A little more than four years after being unceremoniously (acrimoniously might be a better word) dumped by my employer of 20 years, the newspaper that rescued me from the discard bin of long term unemployment, the Bristol Press, was named Newspaper of the Year in its circulation category for 2012 by the New England Newspaper and Press Association. Its circulation may be smaller than that of my previous employer, but its staff is way more enthusiastic and talented, its management much more concerned with putting out a good product than the vast array of deadwood at the paper where I used to work.
My contribution to the award winning product was marginal, a few headlines here and some page layouts there, dividing my time between the Press and its sister paper, the New Britain Herald, but I'm proud to have contributed even in some small way to the paper's achievement.
Showing posts with label newspapers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label newspapers. Show all posts
Friday, October 12, 2012
Monday, August 16, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, June 14, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, October 12, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Quiet days at cliche
Or how a cliche headline got me thrown out of the Daily News sports department and almost got me fired.
The year was -- oh, hell, I don't remember what year it was, it was a long time ago, let's see, it was about halfway through my ten years at the News which ended in 1988, so let's say it was roughly 1983. It was a heady time in the newspaper business, the News had recently launched an afternoon edition called the Daily News Tonight and printed bright yellow promotional news vendor aprons, I still have one tucked away in storage.
Wow, I'm really off. An old New York Magazine article by Nicholas Pileggi that popped up in Google Books pilegged the launch to sometime late in 1980, and it might have lasted a year or a year and a half.
Pileggi put the News' investment in the afternoon edition at $20 million and they hired a slew of people, including a new sports editor named Buddy somethingorother and he brought in a deputy sports editor who shall remain nameless for legal purposes.
It's been my experience that people in positions of authority like to put their own stamp on a product, whether they know what they're doing or not. Such was the case with Mister New Deputy Sports Editor, who handed down an edict saying we copy editors were no long allowed to write cliche headlines.
I love the way headlines get labeled. There are cliche headlines. Label headlines. Question mark headlines. Exclamation point headlines. Colon headlines. Gerund headlines. All except the latter have been banned by someone in authority at some point in my 40 years as a copy editor, often more than once by more than one person in authority. But if anybody ever banned gerund headlines -- those usually beginning with a word ending in "ing," like "Bringing home the bacon" or "Seeing the future of newspapers through rose colored glasses" -- at the Bergen Record, the paper would likely go to print with blank spaces over a third of its stories. But we'll save gerund headlines for another day.
The Daily News goes back a long way, so long in fact that its logo is a drawing of an old fashioned press camera, the kind used in 1930s movies when James Cagney entered the courtroom. And the News' back page goes back to the days of Ruth and Gehrig and Cobb, and I can't say for sure but I'll bet dollars to donuts that when Babe Ruth was traded to the Yankees, the back page headline said "BOSOX DEAL BABE TO YANKS."
Two events more or less converged that altered my alleged career somewhat. First, the new Deputy Sports Editor put out an order that there were to be no more cliche headlines in the section -- you would now say "Red Sox" instead of "Bosox" and "White Sox" instead of "Chisox" for example -- and this was before computer software could squeegee a few extra letters into a headline that spilled off the side of the page. The result was bland headlines like "Yankees triumph" instead of "Yanks whip Chisox."
Second, the new Daily News Tonight wasn't doing too well. In fact, its revenue stream downright sucked. The paper had hired dozens of new staffers who could see the handwriting on the wall, excuse the cliche, and morale was very low.
The editor, or managing editor, I could never figure out the difference, Bill Brink, began going from department to department giving pep talks, only a few weeks before the paper threw in the towel on the Daily News Tonight and laid off dozens of people.
Bill Brink is the editor who claimed to have written the famous headline "Ford to City: Drop Dead," although scuttlebutt at the News was that a copy person suggested it and Brink stole the idea. But that's neither here nor there. At the end of his pep talk, I forget how it went, he said, "Are there any questions?" One hand went up.
"Yes?"
"Why is it," I asked, "that we're no longer allowed to write 'Bosox' or 'Chisox' in headlines?"
"I didn't know you weren't," Brink said, or words to that effect. "I don't see anything wrong with them."
"They're cliches," blurted Mister Deputy Sports Editor, "and we don't use cliches in the sports section."
Unbeknownst to me, the paper was considering terminating the Dep, and his somewhat idiotic remark turned out to be the deciding factor. The next day he was no long working at the paper.
Also unbeknownst to me, he was the person who heard on the grapevine that there was an opening for a sports editor at the Daily News, and told his buddy Buddy about it. So Buddy placed the blame for his firing squarely on me, which is probably where it deserved to be. When I arrived at work a day later, I was summoned to his office.
He gave me two choices. I could resign, or I could be transferred to another department. Because it was a unionized paper, at least for editorial peons such as myself, I couldn't be fired without cause, or else he'd have fired me on the spot. I opted for the transfer, and the next day I was on the paper's features desk.
I don't read the Daily News very often, maybe once every two weeks, it's a crapshoot with my favorite waitress Ella at the Plaza 46 Diner, I have breakfast at the counter there maybe four times a week and she'll slip one of three papers next to my plate depending on which papers earlier customers left behind, the papers being the Daily News, the New York Post and the Bergen Record. But still, 25 years after the demise of the Daily News Tonight, the Chisox and Bosox still work their way into the Daily News, only now it's on the inside pages since the "YANKEES WHIP BOSOX" headlines have long given way to gigantic white-on-black graphics like "A-ROID" and "JOBA RULES."
The year was -- oh, hell, I don't remember what year it was, it was a long time ago, let's see, it was about halfway through my ten years at the News which ended in 1988, so let's say it was roughly 1983. It was a heady time in the newspaper business, the News had recently launched an afternoon edition called the Daily News Tonight and printed bright yellow promotional news vendor aprons, I still have one tucked away in storage.
Wow, I'm really off. An old New York Magazine article by Nicholas Pileggi that popped up in Google Books pilegged the launch to sometime late in 1980, and it might have lasted a year or a year and a half.
Pileggi put the News' investment in the afternoon edition at $20 million and they hired a slew of people, including a new sports editor named Buddy somethingorother and he brought in a deputy sports editor who shall remain nameless for legal purposes.
It's been my experience that people in positions of authority like to put their own stamp on a product, whether they know what they're doing or not. Such was the case with Mister New Deputy Sports Editor, who handed down an edict saying we copy editors were no long allowed to write cliche headlines.
I love the way headlines get labeled. There are cliche headlines. Label headlines. Question mark headlines. Exclamation point headlines. Colon headlines. Gerund headlines. All except the latter have been banned by someone in authority at some point in my 40 years as a copy editor, often more than once by more than one person in authority. But if anybody ever banned gerund headlines -- those usually beginning with a word ending in "ing," like "Bringing home the bacon" or "Seeing the future of newspapers through rose colored glasses" -- at the Bergen Record, the paper would likely go to print with blank spaces over a third of its stories. But we'll save gerund headlines for another day.
The Daily News goes back a long way, so long in fact that its logo is a drawing of an old fashioned press camera, the kind used in 1930s movies when James Cagney entered the courtroom. And the News' back page goes back to the days of Ruth and Gehrig and Cobb, and I can't say for sure but I'll bet dollars to donuts that when Babe Ruth was traded to the Yankees, the back page headline said "BOSOX DEAL BABE TO YANKS."
Two events more or less converged that altered my alleged career somewhat. First, the new Deputy Sports Editor put out an order that there were to be no more cliche headlines in the section -- you would now say "Red Sox" instead of "Bosox" and "White Sox" instead of "Chisox" for example -- and this was before computer software could squeegee a few extra letters into a headline that spilled off the side of the page. The result was bland headlines like "Yankees triumph" instead of "Yanks whip Chisox."
Second, the new Daily News Tonight wasn't doing too well. In fact, its revenue stream downright sucked. The paper had hired dozens of new staffers who could see the handwriting on the wall, excuse the cliche, and morale was very low.
The editor, or managing editor, I could never figure out the difference, Bill Brink, began going from department to department giving pep talks, only a few weeks before the paper threw in the towel on the Daily News Tonight and laid off dozens of people.
Bill Brink is the editor who claimed to have written the famous headline "Ford to City: Drop Dead," although scuttlebutt at the News was that a copy person suggested it and Brink stole the idea. But that's neither here nor there. At the end of his pep talk, I forget how it went, he said, "Are there any questions?" One hand went up.
"Yes?"
"Why is it," I asked, "that we're no longer allowed to write 'Bosox' or 'Chisox' in headlines?"
"I didn't know you weren't," Brink said, or words to that effect. "I don't see anything wrong with them."
"They're cliches," blurted Mister Deputy Sports Editor, "and we don't use cliches in the sports section."
Unbeknownst to me, the paper was considering terminating the Dep, and his somewhat idiotic remark turned out to be the deciding factor. The next day he was no long working at the paper.
Also unbeknownst to me, he was the person who heard on the grapevine that there was an opening for a sports editor at the Daily News, and told his buddy Buddy about it. So Buddy placed the blame for his firing squarely on me, which is probably where it deserved to be. When I arrived at work a day later, I was summoned to his office.
He gave me two choices. I could resign, or I could be transferred to another department. Because it was a unionized paper, at least for editorial peons such as myself, I couldn't be fired without cause, or else he'd have fired me on the spot. I opted for the transfer, and the next day I was on the paper's features desk.
I don't read the Daily News very often, maybe once every two weeks, it's a crapshoot with my favorite waitress Ella at the Plaza 46 Diner, I have breakfast at the counter there maybe four times a week and she'll slip one of three papers next to my plate depending on which papers earlier customers left behind, the papers being the Daily News, the New York Post and the Bergen Record. But still, 25 years after the demise of the Daily News Tonight, the Chisox and Bosox still work their way into the Daily News, only now it's on the inside pages since the "YANKEES WHIP BOSOX" headlines have long given way to gigantic white-on-black graphics like "A-ROID" and "JOBA RULES."
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