Newspaper fads that came and went

Hey, it's the weekend, let's have a little fun. Readership in freefromeditors.blogspot. com continues to increase.

I just wish my 401k had the same upward graph as the daily readership of this blog. Since March 31 we've had more than 7,000 visits. (By the way, the reader in Estonia keeps checking back). The time people spend on the site is also increasing, so thanks for your loyalty.

On Thursday, I talked to an old friend (actually the person is much younger than I am) but someone I have known in the business for a long, long time. As a frequent reader of this blog the person reminded me of some of the wonderful, if short-lived, fads that reporters and copy editors had to live with at the Journal.

These were the fads of the moments. These were the things that were going to save the newspaper and make us more relevant to the readers. These were the things that were, frankly, one big pain in the behind.

I'm going to throw out a couple and invite you to offer your own. (Remember, when you click on comments you can leave your information safely as anonymous. Not even I know who is responding, although I really wish "inky" would let him/herself be known to me.)

Anyone who has been at the Journal five years or more will remember the metro editor's brainchild to have an "info box" with every story. These little boxes were going to be short, pithy

little factoids that readers could not live without.

They were supposed to be important information that would explain an important part of the story, pull out facts that, if written in text, would be clumsy. In some cases, they actually worked.

There were a number of times that the metro editor caught my wrath after the copy desk would cut the info boxes for space. So a story about, say police salaries, would not include the actual salaries because they had been formatted in the "info box" and then cut for space. That left the reader thinking I was an idiot, which might not be that far off, but for the wrong reason.

Or the phone number to respond to a story about an event that was included in the info box was axed. The metro editor would tell me that he was doing all he could to explain to the copy desk how vital the "info boxes" were in the scheme of things, but what he didn't provide was the actual room in the paper to include them.

I came to really dislike info boxes, not because they were a bad idea. In some cases I actually thought they were a good idea, but because in practice it never really worked or ended up causing more than a few corrections or clarifications.

Then there was another fad about a half dozen years ago, in which the same editor or one like him came up with the genius idea that every name in the paper had to be a person's full given name. That meant Jim Jones, whether that was what Jim preferred or not, had to be written as James E. Jones in the paper.

Reporters often spent long periods of time trying to call government officials or other sources to determine the formal names of people. If Pete Frankenstein spoke up at a city council meeting and you couldn't catch him before he left, you were left scrambling phone books, city clerks records or anything else to make sure you ended up with Peter J. Frankenstein in the paper.

There were no exceptions. If an unidentified body was found it had to be written as John B. Doe in the police blotter item. OK, I made that part up, but it was almost that silly. Actually, I think cop stories were pretty much the only exemptions to the edict.

It went on for a frustratingly long time until even to the geniuses that control these important things, it was allowed to vaporize into Journal history.

Now, it's your turn. There are many more examples of this stupidity and I'm inviting you to submit them to me now. If you prefer not to leave a comment but send them to my e-mail send them to: jlsmediaservices (at) gmail (dot) com. Use the actual symbols for the words in parenthesis, but I don't need the spam by printing the actual address here.