High Anxiety

Boomer says "But why do you want to put plants here? It's my anti-puppy fortress!"

   A Facebook friend recently posted a picture of her cat named Boomer, which reminded me of a story.
   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.
   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.
   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.
   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.
   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.
   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.
   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.
   "It's a woman with a foreign accent," my colleague said, "and she wants to talk to Henry."
   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.
   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"?
   Then the phone rang. It was Henry.
   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:
   "Dave Kingman brought his dog Boomer to the ballpark. I think it would make a good human interest story."
   Oh ... my ... god.
   Well, sometimes you have to make a decision that can affect the rest of your life very quickly.
   "Henry," I said. "I have to tell you something."
   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.
   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.

 

- - -

  
A related story, from my former colleague Steve Bromberg

Mandatory retirement and me

As I await the arrival of my first piddling pension check, with my checking account overdrawn and my credit cards maxed out thanks to two years and three months without a job in the newspaper industry, a couple of items, one from the Paleozoic Era of Journalism, the other a Facebook post, come to mind.

This will be a lengthy post, so if you're on deadline, Hasta la vista Mista, or Ms (you were expecting maybe Miss from a dinosaur like moi? Why, I'm so up to date I was going to tweet this blog post only it's about 276,000 characters too long. Of course, I could tweet it in installments, a la the New Yorker's long-ago capsule review of "The Fantasticks," which was in the form of another sentence, or part of a sentence, or part of a participle, from "Finnegan's Wake" each week until either the Fantasticks finally closed or James Joyce's estate ordered it to cease and desist.) But I desist, I mean digress.

Ironically, the two incidents are related. So called ink stained wretches the nation over are boo-hooing the demise of the newspaper industry but the newspapers I worked for were demising as far back as I can remember, which is roughly 42 years. New York City once had an astounding number of competing newspapers, morning newspapers, afternoon newspapers, evening newspapers, and all of those newspapers had several editions, bulldog editions, late sports editions, early sports editions, 2 o'clock cup of coffee editions. There was a World and a Tribune and a Sun and a Journal and a Herald and a Telegram and the Post and the Daily News and probably a couple of others I'm forgetting (like the New York Times!), and none of them were owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

The first night I went to work at the old Journal-American building which the New York Post had bought I took a taxi from the subway. When I asked the cabbie if he knew where the Journal-American building was he said, "You mean the Journal building?" He knew it from before it merged with the American. Newspapers in New York City in the first half of the 20th century did more folding than an old lady in a Chinese laundry.

When I left the Post to work at the Daily News, my new colleagues on the copy desk were making jokes about the small size of their Christmas bonuses. I had never even heard the word "bonus" at the Post. And my new News colleagues were lamenting the days, not long past, when if a staffer even thought he or she might have to call in sick, he or she would call ahead and the paper would call in an extra "just in case."

When I left the Daily News and arrived at the Bergen Record it was only a matter of time before profit-sharing, a term I had never heard used at the Daily News or the Post, was discontinued, and there was even a round of layoffs about 15 years ago. At the time the newspaper industry was healthy by today's standards, so I thought there must be a black cloud following me around, sort of like Linus in the "Peanuts" comic strip. I'm sure some of my former supervisors at the Record would agree, as they have clutched at every straw in the book, if you'll pardon the mangled metaphor, to explain the paper's financial difficulties.

Which brings me, by way of a poor transition, to my former colleague's Facebook post of a couple of days ago. He posted a link to an article about the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he used to work. The Inquirer is in bankruptcy court, and a deal to sell it to its creditors was torpedoed because the Teamsters Union, which represents the drivers, refused to void the paper's contractual obligation to pay into a pension fund and create 401(k)s instead.

A commenter on the Facebook page wrote "We'll survive no matter what," and my former colleague wrote "You damn well better."

I applaud the Teamsters for taking a stand. The bankruptcy court will tear up the contract anyway. I didn't dare make such a comment on Facebook as I would hate for him to think I'm rooting for all those "Inky" staffers to wind up in the same boat as me, which I'm not. But the action of the Teamsters, and the pending arrival of that piddling pension check, a double dose of dreaded "R" words -- recession and retirement -- made me think of the time about forty years ago, I can't recall the precise year, when the picket lines were up outside the New York Post, owner Dorothy Schiff was threatening to close the paper if the unions struck, and only two items remained on the table: mandatory retirement and me.

First, mandatory retirement. Even then, most people couldn't afford to retire. There was one writer at the Post, Archer Winston, who was 92 if he was a day and he still wrote a skiing column. Okay, maybe he was only 78 but he sure looked 92. But there were many workers who would be out of a job, for whatever reasons they were still working, whether it was due to a lack of funds to retire or because it kept them from being henpecked 24 hours of the day, if mandatory retirement were accepted. (One of my all time favorite Daily News headlines, "YANKS WISC. MILWAUKEE," was written by a copy editor who should have retired years earlier but couldn't stand spending that much time with his wife).

I forget what the proposed mandatory retirement age was, maybe 62, maybe 65. As newspaper work is for the most part cerebral if Damon Runyon were still alive he'd probably still be writing for a newspaper. Even back then, this was a marvelous ploy to get rid of longtime workers with high salaries and lots of vacation and replace them with younger, lower-paid workers.

And now for "and me." Circa  1969 I was working as a clerk in the sports department of the Post. That department was legendary, probably the best in the nation, with writers like Jimmy Cannon and Milt Gross and Larry Merchant and Vic Ziegel, who still writes a column for the Daily News and is as sharp as ever. The writers would cover their games and file their stories with Western Union, which sent the stories over a teletype machine. But that ol' divvel economy was nipping at the heels of Western Union -- oops, another mangled metaphor, if I were paying me to write this blog I'd give me a virtual rap on the knuckles -- and it eliminated the "night press rate." Overnight the cost of filing the stories with Western Union increased sevenfold. Whether it went from $1 a page to $7 a page or 2 cents a word to 14 cents a word I couldn't tell you, all I know is "sevenfold."

Step back a little further in time with me to seventh grade at Joan of Arc Junior High School when for one period a day my class took typing. Little did I know how that would influence my life. Okay, fast forward to 1969, zzzzzzziippp. The Post bought two reel to reel tape recorders, and soon I was recording one sportswriter while transcribing another. I would arrive at 8 p.m., and it was not unusual, before the first fax machine was invented, for me to type up 21 stories in the course of a shift, which often lasted until 5 a.m. And if you thought those early fax machines were a time saver, fuhgeddabouddit, the print quality on the thermal paper was so poor that I had to strain my eyes and type them over anyway.

The Post was a union shop then, and jobs were classified as Group this and Group that. A copy person, for instance, the lowest rung on the totem pole, was Group 1. A copy editor, the highest rung on the totem pole below management, was Group 10. I was Group 4.

The record/transcribe setup, I'm sure, saved the paper a bundle of money. So much so that the news desk on occasion asked if we could handle a couple of stories for them. Not a problem, especially since it was compensated with a bit of overtime.

Soon, however, the news desk created a position similar to mine to handle the three to five stories a night that news reporters phoned in. That position, which entailed a fraction of the transcribing that I was doing, was created at Group 5. I filed a grievance with the union.

The grievance was never quite resolved, and wound up as a contract issue in a protracted round of labor negotiations. The union assured me I had an airtight case, although I was sure I would make a pretty good bargaining chip for some other hard-to-resolve issue.

I don't remember the date, but the contract went down to the wire, and talks were extended. They weren't going well, and the picket lines went up, although the workers were not yet officially on strike. At this point, two issues remained unresolved: Mandatory retirement and Aaron Elson, which is how my case was referred.

Finally, Dorothy Schiff relented on mandatory retirement, an issue worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. The union negotiators said, "How about Aaron Elson," an issue worth maybe fifty dollars a week. Dorothy refused to budge. The union, god bless 'em, budged. I don't begrudge them that.

A few weeks later I was given a tryout as a copy editor, so the issue was essentially  moot.

The contract negotiations were in September, and by the holiday season I was editing copy instead of typing, Group 10, pretty good money. Dorothy Schiff, who would soon sell the Post to Rupert Murdoch, made an appearance at the Christmas party. My editor, Ike Gellis, asked if I would like to meet her.

He brought me over and introduced me. "This is Aaron Elson," he said.

Dorothy Schiff, without saying a word, promptly turned and walked away.

Without unions like the Teamsters, newspapers have long since replaced mandatory retirement with age discrimination. Do the math. Fifty-eight years old plus five weeks' vacation equals ten-four, out the door, or so it was in my case.

The Philly Inquirer is a wonderful newspaper. I hope it survives. From time to time I hear about former colleagues who are still employed by the newspaper that laid me off. Their salaries have been slashed, their workloads increased, and their morale has never been lower. They have been warned that posting on certain blogs critical of the newspaper is a fireable offense.

That's why I applaud the Teamsters. Sometimes you have to take a stand, whatever the cost.

Another nail in the coffin of my career

Two online headlines grabbed my attention this morning -- well, they didn't exactly grab it, I just threw that in as an action verb to grab your attention, they really just intrigued me. Most of the headlines I read these days are online since newspapers are too expensive for a 99er like me who doesn't know where his next month's minimum credit card payments are coming from. Ahh, those heady days when I was a card-carrying member of the middle class. But I digress.

The first was one of those heads that gave me pause ... that is, there was just something about it that didn't work, at least for me. "Chinese 'iPod' aims to skin Apple." The story was about some 22 year old whiz kid in China who designed a contraption that fits over an iPod Touch like an outer skin, and converts it into an iPhone, making for a much more cost effective iPhone than the iPhone itself. So yes, this was a skin for an iPod, but when you "skin" something, you're removing the skin, not adding it. Here we go again with the "poetic license" defense.

But that's neither here nor there. I'll give the headline writer credit for trying, for putting it out there to see if it works, whether it works or not. Sometimes you have to do that.

It was another head that troubled me, not because it was a poor headline, but because it was a good headline. A little background. The very first story I wrote as a cub reporter for The Campus, one of two school newspapers at the City College of New York, back in 1967 was about a series of old movies that were to be shown in the South Campus cafeteria. When I opened the paper and looked at the story, the headline said "Welcome now to Rick's Cafe." I was like "Huh?" Let me rephrase that. I was 17 years old and had never seen "Casablanca," a still from which accompanied the article.

The lesson I learned way back then was that a good copy editor has to keep abreast of culture. I can still remember the thrill I had at the New York Daily News the first time I was able to sneak the word "Yo!" into a headline, following the success of "Rocky." Don't ask me what the rest of the headline said, I don't remember. That was a long time ago, and that's the problem.

The headline that intrigued me today said "Police dare Switchfoot singer to move." My initial reaction was that this was some kind of "Are you feeling lucky, punk?" kind of story. It was actually about a singer for the band Switchfoot -- which I'd never heard of -- who gave an impromptu concert in Tampa after opening for the Goo Goo Dolls. At least I'd heard of them.

These days so many jobs in the media business have been merged that I'm guessing the writer wrote his own headline, just as copy editors now have to lay out the stories they edit, because it appeared that the last two paragraphs of the story were written to explain the headline.

Switchfoot, the writer noted, is a San Diego-based Christian rock group whose mainstream hit "Dare you to move" was featured on the U.K. version of the "Spiderman 2" soundtrack.

Well, I thought, so much for me keeping abreast of modern pop culture. Now if you'll excuse me, I think I hear the Christian rock ringtone on my iPod Touch phone.

THIS JUST IN: On the other hand, there are some advantages to being a dinosaur, in addition to being able to chow down on nerdy scientists. A teaser headline on aol.com that I saw only moments ago said "Tea Company Is Closing 25 Stores." Tea Company? Obviously, the tech-savvy youngster who wrote that could probably whistle the U.K. soundtrack for Spiderman 2 backward, but is too wet behind the ears to know that the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company is commonly referred to as A&P, not Tea Company. I'm reminded of the fool who created the New Jersey Turnpike sign directing travelers to the James Cooper rest area. That person probably thought Fenimore, who needs a middle name like that, when we can save a few bucks on the signage, but at least he wasn't a copy editor.

Toity

My entry into the newspaper business came with a question on a copy editing test at my college paper, The Campus, some 43 years ago.

The question: What is bfulc?

My answer: Those were the glasses Ben Franklin invented.

My exit from the newspaper business came with an email from the editor of a midsize newspaper: "Thank you very much for your interest in our page design/copy editing position. We had a flood of 80 applicants including many who were highly qualified and it was a very difficult choice, but we have filled the position."

That's it for me. Ten four, out the door. I used to tell kids if they could write a good headline, they could always get a job in this business. That advice is now as useless as this blog, although some copy editors might still learn something from my occasional entries.

My former newspaper, the Bergen Record, would like to consider me retired, but I'm not. I'm just beginning my second career, reinventing myself as it were, as an oral historian. It's an uphill climb, but I need the exercise.

When I started in the newspaper business, as a cub reporter at my college paper, there was a tradition when seniors graduated, or even if they didn't graduate but finally moved on to a real newspaper after six or seven years dodging classes in the school paper office, a little hole in the wall, capacity about eight with a couple of desks and a few typewriters and paper all over the place, look at this, a run-on sentence, tsk, tsk, I must be getting copyheimer's disease, but anyway, they got to write what was known as a "Thirty" column. I wrote one in my fifth year when I finally negotiated my way into a degree, trading all my "incompletes" for F's and emerging with a 2.1 grade point average, a smidgin above the requirement to graduate. I forget what I said in my Thirty column.

By the time I graduated I was already working full-time, at the New York Post, where I started as a copyboy in the summer of my freshman year.

In real businesses -- newspapers, after all, were never real businesses, still aren't, although they've come to think they are -- people get a gold watch after 25 years. In newspapers, whatever the number of years, they got something much more personal. The cartoonist would do a big drawing and everybody would sign it. When I was at the Daily News there was one fellow who up and went to Hollywood because an old friend of his was now a famous screenwriter and was going to help him get started. The staff held a party for him and the artist, I think it was my alltime favorite newspaper artist, Jerry Schlamp, did a big caricature of him lying in a king-size bed with a horse's head sticking out from under the sheets, two empty bottles of booze with three x's rising from the top of each, and a nurse wearing nothing but panties with a red cross on them and a bra and saying "Now about that screen test ..." I got to sign that along with everybody else, although I suppose if he were to look at that today, he wouldn't know who the heck I was.

That's what I aspired to in the newspaper business, but it never came to pass. I left the Post in the exodus that followed Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the paper, and went to the New York Daily News. Ten years later I left the Daily News in a mass downsizing and wound up at the Bergen Record. I left the Record twenty years later in a "restructuring," please step into my office, you're not being offered a job, goodbye, a few days later some of my copy desk colleagues took me and another laid off copy editor to a diner and that was it, no cartoon. They did get me some kind of Hallmark card and signed it, but that's not the same.

"Thirty," in the Pleistocene Era of Journalism, is what reporters would put at the end of their story so that the people working the linotype machines would know that it was finished.

Oh, and bfulc stood for bold face, upper lower case.

Early to bed ...

It is with some sadness that I write this post, because I take no joy in knocking my former colleagues on the copy desk. The news editors, assignment editors, supervisory personnel, the managing editor and editor, they're all fair game, but I'd like to see the copy editors turning out sparkling headlines even at the cost of proving my job was superfluous.

I don't see the print version of my former employer, the Bergen Record, very often. I don't take advantage of the employee subscription discount to which I'm entitled, and when I have breakfast at the Plaza 46 diner my favorite waitress, Ella, usually plunks the New York Daily News or the New York Post in front of me at the counter to read with my eggs over easy, dry whole wheat toast and coffee, hold the potatoes, thanks. Not that I don't like the potatoes, but it helps me pretend I'm trying to watch my weight.

Speaking of which, weight, that is, today she plunked the first two sections of the Record in front of me, because the worst snowstorm in several decades had interrupted delivery of the Post and Daily News, and I was amazed -- you could almost say flabbergasted -- at how lacking in content the paper was. The Post, the News, I can sit there for half an hour reading meaty story after meaty story, stories buried on Page 8 that on a slow news day would be all over Page 1 but there are no slow news days in New York anymore. Today's Record was like Where's the Beef?

It's a funny phenomenon. You look at the Bergen Record from a few feet away, there it is, lying on the counter at the diner, it looks like a newspaper, like a damn good newspaper, a big, splashy picture on Page 1, big headline type, catchy-looking things we used to call ears and refers (pronounced reefers) promising goodies on the inside, informative-looking briefs running down the left hand side of the page.

Speaking of snowstorms, the Daily News used to run the comic strip "Annie," later the basis of a Broadway musical, and I won a monetary prize once, somewhere between $5 and $15, for a headline I wrote when the city was blanketed with upward of a foot of snow. "Bleepin' blizzards" was the headline. I was always kind of proud of that one. But I digress.

The first thing I noticed about today's Record was how vacuous its lead story was. I forget the headline, but the point of the story was that New Jersey is getting almost as much federal stimulus money for highway projects as New York and Pennsylvania (eight hundred and some million for New Jersey and a little over a billion each for New York and Pennsylvania), yet the number of jobs created in New Jersey is strikingly less. So the writer quoted this official and that official as saying that this is only the beginning, and that more jobs will be created down the road, no pun intended. But NOT ONCE did the writer even hint at the possibility that greedy contractors in New Jersey might be pocketing a much bigger chunk of the stimulus money than their counterparts in New York or Pennsylvania, or otherwise try to explain the discrepancy except to say more workers would be added in the future. Not one worker was interviewed, no salary figures were given. And to me the 800 pound gorilla in the article was the possibility that organized crime, not an unfamiliar entity in the state of New Jersey, has its scoop in the pie.

That was the first thing I noticed. But lest my critique run longer than the article itself, I'll move on to the preprint. The preprint is a holiday tradition at the Record, and I don't just mean at Christmastime. Every major holiday, when advertisements swell the paper in size, a part of the news section is printed on Friday night while the rest of the paper is printed Saturday.

The wire editor, as he goes through the day's stories, selects so-called "timeless" features, or long stories that won't fit in the regular news hole and can hold for a day or two without losing their value, and places them in a separate file. These stories are called "evergreen." Then when a holiday rolls around, the wire editor is given a preprint section to fill. It goes in the back of the main news section, and usually contains six to ten pages of what are called "shelfs and rails." A shelf is a story that goes above an ad that fills the width of the page but leaves about a three-inch-deep hole for news at the top. And a rail is an ad that comes to the top of the page but leaves a single column for news running down the side.

A good news editor, with a batch of evergreen in the queue, can lay out a six-page preprint in about two minutes.

I used to like editing preprint stories partially because they were usually from a wire service and were better edited than the staff copy, but mainly because the headlines on the shelves were usually six columns and no larger than 36 point, which gave a copy editor leeway to tap into his or her creativity.

Today's paper, this being the Sunday before Christmas, had a preprint. I daresay, when I opened it, I was terribly disappointed. I knew all the stories already because I'm an Internet news junkie, but that's not what disappointed me.

What bothered me is that the headlines were padded.

Now a little padding can be very attractive in certain parts of the body, if enough clothing is worn to disguise the padding, but there's no excuse, to me, for padding a headline with extraneous and unnecessary words. Well, there is an occasional excuse, if an extra word is needed to keep a line from breaking badly in a two- or a three-deck headline, you may have to choose between the lesser of two evils. But padding a six-column 36 point headline, there's no excuse.

These are the two headlines that bothered me the most.

1) Uproar in N.C. over atheist taking oath of office." What's padded about that, you might ask. "Taking oath of office?" At the very least, the copy editor could have written "Uproar in N.C. over swearing in of atheist," and the N.C. isn't even necessary. The key words here are legislator (which isn't in the headline), atheist, and oath of office. There are a hundred poignant headlines you could write with that kind of space.

2) "Judiciary acknowledges prisoners were beaten to death" -- this I knew to be a reference to Iran, although you'd think the copy editor would have mentioned Iran in the headline (there was a little "world" overline called a "bug" over the headline). Judiciary acknowledges. If that isn't padding, I don't know what is. I'm not saying he was right, because it was one of those rules that are made to be broken, but I once had a copy chief who banned headline words of more than two syllables because he wanted headlines to be easy to read. There is a place in headlines for polysyllabic words and I've used them myself on occasion, but "Judiciary acknowledges"?

During my last few years at the Record, the copy chief, V.B., used to send me headlines that other copy editors had written and ask me to massage them. And I've been out of the newspaper business for a year and a half. But I've got an idea. I just might try revising my resume, and instead of listing my job title as "copy editor," I'll list it as "masseur." Maybe I'll get lucky and my resume will wind up in the hands of an editor with a stiff neck.

Recycled Ridiculousness

#!):?(ing Labels

Rumor has it that my former employer, the Herald Record of Woodland Park, N.J., has banned colon headlines. Read that, "Editor to copy desk: No more colons," only, as was always the case at my former place of employ, the editor himself or herself was always too much of a wuss to throw down such an edict him-or-herself, so, according to rumor, the order was barked in the form of a memo from an intermediary, something to the effect of "Let's not write headlines with colons in them anymore."

As I've mentioned previously, at one time or another I've seen just about everything you can put in a headline banned except spoons. And personally, I'd like to ban spoons. The kind used by headline writers who write things like "Performance stirs emotions," or "Election result stirs anger." Such headline spooning should be restricted to the food section. "Chef stirs pot," now there's a headline that makes sense.

During a recent discussion of the alack and alas rumored to be doomed colons, I pondered an accomplishment which at the time I deemed to be virtually impossible. If I were still chained to a copy desk, I opined, I'd love someday to write a single headline that included not only a colon but an exclamation point, a question mark, a parenthesis or two, and, of course, it couldn't be a normal straight headline but would have to be a gerund.

Then it dawned on me. Only I daresay in the above headline I cheated a bit by using a faux gerund, as it were. And it isn't a cliche, unless you consider a string of punctuation marks in place of an expletive to be a cliche.

I can see debating whether a colon should be used to place the attribution at the beginning or the end of a headline, as in "Report: Newspaper business at death's doorstep" vs. "Newspaper business at death's doorstep: Report."

But banning colons entirely? If the New York Daily News had banned colon headlines many years ago, the great headline writer Joe Percival might never have been able to write, on a story about a woman who advertised her colon-cleansing services in the back of New York magazine being arrested when one of her clients turned up dead, a headline that read: "Public enema Number 1." On the other hand, I guess he still could have written that, unless some editor banned colons from stories as well.