other parts to go through, and realized the ease with which the little reprobates could travel from drawer to drawer and in and out of the desk. No wonder the little guy who found my Oreos was gone, he'd probably returned to the mother ship with the good news that it was party time in Aaron's desk.<br />
Poor sucker. By the time he returned he was going to find not only no more cookies but not another piece of candy in the entire desk.<br />
I thought about putting a mousetrap with a piece of cheese in the bottom lower left hand desk drawer, but then all the Facebook videos of mice sunning themselves on the Riviera and playing catch and otherwise acting like human beings flashed before my eyes and I said I can't do that. There must be a more humane way to banish them. Maybe lacing a piece of cheese with a contraceptive would keep them from reproducing. Better yet, I could wrap a piece of cheese in a condom. That might not work, but it would go viral on YouTube.<br />
And that's where things stand now. I have not yet said anything to anyone other than the cleaning guy. All I've done is hung a sign in the lower right hand bottom desk drawer. It says "Aaron's Copy Desk Diner is Closed for Renovation."<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5zBRHSXxQ7vpfWE22FEzWmJX8XNIglkxcrzqx_PnEUnOb8ZmqCnUXrS0TX53qpYtUdMCTL_7-5o7SvCBWWVNZATEHVY3Q5axhyphenhyphenH2OoJwT7y15R4SicUDZoLS5xTHD-PikSc5slLL3rjF5g5Y/s1600/mouse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5zBRHSXxQ7vpfWE22FEzWmJX8XNIglkxcrzqx_PnEUnOb8ZmqCnUXrS0TX53qpYtUdMCTL_7-5o7SvCBWWVNZATEHVY3Q5axhyphenhyphenH2OoJwT7y15R4SicUDZoLS5xTHD-PikSc5slLL3rjF5g5Y/s320/mouse.jpg" width="264" /></a></div>
Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-54735744150126515702016-09-03T09:23:00.000-04:002016-09-03T11:56:48.776-04:00Post traumatic headline disorder<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYzPfZm61ITk1GsdGI_E9A0fp9BDnJ9wWmogunu7e1QQ7tmlyhZ1M9nE5l38cXOUYY75Yj1LmonJUC_URb1C0qP5jY4uv_2ObgjDNS9xpULNuxOohOd_YhbnB4pqhzLoFgt9Dc0LH0-WHnWaY/s1600/mineshaft.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYzPfZm61ITk1GsdGI_E9A0fp9BDnJ9wWmogunu7e1QQ7tmlyhZ1M9nE5l38cXOUYY75Yj1LmonJUC_URb1C0qP5jY4uv_2ObgjDNS9xpULNuxOohOd_YhbnB4pqhzLoFgt9Dc0LH0-WHnWaY/s1600/mineshaft.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Entrance to the Mine Shaft (source of photo: Lenny Waller)</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
A recent headline on Politico triggered in me an episode of post traumatic headline disorder, setting off a flashback to a Page One headline that appeared in the New York Daily News in the early 1980s. I was still working in the sports department of the Daily News so it must have been prior to 1983, that's what, 33 years ago. By the way, why is it that reporters often say "prior to" instead of "before," but that's a nag for a different race.<br />
Jim Willse had recently been hired as the new editor of the Daily News. He wasn't in the position long before the News ran one of its trademark exclusives: A gay nightclub called the Mine Shaft was rented from a landlord who had some connection to the city and was getting a big tax break. Great story. The blaring Page One headline, however, was "How the city got shafted."<br />
Whoa, I thought. "Shafted" is a euphemism for f***ed. I had always considered that to be a no-no. I mean, to me, saying "How the city got shafted" was no different than saying "How the city got f***ed." What would the housewife in Queens, considered to be a typical Daily News reader, react to that?<br />
This took place in November or December. At the Christmas party that year I approached Willse, whom I'd never met, and asked him about the headline.<br />
"That was a good headline," he said. Who knows, he might have written it. His point being that shaft, as in the club's name, and shaft, as in what happened to the city, was a clever pun. No arguing with that, so I let the issue go.<br />
That headline opened the floodgates, even in the sports department. A few days later, my colleague Freddy Cranwell, for an article about how the New Jersey Nets basketball team got blown out in a road game for the umpteenth time, wrote a very large back page head that said "Road Apples."<br />
Now, I grew up in the city and had no idea what a road apple was, so I asked him, "What's a road apple?"<br />
"You don't know what a road apple is?" Fred, who lived in New Jersey, asked incredulously.<br />
"No I don't," I said.<br />
"They're what a horse leaves behind on the road," he said.<br />
In other words, horse shit. He was writing a headline that said the New Jersey Nets were horse shit.<br />
Fred was the night sports editor that night, so there was nothing I could do about it, doubly so since the city had just been f***ed.<br />
Which brings me, 33 years later, to a headline on Politico.<br />
"Critics ream Trump immigration address," the headline said.<br />
Whoa, I thought. Just to be sure, I looked up "ream" on the Internet, and here is the definition from the Urban Dictionary:<br />
<div class="meaning" style="text-align: center;">
v. to be reamed
<br />
usage: To get fucked painfully. Can be replaced in most instances of f**k.
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Jon f***ed Shelly -> Jon reamed Shelly
<br />
I got f***ed over on this assignment -> I got reamed on this assignment
</div>
<br />
Now, some people, including I'm sure Jim Willse, who went on to a prize winning career as the editor of the Newark Star-Ledger, would find Trump's immigration speech getting "reamed" to be perfectly acceptable. Maybe Arianna Huffington would find it OK as well, although to the best of my recollection this is the first time I saw it used in a headline on any news site.<br />
Further, one might argue, the purpose of euphemisms is to make acceptable in language or usage acts or things which would otherwise be perceived as unacceptable.<br />
And then it occurred to me that as dinosaurs such as myself fade from the copy editing scene, a much younger generation is cranking out the news both in print and on the Internet. Which raises the possibility, perhaps even the likelihood, that someone who only heard "reamed" in a usage whereby it was substituted for "harshly criticized," as in "I got reamed for trying to sneak that headline through," that copy editor might not even know he had just written the equivalent of "Critics painfully f**k Trump immigration speech," and thought that they were only being harshly critical of it.<br />
That's what I'd like to think, in which case I could attribute my reaction to a case of Post Traumatic Headline Disorder, even though the initial headline was in the Daily News and not the New York or Washington Post. Daily News Traumatic Headline Disorder doesn't carry much weight as a malady, although it would be hard to argue with WaPo Traumatic Headline Disorder. Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-89070552805355733522016-01-03T07:21:00.000-05:002016-01-03T13:32:01.082-05:00Why I am unfriending Steve Collins on Facebook<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ2NCwgYP99pNy16BgrvNeWZPFV7MnGiGyBzIjbeWD6d36qPJoIUABhgQrSrsfuIjPd681aYSJnqHxQB7aF-E45Zm1faZdjU-aKVmbxW0cYoLIfS4dmVl659w_LUFk6efGSqNfEfcFZER8M5I/s1600/titanic3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ2NCwgYP99pNy16BgrvNeWZPFV7MnGiGyBzIjbeWD6d36qPJoIUABhgQrSrsfuIjPd681aYSJnqHxQB7aF-E45Zm1faZdjU-aKVmbxW0cYoLIfS4dmVl659w_LUFk6efGSqNfEfcFZER8M5I/s400/titanic3.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="right"><td class="tr-caption">image from history.com</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
Je suis Edward Clarkin.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
On April 15. 1912, the ocean liner
Titanic, on its maiden voyage, struck an iceberg in the north Atlantic Ocean
and sank, taking "1,517 <span class="st">women, men and children to the bottom
of the ocean with her, including some of the most famous names of her
time," according to jsonline.com.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
<span class="st">Now that was an
epic, the kind of epic that would place Leonardo DiCaprio on top of the world
one moment and at the bottom of the sea the next.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
<span class="st">On Sept. 28, 1980,
the Washington Post published an article titled "Jimmy's World" by
reporter Janet Cooke about an 8-year-old heroin addict. "She described the
'needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin, brown arms,'"
according to Wikipedia. "The story engendered much sympathy among
readers," leading to a search for the boy. They couldn't even find him on
Facebook. Oh, wait, Mark Zuckerberg wasn't even born yet. Nevertheless, none
other than the legendary Bob Woodward, also according to Wikipedia, nominated
Cooke for the Pulitzer prize for feature writing, which she won. "</span>Two
days after the prize was awarded," Wikipedia notes, "Post publisher
Donald E. Graham held a press conference and admitted that the story was
fraudulent. The editorial in the next day's paper offered a public apology. ...
Cooke resigned and returned the prize."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
That was an epic breach of
journalistic ethics.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
On May 11, 2003, the New York Times
published an article titled "Correcting the Record; Times Reporter Who
Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
"A staff reporter for The New
York Times committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud while covering
significant news events in recent months, an investigation by Times journalists
has found," the article begins. "The widespread fabrication and plagiarism
represent a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history
of the newspaper.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
"The reporter, Jayson Blair,
27, misled readers and Times colleagues with dispatches that purported to be
from Maryland, Texas and other states, when often he was far away, in New York.
He fabricated comments. He concocted scenes. He lifted material from other
newspapers and wire services. He selected details from photographs to create
the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
"And he used these techniques
to write falsely about emotionally charged moments in recent history, from the
deadly sniper attacks in suburban Washington to the anguish of families
grieving for loved ones killed in Iraq."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
Step aside, Janet Cooke. This was an
epic breach of journalistic ethics on steroids.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
Which brings me to what my former
colleague Steve Collins calls "journalistic misconduct of epic
proportions."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
"I have watched in recent days
as [the publisher of the Bristol Press] has emerged as a spokesman for a
billionaire with a penchant for politics who secretly purchased a Las Vegas
newspaper and is already moving to gut it," Collins wrote in his Dec. 24 letter
of resignation. "I have learned with horror [pardon me, but do I hear the
tap tap tapping of a raven as Edgar Allen Poe turns in his grave?] that my boss
shoveled a story into my newspaper – a terrible, plagiarized piece of garbage
about the court system – and then stuck his own fake byline on it. He handed it
to a page designer who doesn’t know anything about journalism late one night
and told him to shovel it into the pages of the paper. I admit I never saw the
piece until recently."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
I am the copy editor to whom the
publisher handed the story "late one night" -- it was actually
sometime around 8:30 p.m., as the deadline for the New Britain Herald -- where
the story originally appeared, being reprinted with some additions in the
Bristol Press the next day -- was 9:15 p.m.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
I carefully placed the story on a
blank page. I corrected a couple of grammatical errors and eliminated some
redundant lines after checking with the publisher. The piece was about business
courts -- the Herald is very attuned to the workings of the business community
in New Britain, and the publisher is active in the local Chambers of Commerce
as well as the Rotary Club -- and he made a case for the need for business
courts in Connecticut. The section criticizing Nevada judge Elizabeth Gonzalez
seemed like something personal for a person other than the publisher, but it
didn't seem libelous so I didn't raise the issue. The article would have been
more appropriate in the opinion section, but I didn't suggest that.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
Since then it seems like every
media watchdog has been barking about the relationship between a Las Vegas
billionaire and the publisher. The staff of the Las Vegas Review Journal is
supposedly upset with the sale of the paper to the billionaire's family. But
has he already "started to gut" the paper, as Collins claims? So far
only the managing editor has left, with a buyout.<br />
If I have not yet put this in perspective, let's say, for argument's sake, the publisher unintentionally crossed a line in an article that appeared in a pair of newspapers with a total circulation of a few thousand, on a page which was so poorly designed -- a virtual sea of grey with only a couple of subheads -- that only a handful of people were likely to read it -- is hardly a breach of ethics along the lines of a Janet Cooke or Jayson Blair. Yet Steve Collins would have you believe that the future of journalism is at stake, and the media watchdogs are lapping it up. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
Three factors went
into my decision to unfriend Collins.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
The first was a couple of days
after Collins posted his letter of resignation and started a gofundme campaign.
Jeremy Stone, the son of I.F. Stone, created an award and gave the initial one,
worth $5,000, to Collins. Stone called it a "whistleblower award."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
There wasn't one iota of
whistle-blowing involved in Collins' act. He wasn't fired. He was neither
demoted nor disciplined. If Collins were indeed all about journalistic
integrity as he claims to be, he should have said thank you, Jeremy, but I
can't accept this.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
The second was on Dec. 29 when he
posted a link to a column in the Day of New London that suggested the
publisher's purchase of the Block Island Times was a front for the Las Vegas
billionaire so <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he can bring a casino to
Block Island. And in a Dec. 30 post Collins mocked the publisher's sincere
column in his first issue as publisher of the weekly.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
"We're an independent company,
and the buck stops at my door. There's no connection to anyone or any
thing," the publisher wrote. "Our only commitment is to the
communities we serve."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
In the five years I've worked at
the Herald, the publisher's door has always been open, and while he won't
always be on Block Island, I've no doubt he'll be accessible to the workers
there, and that he meant what he said.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
The <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>third was a Facebook post by Collins, who has taken
to comparing himself to George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life" and
other icons of American idealism:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
"There's battle lines being
drawn," the headline reads.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
"This is a watershed moment
for American journalism," his post begins.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
Las Vegas. He's talking about Las
Vegas.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
"The strange, secret purchase
of the Las Vegas Review-Journal by a billionaire who has never hesitated to use
his riches to advance his political agenda has stirred us to long-delayed,
much-needed action," he continues. "That brave little band of
journalists in Nevada, who know their future is dim, are fighting back while
they can..."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
Excuse me if a vision of Peter
Finch shouting "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
didn't just flash through my mind.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
In the sports department of the
Daily News, where I spent five years in the 1980s, there was a copy editor
named Eddie Coyle. Eddie was a recovering alcoholic who traded his addiction to
booze for an addiction to running. The older copy editors at the News liked to tell a story about the
"old days." The News Building had a large globe in the center of its
Art Deco lobby. One night when he came to work inebriated, the story went, Eddie climbed
on top of the globe and shouted "I'm on top of the world!"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .3in;">
Today Steve Collins is feeling like
he's on top of the journalism world. Tomorrow he will have one less friend on
Facebook. </div>
Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-76265361881608983002015-08-23T12:56:00.005-04:002015-08-23T12:57:49.347-04:00A headline writer's view of the presidential race<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBGitYKGsu2tPPluiVNjZ6ccFVL8DP7AT-e4oqJul_w6oEk0TEaJypIjgXob3P93-BjiSg24OG3RJMhIkFTukaz5mcIxaf24HfiByRPjcnAb_WE9jIy2O5Fp1boK5AUQUWeTKrN5uff7YQhY0/s1600/wasserman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBGitYKGsu2tPPluiVNjZ6ccFVL8DP7AT-e4oqJul_w6oEk0TEaJypIjgXob3P93-BjiSg24OG3RJMhIkFTukaz5mcIxaf24HfiByRPjcnAb_WE9jIy2O5Fp1boK5AUQUWeTKrN5uff7YQhY0/s400/wasserman.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Debbie Wasserman Schultz for president (Politico photo)</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
One thing that has emerged from this hotly contested presidential primary field: If you want to be the leader of the free world, you'd better not have a lengthy surname.<br />
Why do you think Donald Trump is leading in all those polls? I'll tell you why. Because not only does his name fit neatly in large type on the front page of a tabloid newspaper, not to mention on the screen of a smartphone, but because it rhymes with so darn many words -- dump, thump, frump, pump, rump, hump, bump, Forrest Gump -- that the nation's next poet laureate is probably working today as a copy editor at the New York Post.<br />
But the Donald is far from alone in the anorexic surname department. There's: Cruz, Rubio, Biden, Graham, Fiorina (she's got four syllables, but only seven letters, and is likely to be identified more as Carly as the campaign heats up anyway), Bush, Jindal, Christie, Perry, Walker, Kasich, Clinton, Paul, Carson, Sanders, Santorum (three syllables, eight letters, he's lucky's he's not a Santorini, then he'd have four syllables and would split the Italian vote with Fiorina, but I digress), Huckabee, hell, there's even only one apostrophe in the bunch, O'Malley.<br />
What this race needs is a few more candidates like Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Although I'm not sure how well she would fare in a primary race against John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-12333120828151594252014-11-11T18:33:00.000-05:002014-11-11T21:36:15.887-05:00Here's to you, Forrest Dixon<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3Ox6YQNAgVTi2E5GY7ixfi4b50KZ_zy0GqzKQ0_AKPjbE01TUQpW8Wr1RbAVhyduLNNlZjZ_Vp4BlVT6aitronms_SIx0-lTtymu6DEbMuZXK7M9H8ppRO5XrwDJu45vLYmvt-J7I5BkHSxQ/s1600/Forrest+Dixon+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="393" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3Ox6YQNAgVTi2E5GY7ixfi4b50KZ_zy0GqzKQ0_AKPjbE01TUQpW8Wr1RbAVhyduLNNlZjZ_Vp4BlVT6aitronms_SIx0-lTtymu6DEbMuZXK7M9H8ppRO5XrwDJu45vLYmvt-J7I5BkHSxQ/s400/Forrest+Dixon+2.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Forrest Dixon</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
I was not having the best of Veterans Days. The former president of the Kassel Mission Historical Society is upset with me because I didn't write a president's message for Veterans Day. This morning I went to Dunkin Donuts and the lady behind the counter asked me if I was a veteran. I knew what that meant. A free cup of coffee if I said yes. She probably wouldn't have even asked me for an ID. I said "No, but thank you for asking." She did give me the senior discount. Heck, last week I asked her what time it was and she took five minutes off.<br />
As I was driving this morning, listening to National Public Radio, I shouted "Dammit!" Because one of their reporters played a tape of an interview he did with a couple who didn't plan to be on the radio, but agreed to let him use the interview. It was truly heart-wrenching, in which the couple described the night the doorbell rang and they saw two Marines outside, and they knew immediately that something terrible had happened to their son in Afghanistan, or maybe it was Iraq. He had been killed in a helicopter accident, barely a month before he was due to return home.<br />
So why did I shout "Dammit!" in my car, in which I was the only occupant? Because just the night before I'd been thinking how the media doesn't know the difference between Veterans Day and Memorial Day, Memorial Day is when you talk or write about the men and women who died for their country, and Veterans Day is when you talk or write about people who lived to relive their experiences. To its credit, after I shouted "Dammit!" the rest of the show was devoted to discussions of post traumatic stress disorder, and other Veterans Day appropriate material.<br />
Maybe I'm full of shit. That's just the way I think it should be, although I was surprised by the strength of my reaction.<br />
And then it happened. In the afternoon I got an email informing me that one Lori Greiner had posted a comment on my oral history blog informing me that a link was broken. Well, the rest of the email is what, to me, Veterans Day is all about.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"In honor of Veteran's Day, I googled my grandfather, Forrest Dixon, and
came across this page with the audio link. However, the link does not
appear to be working. Can this be fixed? Also, I would be interested in
purchasing the audio CDs that contain stories from my grandfather. Can
you provide me additional information? I would love to be able to
share these stories with his great-granddaughters. Please contact me at ..."</blockquote>
Needless to say I was not looking to sell a couple of audio CDs to the granddaughter of a veteran I interviewed, and told Lori that I would send her the audio of Forrest's interview. I also attached a transcript of a 1993 interview I did with her grandfather at his farmhouse in Munith, Mich. She emailed me back with the remark "This is great stuff." Which indeed it is. But the fact that my work had helped Lori's children learn about their great-grandfather's experiences -- and what experiences they were -- redeemed this year's Veterans Day for me.<br />
Forrest Dixon was a farmer, an onion farmer in Michigan. He once told me a story about an accident on a nearby farm. A worker had fallen into a piece of farm machinery and his body was mangled. He used the phrase "tossing their cookies" to describe the reaction of the EMS workers who arrived, maybe they weren't EMS workers but whoever they were they faced a difficult challenge extracting the worker's remains from the machine. Forrest said he told them, "Here, let me help." He had seen things during his 11 months of combat as a maintenance officer in my father's tank battalion that made him used to sights like that.<br />
I met Forrest at the first reunion of my father's tank battalion that I went to, in 1987, in Niagara Falls, N.Y. Following the 1989 reunion in Detroit, he was diagnosed with rectal cancer. The doctor doctor told him it was helpful to talk about it. He said that within a few days, everybody in Munith knew he had rectal cancer. He lived more than another ten years.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=15592178" target="_blank">Forrest Dixon's obituary</a> <br />
<br />
A couple of times Forrest's son Tom, Lori's uncle, came to the reunion with his dad. Once a few of us were sitting around a table in the hospitality room and Forrest was telling some of his favorite stories and one of the veterans addressed him as "Major."<br />
Tom turned to his father and said, "I didn't know you were a major!"<br />
There was one story Forrest didn't tell, or at least didn't volunteer. I had to hear it from another veteran of the 712th Tank Battalion. It was about the time Forrest climbed into a tank with no engine -- it had been removed so the mechanics could work on it -- and singlehandedly knocked out a German tank that had broken into the maintenance area. <br />
The last time I saw Forrest, he had just been robbed. Not at gunpoint. He had a thriving vegetable garden in the back yard of his farmhouse, and some thieves drove up in the night and made off with his entire crop of butternut squash.<br />
Thank you, Lori, for googling your grandfather on Veterans Day. I hope many others did the same.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br /></blockquote>
<br />Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-71419540855319275332014-10-29T16:06:00.000-04:002014-10-29T16:06:52.281-04:00A slow news day in the neighborhood<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij1BuHVuHNAdP-uuAKhUARdZCR-H9-479jYPfLLHd1vipkeOUyVh2pihIUUV9zBqJxKNQaJqYTHJGkC5XLeL7rKK2bpqZUAvVsY3EOfR0Dt1qLTmQ1PBAjDjZEuNNPShyoO4kmR-Ov7KH_BHI/s1600/nypost.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij1BuHVuHNAdP-uuAKhUARdZCR-H9-479jYPfLLHd1vipkeOUyVh2pihIUUV9zBqJxKNQaJqYTHJGkC5XLeL7rKK2bpqZUAvVsY3EOfR0Dt1qLTmQ1PBAjDjZEuNNPShyoO4kmR-Ov7KH_BHI/s1600/nypost.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
In the world today, an epic battle that already is being compared to Stalingrad and Bastogne was in its fortysomethingth day on the border between Syria and Turkey, U.S. military troops were being quarantined after helping out in Ebola-stricken countries, Pentagon workers were being warned they might be targeted for lone-wolf terror attacks, and the Fed was ending quantitative easing.<br />
So what did I see as I passed the newspaper stand in the supermarket this morning?<br />
A blaring headline in the New York Post that said "Fiddler on the roof" about a fellow jerking off in his window who was photographed by a popoffrazzi. And a blaring headline in the New York Daily News about a guy somewhere who some court said could marry his niece. Naturally, the headline was "Speak now or forever hold your niece."<br />
Here's a headline for you: "Vinnie Musetto turns in grave." (Poor Vinnie, who died last year, was the Post copy editor who wrote "Headless body in topless bar.")<br />
"Pervy peeper plays his pickle." I wonder if Rupert Murdoch wrote that one himself. Now, WTF is quantitative easing? Or is it qualitative easing? Whatever.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-35607564860652734442014-07-27T12:07:00.001-04:002014-07-27T12:27:47.582-04:00Frozen in time in a vast portfolio<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Grandpa"</td></tr>
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<br />
I daresay I've been on a bit of a warpath the last few days. A bit of a warpath, heck, stick a few feathers in my hair, if I had any hair to stick them in, go to Home Depot and get a pint of Glidden eggshell white and slather some streaks along the sides of my face and I'd probably be shouting for the Washington Redskins to change their name to something less racist, like the Washington Tea Partiers, oh, wait, it doesn't get more racist than that, now, does it?<br />
<br />
Or just the other day, when I was getting gas for my car in New Jersey, granted, the place was one of the lower priced gas stations in the area, it only had four pumps and was a little crowded so I had to angle my car in a little, and while the attendant was filling my tank a woman of at least forty in a white SUV squeezed past my car, stuck her head out the window and said "Really Grandpa" because she didn't like the way my vehicle was almost blocking hers. Luckily for her her vehicle was out of the station by the time I realized it was me she was addressing. If that had been Connecticut or Texas and not New Jersey, I could have had an AK-47 in my glove compartment.<br />
<br />
And then today, I figured I'd check out my friend Victor's blog, which I hadn't seen in a few days. Victor started a blog that is slightly critical -- mind you, slightly is a bit of an understatement -- of the newspaper that fired him a few years back. In his blog he sometimes goes out of his way -- like that woman should have gone out of her way to avoid calling me Grandpa -- to expose the paper's flaws. I don't agree with everything he criticizes -- the Israeli-Hamas war, for instance, does belong on the front page and not on the "nation/world" page way the heck inside the "A" section.<br />
<br />
But today, I daresay, he didn't nearly go far enough in his criticism. He posted the lead to a story and made some negative comments about the story, which I didn't read, nor will I, because I don't subscribe to the paper and rarely visit its web site. But this was the lead: <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">"For
years, the Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown Manhattan has seemed
frozen in time, a forgotten giant in the agency's vast portfolio of
transportation facilities" (A-1).<b><br /></b></span></blockquote>
<br />
Some people will think this is a good lead. It wouldn't surprise me if the reporter got a bunch of pats on the back. But an editor should learn to trust his gut, and my gut was seeing all sorts of red flags, how's that for a mangled metaphor. Frozen in time? The Port Authority bus terminal has morphed dramatically over the past two decades, with fancy eateries sprouting up inside and around it, hell, five years ago you didn't have to spend two dollars for an eight ounce bottle of water if you were dying of thirst while waiting for the bus to Hoboken. Okay, so there's an occasional homeless person late at night. And forgotten giant, vast portfolio, hell, Donald Trump may have a vast portfolio but what the heck is a "vast portfolio of transportation facilities"? Actually the Port Authority is probably the flagship of the Port Authority's portfolio..<br />
<br />
Truth be told, I'm not entirely sure what it is that pisses me off about this lead. Maybe it's the first two words, "For years." The reporter says "For years" like he's been there more than a dozen times. Now if a commuter who passes through it every day for umpteen years said to the reporter, "For years, this place has seemed frozen in time..." that would have been way better. Maybe the reporter has been to the bus terminal a lot. Maybe it's just the flowery exposition here that gets under my skin. <br />
<br />
<br />
Like I said, I didn't read the rest of the story nor will I. So if you're the reporter who wrote it, I hope you got a lot of compliments and a raise. As for me, your lead was just the icing on the upside down cake of my week.Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-46843164413408145222014-03-11T02:01:00.000-04:002014-03-11T08:45:16.694-04:00The unknown soldier<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjgZbmo9Ar-Sgy8sGB9jMmo0g_csqC6UHl_U7sOMSxBoH_aSY2eGcY3_s_5WrF8eRvNYeFJ8Ce1BrEbJ1iMUbLg-t_d8e5-GONv1uw5EGz78AUkAwCxCmWGI3EkRj0_UPw8dUF0sh_dKer_vI/s1600/big+andy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjgZbmo9Ar-Sgy8sGB9jMmo0g_csqC6UHl_U7sOMSxBoH_aSY2eGcY3_s_5WrF8eRvNYeFJ8Ce1BrEbJ1iMUbLg-t_d8e5-GONv1uw5EGz78AUkAwCxCmWGI3EkRj0_UPw8dUF0sh_dKer_vI/s1600/big+andy.jpg" height="221" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From left, Bob Anderson, John Owen, Rollie Ackermann, Ted Duskin</td></tr>
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On NPR today there was a blurb for a program on things people learned at their first job. I got a phone call today that reminded me of a lesson I learned not at my first job, but at my first job in the newspaper industry that I've never forgotten, even though I ignored that lesson in the publication of a recent book.<br />
I was a clerk in the sports department of the New York Post when some team -- I forget which league and I even forget which sport even, this was a long time ago -- exercised a fairly high draft pick to acquire a player nobody, at least nobody in the sports department of the New York Post, had ever heard of.<br />
I don't know if I wrote the headline or somebody else wrote it, or if it even made it into the paper, and I'm not sure even if it was in the headline or the lead of the story. What I do know is that the player who was drafted was referred to as an unknown.<br />
Nor do I remember if it was me who was admonished or somebody else. But the night sports editor said "He's not unknown to his family or his loved ones." Of course I'm not quoting exactly, but the point was made. He was not an unknown player, he was a little known player, or a relatively unknown player except by his relatives."<br />
So today the phone rings. "Is this Chi Chi Press?"<br />
"Yes, this is Chi Chi Press."<br />
A word of explanation. When I self-published my first book, "Tanks for the Memories," I didn't want it to appear self-published, so I made up the name of a publishing company. My mother and father used to call each other Chi Chi, although it was pronounced kind of like Chitchy or Chitch. Either way it was short for Cicciolino or cicciolina, which is Italian for dumpling. After two or three books I incorporated Chi Chi Press, although after five or six books I dissolved the corporation because of the high corporation fees. Chi Chi Press is still my imprint, and I use it on the books that I publish through Amazon for the Kindle and Create Space programs.<br />
"I'm calling about the picture that's on the cover of the book "Big Andy," the one which shows Bob "Big Andy" Anderson butchering a cow that had to be put down because it had a broken leg ("That cow's leg was no more broken than yours or mine," Andy said in the interview. Still, it's a pretty well-known picture in the annals of the 712th Tank Battalion from World War II.<br />
"On the inside of the book you identify the people in the picture as "Bob Anderson, John Owen, Unknown and Ted Duskin," the caller said.<br />
"Are you related to one of them?" I asked, or words to that effect.<br />
"The one you identify as unknown," the caller said, "he was my father."<br />
Kaye Ackermann, who said the unknown tanker was Rolland "Rollie" Ackermann, and I spoke for about half an hour. She said her father died in 1971, and that he never talked about the war, and her mother never allowed her and her sister to ask about it. But that once when she was young her father was kind of dozing in a chair and he opened his eyes and saw her and said, rather softly, "The only mass grave I saw had 250 bodies in it."<br />
She said her dad was buddies with Big Andy, but that he never went to a reunion. The battalion didn't really start having reunions until, well, I'm not sure, it might have been the mid to late 1970s, it might have been later. There were a couple of smaller reunions before they became a battalion-wide thing.<br />
Rollie Ackermann was a tank commander and he was wounded, she said, on Feb. 6, 1944, which likely would have been at a place called Branscheid in Germany, in the heart of the Siegfried Line. She also said they gave him "blue" somethingorothers, the term I'd heard was "blue 88s," the term was different but I'm sure the pill was the same. She said she thought it was sodium pentathol.<br />
The great thing about print on demand and e-books is it doesn't take a lot of time or money to make a correction, so I went in and revised to publications to add Kaye's father's name. And I remembered that lesson of so many years ago. Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-74416430068704228342014-02-18T10:36:00.004-05:002014-02-18T10:39:33.986-05:00These are the climes that try men's souls<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5ZvkPBbeL4Btbwk52z0TV9jeSR_1gY0knkRawP2Po8G2k6nRQNEoR3xYRtsFqAeQAI49ywDLjaA8J2pZs16pnkUYIJ5L0Ul_JZYcb9CSditIuUr_KEtnbsS18iW1S2PA7aTa123sXEZkBkpQ/s1600/pooch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5ZvkPBbeL4Btbwk52z0TV9jeSR_1gY0knkRawP2Po8G2k6nRQNEoR3xYRtsFqAeQAI49ywDLjaA8J2pZs16pnkUYIJ5L0Ul_JZYcb9CSditIuUr_KEtnbsS18iW1S2PA7aTa123sXEZkBkpQ/s1600/pooch.jpg" height="223" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A pooch in Omyakon, Siberia. Photo by Amos Chapple.</td></tr>
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Winter has a month to go and already Weather dotcom has run out of ideas for headlines, after "Say it ain't snow," what are they going to say next? Reminds me of my days on the sports desk of the New York Daily News when you had to come up with a dozen different verbs for win, but at least the opposing teams and even the winners rotated so that if the Yankees bopped the Bosox in April they could bop them again in June and nobody would even notice that you were repeating yourself. But this winter of one snowstorm following on the heels of another has pretty much drained the creative juices from headline writers nationwide, except in Florida and California.<br />
Heck, even Snowmageddon is hackneyed by now. Snow kidding. This winter sleighs me. Slush, slush, sweet Charlotte. I give up. Go ahead, hit me with your best snow headline.Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-30520838240809423122013-11-28T12:42:00.001-05:002013-11-29T10:59:02.779-05:00Woe is me, I've got to work a holiday<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://stores.ebay.com/World-War-II-history" target="_blank">Aaron's eBay store</a></td></tr>
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A distinguished former colleague recently took Walmart and other big box, little box, Jack in the Box and Taco Bell employees to task in his blog for lamenting the fact that they had to work on Thanksgiving when they could be spending time with their families. And then said former colleague went on to point out that in the journalism trade, one was expected to work holidays.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Even though I've worked more Thanksgivings than you could shake a drumstick at, I have to differ with my distinguished former colleague, although I agree with him on many other points he's made in his blog.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Reason one is an anecdote. During the Great New York Newspaper Strike of 1978, I think it lasted 77 days or so, I worked in the sports department of one of the three "interim" dailies, a mock Daily News lookalike called the Daily Press, run by a couple of brothers from the Midwest looking to make a quick buck. The temporary newspaper offices were in a downtown office building, and heck, I have no idea where they got the computer terminals and other equipment from, probably Rent-a-Center. One day I was riding up in the elevator with some secretaries and receptionists and one of them asked if I worked for the newspaper. I responded in the affirmative, and she said I was lucky to have such an exciting job.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
These are the people who deserve to spend time with their families on Thanksgiving. You want to be a reporter, a police officer, a firefighter, a nurse, it goes with the territory, you work nights, weekends, holidays, and usually you get extra pay for doing so (although that is no longer the case in much of the newspaper industry). DFC was, of course, saying it goes with the territory, but a little compassion is in order here for people whose jobs are not as exciting and fulfilling as ours.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
And reason two: All the holidays I've worked, the newsroom has been all but deserted. Management types, fuhgeddabouddit except maybe one poor shmuck who's at the bottom of the managerial pecking order and has to supervise the skeleton crew in the newsroom. That's right, skeleton crew, DFC and I both should be namned Armbone or Legbone we've been on so many holiday skeleton crews in forty plus years in the newspaper business. So let's say 80 percent of newspaper people actually do get holidays off -- even Columbus Day at the New Britain Herald -- whereas 100 percent of Walmart and Taco Bell and Best Buy workers not only have to work but don't get any holiday premium in their paycheck. Still, no time card to punch in and punch out to make sure we're not paid any more than our minimum wage.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Usually there isn't much news on a holiday, and the skeleton staff would get a pretty healthy "slide," or the opportunity to go home early, say on Thanksgiving, work a four or five hour shift, get your full seven or eight hours pay and the holiday premium as well (in the good old days that was time and a half plus a day of comp time, boy, although both of those perks got whacked as the industry nosedived). No such perks for your big box or fast food worker. There was one New Year's Eve 30 or 35 years ago where a bomb blew up in Times Square and there was quite a bit of scrambling on the news desk, but such holiday occurrences are few and far between.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Thanksgiving is a time for family, perhaps moreso than any other holiday. My own family is scattered across the country, Boston, New York, Ohio, Florida, California, so I kind of relish working on Thanksgiving because I'm with colleagues. I have a lot to be thankful for, even when I was out of work and sleeping in my car I had a lot to be thankful for (that my car was insured, ran and had gas, for one thing, or is that three things?).</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
I personally am thankful that stores are open on Thanksgiving, because I've already scored two bargains online, but I feel for the employees who have to handle the mobs of shoppers. As far back as the first Black Friday -- I don't remember when that was but I know I was in the newsroom the day it happened, and even then Black Friday was on a Friday, this year Black Friday began Monday online, and it begins at 6 p.m. Thursday evening at Walmart and Best Buy -- I could see the beginning of a now long established tradition, the annual social phenomenon of overflowing the mall parking lots and the stampede mentality of mobbing the stores. I don't begrudge the employees the desire to be with their families, although I suppose a good investigative reporter would discover that if Walmart closed on Thanksgiving Day and Best Buy opened, a small percentage of the Thursday night throngs at Best Buy would be composed of Walmart workers. But that's their prerogative.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
DFC noted that the one holiday, for him, that was sacrosanct was Opening Day. He's a baseball fan, and working all those other holidays got him sufficient leverage to get the night off, even in a downsized newsroom. Opening Day is just another day at the office for me, but I had my special days, too, I'd cash in my chips for the annual reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion, with which my father served and which turned me into an oral historian when I'm not writing headlines.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
A couple of times I've been on road trips over the Holidays. Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, try and find a cup of coffee on an interstate when every McDonald's and Burger King is closed. Then one New Year's Eve somewhere in North or South Carolina I pulled off the highway and saw the bright lights of a Waffle House. Whereas usually there would be three to five employees slinging hash browns and pouring batter onto waffle irons, there must have been a dozen workers, all in festive hats, you'd think they were having a party. Apparently they not only had to work New Year's Eve, they seemed to relish the fact, possibly because they were being paid time and a half, or maybe it was just a tradition for them, like Black Friday is for shoppers. But that's the image that comes to mind first when I think of having to work on a holiday. When life hands you lemons, make key lime pie. Use evaporated milk and graham cracker crust, and no one will know the difference.</div>
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Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-70643791423477634352013-10-13T16:06:00.000-04:002013-10-13T19:17:24.755-04:00The Very Short Career of Professor Elson<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A transcript of this article will appear later in this entry.</td></tr>
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<br />
In 2005 I received a teaching fellowship for one semester in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. I taught two classes, one in basic newspaper writing and one in intermediate newspaper writing. The fellowship was sponsored by my former employer -- at the time they were my current employer -- and the fact is, I was one of only two candidates for the fellowship, due to the harsh nature of the Syracuse winter; that and the fact that the other candidate was a photographer and the school needed to fill its newspaper writing slots more or less worked in my favor.<br />
I didn't make a very good professor, in that every time my marking pencil drifted into territory below a C all I could think about was how much my students' parents were shelling out for their kids to get blitzed every Friday night, or how the students were going to be saddled with student debt for years to come. That and the fact that I was a pretty poor student myself back when I was in college, more preoccupied with putting out the student newspaper and working almost full time at the New York Post than I was with my classes.<br />
But I did try to impart a handful of "real life experience" lessons on the students in my two classes. And one of them was that if you can make a reader laugh, not to mention your colleagues in the newsroom, there's a good chance people will remember your byline.<br />
I used two articles from my experiences in interviewing people of the World War II era to drive home my point. One was an article that Dale Albee, a lieutenant in my father's tank battalion, had in his scrapbook. It went like this:<br />
<h3 align="center" style="color: #330000; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16pt;">
Medal? Trooper Asks Only His Shirt</h3>
<div class="text" style="color: #330000; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
<i></i> Private Frederick Gislain, Troop E, 11th Cavalry, doesn't care about a medal. All he wants is his shirt back. It was ripped beyond repair when Gislain, on maneuvers with his outfit near Barrett Lake in the San Diego Mountains on the night of August 6, unwittingly made himself a potential candidate for a heroism citation, his superior officers reported Thursday.<br />
Gislain and a fellow cavalryman identified as Private Margetta were among a group making its way along the edge of Barrett Lake. At one point, underbrush was so thick the soldiers were forced to wade into the lake.<br />
Private Margetta’s horse stumbled. Weighted down by equipment, Margetta went down.<br />
Gislain saw the impending tragedy. He discarded his equipment, ripped off his much-mourned shirt without thought for buttons or fabric, and dived in.<br />
A minute later, he was back on the bank with Margetta, wet but safe. Out in the lake, Margetta’s horse still foundered.<br />
A cavalryman isn’t much good without his horse, reasoned Gislain to himself with a speculative glance at Margetta. So he dived in again, risked thrashing hoofs in the dark water, and brought the horse to shore.<br />
Now Gislain wants a new shirt."<br />
<br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small;"> The other was the article at the beginning of this entry. It, too, was in a scrapbook, kept during the war by Florence and Bruce Andrews of Stockbridge, Mass. It reads as follows:</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<br />
<h3 align="center" style="font-size: 16pt;">
Woman Swoons in Local Store at Sight of Sinatra Picture</h3>
<div class="text">
<i></i> Women employees of England Brothers' record department learned yesterday afternoon why the term "weaker sex" is in such general use. Yes, the latest in national foolishness, a Sinatra swoon, had a belated but protracted Pittsfield premiere, but this one was different. She wasn't a starry-eyed, ankle socks teen-aged miss, but a mellowing 25 or so.<br />
At any rate, she passed dead away at sight of a cardboard picture of The Voice, according to Mrs. Edward Roan, manager of the department. Anxious employees, intent on rendering first aid, rushed to her prostrate form, but were rebuffed, and sharply, by two companions, who said smelling salts or any such nonsense just wasn't needed. They played one of "his" records to revive her and as soon as he came on, her condition took a sharp turn for the better.<br />
Her eyes opened, and so did her voice. In a few seconds she and her associates in madness were splitting the air with screams that were a cross between frenzied delight and agonizing distress.<br />
Employees were baffled, talked of evicting proceedings, but a tolerant general manager let them go. Punishment of their larynges continued through several more pieces to both the amusement and disgust of an ever increasing audience.<br />
As they left, they placed heavily rouged lips on his lips, his eyes, his nose, his cheeks, and yes, his hair.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small;"> The date wasn't on the article in the scrapbook, but some years after meeting the Andrews I was able to find the original page at newspaperarchive.com. Due to the size of the page, the headlines are a little hard to read, so after "Russians Lunging for Odessa Hoping To Trap 100,000 Nazis," "Jap Invaders On Outskirts Of Imphal," "Too Few Men Caused Stalemate in Italy," "RAF Mosquitoes Hammering at Smashed Hamburg," "Tirpitz Victors Home in Triumph," and perhaps the most prophetic, as the paper is dated a month before D-Day, "General Denies Invaders Will Lose Heavily." (The general is none other than Omar Bradley). And the picture on Page 1 is of a B-24 returning from a mission in China.</span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small;"> On Saturday, November 9, at 1 p.m. I'll be talking about my new book, The Armored Fist, at the Stockbridge Library in Stockbridge, Mass. If you don't live too far away, I hope you can attend. For more information, visit the <a href="http://stockbridgelibrary.org/" target="_blank">Stockbridge Library website</a>.</span></div>
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Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-10983355012243161762013-09-05T22:52:00.004-04:002013-12-13T23:26:54.569-05:00'Headless' headline writer axed<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The headless newspaper delivery person of Sleepy Hackensack</td></tr>
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It was big news recently when the fellow who wrote "Headless Body in Topless Bar" was let go after 40 years with the New York Post. Actually, he'd been writing movie reviews on a freelance basis for the Post, so he was probably either bought out or laid off a couple of years ago, and some bean counter likely said, "Why do we need to pay for freelance movie reviews anymore?"<br />
The firing of Vinnie Musetto went viral, with NPR saying many people consider that the greatest tabloid headline ever written. Not me. First, note how NPR qualified it with "tabloid," as if the New York Times or Washington Post never would let a headline like that grace its pages, which they wouldn't. It's probably taught in journalism school as the ne plus ultra of tabloid headlines.<br />
If I had the final say, I'd have let the headline through, I may be critical but I'm not a fool.<br />
I suppose, though, it was a watershed event in tabloid journalism and if it has inspired legions of journalism students to think creatively, so be it.<br />
There's another headline, though, that I think of as far better as pure headlines go, and it doesn't make fun of gruesome murders or strip clubs.<br />
It was written by my former colleague Ed Reiter, and won a New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists award, for which it hung for several years on a bulletin board near the copy desk. It's probably still hanging there, although the newsroom has long since been deserted and the staff moved to less valuable real estate.<br />
The headline was above a gardening story, that's right, a gardening story, about an invasion of slimy pests that were giving people grief. The more I looked at that headline from my seat on the copy desk, or as I passed the bulletin board on my way to the cafeteria, the more it grew on me.<br />
The headline was "Slugfest in the Garden." To me, looking at that headline on the bulletin board was like looking at a work of art in a museum. It was a double double entendre deal, with slugs being the slippery slimy creatures and the left and right hooks and body blows and haymakers and garden conjuring imagery of both that place the slippery slimies were invading and Madison Square Garden, once the mecca of the so-called "sport of kings."<br />
So here's to you, Ed Reiter, award winning headline writer and world famous numismatologist (he's also an expert on coin collecting).<br />
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Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-32200463158306596522013-09-03T10:45:00.000-04:002013-09-03T10:45:19.451-04:00Way to go, Diana Nyad!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Two headlines on the Internet today from the world of aquatics caught my eye.<br />
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CNN: Diana Nyad a baby boomer hero</h2>
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Yahoo!: Beyonce rocks '60s style bikini</h2>
In all seriousness (wait a minute, the above was a serious observation on the state of online journalism), congratulations to Ms. Nyad, and may this month's special edition of the AARP magazine outsell that exploitative issue of Rolling Stone that glamorized the Boston Marathon bomber.<br />
Now excuse me while, thanks to Nyad's persistence and success, I go practice for my Outback-to-Canberra swim without a saltwater crocodile cage. Owch! Ooch! Shut your mouth, you future pair of high end cowboy boots.<br />
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Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-55592562145342626002013-08-12T19:45:00.000-04:002013-09-02T19:07:13.472-04:00Man With No Lines in Head Writes Headlines<div style="text-align: center;">
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<em> When I recently sent a link to my last post to the CCNY Communications Alumni group on Linked-In, Sam Gronner suggested I let the group know when I write a post concerning my alma mater. I started out as a DIY blogger -- that is, no Blogspot, no Wordpress, I just called a section of my web site "Aaron's Blog" and did it myself. I made a few posts, which required a great deal of linking back and forth, and had none of the bells and whistles that the two main blog arenas offer.</em></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><em> You won't find those entries unless you follow a series of links to pages which are no longer linked to from the main page, and you won't find them from this blog. So I'll reprint, with a couple of minor edits, one of my first entries from what would eventually become this blog.</em></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"> Nov. 19, 2008 -- When I was a teenager riding the
subway to Stuyvesant High School from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, long
before New York Magazine dubbed it the Yupper West Side; in fact, just a few
blocks from where I lived on West 89th Street was 84th Street between Columbus
and Amsterdam avenues, which some civic organization trumpeted as the worst
block in all of New York City, and to think we moved to the Upper West Side from
Hell's Kitchen. Riding the subway I would crane my neck over
riders' shoulders to read the headlines in the New York Post and the Daily News,
little thinking that I would one day be writing those headlines myself, and gazing in wonder at the origami-esque wizardry of the mostly men in suits who neatly folded the New York Times so that they could manage reading it on the subway.</span>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"> As a freshman at the City College of New York, I
joined The Campus, one of two student newspapers at the school. The first story
I was assigned to write was about a series of old movies to be shown in the
South Campus cafeteria. When I opened the paper, a photo from a movie I didn't
recognize accompanied my story along with a headline that said, "Welcome now to
Rick's cafe."</span>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"> I was like, "Huh?"</span>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"> I can't tell you how long I resisted writing or
even saying things like "I was like 'Huh?'" because it seemed a bastardization
of the English language, but everywhere I turned someone was saying "I was like,
'This'," or "I was like, 'That'," and so finally the phrase just slipped out of
my mouth, and then it appeared on paper, but while I would leave it in the text
of a story I was editing at the Bergen Record, I never entered it into copy
myself, not because I didn't think it appropriate, but because it would then
pass through the hands of an anally retentive supervisor who would turn red and accuse me of butchering the English language.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"> Getting back to my freshman year at City, I took the copy of The Campus with my story in it to
one of the paper's upperclasspersons, pointed to the headline and said, "I don't
understand this."</span>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"> The upperclassperson was like "You're 17 years old and a New Yorker and you've never
seen 'Casablanca'?"</span>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"> And so I learned my first lesson about headline writing -- a lesson with which several supervisors I
worked under over the decades would disagree. </span><span style="font-size: medium;">The lesson was give the reader credit for knowing a thing or two about popular culture. There
was no mention in my story of Rick's cafe, but the headline writer assumed that
anybody who was into old films -- especially at a culturally savvy school such
as the City College of New York, which turned out such stars of stage and screen
as Zero Mostel, Edward G. Robinson and Cornel Wilde, not to mention more nobel
laureates than you could shake a wandful of pixie dust at -- would not only know
where Rick's Cafe was but could toss off lines like "Out of all the gin joints
in all the world ... " without ever having been in a gin joint or having seen
any of the world beyond the Bronx or Brooklyn. My first supervisor at the Bergen
Record, the late beloved Bob Sumner, for all his warmth and nurturing, would
have tossed that headline across the newsroom and made me go stand in the corner
for 15 minutes because Rick's Cafe wasn't mentioned anywhere in the story.</span>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"> When I look back, "Welcome now to Rick's Cafe"
was not a bad headline. It transports the reader not only into an article
about the movie but into the movie itself. And if, like me at age 17, the reader
doesn't know what or where Rick's Cafe is, then he or she can ask, or now, some
four decades later, Google it.</span>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"> Good God, I take it all back. Google Rick's Cafe
and the first thing that pops up is some upscale restaurant in Jamaica, and
"Casablanca" doesn't come up until the seventh entry.* But if there hadn't been a
Humphrey Bogart, the place probably would be called "Jamaica Joe's."</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"> Thanks for reading.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">*This was in 2008. Google Rick's Cafe today and Casablanca doesn't even make the first page.</span></div>
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Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-56959765063642216962013-08-10T11:45:00.000-04:002013-08-10T15:14:09.100-04:00Longshot Larry and Lucky Hal<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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One of the World War II veterans I interviewed spoke about what a character his mother was, and how she was so supportive of everything he did. When he made the football team in high school, she came to his games, and one time, when he scored a touchdown, she proudly told everyone within hearing distance in the stands that her son just hit a home run.<br />
I, too, had a mother who was very supportive. Her son wasn't an agate clerk in the sports department of the New York Post. He was the sports editor of the New York Post, never mind that in its pre-Rupert Murdoch heyday being the sports editor of the Post was only one or two steps removed from being king of New York.<br />
At the time, the Post had a prestigious horseracing section. With a bunch of charts and all, it was kind of a poor man's Racing Form. And you can't have a horseracing section without handicappers.<br />
The post had one professional handicapper, Jerry DeNonno, and it had a couple of amateurs who would send in their picks, and Mr. Agate Clerk, aka me, would arrange their three picks per race neatly in a box that appeared on one of the three or four racing pages. There was, however, one handicapper out of the five in the box, his name was Trackman, who may have at one time existed, but he didn't exist when I was there.<br />
Here's what you do, I was told. You take Jerry DeNonno's three selections and jumble them up, and that's Trackman. Sometimes you mix in a jumbled trio of one of the other handicapper's selections to throw off any conspiracy theorists who might latch onto the formula. It may not be in a league with Edward Snowden, but I often thought one day somebody is going to expose this racket, except that in the horseracing world those three jumbled selections had about as good a chance of winning as the professional handicappers' picks. Kind of like the stock market.<br />
The night sports editor at the time was Vic Ziegel, who was a legend among sportswriters. Vic died a couple of years ago of lung cancer, and he didn't smoke, but he used to cover boxing in the days when Madison Square Garden was one big cloud of cigar smoke during a match, and newsrooms weren't smoke free either. Vic's job was extremely stressful thanks to ever-earlier deadlines and ever-later games, but he found a way to handle the stress. However difficult a night it was, come about four or four-thirty in the morning Vic would stop everything, he'd lean back in his chair with, I guess it was the Racing Form since he knew how we handicapped our own paper, and he would pick a longshot at Aqueduct or Belmont, and there'd be a little box on the racing page, one day it would be "Longshot Larry" and the next day it would be "Lucky Hal." Most days Longshot Larry or Lucky Hal was actually Vic Ziegel.<br />
When Vic was off, sometimes Longshot Larry or Lucky Hal would be ... you guessed it. And my mother would always ask me for recommendations when one of her poker playing buddies was going to the track.<br />
At any rate, Longshot Larry and Lucky Hal went a long way toward alleviating the stress on poor Vic.<br />
There was a story Vic may or may not have told, I lost touch with him and only saw him once after I left the Post in 1978, but he was a great storyteller and I was there when this story happened, so I assumed he would add it to his repertoire, although it's possible he told it a couple of times and then it slipped into the recesses. Like during the great Newspaper Strike of 1988 when there were three "interim" newspapers and the strike lasted 78 days and the new Pope died suddenly and one of the interim papers ran a headline on the top of its front page that said "Pope dies -- see tomorrow's paper for details." And it seemed like everybody who worked for one of the interim newspapers was going to write a book about it and no one ever did.<br />
In this particular story, however, Longshot Larry made his selection for the night. An hour or two later the paper was finished. Vic probably went out and had some breakfast, then hopped on the subway and got to Aqueduct, or maybe it was Belmont, in time for the first race. <br />
Longshot Larry picked a horse named TV Rerun that day. I don't know which race it was in, but I'll wager that Vic plunked ten or twenty bucks on its nose. The bugle signaled that the race was about to begin, the starting gate was lifted, TV Rerun bolted from the gate and soon was in the middle of the pack. The horse was acquitting itself well and entered the stretch in second place, but didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning. Suddenly the jockey on the favorite horse raised his right hand, or maybe it was his left hand, to give his horse a gentle little thwack with the whip and, lo and behold, the whip fell out of his hand, the favorite switched gears from Express Train to Laid Back Surfer Dude, and TV Rerun passed him just before the wire, returning a handsome sum to all the Longshot Larry devotees who wagered two or four dollars on him.<br />
That night Vic came in to work in a very good mood and was telling the story to anyone who'd listen, and then he got down to the stressful work of the night.<br />
Around seven or eight in the morning the phone rang and it was Ike Gellis, the sports editor of the Post, calling, as he usually did, to see how things went during the night. Now Ike, too, liked to play the ponies, only whereas Vic bet ten or twenty dollars on a horse, Ike would bet several hundred, if not more. And there was Vic, a few feet from me, on the phone relating the story about TV rerun and the favorite's jockey dropping the whip when all of a sudden there was a prolonged silence, and Vic's face turned ashen.<br />
"What did he say?" someone asked.<br />
I could see Vic was trying to maintain his composure. Then he said that Ike, the sports editor, said, in what was probably a terse near whisper, "That was my whip the jockey dropped."<br />
Nothing more was said, but man, what a great story Vic had to tell, I thought. Whether he ever told it I don't know.<br />
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<br />Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3130805444712439919.post-76199030645835968872013-08-02T11:05:00.000-04:002013-08-02T18:55:16.857-04:00High Anxiety<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Boomer says "But why do you want to put plants here? It's my anti-puppy fortress!"</td></tr>
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A Facebook friend recently posted a picture of her cat named Boomer, which reminded me of a story.<br />
In my job at the New Britain Herald/Bristol Press, my fellow copy editors are mid to late twentysomethings, maybe fast approaching the big 3-0, which, considering I'm in my 63rd year on this planet, makes them less than half my age. However, by the time I'm eligible for Medicaid they'll be at least half if not more than half my age, by the time I'm bent over and walking with a cane they might be three-quarters of my age, and by the time they're selling beachfront property on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan they should be a couple of years older than me. Who said I was never good at math? I think I said that, but in my youth I could count units in a headline like nobody's business.<br />
Sometimes, sitting at my desk, I'll overhear a conversation among my younger colleagues about what might be called anxiety dreams. One of them will have had a dream, for instance, in which it's ten minutes past deadline and no one is answering the phone in the plate room, or the pdf of a page reveals white space where a story is supposed to be, nothing spectacular but enough to give the best of copy editors a severe case of agita.<br />
I used to have dreams like that, except that it was in the era of hot type. I would dream that it was seven in the morning -- the New York Post was an afternoon paper then, and the "wood," or the front page, had to go to the plate room around 7:15, so all the other pages had to be finished well before that -- and I would walk into the composing room and there would be a row of sports pages (I used to fill in as the night sports editor) which should have been filled with stories about the Yankees and Mets and the Giants and Jets and the etc. and the etc. and there the pages would be -- empty, hollowed out forms with less lead in them than a Bushmaster clip. Then I would wake up, not screaming, not pounding the bed, not on the floor, like many of the PTSD-afflicted World War II veterans I've interviewed, but confused at first, then terribly relieved when I realized it was a dream.<br />
The few months I filled in sporadically as the night sports editor were filled with the kind of anxiety that triggered such dreams. As the person in charge of the section, I will say I was fairly adept; I had a good handle on copy flow and the staff was very professional. For economic and competitive reasons, however, the deadlines kept getting earlier and earlier, and some things were simply beyond my control, such as when the Yankees or Mets had a night game on the West Coast which would require the sportswriter covering the team to get his copy in often moments after the game ended.<br />
The year was 1977. That was a year after Rupert Murdoch bought the Post. The New York Yankees were playing on the West Coast, I'm not even sure which team they were playing. The sportswriter covering the game was a fellow named Henry Hecht, with whom I'd clerked a few years before and then watched as he became one of the paper's better sportswriters and I became a copy editor.<br />
Henry lived by himself on Lafayette Street in Manhattan, which is a little north and east of Greenwich Village, maybe it's even included in the Village. And he had a cat.<br />
While the game on the West Coast was in the later innings, the Sports Department phone rang. One of my colleagues answered it and handed the receiver to me.<br />
"It's a woman with a foreign accent," my colleague said, "and she wants to talk to Henry."<br />
I took the phone and explained that Henry was out of town. She knew that already, because she was a neighbor of Henry's and had agreed to watch his cat. She proceeded to say, in a panicked voice with a foreign accent, that Henry's cat fell out the window and was dead.<br />
This was before the days of text messaging, when she simply could have texted Henry "yr ct fell out wndw," so she was trying to reach him on the telephone. On D-Day in World War II, as the troops were getting slaughtered on Omaha Beach, General Eisenhower had to make a choice: Call off the invasion or not call it off. He didn't call it off and the rest is history. The decision I had to make was not in the same league as that; nevertheless it was fraught with anxiety: Do I tell Henry his cat fell out the window and risk him having a meltdown, blowing deadline, and my ass gets called on the carpet? Or do I not tell Henry until after he filed his story, and risk having a sportswriter I considered my friend hate me for the rest of his life? What would I say, "Thanks for getting your story in on time, by the way your cat fell out the window"?<br />
Then the phone rang. It was Henry.<br />
I'm guessing it was the seventh-inning stretch. Before I could say anything, Henry wanted to know if, in addition to his game story, he could write a sidebar. Then he said:<br />
"Dave Kingman brought his dog Boomer to the ballpark. I think it would make a good human interest story."<br />
Oh ... my ... god.<br />
Well, sometimes you have to make a decision that can affect the rest of your life very quickly.<br />
"Henry," I said. "I have to tell you something."<br />
After I told him, there was silence. The game still had an inning or two to go. I don't remember whether Henry wrote the sidebar about Dave Kingman's dog Boomer, but he told me later that after I told him about the cat, he cried, then he wrote his game story. It was clean, professional, and filed ahead of deadline.<br />
Had I made the right decision? I think so. In the best of all possible worlds, I never would have had another anxiety dream, but in the newspaper business there's always another day and another deadline. One day at Murdoch's daily meeting my supervisor threw me under the bus over a blown deadline, and my career at the New York Post was over. Luckily, I was able to land a job at the New York Daily News, where I worked for the next ten years. But that's another story for another day.<br />
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<a href="http://wp.me/p3tYCA-iI" target="_blank">A related story, from my former colleague Steve Bromberg</a>Aaron Elsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08765103620316143748noreply@blogger.com0