Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Someone at the State News was having fun with a news story

As a former State News editor I am a frequent visitor to their site. Someone on Facebook put up a link to this gem this morning.

I probably would have stopped the fun tampon and period references in the second paragraph, but Brittany (not sure a male reporter would have been able to get away with this) laced her pun fun all the way through the story.

4 comments:

truthiness said...

Why, that only set the credibility of the paper back 20 years. Is this some kind of payback because the J-department head was replaced or just your basic summer-at-college immaturity?

Anonymous said...

Someday this article will be known as a period piece.

Anonymous said...

This means the State News is not a serious publication. Period.
Oops,sorry.

Jim of L-Town said...

OK, I have to tell a story on myself. During my first summer at The State News (while I was still a reporter) I was assigned to write a piece on the Kresge Art Museum/Gallery.

I was told to write 20-inches to fill a hole on one of the Feature section pages.

Apparently it came up about 2-inches short and my copy was returned with a note to stretch it.

Soooo, being the smart a.. that I am I wrote something like this:

"My editor wants me to stretch this story another two-inches and because no one will read this far into this story, this will have to do."

I planned to repair that damage when the copy was returned to me after a sharp copy editor noticed my joke and brought me back the copy.

Well, no one, including the copy editors read that far into the story and it was published with that awful last paragraph.

The only people who did read that far were officials at the Kresge Art Gallery, who were less than pleased. But it was a good lesson, learned the hard way by me.

I never, ever put something into my copy that I wouldn't want to see in print, even as a joke.

Someday I'll have to tell the "Bonehead Writer" byline story.